Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

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Yes, but is it actually what people are thinking when they enact these policies? Or is it a side effect?

For instance, this went by recently in my feeds: http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/shampooing-hair-a... In Michigan, getting a hairdresser's license requires requires 1,500 hours of training, the same as an airline pilot.

Was somebody going yeah, this'll keep those nasty other races down? Was it just an attempt to pull the ladder up behind them by the existing hairdressing firms? Was there some regulator somewhere who was honestly convinced by someone that hair chemicals are so dangerous that they require 1500 hours of training as to how to handle properly? Was it something else?

If you don't identify the problem correctly, you don't stand a chance of solving it. The zeal to attribute everything that can possibly be attributed to racism to racism ironically hurts the very people it's trying to help by ensuring the problems facing them do not get correctly addressed, when it isn't always racism.

Maybe it was this time. I dunno. Maybe there really were some legislators or regulators in Michigan who where just champing at the bit to find a way to keep down those nasty people, and ha ha, here's my chance to strike, no hairdressing for you unless you pay the rent! Ha ha ha!

But I suspect that sounds pretty silly to most of you reading this. I mean, even the most stereotypical racist I can come up with in my head isn't standing there ranting about how terrible it is that "those people" have hairdressers who didn't have to take the full 1500 hours of hairdressing training like good, decent people. It was probably something else.

You don't have to be thinking "these policies will keep black people down" to enact policies have the exact same effect. And it doesn't make you, in legal and moral terms, any less culpable for causing those effects, even if they're systemic and emergent.

But if you want to fix the problem, running around looking for the non-existent racists is going to be less effective than finding the real root problem and addressing that. Meanwhile, if you're too busy running around and yelling at everybody that they're racists, which is one of the most vicious slurs in the modern world, you're not only not spending that effort finding the problem, you're actively impeding it.

Is it racist to suggest that being called a racist is worse than living under the effects of racism? Probably, yeah. Are you a racist? I don't know; I'd assume not. But I think you're right: calling people racist isn't super useful. Given that this isn't the Jim Crow era, racism works differently. Instead of people being actively, loudly and vociferously racist, we just tend to not notice all the many ways that whiteness helps us out, and then plead innocence when asked why we're not doing more.

I mean, think about NIMBYism (or any of the examples above where access to some economic benefit are restricted). White folks have most of the assets; NIMBYism means the world's most vibrant cities become more and more off-limits to non-white folks, who then become even less likely to hold and grow any real assets. I'd call that racist, but again, it doesn't really matter if the people who benefit from racism are Racists with a capital R. They may not hold racist beliefs, and yet they can still benefit from and promote racist systems. We're all complicit in these systems, because they persist today. Denying that, I think, is a way to keep racism working.

How do you fix the real root problem without naming racism and the people who benefit from it as in some way complicit in racism? I don't know. "Racist" is a high bar, and it lets us ignore that so many of us are responsible for the persistence of racism.

The problem with your logic is that if applied consistently, it turns motivations and root causes into a non-actionable mush. If it disproportionally affects women, it must be misogynist, and we mustn't ignore that. If it disproportionally affects people from Kentucky, it must be Kentuckiest, and we mustn't ignore that. If it disproportionally affects people with red hair, that's hairist, and we mustn't ignore that. If it disproportionally affects rural peoples, that must be ruralist, and we can't ignore that.

The problem is, in the real world, everything correlates with everything. Why are there potholes in the road? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why is there acid rain? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why is there a plastic patch in the ocean? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why are governments everywhere going dangerously into debt, running the risk of defaults? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else).

You need no more stretching for any of those examples than the gymnastics you exhibited in your post.

If everything is caused by the same cause, nothing is really caused by that cause. It has no information content. You can't fix anything if you assign everything the same list of root causes without distinction.

In trying to do a favor to the victims of racism, you are working very, very hard to ensure that only ineffective methods of solving their problems are deployed. Is that really helpful?

Fortunately, we are armed with radical social justice tools like "empiricism," and are capable of noticing that some outcomes really do look like racism in action. Maybe you don't understand the meaning of the word? "This happened on our planet" is not indicative of racism; "this happened in a racist society, as a result of policies that began with both racist intentions and which enacted racist outcomes" is.

Try not to conflate the words "disproportionately affects" and "systemic discrimination." There are some things that disproportionately affect women, like "being able to become pregnant." That's a mere fact; frustratingly, it turns out to also be a thing that marks someone for systemic discrimination. "Being able to become pregnant" is, on its own, just a boring old fact, and we mustn't do anything about women being able to become pregnant at rates far higher than men. On the other hand, we ought to do something about ongoing misogyny, in all its modern and subtle forms.

And yeah, if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs or policies that mark them for lesser treatment and poorer outcomes merely for their being rural dwellers, then we can't ignore that. Do you not understand that there's a difference between people being different, and people being marked for worse treatment because of their difference?

I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause: the act of marking others for lesser treatment because of their group. If you deny that such a difference is salient to someone's treatment, you have freed yourself from noticing or helping their plight.

>empiricism >I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause

When your body of data is so large, it is easy to mistake cherry picking and associated fallacies for empiricism.

>if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs...we can't ignore that

We can if these policies create more good than harm. Furthermore, even in this example, whether the issue is classism or collateral effects, although people would be quick to scream racism if we replaced "rural" with black, without sufficient evidence of racist intent.

The biggest problem I see with a mindset like this is that the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome leads to policies which forgo merit to correct imagined racism. And we end up with less competent firefighters, law officers, doctors, lawyers, etc; and by lowering standards to attempt to force equity, all of society is worse off.

>Given that this isn't the Jim Crow era, racism works differently. Instead of people being actively, loudly and vociferously racist, we just tend to not notice all the many ways that whiteness helps us out, and then plead innocence when asked why we're not doing more.

There's also the fact that many people are indeed, openly or covertly, racist.

Just because it's not mentioned in "polite company", and surely not in the kind of circle most Bay area programmers frequent, doesn't mean they don't exist.

And this includes government officials, judges, bankers, and so on...

True. I think that a lot of folks think racism will end if those people just stop being openly racist, though, which is silly.

There are real racists in America. There are also systems that are in effect racist. But there are also real differences between whites and blacks and other races, and there are real differences between their cultures. A difference in outcomes is insufficient to tell whether the cause is racism. It's quite tricky to prove how much of any difference is due to external racism.

> There are real racists in America. There are also systems that are in effect racist. But there are also real differences between whites and blacks and other races, and there are real differences between their cultures.

The former pair are contributing causes to the latter pair (and especially the last.)

> But if you want to fix the problem, running around looking for the non-existent racists is going to be less effective than finding the real root problem and addressing that.

On the contrary, if you want to fix the problem, actively ignoring the real and existing racism that caused and is contributing to maintaining the problem is going to be a lot less effective than acknowledging and addressing it and it's mechanisms and effects.

Intent is not magical, and does not make things retroactively okay.

If one can look at the results, see the net effects, and then not do anything to fix it, one's intent doesn't matter.

My best interpretation of your message is that you think I'm trying to defend someone (probably "racists") by assuming some beneficial intention in the regulation I cited. I have no idea what innocent intention you think I had in mind, though. Certainly none of the ones I mentioned seem like a good idea to me.

You're absolutely right. Intent is in no way, shape, or manner magical. In a very real sense, it doesn't matter why a policy with racist outcomes exists. It needs to not exist. It was at no point OK.

I believe jerf's point is that motivations do matter, at least a bit, in understanding how a state of affairs came to be. If it's racism, then we might be able to dismantle it and let it be. If it's about keeping out competition, then taking away barriers is very likely to provoke a backlash as the people whose incomes drop look for a way to avoid that.

Again, you're 100% correct. Intent is not magical. It's just that motivations matter at least a little bit for predicting human behavior.

When resumes with more black sounding names get 33% fewer callbacks than resumes with white souding names, is that somehow not racism? Does it require some moustache-twirling man in black muttering to himself about other races? How do you think racism happens?

(http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...)

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