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Comment by BoiledCabbage | Hacker News Reader

The issue with this essay, while it is clear in it's wording (as written by a lawyer). It's still has it's fundamental flaw. It's argument boils down to this, which the author spells out

> If the world I was living in had deep, systemic discrimination against latinos, surely I was an easy target. And yet here I am.

So many of these articles are a single person who succeeds and as a result declares racism must not exist. A personal anecdote is always convincing (as many people know), but anytime an actual rigorous statistical study of this comes up it's shows that clear systemic racism exists.

And people love to read anecdotes like this, because it's a very easy way to ease discomfort. The discomfort that shows that deep seated racism exists in the US, and that our country in a number of areas isn't doing a good job of living up to its ideals. But in the end it's an anecdote and data shows it's not the case.

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> So many of these articles are a single person who succeeds and as a result declares racism must not exist.

That is not the evidence the author is submitting. His argument rests on the fact that Cuban immigrants outperform Mexican immigrants in many metrics, which thus disproves the racial discrimination hypothesis. He likewise cites the dramatically different performance of Ghanaian immigrants versus African Americans. These statistics are not subjective.

He then draws on his own experience in the Latino community and hypothesizes the disparity of performance in Mexican immigrant communities stems from a parental culture that encourages short term gains at the cost of long term reward.

There is more to the article but I’m going to butcher it by summarizing it. It is well worth reading and thought provoking.

What I don’t understand about the whole cultural piece is the selection bias. My understanding is that the Cubans that came here had different circumstances, different opportunity and different resources (they came because they were successful).

Otherwise are we just saying that Mexicans are lazy compared to Cubans and that is just culture? Or African Americans aren’t as hardworking as Ghanaians and that stereotype is what it is and we should just operate around it?

> is that just culture?

Yes, I think that is the author’s point. The values and habits of the Cubans who fled Cuba and Ghanaians who left Ghana are ones which lend to successful lives. These values and habits, such as placing importance on higher education and academic achievement, are partly what culture consists of.

The alternative hypothesis, if one rejects the notion of value and habit transfer, is to claim that intelligence is genetically transmitted. That opens a very ugly can of worms and to my (limited) knowledge is unsupported by scientific evidence.

In either case though, I think it is clear that the Cuban and Ghanaian example precludes the possibility of racial discrimination.

It seems to me this has deep implications about effective and ineffective policies to raise the living standards of Mexican immigrants and African Americans. If we fail to address the root cause (poor cultural practices vs racial discrimination), the problem won’t get fixed.

> anytime an actual rigorous statistical study of this comes up it's shows that clear systemic racism exists.

All the statistics I've seen have made it clear that it doesn't. Well, except for that in the opposite directions you'd claim, as in open anti-Asian discrimination.

Can you share your statistics? Author claims there is data to prove his point but doesn’t include it either.

All the statistics. Maybe start by googling the replication crisis.

Yes I’m familiar. The inability to replicate findings. With faulty data, tests, experiments I’m especially skeptical of most of the BS posted on blogs. Excuse me for not trusting “all the statistics”

Well, there is a ton of statistics. If any of it showed clear signs of systemic racism, you could just post it and say, here it is! Usually it gets debunked -- weak-ass research that doesn't replicate being one category -- those addressed by controlling for some obvious variables another.

The thing is, it's pretty easy to back claims that racism happens in the small, because it's true.

But "systemic racism" is a different claim than that.

Great I’ll look out for those statistics from you. Also easy to back claims that racism doesn’t happen.

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