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Comment by TheGrim999 | Hacker News Reader

If you haven't noticed, that's been the goal for a long time now. People get accepted to college because of the color of their skin. People get better SAT scores now because of the color of their skin. Every major company has diversity boards which make sure to hire people based in the color of their skin. Hollywood and big business choose who to be in ads, movies, and other customer facing media because of the color of their skin. Groups decide their memberships based on the color of people's skin. CHAZ protesters in Seattle are arguing for judging people in court differently based on the color of their skin.

It's really so interesting that these groups of politically motivated people think they're ending what they perceive as racism ... by being as racist as it's possible to be.

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It's weird that people act like this is the only solution to correct past injustice, too, when there's a much simpler racially-neutral method. You just help all disadvantaged persons equally. Inasmuch as any particular identifiable group is thereby disadvantaged, they're disproportionately helped by this neutral method. If only people of race X were poor, then helping all poor people would be isomorphic to helping all people of race X. But it will always remain balanced to the degree that any group is disadvantaged.

So if we just make things biased in favor of the poor, this will be able to self-correct automatically.

I don't get why that isn't seen as the best solution.

Yeah it's a weird contortion of the mind that a vast majority of people are willing to make. Like the issue is poverty and opportunity, for every race, but no, suddenly there is this disproportionate rush to be "anti-racist" by being racist, it's so obviously orwellian 2+2 = 5 i'm surprised it hasn't been made the headline of every major media

Most people aren't smart enough to think these types of things through, instead of just following the crowd. So cheaters get to put in policies that high income people from non-white races can game while continuing to oppress poor people from all races in the name of "social justice".

https://www.thedailybeast.com/antiracism-our-flawed-new-reli...

Because people who promote these policies have their own vested interest. The formula is always the same:

1. You pick a minority that suffers from something, compared to the majority. The minorities usually feel intimidated by the majority, and the viral/network effects within them are much stronger. Once you get them to back you, this directly translates to political capital.

2. You find a way to offer help to them, that is seen as beneficial at the first glance, but in the long run will not solve the problem. This entrenches them, making them dependent on your help.

3. You find a party that will pay for your policy. It needs to be a relatively large group with much weaker network effects. They also need to be wealthier than the minority, so you will be seen as a nuisance, rather than a real threat.

4. You use the "*ist" label to quickly shut up people criticizing your policy and pointing out its long-term inefficiency. Because most of the critics won't have a vested interest, they won't fight you till their political death. Instead, they will quickly retreat in fear of social media outrage against them.

Rinse and repeat. The minority continues to suffer, the silent majority is scared to criticize anything, the society becomes more and more polarized and divided.

No idea why are you being downvoted. It seems like a pretty accurate description of what's happening.

We don't have much of that in my country but we have it with women. Anyway it will eventually reach us as we're already colonized by American culture.

Probably sooner than you think. Thanks to the internet nowadays things travel incredibly fast.

Yeah, we noticed with the last BLM protests. It's funny to see your government rushing to virtue signaling and pushing people into the streets, in the middle of the current crisis and calling the opposition to be criminals just a few weeks ago for suggesting that we had to stop quarantines.

And this in a country ravaged with structural unemployment and <1% black population.

It's an increasing problem. People gets distracted with american internal agenda.

We have a social-communist government, I don't know what you'd expect from them.

These policies exist because we live in an imperfect system that does see race and actively favors whiteness. It’s the pinnacle of white privilege and ignorance to say that “I don’t see race.”

> It’s the pinnacle of white privilege and ignorance to say that “I don’t see race.”

Who gets to decide when "white privilege" no longer exists? Not intended to be inflammatory, just curious what the benchmark is. “If you can't measure it, you can't improve it.” sort of thing.

No one. The statistics decide. Roughly speaking, the USA is a corporatocracy. With the powerful lobbying and incentives the corporations have on how the government functions, these organizations and the people who control them have the most power to influence the country. The answer to the question "when has power been appropriately dispersed" is ultimately simple--Look at the makeup of the executive leadership at the most powerful companies. When it consistently matches the demographic makeup of the country as a whole, then it will have largely been demonstrated that there is a certain level of equality.

> by being as racist as it's possible to be.

Even if someone were to hire someone else solely because of the color of their skin, this would be nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.

Hint: people are being killed because of the color of their skin right now. People in the US used to buy people in large numbers because of the color of their skin.

I know this will be hard to accept, but no matter how many people tell me that minorities are being killed because of the color of their skin, I've noticed that not a single one of these people ever include any facts or data to back up that claim.

Sure, black people are killed by police. So are white people. So are people of every race. All the actual data I've seen is that black people are killed less frequently, in proportion to the violent crime they commit than white people are.

I believe your thought process is no more than a mind virus, a viral meme, that's wrapped up in emotion and pushed as hard as possible for political gain.

There's plenty of videos of white people being killed by police that you all just ignore. You don't look at the actual data or think critically, you're just driven by emotion and group think.

You've brought exactly as many sources to bear in this conversation as the parent you've replied to, which is to say, none. When admonishing others for their lack of sources and making a counterclaim, you may want to consider providing the source yourself.

As for sources of evidence suggesting disproportionate use of force against black persons, here's one to consider:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6080222/

Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black. Additionally, black individuals were unarmed when fatally shot more frequently than white persons.

>Victims of fatal shootings by police were majority white, but disproportionately black.

That depends on what you take as a baseline. I would assume that police shootings mostly happen in response to violent behavior. I couldn't find any data on the violent behavior, however there is an open FBI dataset on homicide offenders by race [0].

If you assume a correlation between the number of homicide offenders and the general probability of violent behavior, it could very much explain the disproportion you pointed out.

[0] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

The table you linked is a little confusing because it's focused on the murders, but the offenders are more relevant to your point. It also excludes a lot of murders where information about the offender is missing, so the overall numbers seem too low.

The following table is more relevant:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

And here's the one from 2018:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

So your point stands: when you talk about "disproportionate", you need a baseline. If you choose the proportion of the general population as a baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts blacks. But if you choose the proportion of known murderers as the baseline ratio, it looks like police violence disproportionately hurts whites.

Note that there is a subtlety here: the baseline ratio is simply a ratio to use as a comparison point. I am in no way implying that all people killed by police are known murderers. Nor am I saying the ratio of known murderers necessarily extrapolate to the number of justifiable-use-of-force incidents.

EDIT: I am really just saying the baseline expectation matters, and that the general population is not the only meaningful baseline. I am not saying which baseline is the "right" one. That depends on which specific policy you are considering.

I think the GP would use your source to prove his point as well. An absolute disparity of 2.8x but it does not consider the level of violent crime a particular racial category commits.

Your source also suggests unarmed white people are nearly twice as likely to be shot than unarmed Hispanics. Doesn't that contradict the narrative of racist motive by white police?

I have to wonder how many people were killed by police. Was it 100 or 10,000? The difference in magnitude could see these racial biases diminish or worsen.

If you go to the WaPo database:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

And select 2018, you'll see a total of 991 people killed by police. If you also filter by race, you'll see that 229 were black and 454 were white. I'm using 2018 because it's the most recent year with good FBI stats to compare to.

According to the FBI, were 14123 murders in 2018:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

For blacks and whites, it looks like most murder victims are killed by a member of their own race:

https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2018/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

That table is excluding a lot of cases where there is missing information (that's why the numbers don't add up to 14123). It shows 2600 blacks were murdered by blacks out of 6570 murders with enough information to be included in the table. If you were to extrapolate to 14123 total murders, then you would estimate 5589 blacks were murdered by blacks in 2018; and 5754 whites were murdered by other whites in 2018.

That means blacks in 2018 were over 20 times as likely to be murdered by another black as to be killed (justifiably or not) by a police officer (black or white). Whites are about 13 times as likely to be murdered by another white as killed by a police officer. Note that "white" include latino in these numbers, but it doesn't look like the number of latino murders is high enough to have a major impact on the overall analysis (though feel free to dig in to that as well).

I'm not passing any value judgement here, but the data do seem to paint a different picture than the simplistic view of a racist police system. I conjecture (and am open to evidence that supports or refutes this claim) that the vast majority of problems blacks face in the U.S. happen long before risky police encounters, so police reform is unlikely to be very impactful by itself. In fact, there is a major risk that it will be counterproductive, if reform causes police departments to be less effective at their jobs and allow criminals to do far more damage.

Police brutality is one problem.

Systematic racism and segregation is another problem.

The first problem exacerbates the second. We have to fix both.

"in proportion to the violent crime they commit"

This comes across as tone deaf when people are talking about victims who were not committing violent crimes. For example, allegedly passing a counterfeit $20.

Furthermore, the violent crime statistics exist in the context of people not being able to trust the police, and to the extent they do, the police not doing anything in response to shootings.

So it's easy to see a causal relationship between police misconduct and the prevalence of violent crime in certain communities. People are trying to penetrate the mindset that it's intrinsic, and say, no, police corruption systematically produces the problem and racism saps the motivation to solve it.

I was just noticing that my Google News feed is reporting local shootings, seemingly in a different world than the rest of the news, but it's quoting the police response as basically saying "gee, we have no leads, we wish people would stop settling their disagreements with violence". With the most charitable interpretation, it's ineffectual and lends support to people saying "gee, why don't we just defund the police in favor of social workers".

This is ridiculous trying to pin the prevalence of violent crime in some communities as the fault of the police. What evidence supports this?

Maybe you can say that violent crime is an offshoot of poverty, but a lot of poor communities don't have the same violent crime as others..so that's tenuous at best.

The big experiment would be to reduce the poverty of all groups and see what happens to violent crime, maybe then we don't need police and can have un-armed social workers. But until then, the correlation is community with high violence...incites violence from police, suspicion is then generated against that group. Simple statistics.

Well, I wrote a comment and then I decided to delete it and start over, rereading what you wrote and studying it.

First you say it's ridiculous to blame the police.

Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.

Then you propose the experiment of reducing poverty.

But you don't believe that's the cause! And I don't either. So it seems to me like you're not providing an alternative hypothesis to blaming the police.

I think in order to select evidence, two alternative hypotheses are a pre-requisite. And if you think the one is "ridiculous", then it implies you have another one. You just haven't stated it so I am aware.

Also, your last two sentences really bother me, despite being far from an expert in statistics. Do you think it's reasonable to say that correlation is symmetric, while causality is not? And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility? It doesn't seem to me like the answer is simple or purely a matter of statistics.

>And how in general, do you think you resolve a chicken-and-egg problem where people dispute responsibility

Not sure exactly what you mean here.

>Then you suggest poverty might be to blame, but you doubt it.

I don't necessarily doubt it, but I find it curious that there is not a universal poverty == violence.

I think reducing poverty is more of a solution than blaming the police, I apologize if I wasn't as clear with my statement on poverty.

My hypothesis is something like this: I doubt police cause violence in communities (except perhaps violence against police). There seems to be a correlation with poverty and violence, it's not universal. Picking a group based on skin color and saying "we reduce this poverty and not other kinds" is fairly immoral, therefore the experiment is to flatten the problem of poverty and control to see if there are spikes of violence across this flat plane and to see in which communities it occurs. That would help to isolate a potential root cause of violence. Other experiments could be done.

I'm pretty sure the causality is baked into most people not being an expert in statistic, hence "simple" statistics. If the police are running a really basic pattern matching algo, the line between correlation and causation may not be perpendicular. What I mean is that if the situation on the ground "community A has % higher violence" then in situations interacting with A implies higher chance of % violence. The causality is reached because of the simple understanding. At least that's my take.

Logic and experience lead me to have an appreciation for how harmful and painful catch-22 or double-bind situations are.

When people are vocally backing the police at times like these, then I think it's obvious they are empathizing viscerally with the police who are subject to no-win situations, so they have that capacity for empathy.

But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions.

Have you ever been, in some sense, punished by someone with power or leverage over you, because you were less than trusting, and that made them distrustful or fearful of you? I tend to think this is common, whether or not it's exactly a conscious preoccupation for most.

There are things you can't explain, you have to demonstrate and/or experience.

"But they are withholding that same empathy from the people who are on the other side of police interactions."

How would you explain people who empathize strongly with the images that we've all seen on TV... but then look at the numbers a week later and realize that the narrative of police violence against blacks is highly misleading.

I haven't been watching TV for ages, but I've had interactions with the police over the years that demonstrate the difficulties that come with a lack of trust on both sides.

There doesn't have to be a specific amount of violence in order to prevent dialogue and trust in a community. It's much more significant where and how it's applied. When people are punished for trusting in the authorities, then it's a huge multiplier of the criminal activity that the authorities then blame on the community.

I recently learned something interesting about corruption in my state, not directly related to the police, but about how corrosive it is when people are punished for trusting the system. In NYC, rent is regulated in various ways. One thing is that, if a landlord wants to raise rent, they can justify it with a certain dollar amount of renovations, but they may fraudulently inflate that amount. If you are a victim of that and about to be evicted because your rent was doubled, then you can sue in housing court. However, whether or not you have a good case and win, it will be on record that you sued and the authorities subsequently sell access to the data to interested parties, which means, essentially, that if you exercise your rights you will be put on a blacklist and it will be difficult going on impossible to rent anywhere. Now, this sounds like some activist's tendentious characterization, but this idea that the government effectively runs a blacklist came from court documents. The courts are cognizant this is how the system works, and to some extent they try to compensate for it, by for instance granting injunctions to stop eviction early on.

Surprisingly little data in this post complaining about not seeing data.

From former Harvard professor Roland G. Fryer Jr. who is an expert in this area:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2807729

> There's plenty of videos of white people being killed by police that you all just ignore.

Two perfect examples are the videos of Daniel Leetin Shaver (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBUUx0jUKxc) and Tony Timpa (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6X4PUwrq8tA).

Ending qualified immunity, no-knock warrants, civil asset forfeiture, over-criminalization, mandatory minimums and militarization of police are not race specific issues. They affect all Americans.

I too was fooled by this mind virus until I got curious recently and looked at the stats. I was surprised at what I found and I felt played. The whole thing is a massive lie, and a highly successful manipulation by groups with radical agendas, and the well-meaning masses that they have managed to zombify.

I’ve noticed that, in defending your previous claim that affirmative action is as racist as it’s possible to be, you’ve chosen to dispute that police killings of black people are racist, but you’ve chosen to ignore legalized slavery. genocide, lynchings, Jim Crow, the Trail of Tears, WW2 interment, etc.

Affirmative action absolutely could be construed as racist, and one can reasonably debate whether it’s ethical or effective, but regardless, it’s nowhere near as racist as it’s possible to be.

(I left the Holocaust out of the list above because I bet you’d reply either that there is insufficient evidence that it happened or that it wasn’t racist per se.)

> It's really so interesting that these groups of politically motivated people think they're ending what they perceive as racism ... by being as racist as it's possible to be.

The existing system is already very biased against them, I don't have a problem with some corrective action.

"In fact, companies are more than twice as likely to call minority applicants for interviews if they submit whitened resumes than candidates who reveal their race—and this discriminatory practice is just as strong for businesses that claim to value diversity as those that don’t."

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

More evidence of systemic bias in hiring practices:

"This paper suggests that African-Americans face differential treatment when searching for jobs and this may still be a factor in why they do poorly in the labor market. Job applicants with African-American names get far fewer callbacks for each resume they send out. Equally importantly, applicants with African-American names find it hard to overcome this hurdle in callbacks by improving their observable skills or credentials."

https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...

I would actually blame the corrective action for it. Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks. When you hire a person, you care for 2 things:

1. How likely will they perform their duties in a way that is profitable to the company?

2. How much will it cost to the company to fire them, if they turn out to generate loss.

Some people may have a stereotype that people of certain backgrounds would perform worse than people of other backgrounds, so that would affect heir judgement at point 1. However, if we make special rules that make it harder to fire underperformers from certain backgrounds, it greatly increases the costs at point 2, making them actually much less favorable candidates.

So in the current political climate, companies at the same time are forced to:

1. Claim that they will prefer diverse candidates and have diversity policies.

2. Actually avoid diverse candidates, because in case they underperform, laying them off would be considerably more expensive due to PR issues.

The study very much confirms this behavior, and I bet that making more special rules will only make it worse.

> Companies are not personal, they are purely about managing business and risks.

Let's completely refute this notion:

"Companies with more culturally and ethnically diverse executive teams were 33% more likely to see better-than-average profits. In McKinsey’s previous study—conducted with 2014 numbers—that increase had been 35%. At the board of directors level, more ethnically and cultural diverse companies were 43% more likely to see above-average profits, showing a significant correlation between diversity and performance."

https://www.forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2018/01/25/more-...

I would dare say the causality is reversed here. Once your company reaches a certain size, NOT having a diverse executive team will very quickly get you labeled as racist and will cost you dearly. Nobody cares about a mom and pop bakery, but imagine the outrage in the media, if Apple or Google did not pick their executive teams based on the diversity constraints.

Not only that, for the time period when this study was done, the most successful businesses will be in cities where there is statistically a more diverse pool to draw from.

Is the cause the diversity or is it that cities are generally hyper-competitive places that draw the most competitive people in society and filter out those that can't hack it.

Your reason and my reason are just two possibilities of reversed causality. I'm sure there are many others.

The conclusion of that study is basically a wet streets cause rain conclusion.

One only needs to look at foreign firms like those in China that are crushing it to see that many non-diverse businesses are doing very well. I'm sure those businesses weren't included because it wouldn't support the conclusion the researcher wanted to arrive at.

China is a great example, very mono-cultural (relative to the US, I know there is different great diversity in China) and (personal experience) a bit racist or dismissive of Non-Chinese.

Yet they absolute crush it with almost everything they do? How do we square that circle and say well..if everyone just looked different we would be better off. Minus the white people, they shouldn't be around anymore.

Not to mention, anyone with half a brain that they are willing to use should already know that it’s absurd to think that 2 people with a different skin pigment have an advantage over 2 people with the same skin pigment. The willful delusion and mental gymnastics to justify reverse racism are a wonder to behold.

It's pretty easy to pick this apart. China is actually quite diverse culturally, but communism has long had a focus on equality. They're demonstrating that equality is a competitive advantage.

I've lived in China and the US and it doesn't even come close to the diversity of thought as the US. That said, they still crush it despite the lack of diversity of thought. With the US diversity of thought also comes the diversity of work ethic. China doesn't have that issue. A lot of the diversity of thought China has typically comes from expatriates that have returned home after meaningful experiences living abroad. This alone demonstrates that genetics is a terrible proxy for diversity of thought. What matters is cognitive diversity and diversity of experience.

Seems like you're assuming that having an all-white workforce, absent the political blowback that this would cause, is some kind of competitive advantage? Am I understanding you correctly?

I am assuming that having workforce hired purely based on their ability to perform the job, would be a competitive advantage if the company was aiming at efficiency rather than playing games with investors (which is another long story). I am not saying anything about their race and I personally know many competent people from many races and ethnicities.

Ironically, by interpreting my statement as an claim that such a policy would lead to an all-white workforce, you yourself just made an assumption that many people would call very racist.

> I am assuming that having workforce hired purely based on their ability to perform the job, would be a competitive advantage if the company was aiming at efficiency rather than playing games with investors (which is another long story)

Have you considered that the companies with diverse executive teams and boards did exactly that?

Can you point me to the list of companies where their lack of diversity at the executive and board members level has 'cost them dearly'?

You might want to read the actual study. It’s horribly mischaracterized everywhere.

> she weighed whether to include her involvement in a black student organization

I suspect the same bias would hold true if someone applied for a job bragging about being in a white student organization.

Would you hire someone was a member of the Society of White Engineers? Probably not.

> I don't have a problem with some corrective action.

What you're arguing in favor of is addressing problems from technical debt by adding more technical debt on top.

The corrective action is to perform a root cause analysis and fix things at the root.

The clear, obvious root cause is that humans have a deep tribalistic streak. I would love to hear a solution to that that doesn't involve invasive action to educate people in early childhood. A baby step in that direction was integrating public schools, and to this day a major political party is still trying to reverse that simple measure.

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