Hacker News Reader

Comment by 11thEarlOfMar | Hacker News Reader

This struck me as well. Systemic racism means (to me) that if you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased outcomes based on race. In my view, it's a different matter to say that a system produces biased results because it is designed to do so, rather than it is systemic because the people operating it make biased choices where their discretion is called on.

Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes?

View on HN

> Are there actual, current examples of systemic racism where an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes?

If you removed all racists from the economy, black people as a demographic would still be at a huge disadvantage for a very long time (or forever?). The playing field might not level on it's own.

If a system starts out with biased functions and runs long enough so that the distribution of the state is biased, removing the biased functions doesn't necessarily guarantee the state will return back to an unbiased equilibrium.

Removing explicitly racist laws doesn't remove the biases embedded in the system from two hundred years of slavery and terrorism. There is a complex feedback loop of education, economics, and cultural attitudes that have locked the imbalances in.

the term “systemic racism”, to me, sounds like parts of the system are actively racist. your argument is true (black people are economically disadvantaged given history), but aren’t poor white people/latino people too?

how is a poor black person any worse off than a poor white person?

Your idea of "justice" is based upon group membership, as unfortunately for many other people. I see absolutely no difference between a poor white person vs. a poor black person. Sure, there might be more poor black people, but so what? Do you seriously believe that rich white people would actively be trying to help poor white people and not poor black people? No, everybody wants riches for themselves, poor whites aren't given anything either.

This is what I tune out of the conversation whenever someone mentions "patriarchy" (the "modern" version, i.e. "men are in power" not "men own women") - I'm a man, but I've never received any benefit just because (most of) our presidents / businessmen are men (in fact, arguably (individual) women receive more benefits, because most of those men are heterosexuals).

> I've never received any benefit

You have, it is just that these benefits are so ingrained in society that you didn't notice. That's what people mean when they talk about systemic issues.

I am a man and worked in fastfood during my studies.

I was offered a permanent contract immediatly after my first month, while there were also a lot of women with kids working there who had been on temp contracts for years. Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes. Any time someone got pregnant, their contract was not renewed.

In this situation I had an advantage because of my gender. This was not because the business itself was specifically sexist, in fact almost all of management were women. Instead, the systems in place made it so that financially smart decisions negatively impacted women.

> Probably because I could work at night; the mothers worked during schooltimes.

I mean, sounds it literally wasn’t sexism, you were just a better worker.

Obviously, it’s a problem that society doesn’t value people having children. But that’s an orthogonal issue to sexism, I’m pretty sure that if a father couldn’t work nights, he’d be treated exactly the same. Ideally the society would subsidize people having kids, or businesses employing workers with kids, or something...

In many cases, I don't think you can separate "people" from "the system" because the system is a human construct in which human discretion is called upon repeatedly. For example, studies which show that young white children react more negatively to black faces compared to white faces - is this "the system"? Is is it "discretion"? I'm not sure you can differentiate the two.

It's also important to note that just because you fixed a racist practice, that doesn't immediately endow an underprivileged group with the full fruits of equality. For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.

It seems like you're saying momentum is racist.

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying, but if your implication is that I'm saying "(legal) progress towards racial equality is racist", then I'm not really sure how you got that from my comment. My point is simply that you can have greater legal equality and yet things that happened in the past can still cause racist outcomes in the present (see my example).

> For example, redlining may now be illegal in the United States, but middle class white Americans have been benefiting from nearly a hundred years' worth of wealth accumulation through housing that black Americans were locked out of. This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.

I think this is describing how the system includes momentum, and you're saying that the system (momentum) is producing racially-biased outcomes _without_ racist input today. That's true in the strictest, most technical sense, but is this supposed to be a motivation for reparations or something?

I don't think it's just the "strictest, most technical" sense. It's a significant example of how "if you took the people out of the system, you'd still get biased outcomes based on race." (or, if you prefer, an example of where "an entirely non-racist staff would still produce racially-based biased outcomes")

Ok, I understand what you mean. Thanks for being considerate, I usually don't express my opinion in these discussions, hopefully I didn't come across very rudely.

This seems to fit with the charge that you are arguing momentum is racist. They were born in a poor household. That household is poorer than it would otherwise be because of racism in prior generations (but which no longer exists today) leading to a lack of inheritance among other things. This is your evidence of systemic racism.

Along those same lines I suppose we also suffer from systemic genocide, systemic famine, systemic war, and every other crappy thing that happened to people in history and were not somehow complete corrected for by a counter redistribution of wealth and status.

That is one piece of evidence of systemic racism.

The problem with your counterexample ("systemic famine"/"systemic war"/etc.) is that those are one-off events in the past, and thus they don't cumulatively add up and compound to create very unequal outcomes today. A more appropriate hypothetical would be that the last 400 years of one's ancestors all experienced genocide, war, or other similarly "crappy" things.

Focusing on one piece at a time is how we do logic. You need to defend the weakest link in your case. Or are you suggesting that the various pieces of systemic racism are not themselves racism, until aggregated together?

As for one-off events, it seems like just a matter of degree, not principle. Though surely genocide continue to have negative affects on the victimized group to this day.

Regardless of whether you think it's a "weak link", this isn't a logical proof where you can disprove one statement rendering the entire proof invalid. Rather, you have to disprove each piece of evidence for systemic racism in order to disprove it exists.

Your argument is mostly "whataboutism" - you point out that terrible things have happened to groups of people in the past and those things have inter-generational effects. Of course it's true.

That being said, of course it's a matter of degree, but at that point you're just arguing semantics. Driving your car at 25mph vs 125mph is only a difference of degree, and yet one is totally permissible and the other is incredibly dangerous and would land you with a big fine. The key point here is that speeding becomes increasingly more dangerous as you drive faster, to the point that exceeding speed limits by a given amount becomes reckless driving because you're much more likely to cause injury and/or death to yourself and others. In the same way, racist systems create a compounding disadvantage that is almost impossible to rectify simply by changing the laws to make them "colorblind" in the modern day.

I'd call it reductio ad absurdum personally, an application of your logic elsewhere to reach absurd conclusions. And the existence of inter-generational effects are the undisputed facts I started with, not the conclusions reached via your logic, which are that the existence of these effects support the charge of systemic war/famine/etc. Whether it's just semantics depends on what you think the supposed existence of these "systemic evils" requires morally.

Not really. You've said that because the difference between the intergenerational harm caused by "other crappy things" and 400 years' worth of racism is only quantitative, the intergenerational effects of "other crappy things" ought to be considered systemic. Your logic implies that because driving your car at 5mph and 100mph is only a quantitative difference, driving at 5mph ought to be considered "speeding." Or because the difference between heating cold water 1 degree and 100 degrees is only quantitative, cold water heated 1 degree ought to be considered "steam." Quantitative differences eventually become qualitative differences; that much should be trivially obvious.

Ah I missed that little gem. So genocide would be the safe slow driving extreme in this analogy?

> This is a good example of how the "system" produces racially-biased outcomes without any racist human input in the present day.

What is the end goal here though? The most wealthy ethnicities in the US are Asian-Indians, Jewish and East-Asians. Is that also systemic racism (against Whites) and these groups should be knocked down?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-asian-quotas-repeat-an...

There are plenty, such as the influence of religion and customs instilled by people in the past. Many people are assigned these cultural norms from childhood.

For example, the normalized Western image of something like a caucasian Jesus or a caucasian Santa Clause influences ways of thinking and who we see as our cultural betters.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com