Hacker News Reader

Comment by x86_64Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

Race isn't a distraction, especially from economic issues. When you look through US history you don't see laws and regulations passed against people that cite income level, but we see them cite race. When blacks were prevented from voting or serving on a jury, no one considered their economic status. When housing covenants were created that expressly forbade selling to blacks, no carve outs were made for blacks of a certain income level.

View on HN

> When blacks were prevented from voting or serving on a jury, no one considered their economic status. When housing covenants were created that expressly forbade selling to blacks, no carve outs were made for blacks of a certain income level.

Wouldn't you consider those laws a mistake? Wouldn't you want the law to be blind to race, considering the potential evil you've outlined?

I don't understand this reasoning. "Black people used to have their own set of laws, and that was bad, so now we are going to continue to write a set of laws that only apply to black people".

The impact of generations of de jure racism didn't simply disappear when the laws were overturned. My parents were already in school when the schools were first forced to integrate. Some of their cousins lived under segregation in the South and did not have access to even secondary education, let alone higher ed. On top of that, there are laws that persisted beyond segregation and even to the present day that are highly discriminatory in their impact, even if they are not in their literal content.

My understanding is that people with resources tend to acquire more resources, which means people who were excluded are as a demographic already set behind with little opportunity to catch up. In order to correct the bias alternate channels need to be made. (That’s the logic anyways. I haven’t seen any evidence the result is as expected…)

>Wouldn't you consider those laws a mistake?

>I don't understand this reasoning...now we are going to continue to write a set of laws that only apply to black people

Yes, it was a mistake, with grave intergenerational consequences. The idea behind new targeted laws is to make some effort to acknowledge and remedy the damage done.

I think you may not fully appreciate the massive, compounded, multi-trillion dollar impacts of this legacy, in conjunction with the profound trauma of psychic and physical violence inflicted over generations.

Because it's hard to imagine someone fully internalizing that, then effectively declaring, "can't we just say 'our bad', call it even, and move on?"

>...Black people used to have their own set of laws, and that was bad, so now we are going to continue to write a set of laws that only apply to black people

If you're arguing that Jim Crow laws are equivalent to diversity officers in schools in effect, I'm not really sure what to tell you.

Attacking drivers of racial division and discrimination has produced very many concrete improvements. Equal housing laws, anti-discrimination laws, anti-segregation laws have all been shown to do good. I think the track record for "positive equity" efforts is much more spotty. If we look at US minority populations whose measurable social position has improved greatly from their historical origins and matched or exceeded the white populace as a whole, how many of their success stories involved this type of heavy-handed brotherly-love enforcement? Irish people, Italian people, Jewish people, Asian people. I don't think the unending reminder of our differences ultimately contributes to social equity.

Citing ethnic groups that eventually become "white" and model minority groups is a whole thread unto itself, there is a reason your list doesn't include Native Americans, African-Americans and Hispanics. Race-blindness always serves to hide the hierarchy as it currently stands, as society is never blind to marginalized groups.

Most observers predict that Hispanics are on track to become the next "white" minority, followed by other groups. The whole point is that "the hierarchy as it currently stands" is not immutable, in fact it can shift rather quickly.

Who is predicting that? Hispanics have been here since Manifest Destiny ran into them way back when. Yet they haven't assimilated like other groups sourced from Europe, or ones that remain at non-threatening numbers.

The only time I ever here someone talk about a non-European sourced group ever becoming "white" is in the context of the conservative demographic threat on the horizon.

> Hispanics have been here since Manifest Destiny ran into them way back when. Yet they haven't assimilated like other groups sourced from Europe, or ones that remain at non-threatening numbers.

Hispanics assimilate quite rapidly. 50% of second generation hispanics consider themselves "white". The issue is the flood of new hispanics is sufficiently large so as to hide the corresponding flood of assimilation. Florida turned red on the back of hispanic voters.

Considering yourself one thing has nothing to do with how society views you. You can think you are as white as you'd like, it's not going to help when you are a 5'66'' man who grew up in an Indian and Mixtec speaking household. As for Florida, Fl is red because of the presence of Cubans who lost everything during the revolution and were whiter, and because of snowbirds retiring there.

> Considering yourself one thing has nothing to do with how society views you.

Being hispanic in the US has long been considered an ethnicity rather than a race. So yes, it is all about how you view yourself. And you cannot view yourself one way if the majority of your peers views you differently. It's just a myth to think that tens of millions of descendants of hispanics who view themselves as white are viewed as non-white by the society at large.

> Fl is red because of the presence of Cubans who lost everything during the revolution and were whiter

This is racist nonsense. The Cuban revolution happened in the 50s, and that's when the expats fled - only a minority of which were "wealthy". There has not been a rush of wealthy Cuban expats into Florida during the last few election cycles. What has happened is the decedents of those people are second and third generation now, which is exactly the phenomenon I was describing.

So when looking a how the hispanic population as a whole breaks blue, we can't cite the Cuban-American genesis story as why they vote Red?

So my claims that a portion of the descendants of hispanics view themselves as white - and therefore are white - and this portion increases with each generation, is not incompatible with the view that those who still view themselves as hispanics break more blue. In fact, it has nothing to do with testing this hypothesis.

Moreover, if you insist on trying to reduce the politics of Miami to Cuban Americans, and the politics of Florida to Miami, then you are going to be missing the big picture.

Walt Disney himself had Hispanic origins.

So?

The solution to discrimination based on race is certainly not to discriminate based on race.

Why do you think more racism is the solution?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com