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Comment by gotoeleven | Hacker News Reader

African immigrants do very well in the US.

> According to Hamilton (2019:11), 63 percent of first-generation Nigerian immigrants to the United States are college educated, which is significantly higher than in the U.S. population (Tran et al. 2018). This selectivity is further evident because “in Nigeria, however, only 7 percent of the population had earned a bachelor’s degree” (Hamilton 2019:11), as is also emphasized in Tran et al.’s (2018) discussion of “hyper-selectivity” (p. 188).

These immigrants are usually already somewhat wealthy and educated before they step foot in the US.

But now you're talking about socioeconomic status, not "race".

The debate about race and racism is a constantly moving goal post. CNN said that pointing out the police officers who murdered Tyre Nichols are all black is a form or racism.

GP said "show me that structural racism is imaginary"

Parent said "African immigrants do very well"

I provided data that shows that the claim "African immigrants do very well" suffers from selection bias. It cannot be used as evidence that structural racism does not exist. I am not supporting any claim other than the fact that parent's argument is flawed.

Actually, Africans immigrants doing well in the US would be evidence that there is structural racism. It could be said they're doing well because they bypassed it.

Replying to those below:

Yeah, being poor in America is rough, and it perpetuates. I grew up poor, and totally get it. It's just not an either-or problem. For many black Americans, they're hit by both.

Is argument that because some African children do well we should ignore the overall stats?

Is that "structural racism" or just "being poor sucks"? There's a difference between the two, because the former implies that it's due to the color of their skin, whereas the latter implies it's due to their socioeconomic status.

Economic disparity is a mechanism through which structural racism works.

If we purposefully impoverish black people (e.g., via Jim Crow), the destitution of their kids isn't _just_ an economic problem.

And note that this is the literal case: I know a bunch of poor older folks whose parents struggled to get good jobs because of Jim Crow policies.

I know you would be editing to elaborate, but I think you are going dangerously deep into the territory of unfalsifiable theories. African immigrants and their children both do pretty well actually

The immigration system actively filters for those who would do well (both as an overt goal of the poicy criteria and because of filtering effects of the required effort and opportunities for failure even outside of selection criteria); the existence of that structural bias does not disprove the existence of other structural biases.

African immigrants doing well would not mean there’s not structural racism. Africans don’t have a monopoly on racism to begin with.

I think it would mean that the bias isn’t based on race (so having an intervention based solely on race wouldn’t correct the problem) but on based on prejudice on historical race or being subject to discrimination. So perhaps it’s not discrimination due to race that causes harm as long-term generational discrimination based on race.

It may seem insignificant in that it’s not racism now that’s the problem, but racism then. But, again, if the goal is to increase equity in STEMM then we want to properly design interventions.

"African" is not the only race, a single counterexample is not sufficient to say there's no structural racism.

I’m not arguing that structural racism doesn’t exist. I’m arguing that saying there is structural racism against Black people is not generalizable to all Black people as there are some people with black skin from Africa that don’t have the measurable disparity as other people with black skin.

If anything, I think there should be more precise interventions to reduce structural racism.

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