Comment by kylerush | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kylerush | Hacker News Reader

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Racism tells us that the white race is superior to all other races. If you reject that, you expect to see that white people (or “model minorities” like Asian race) are not disproportionately receiving access to opportunity or disproportionately controlling the wealth. In the USA, it’s the opposite.

You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.

Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.

If your values include a rejection of racism, you need to create a system that achieves the outcome of proportionate access to opportunity and proportionate control of wealth. Affirmative Action is the system that got the USA closest to achieving that outcome.

This is an extremely simplistic take on a very complicated topic.

While race may be a social construct, it has correlations with a number of other, less artificial factors. A random sample of people with the characteristics we associate with Asian race will tend to have more ancestry that traces back to Asia than would a random sample of people with Caucasian characteristics. This ancestry brings with it cultural and genetic factors that do affect outcomes and are in no way artificial.

This isn't to say that we can just shrug and say that people are different and therefore there's no racism. We absolutely need to be trying to actively eliminate racism. But it's absurd to try to claim that all people are essentially identical across all ethnic groups, and it's frankly offensive to a lot of people who take pride in their culture and ancestry.

The point you’re making is that some cultures devalue educational achievement and success? So much so that we should expect to see members of those cultures disproportionately lacking access to opportunity because they “don’t want it?”

You're putting words in my mouth and, once again, oversimplifying. I'm saying that measurable economic outcomes are tightly wound up with personal identity, and personal identity is an extremely complicated mosaic of many different factors, and many of those factors are cultural. What we believe about the world, ourselves, and other people has a profound impact on the way we live our lives.

It's not simply "some cultures devalue educational achievement and success", because that implies that there is some discrete unit that can be measured called "success". My point is that what "success" means varies dramatically from person to person. When you claim that any variance in numeric results must stem from racism, you are attempting to distill humans down into numbers that can be sorted on a linear scale, and denying the amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world.

I did not claim "any variance in numeric results" is racism. I said the specific "variant" of numeric results that show non-white races disproportionately lacking access to opportunity and wealth is racism.

The amazing amount of cultural diversity in the world is not the reason non-white racial groups disproportionately lack access to opportunity and wealth and you know it.

It's possible I misunderstood this line:

> You can invent whatever system you want, like the one you proposed here, but if the outcome is disproportionate then it is, by definition, a racist system.

> Why? Because race is a construct. It’s fake. Factually speaking, the only differences between these constructed racial groups are things like hair texture and skin pigmentation. Anyone saying otherwise is lying to preserve the construct.

I read this as saying that any difference in outcomes is due to racism. My understanding of your argument is that if it were not for racism then all outcome curves would be identical across all racial categories, because there are no real differences between racial groups.

If that was misunderstanding, I apologize!

Yes, probably a misunderstanding then. The line you quoted says disproportionate. It’s not saying “difference in outcomes” it’s saying “disproportionate outcomes.” And it’s not any outcomes. It’s outcomes that specifically control what is deemed as valuable in the society, in this case education, which is widely understood to be a gateway to success/wealth/improvement/empowerment/power/etc.

I understand that there are differences between cultures. But saying that a culture difference is the reason that a culture disproportionately lacks access to the things deemed of value in the society is blaming the disadvantaged for their disadvantage. That is literally racism. “You do not have the same access to education that white people do because your black culture prevents you from having it.” That is obviously preposterous. What prevents none-white races from having proportional access to education (or anything of value in the society) is the racist system. People do not inflict racism onto themselves. It is inflicted onto them by the race in power.

You'll notice that I've never argued that we reached the point where racist factors in outcomes have been eliminated—I've only ever argued that when we do reach that point, I expect to still see disproportionate outcomes in the way that we currently measure them, because we will still value different things across different cultures. And that's okay! I think a lot of our definitions of success are fundamentally flawed, and cultures prioritizing other things have a lot of value!

Just make sure that when talking about cultural differences (specifically in regards to race) you don’t imply that “some cultures” (you know which ones) don’t value prosperity/wealth. It comes off as … you know what.

However, for the class in question - African-Americans - is it not the case that they have been in America for generations, and so these cultural 'characteristics' would have been far more influenced by their experience in America (at the hands of the ruling white population) than anything that they might have brought with them over the Atlantic?

Unless you think the 'characteristics' have a strong genetic component, and so we are back to racism.

African Americans have retained a pretty distinct identity throughout this time. There are a lot of shared cultural artifacts to be sure, but the existence of a completely distinct dialect of English with its own distinctive grammar is solid evidence that the cultural overlap is not complete.

I resent the implication that any claim of genetic differences amounts to racism. We need to be able to have a reasonable discussion about genetics that doesn't come with all the value judgments that people assign to different genotypes. It's a bald fact that there are genetic differences, and that shouldn't be controversial. The inferences we draw from that fact can be racist, but the fact itself is just a fact.

The only conclusion that I'm arguing for is that people are born and raised differently, and we should expect to see different outcomes as a result. It's pretty obvious that we have not yet reached the point where the differences in outcomes are due exclusively to different choices, but we should expect to eventually reach such a point! People prioritize different things in their lives, and sometimes people prioritize things that the majority doesn't believe are important. That doesn't make them flawed people.

But it could be cultural. All the facts point to that being the cause. If there is so much racism against black people how could Nigerians and Carribean Blacks be some of the most prosperous ethnic groups in the US?

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