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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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