3 ms·

> Power dynamics are fluid and contextual. True, but a distraction. When you can have a black man graduate from a top university, well dressed, and yet pulled

> Power dynamics are fluid and contextual. True, but a distraction. When you can have a black man graduate from a top university, well dressed, and yet pulled over, torn from a car, treated poorly and handcuffed -- all for being black and owning a car that made the cops think he might be a drug dealer, that seems even worse than privilege from money. Fighting privilege as a result of wealth is another noble cause; the entire 99% movement was about that, as is Bernie Sanders' popularity. But its existence doesn't mean that other problems aren't worse. I honestly don't like the statements on either side about the babies, so I'll just leave that one. > > Helping groups isn't the same as discrimination. > It is. The only cases where it makes a difference are inherently zero sum or net negative, because if they weren't then the racial preference wouldn't have been necessary to reach the same outcome. No, I'm not talking quotas, I'm talking extra education and being open to working with someone who doesn't look like you. There are cognitive biases that cause people to naturally want to work with people who look like themselves; making an extra effort to overcome that bias and honestly compare candidates is not, by any stretch, a bad thing. It's only "net negative" if you think the whites who had all of the privilege somehow "deserved" the jobs that the potentially better minority or disadvantaged candidates could get with additional help and with mitigation of bias in hiring. I know that there are groups who feel that way (otherwise Trump wouldn't be where he is), but that kind of us-vs-them mentality is harmful.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
You're defending positions nobody is attacking. Here's the part from the original post where you were wrong: > The dominant group doesn't need help. And the reason is that you assume the dominant group is homogeneous or even discretely identifiable. "Black men need more help than white men" is a statement which is true in the aggregate but tells you nothing about whether a specific black man needs more help than a specific white man, and using the color of a man's skin to make the assumption that he is like the stereotype of his race is black letter racism. We need to be teaching people that that is not OK, not that it is OK under various subjective circumstances that racists can then use to rationalize their racism. So this: > When you can have a black man graduate from a top university, well dressed, and yet pulled over, torn from a car, treated poorly and handcuffed -- all for being black and owning a car that made the cops think he might be a drug dealer, that seems even worse than privilege from money. Even assuming that's true (but cf. people who die of starvation or exposure or suffer preventable diseases for lack of money), the fix for that is to fix it. This kind of gets at the heart of what is wrong with the concept of privilege. If you frame it as privilege then the evildoers are the people who have this "privilege" of not being unjustly harassed by the cops. But the actual evildoers are the cops who unjustly harass black people. And we need to attack a problem where it is, not where it isn't. > It's only "net negative" if you think the whites who had all of the privilege somehow "deserved" the jobs that the potentially better minority or disadvantaged candidates could get with additional help and with mitigation of bias in hiring. "The whites who had all of the privilege" are not in the same decision space. The rich man's son always gets the job because his father owns the company. The problem with making decisions at the margin by favoring a nominally less privileged group is that it's too late by then. If the specific person applying for the same job really had significantly more privilege, he wouldn't be applying for the same job. He would be an engineer instead of a mechanic or be applying for a senior position instead of a junior one. To be in the same decision space already implies an equivalent level of privilege. Accounting for it again is double counting. > that kind of us-vs-them mentality is harmful. Categorizing people into groups that have more variation within them than between them and then using the groups to to make preference choices is the us-vs-them mentality.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

You're defending positions nobody is attacking. Here's the part from the original post where you were wrong: > The dominant group doesn't need help. And the reason is that you assume the dominant group is homogeneous or even discretely identifiable. "Black men need more help than white men" is a statement which is true in the aggregate but tells you nothing about whether a specific black man needs more help than a specific white man, and using the color of a man's skin to make the assumption that he is like the stereotype of his race is black letter racism. We need to be teaching people that that is not OK, not that it is OK under various subjective circumstances that racists can then use to rationalize their racism. So this: > When you can have a black man graduate from a top university, well dressed, and yet pulled over, torn from a car, treated poorly and handcuffed -- all for being black and owning a car that made the cops think he might be a drug dealer, that seems even worse than privilege from money. Even assuming that's true (but cf. people who die of starvation or exposure or suffer preventable diseases for lack of money), the fix for that is to fix it. This kind of gets at the heart of what is wrong with the concept of privilege. If you frame it as privilege then the evildoers are the people who have this "privilege" of not being unjustly harassed by the cops. But the actual evildoers are the cops who unjustly harass black people. And we need to attack a problem where it is, not where it isn't. > It's only "net negative" if you think the whites who had all of the privilege somehow "deserved" the jobs that the potentially better minority or disadvantaged candidates could get with additional help and with mitigation of bias in hiring. "The whites who had all of the privilege" are not in the same decision space. The rich man's son always gets the job because his father owns the company. The problem with making decisions at the margin by favoring a nominally less privileged group is that it's too late by then. If the specific person applying for the same job really had significantly more privilege, he wouldn't be applying for the same job. He would be an engineer instead of a mechanic or be applying for a senior position instead of a junior one. To be in the same decision space already implies an equivalent level of privilege. Accounting for it again is double counting. > that kind of us-vs-them mentality is harmful. Categorizing people into groups that have more variation within them than between them and then using the groups to to make preference choices is the us-vs-them mentality.