7 ms·

If you wait to do anything about systemic racism until it's fully quantified, it will be a long time until we can make any progress. Meanwhile, a central point

by lukev 6y ago

If you wait to do anything about systemic racism until it's fully quantified, it will be a long time until we can make any progress. Meanwhile, a central point of the book is one that should be self evident. Talking about racism makes white people[1] uncomfortable. I know this to be true from experience. And we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism. I don't see how you need "statistical power" to recognize this or adopt this strategy. Also, this: > ccuse/blame them for something that they did not personally do That's not what the discomfort is about. Of course none of us are _personally_ responsible for the systemic racism in the US. But if we can't even talk about it without getting uncomfortable, how are we going to fix it? 1: If this doesn't apply to you, great, I wasn't talking about you [2] 2: Except if this topic makes you annoyed enough to disagree then yes, I probably am talking about you.

pdonis 6y ago
> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism. I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody having the same basic human rights, is not achieving that in practice, and how to fix it. Focusing on one particular group of people whose rights are being violated only distracts from that overall objective.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first? Are the only important problems universal ones?
  - Avicebron 6y ago
    No but it comes off as disingenuous because people talk about a lot of ill in the US without getting the level of outrage that this topic brings, rampant inequality, corporate stranglehold of the government and horrible work conditions for many people, regardless of the color of their skin. So when someone says, lets talk about more than this problem, they get sidelined and everything else is pushed further to the back burner.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying we have to fix everything at once. I'm saying that the "one thing that's bad" is not racism; racism is just one particular way the root problem manifests itself. The root of the problem is corruption: people in positions of public trust misusing the power they are granted to indulge their personal prejudices, whatever they are, instead of serving the public. Even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all racism from the world forever, that wouldn't fix the corruption problem; corrupt people in power would just find different excuses for violating people's rights. You have to fix the corruption. And you won't fix corruption by focusing on one particular prejudice that the corrupt people happen to have, even if historically it has been the most common one (which, btw, I'm not sure is actually true--I think religious prejudice is at least as common historically if not more so--but I'm willing to assume it is for the sake of this discussion). The problem is not the particular prejudice the corrupt people have; the problem is that corrupt people are in power in the first place.
  - x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
    >...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it
    - 6y ago
- TeaDrunk 6y ago
  But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it. But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      I think you have both generic problems and module specific problems.
    - TeaDrunk 6y ago
      Arguably, no we haven’t been doing that for more than half a century now. There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s that clawed back a lot of gains and several places (Eg New York City) are still highly segregated in its schooling (and gotten more segregated over time).
      - pdonis 6y ago
        > There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s That doesn't mean we haven't been trying to fix racism for more than half a century. It just means the "fix" hasn't been working.
        TeaDrunk 6y ago
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face. You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.
  - pdonis 6y ago
    > We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face. You're looking at it backwards. The inequality black people face is systematic inequality. (I would argue that it's actually as much based on culture and poverty as on race.) But you can't fix it by focusing on the racial aspect of it. You have to focus on the systematic aspect, because that's the root problem. > You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem. We've been trying "all nuance and approaches" based on the racial aspect for decades, if not longer, and it hasn't helped. The systematic problems, if anything, are worse now than they were in the 1960s when the landmark civil rights laws were passed. If those laws, plus the huge structure of regulations, affirmative action, and so on that has grown up around them, hasn't fixed the problem in more than half a century, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that the root problem is something else, like the system as a whole being corrupt, and try to fix that instead.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      I hear that a lot, were blacks really better off living under Jim Crow than they are today?
Press2forEN 6y ago
> Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable. When the basic premise of the argument is that white Americans are born irredeemably flawed[1], you're unlikely to win many white supporters other than the most guilt-ridden. I suppose the tactic is to impart as much guilt as possible. But that doesn't make the argument a good one. [1] https://twitter.com/DisrnNews/status/1266857347567190016 https://twitter.com/DisrnNews/status/1266857347567190016
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  That is not the starting premise of all who oppose racism. It's not even the starting premise of the majority. It's the starting premise of a few loudmouths who unfortunately were given a microphone. They're doing their cause more harm than good by saying stuff like that. Why are they doing more harm than good? Because, after a claim like that, the conversation is over. There's absolutely no point in talking to someone who makes claims like that. And it makes you less likely to be willing to talk to the next person, either. So the net amount of whites willing to learn and talk about race and racism goes down when people say stuff like this. (It's also factually untrue, blatantly unfair, and bigoted...)
- seppin 6y ago
  Van Jones was right (even the best intentioned are conditioned by forces beyond their control), and you added the word "irredeemable". No one said there isn't a fix. Culture racism is learned, it can be unlearned.
- taurath 6y ago
  I think just about all white people would do well to look around the neighborhood that they grew up in and think about the politics of how it got to be that way. I went to a high school of 1400, and in 4 years there were all of 3 black kids. Turns out this is because no black family was allowed by any bank to get a loan for a mortgage in the area until 1974. White blindness to their privilege is a huge impediment to change - people have literally no idea how different people are treated when there's a different skin color. The tactic is to get people to actually listen so that they might agree its an actual problem and then actually do something about it.
jimbokun 6y ago
Making white people uncomfortable, by itself, does nothing to improve anything for black people. Hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, making police accountable for how they treat black people, are all ways we can help black people. The only thing that "making white people uncomfortable" accomplishes is making more money for white women like Robin DiAngelo selling their books and consulting services.
- jacobush 6y ago
  Unfortunately, many white people feel uncomfortable about hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, and making police accountable for how they treat black people. Buying some books can feel like the lower friction option.
blub 6y ago
Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable because whether it's talking about a specific individual or not, there's an implicit undertone that they're also white and part of the problem. This is particularly grating when considering that white people are a very diverse group and the experience of a white male in Iran is completely different to the one of a white upper-class female in the US or a lower-income white male in the US. The US media and social-media have infected Europe with this us-vs-them attitude and are ironically fueling racism against white people.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world. And if you really want to put a strawman for anti-white-racism up there, use some of the actually happened atrocities against white land owners in some Africna countries after de-colonisation. Obviously without the historic context, because it wouldn't work otherwise. Don't pick Iran, besides being the current boogey man for conservative circles, it really is a bad example for racism. Unless you want to go deep into the shiit-suunit conflict in the Arab World. Which would obviously totally off-topic for this thread.
  - scooble 6y ago
    "Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world." Iirc, in the UK, around half of victims of race hate crimes are white.
    - hef19898 6y ago
      Official government numbers (the full report can be found here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8537/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-..., race starts at page 15 of the PDF): - Percentage of adults affected by hate crime by ethnicity 2015/16 to 2017/18: White 0.1, Mixed 0.5, Asian 1.1, Black/African/Caribean/Black British 0.6 and other 1.0 - Same, by religion: Chistian 0.1, Buddhist 0.1, Hindu 0.7, Muslim 1.5, other 0.5, none 0.1 All adults: 0.2 Conclusion: White christian are by any number underaffected by hate crime in the UK Additonal numbers form London's MOPAC for victims of racist hate cimes in the 12 months up to June 2017: 56% male, 30% black, Asian 25%, White-North European 25%. Obviously, percentages cannot be summed up here. Again, whites are underaffected. perosnal view: Numbers in London might be higher than elsewhere for whites, I don't have a source for that, so. Anyway, both numbers are an order of magnitude away from the 50% you mentioned.
raxxorrax 6y ago
3: I think proponents are full of themselves and at some point I would tell them. I am white for most people aside from some racists. The real ones that think skin color to be indicative of quality. If that comment makes you feel anything, it was probably directed at you.

by lukev 6y ago

pdonis 6y ago

> we can't make progress as a society until we own that discomfort and are willing to have frank conversations about racism. I am all for having frank conversations, but I think the topic needs to be broader than "racism". It needs to be "systematic inequality of treatment". Or even better, "systematic violations of basic human rights". Then we can focus on why our society, which is supposed to be based on everybody having the same basic human rights, is not achieving that in practice, and how to fix it. Focusing on one particular group of people whose rights are being violated only distracts from that overall objective.

pessimizer 6y ago
Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Why, when the aftereffects of American slavery are being discussed, is there always somebody who says that we have to talk about Middle Eastern and African slavery first? Are the only important problems universal ones?
- Avicebron 6y ago
  No but it comes off as disingenuous because people talk about a lot of ill in the US without getting the level of outrage that this topic brings, rampant inequality, corporate stranglehold of the government and horrible work conditions for many people, regardless of the color of their skin. So when someone says, lets talk about more than this problem, they get sidelined and everything else is pushed further to the back burner.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad You're misunderstanding my point. I'm not saying we have to fix everything at once. I'm saying that the "one thing that's bad" is not racism; racism is just one particular way the root problem manifests itself. The root of the problem is corruption: people in positions of public trust misusing the power they are granted to indulge their personal prejudices, whatever they are, instead of serving the public. Even if you could wave a magic wand and remove all racism from the world forever, that wouldn't fix the corruption problem; corrupt people in power would just find different excuses for violating people's rights. You have to fix the corruption. And you won't fix corruption by focusing on one particular prejudice that the corrupt people happen to have, even if historically it has been the most common one (which, btw, I'm not sure is actually true--I think religious prejudice is at least as common historically if not more so--but I'm willing to assume it is for the sake of this discussion). The problem is not the particular prejudice the corrupt people have; the problem is that corrupt people are in power in the first place.
- x86_64Ubuntu 6y ago
  >...Why do we have to talk about everything bad before we talk about one thing that's bad, especially when it comes to black people? Sanitizing discussions of race is something people have always done when it comes to Afrian-Americans. Notice the progression goes from African-Americans -> Systematic Inequality of Treatment -> Systematic Violations of Basic Human Rights -> Everybody. The intersection between race and power in this country is textbook White Fragility, so the go-to move is to "All-Lives-Matter" it
  - 6y ago
TeaDrunk 6y ago
But isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? I mean, if I was debugging something and ignored the segfault because it only happened in one piece of the code, and I only solve bugs that apply to the entire codebase, I’d be a shit engineer
- pdonis 6y ago
  > isn’t it also important to appropriately identify and address the most disenfranchised group when we want to talk about how to help systemic violations of human rights? Back in the 1960s, yes, that was a reasonable approach, and we took it. In your coding analogy, we believed there was a specific bug and started applying patches to address it. But we've been doing that for more than half a century now and it hasn't helped. So now maybe we should consider whether the actual bug might be something else, requiring different patches to fix.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    I think you have both generic problems and module specific problems.
  - TeaDrunk 6y ago
    Arguably, no we haven’t been doing that for more than half a century now. There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s that clawed back a lot of gains and several places (Eg New York City) are still highly segregated in its schooling (and gotten more segregated over time).
    - pdonis 6y ago
      > There was a backlash after the initial push in the 1970s That doesn't mean we haven't been trying to fix racism for more than half a century. It just means the "fix" hasn't been working.
      - TeaDrunk 6y ago
fzeroracer 6y ago
We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face. You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem.
- pdonis 6y ago
  > We can't solve systematic inequality until we solve the inequality black people face. You're looking at it backwards. The inequality black people face is systematic inequality. (I would argue that it's actually as much based on culture and poverty as on race.) But you can't fix it by focusing on the racial aspect of it. You have to focus on the systematic aspect, because that's the root problem. > You want to broaden the topic but by doing so, you're erasing all nuance and approaches for solving a problem. We've been trying "all nuance and approaches" based on the racial aspect for decades, if not longer, and it hasn't helped. The systematic problems, if anything, are worse now than they were in the 1960s when the landmark civil rights laws were passed. If those laws, plus the huge structure of regulations, affirmative action, and so on that has grown up around them, hasn't fixed the problem in more than half a century, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that the root problem is something else, like the system as a whole being corrupt, and try to fix that instead.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    I hear that a lot, were blacks really better off living under Jim Crow than they are today?

Press2forEN 6y ago

> Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable. When the basic premise of the argument is that white Americans are born irredeemably flawed[1], you're unlikely to win many white supporters other than the most guilt-ridden. I suppose the tactic is to impart as much guilt as possible. But that doesn't make the argument a good one. [1] https://twitter.com/DisrnNews/status/1266857347567190016 https://twitter.com/DisrnNews/status/1266857347567190016

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
That is not the starting premise of all who oppose racism. It's not even the starting premise of the majority. It's the starting premise of a few loudmouths who unfortunately were given a microphone. They're doing their cause more harm than good by saying stuff like that. Why are they doing more harm than good? Because, after a claim like that, the conversation is over. There's absolutely no point in talking to someone who makes claims like that. And it makes you less likely to be willing to talk to the next person, either. So the net amount of whites willing to learn and talk about race and racism goes down when people say stuff like this. (It's also factually untrue, blatantly unfair, and bigoted...)
seppin 6y ago
Van Jones was right (even the best intentioned are conditioned by forces beyond their control), and you added the word "irredeemable". No one said there isn't a fix. Culture racism is learned, it can be unlearned.
taurath 6y ago
I think just about all white people would do well to look around the neighborhood that they grew up in and think about the politics of how it got to be that way. I went to a high school of 1400, and in 4 years there were all of 3 black kids. Turns out this is because no black family was allowed by any bank to get a loan for a mortgage in the area until 1974. White blindness to their privilege is a huge impediment to change - people have literally no idea how different people are treated when there's a different skin color. The tactic is to get people to actually listen so that they might agree its an actual problem and then actually do something about it.

jimbokun 6y ago

Making white people uncomfortable, by itself, does nothing to improve anything for black people. Hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, making police accountable for how they treat black people, are all ways we can help black people. The only thing that "making white people uncomfortable" accomplishes is making more money for white women like Robin DiAngelo selling their books and consulting services.

jacobush 6y ago
Unfortunately, many white people feel uncomfortable about hiring more black people, funding more black people, buying from black owned businesses, providing education opportunities to black people, and making police accountable for how they treat black people. Buying some books can feel like the lower friction option.

blub 6y ago

Talking about racism makes white people uncomfortable because whether it's talking about a specific individual or not, there's an implicit undertone that they're also white and part of the problem. This is particularly grating when considering that white people are a very diverse group and the experience of a white male in Iran is completely different to the one of a white upper-class female in the US or a lower-income white male in the US. The US media and social-media have infected Europe with this us-vs-them attitude and are ironically fueling racism against white people.

hef19898 6y ago
Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world. And if you really want to put a strawman for anti-white-racism up there, use some of the actually happened atrocities against white land owners in some Africna countries after de-colonisation. Obviously without the historic context, because it wouldn't work otherwise. Don't pick Iran, besides being the current boogey man for conservative circles, it really is a bad example for racism. Unless you want to go deep into the shiit-suunit conflict in the Arab World. Which would obviously totally off-topic for this thread.
- scooble 6y ago
  "Racism against white people? Definetly notin the wstern world." Iirc, in the UK, around half of victims of race hate crimes are white.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Official government numbers (the full report can be found here: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8537/ https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-..., race starts at page 15 of the PDF): - Percentage of adults affected by hate crime by ethnicity 2015/16 to 2017/18: White 0.1, Mixed 0.5, Asian 1.1, Black/African/Caribean/Black British 0.6 and other 1.0 - Same, by religion: Chistian 0.1, Buddhist 0.1, Hindu 0.7, Muslim 1.5, other 0.5, none 0.1 All adults: 0.2 Conclusion: White christian are by any number underaffected by hate crime in the UK Additonal numbers form London's MOPAC for victims of racist hate cimes in the 12 months up to June 2017: 56% male, 30% black, Asian 25%, White-North European 25%. Obviously, percentages cannot be summed up here. Again, whites are underaffected. perosnal view: Numbers in London might be higher than elsewhere for whites, I don't have a source for that, so. Anyway, both numbers are an order of magnitude away from the 50% you mentioned.

raxxorrax 6y ago

3: I think proponents are full of themselves and at some point I would tell them. I am white for most people aside from some racists. The real ones that think skin color to be indicative of quality. If that comment makes you feel anything, it was probably directed at you.