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Fighting racism with racism is difficult because racism isn't just a number. If you reject the idea of fighting racism by stomping it out where you find it and

Fighting racism with racism is difficult because racism isn't just a number. If you reject the idea of fighting racism by stomping it out where you find it and instead try to use counter-racism, suddenly you're in the business of determining precisely, exactly the opposite direction of the existing racism. If you screw it up you just add to the problem. See: video-game speedrunners blasting through levels at enormous speed because devs thought that "pushing in the opposite direction" was conceptually easy, but it turned out not to be -- and that's just 3 dimensions! Here we're talking about people's lives, with hundreds of dimensions. There's no way that's going to end well, it's just tossing gasoline onto racial tensions. Sure, the gasoline might extinguish the fire. It's not impossible. I'd place a lot of money on the opposite, though.

dahart 6y ago
How do we push back in exactly, precisely the opposite direction?
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  You don't. That's my point: it's nearly impossible to do a good job of fighting racism with racism and very, very easy to screw it up catastrophically. Just look at what's already happened with Asians becoming collateral damage. Instead, you fight racism by A) stomping it out where you see it, B) instituting policies that help poor and disadvantaged people in general. Strategies like that are much more foolproof than trying to fight racism with racism. Also much more expensive, which is why there's a temptation to kid ourselves that fighting racism with racism could possibly work.
  - kn0where 6y ago
    When being a member or a particular race is highly correlated with being poor and disadvantaged in America, is instituting a policy that admits more of them to Yale an example of B) or, as you say, trying to fight racism with racism?
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      > is instituting a policy that admits more of them to Yale If the policy is to look at race and give/take points, that's racism in the most literal way possible. If the policy is to look at SES, it's not racist, even though there's a correlation. At some point correlations become strong enough that it's difficult to disentangle concepts, but I don't think this is an example of that. In particular: would giving points based on SES have screwed Asians in the way that trying to balance races did? Probably not. It's a better formulation of the problem.
  - dahart 6y ago
    I like this direction of discussion, and I think affirmative action actually is acknowledgement of what you're saying - that we don't have any way to push back in the exact same direction. So the idea instead is to work on equalizing the opportunities and outcomes and just hope that helps equalize the cultural forces, right? What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out? Are there cases I can read about where these strategies have been proven foolproof, has it worked in other countries to eliminate racism by helping the poor?
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      I'm afraid I'm no historian, so I'm not going to be able to draw up a comparative history of counter-racism approaches vs help-the-poor approaches, at least not beyond the obvious examples where an oppressed minority suddenly gets power, seeks revenge, and it inevitably ends very badly for both sides. I'm an engineer. Systems theory is how I interface with these ideas. It has notions of "gain margin" and "phase margin" -- i.e. how hard you can push (or how long you can delay feedback, the two are somewhat interchangeable, which is often under-appreciated) before your attempt to build a self-correcting airplane wing, power delivery circuit, rocket that points up, etc stops being self-correcting and turns into a wildly oscillating self-destructive mess that you should count yourself lucky if it only destroys itself without taking its surroundings with it. In society, we can't calculate gain margin and phase margin, but we still have to decide how hard to push and if we push too hard, the system will still punish us. All of us. Nobody likes to hear "push more softly for the cause you believe in." I sure don't. But having screwed up this choice in an engineering context, I respect the possibility of screwing it up in a social context, and I see it as a strong argument for exercising restraint. > What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out? We've stomped out most of the blatant, obvious racism that was easy to see, so from here out it's largely going to be difficult. That is: option B, above. That's how we go after the systemic racism: ensure that the system shrinks the influences of the past rather than growing them. In particular, we need to figure out what kind of support is necessary to give the next generation of kids a fair shake at life and give it to them. Even more specifically I'm thinking about federally funded health care, housing, and primary/secondary education. It's going to cost a lot. It's not going to let us indulge in fantasies of somehow canceling out the racism of yesterday. But it might let us fix tomorrow.

dahart 6y ago

How do we push back in exactly, precisely the opposite direction?

jjoonathan 6y ago
You don't. That's my point: it's nearly impossible to do a good job of fighting racism with racism and very, very easy to screw it up catastrophically. Just look at what's already happened with Asians becoming collateral damage. Instead, you fight racism by A) stomping it out where you see it, B) instituting policies that help poor and disadvantaged people in general. Strategies like that are much more foolproof than trying to fight racism with racism. Also much more expensive, which is why there's a temptation to kid ourselves that fighting racism with racism could possibly work.
- kn0where 6y ago
  When being a member or a particular race is highly correlated with being poor and disadvantaged in America, is instituting a policy that admits more of them to Yale an example of B) or, as you say, trying to fight racism with racism?
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    > is instituting a policy that admits more of them to Yale If the policy is to look at race and give/take points, that's racism in the most literal way possible. If the policy is to look at SES, it's not racist, even though there's a correlation. At some point correlations become strong enough that it's difficult to disentangle concepts, but I don't think this is an example of that. In particular: would giving points based on SES have screwed Asians in the way that trying to balance races did? Probably not. It's a better formulation of the problem.
- dahart 6y ago
  I like this direction of discussion, and I think affirmative action actually is acknowledgement of what you're saying - that we don't have any way to push back in the exact same direction. So the idea instead is to work on equalizing the opportunities and outcomes and just hope that helps equalize the cultural forces, right? What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out? Are there cases I can read about where these strategies have been proven foolproof, has it worked in other countries to eliminate racism by helping the poor?
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    I'm afraid I'm no historian, so I'm not going to be able to draw up a comparative history of counter-racism approaches vs help-the-poor approaches, at least not beyond the obvious examples where an oppressed minority suddenly gets power, seeks revenge, and it inevitably ends very badly for both sides. I'm an engineer. Systems theory is how I interface with these ideas. It has notions of "gain margin" and "phase margin" -- i.e. how hard you can push (or how long you can delay feedback, the two are somewhat interchangeable, which is often under-appreciated) before your attempt to build a self-correcting airplane wing, power delivery circuit, rocket that points up, etc stops being self-correcting and turns into a wildly oscillating self-destructive mess that you should count yourself lucky if it only destroys itself without taking its surroundings with it. In society, we can't calculate gain margin and phase margin, but we still have to decide how hard to push and if we push too hard, the system will still punish us. All of us. Nobody likes to hear "push more softly for the cause you believe in." I sure don't. But having screwed up this choice in an engineering context, I respect the possibility of screwing it up in a social context, and I see it as a strong argument for exercising restraint. > What does it mean exactly to stomp it out where you see it? How do we see it and how do we stomp it out? What if it's hard to see, or difficult to stomp out? We've stomped out most of the blatant, obvious racism that was easy to see, so from here out it's largely going to be difficult. That is: option B, above. That's how we go after the systemic racism: ensure that the system shrinks the influences of the past rather than growing them. In particular, we need to figure out what kind of support is necessary to give the next generation of kids a fair shake at life and give it to them. Even more specifically I'm thinking about federally funded health care, housing, and primary/secondary education. It's going to cost a lot. It's not going to let us indulge in fantasies of somehow canceling out the racism of yesterday. But it might let us fix tomorrow.