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I don't want to start a flamewar or anything. I think you are misunderstanding the issues around race and gender. And it's not really your fault--messaging on

I don't want to start a flamewar or anything. I think you are misunderstanding the issues around race and gender. And it's not really your fault--messaging on this issue is not very clear and there has been a massively toxic tendency to end discussion by declaring someone "a racist" and shutting them out. When I was young, my progressive, well-meaning parents taught me that I should be color-blind and not see race or gender, thinking that a generation of such people would naturally make a world with more equality of opportunity. The problem is that that didn't work. All it did was create a generation of people who were illiterate in regards to the impacts of race and gender discrimination. It created a blind spot where those who wanted to discriminate could hide. Data shows that race and gender have wide reaching impacts on one's ability to access services including education and healthcare, interactions with the justice system, and employment. The sad truth is that categories of race and gender have an outsized impact on your prospects and people have always been defined by them in this country. In some sense, the earlier campaigns were successful--most people agree that overt segregation and discrimination are a bad thing. That's huge progress. But since we have mostly ceased practicing overt forms of discrimination, how is it that these disparities persist? There are two options either there are unconscious and unintentional biases that have a significant impact or the lingering side effects of discrimination keep historically marginalized groups at a significant disadvantage. (I think both cases are true, but that doesn't impact my argument.) If we want to understand why we have these disparate outcomes, we have to pay attention to race and gender and how we behave in relation these categories. Only by doing so can we hope to resolve the underlying issues that drive social imbalance. If you want to learn more about this from someone far, far more expert on the topic than myself, I recommend listening to some interviews with or articles by Ibram X. Kendi. His work is insightful and accessible. https://www.ibramxkendi.com/ https://www.ibramxkendi.com/

endominus 6y ago
Hmm. I don't think that those are the only two options, though; disparities can exist for reasons other than historical marginalization or unconscious bias, and by framing the debate exclusively in those terms, you are blinding yourself to other possibilities. I'm most concerned with the second option, however, as it's too broad a category. The "lingering side effects of discrimination" can be used to explain every negative outcome afflicting a community, and be used to justify pretty much any remedy. It's a dangerous tool, as it very easily obscures directly addressable causes of problems in favor of wide, epic narratives of historical oppression. And I suspect that certain people favor it for aesthetic rather than effective reasons - it is much easier to raise support from people by saying that their problems are caused by the malicious or ignorant other than that their problems are addressable and solvable at the community level. For example, you can assert that urban violence and gang warfare are the results of generational poverty and discrimination of black people - you'd be right - but that assertion doesn't necessarily offer the most accurate or useful model of the issue. Most importantly, I would argue that it shifts the focus for the solution onto external factors (wider discrimination in society) rather than internal ones (such as, stop being violent with one another). The second option sounds ridiculous, but it has worked in the past. [0] History is too easy a scapegoat for current problems. Thinking of outcome disparity only in the contexts of history and unconscious bias leads to distortions in the solution space. Unfortunately, by reframing debate around racial and historical lines, certain people have been able to extract wealth and influence from their communities without providing actionable solutions or illuminating easier interventions that would greatly aid in solving problems. I'm unfortunately a pessimist in this matter; the racial divide is a very useful one to certain interests. With a small investment of wealth and prestige to media outlets and academics, they can keep the people in lower economic classes biting at each other rather than focusing on the much more oppressive and harmful background radiation of wealth inequality that serves as a precondition to their actual struggles. The social ramifications of slavery are negative; no one can reasonably dispute that. But the reason that the prison state is expanding, social programs are crumbling, violence seems ever-present, and the outcome of every successive generation is worse and worse is the ticking along of vast systems forming the bedrock of the American economy. These systems do not care about the race of the people ground beneath their wheels, nor the gender of the blood that slicks their gears; they accept all to offer their bodies and lives in supplication, to suborn their will to alien gods and inhuman reckoning. That's just my opinion, though. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disrupting-urban-violence-with-culture-in-the-bronx-and-new-orleans https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disruptin...
mercer 6y ago
Great comment. I think a big part of the problem, that I feel Cyberpunk actually highlights really well, is the degree to which problems are ultimately defined by and related to the individual. And, unfortunately, constrained. Take the hippie movement. It's often associated with 'the left' but I'd argue that the navel-gazing focus on individual enlightenment caused immense damage to the ability of those without power to collectively have enough of it to see some changes. Cyberpunk, intentionally or not, highlights this. The typical Cyberpunk scene is a person alone, getting by. Any kind of 'collective' behavior is nipped in the bud by surveillance and whatnot. Any solutions involve that lone person forming valuable relationships with other lone persons (or robits, I guess). The dystopia, I feel, is usually not experientially the marketing, the massive corporate powers, and so on. It's the stifling isolation, and the only solution that's remotely viable is finding another single soul to share it with. What I've found interesting about a show/book series like The Expanse, is that it dips into the Cyberpunk themes with the detective dude (I don't think it's a coincidence that Cyberpunk and film noir often overlap, the latter just an earlier iteration of the former). But eventually that guy, in the expanse of multiple planets, has options to find something bigger, more collective, to be part of.

endominus 6y ago

Hmm. I don't think that those are the only two options, though; disparities can exist for reasons other than historical marginalization or unconscious bias, and by framing the debate exclusively in those terms, you are blinding yourself to other possibilities. I'm most concerned with the second option, however, as it's too broad a category. The "lingering side effects of discrimination" can be used to explain every negative outcome afflicting a community, and be used to justify pretty much any remedy. It's a dangerous tool, as it very easily obscures directly addressable causes of problems in favor of wide, epic narratives of historical oppression. And I suspect that certain people favor it for aesthetic rather than effective reasons - it is much easier to raise support from people by saying that their problems are caused by the malicious or ignorant other than that their problems are addressable and solvable at the community level. For example, you can assert that urban violence and gang warfare are the results of generational poverty and discrimination of black people - you'd be right - but that assertion doesn't necessarily offer the most accurate or useful model of the issue. Most importantly, I would argue that it shifts the focus for the solution onto external factors (wider discrimination in society) rather than internal ones (such as, stop being violent with one another). The second option sounds ridiculous, but it has worked in the past. [0] History is too easy a scapegoat for current problems. Thinking of outcome disparity only in the contexts of history and unconscious bias leads to distortions in the solution space. Unfortunately, by reframing debate around racial and historical lines, certain people have been able to extract wealth and influence from their communities without providing actionable solutions or illuminating easier interventions that would greatly aid in solving problems. I'm unfortunately a pessimist in this matter; the racial divide is a very useful one to certain interests. With a small investment of wealth and prestige to media outlets and academics, they can keep the people in lower economic classes biting at each other rather than focusing on the much more oppressive and harmful background radiation of wealth inequality that serves as a precondition to their actual struggles. The social ramifications of slavery are negative; no one can reasonably dispute that. But the reason that the prison state is expanding, social programs are crumbling, violence seems ever-present, and the outcome of every successive generation is worse and worse is the ticking along of vast systems forming the bedrock of the American economy. These systems do not care about the race of the people ground beneath their wheels, nor the gender of the blood that slicks their gears; they accept all to offer their bodies and lives in supplication, to suborn their will to alien gods and inhuman reckoning. That's just my opinion, though. [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disrupting-urban-violence-with-culture-in-the-bronx-and-new-orleans https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-23/disruptin...

mercer 6y ago

Great comment. I think a big part of the problem, that I feel Cyberpunk actually highlights really well, is the degree to which problems are ultimately defined by and related to the individual. And, unfortunately, constrained. Take the hippie movement. It's often associated with 'the left' but I'd argue that the navel-gazing focus on individual enlightenment caused immense damage to the ability of those without power to collectively have enough of it to see some changes. Cyberpunk, intentionally or not, highlights this. The typical Cyberpunk scene is a person alone, getting by. Any kind of 'collective' behavior is nipped in the bud by surveillance and whatnot. Any solutions involve that lone person forming valuable relationships with other lone persons (or robits, I guess). The dystopia, I feel, is usually not experientially the marketing, the massive corporate powers, and so on. It's the stifling isolation, and the only solution that's remotely viable is finding another single soul to share it with. What I've found interesting about a show/book series like The Expanse, is that it dips into the Cyberpunk themes with the detective dude (I don't think it's a coincidence that Cyberpunk and film noir often overlap, the latter just an earlier iteration of the former). But eventually that guy, in the expanse of multiple planets, has options to find something bigger, more collective, to be part of.