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I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuri

I think US-bias is more so class bias than race bias and this comes with a 99% correlation to racial discrimination due to the half millenium of directly ensuring certain races could not access the economy or capital or literacy. Racial discrimination also occurs. A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago
There once was a study where they eloquently demonstrated this by putting the same white actor into two situations: one had him lay down acting like he was dying from a hear attack in front of Wall Street wearing a suit. The other had him doing the same thing but wearing worn out sports clothing. They found that people responded more favorably to the actor when he appeared to be of the same social class.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
  We can thank the wars against poverty, drugs, homelessness, and crime for this. These all serve as foils against considering ones own class and how easy it is to move downwards in America without any support for those not in abject poverty nor consideration for the disappearance of community building locations, events, and organizations, in large part due to union busting.
  - Kranar 6y ago
    You are suggesting that draconian actions against drugs, homelessness and crime are causes for people associating with their own class and prejudicing other classes. I suspect it's the other way around; we are prejudiced to favor our own kind across many metrics and the consequence of that prejudice is homelessness, crime, poverty etc... I say this because the kind of prejudice you point out is rampant across all societies, not just America and if anything, America handles it a lot better than any other society.
    - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
      "America handles it a lot better than any other society." How did you come to that conclusion? If I come up with some metrics, like the amount of support and education poor people can access, or the amount of people in jail, or access to justice, America is near the bottomn out of 'developed' nations.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fighterpilot 6y ago
99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical
- vmception 6y ago
  the point is how to address it and gain support from people that don't experience it but have the power to change it if we tell everyone they have problems with skin tones and phenotypes when really their primary unconscious bias is being pretentious, then we need to adjust the messaging and address it more accurately
- Thorentis 6y ago
  Correlation doesn't mean causation. If the cause is class bias, and you spend all your energy trying to make people more tolerant of other races, when actually they have no racist feelings whatsoever but have terrible class prejudices, then all your efforts are in vain. Trying to conflate the two things just because a correlation might exist is the problem OP is talking about.
heterodoxxed 6y ago
The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race into consideration. For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all. The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth). That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study. A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.
- vmception 6y ago
  Yes, and on your first point I think this will be a recurring addendum to my post. My point is that we must address the class issue between and within racial groups or simply put: American culture. It requires compartmentalizing and understanding this more heavily, instead of looking only at the result. We are chiseling at the top of an iceberg, trying to trace backwards and assuming people feel a way that many otherwise supportive people really don't feel, instead of tackling a root cause.
- hnxs 6y ago
  I think class is primarily dictated by three things on a superficial level, e.g ten minutes or less of a first interaction with someone: - How you speak - How you dress - How physically attractive you are, specifically in regards to things like height, fitness, and angular features. Skin color takes a backseat to these factors in the modern era
twic 6y ago
> A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority There was a study on that recently: https://osf.io/tdkf3/ https://osf.io/tdkf3/
- vmception 6y ago
  released yesterday, wow nice to see the collective conscious is producing similar paths of study
- TameAntelope 6y ago
  I've got a lot of problems with this work, but I think I can best summarize my issues with the question: Who are the "Democratic elites"? A list of "Democratic politicians" and quotes from them is given, but I'm curious if that's the full summation of who the "elites" are, or if there are other, thus far unnamed "elites". I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of some of the papers on skull size from the late 19th/early 20th century (Mortonites? A bit fuzzy, it's been a minute). There was an undeniable correlation, but it took decades to undo the false causation that was implied (not directly stated in that paper or this one), and that damage still has not been fully undone, despite the heroic lifelong work of Franz Boas and others. This paper needed to discuss why racial framing isn't persuasive, and it doesn't do that. The whole, "We should trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-very-noble things. White people should be able to hear arguments about racial inequality without losing their collective minds.
  - panopticon 6y ago
    While I don't think the study is particularly strong by itself, your criticisms are kind of strange. I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Democrat elites" materially changes the survey responses and analysis. The only way this critique is relevant is if you reject the premise of the paper, but you don't seem to be doing that? Is that a critique of all correlative studies? What specifically is this paper doing that you think bridges on phrenology (or all that other brain-size hokum)? Why must this paper do that? There's a whole field of political science and opinion polling devoted to effective messaging, and they produce studies like this all the time. Maybe you find focus-group-shaped messaging "insulting", but that seems orthogonal to the goals of this paper. But maybe you can crack that nut and then we can purge like half of Twitter and most political talking heads ;)
throwawayboise 6y ago
> class bias is never addressed at all You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial bias claim.
- newacct583 6y ago
  Interestingly, I see some of the former in online forums. I see a decent amount of the latter, both with and without justification. I've never in my life seen a single poster do that. You have a cite demonstrating this happens "a lot"? This sounds like a strawman. You're taking a criticism often made (again, not without justification) against "your side" and arguing against it by charging the "other side" with hipocrisy despite the fact that e.g. the /r/FloridaMan community has almost no overlap with woke SJWs (or even the surburban families in my neighborhood with BLM signs in their yards).
  - kodah 6y ago
    You can search my username and the word "redneck" and you'll find one. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=kodah%20redneck&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815
    - ingleswood 6y ago
      Reading the thread shows a very different story to the one in the GGP. Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol rioters 'rednecks' or for accusing rednecks of being Capitol rioters. I don't see where that poster told someone off for using racist slurs, but I believe you that it happened. Not sure this is even one example of what was claimed above to happen 'a lot'?
flavius29663 6y ago
as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more resources growing up.
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  Sure you can. You're less likely to be pulled over in most of the US than a black person driving the same car and wearing the same clothes.
  - flavius29663 6y ago
    I was stopped too by police and one time briefly searched, so what? Being stopped by the police is not a game changer. If you haven't done anything wrong you'll walk away and go to work and back home. Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.
    - lucian1900 6y ago
      Black peoples in the US are far more likely to be summarily executed when interacting with police.
      - flavius29663 6y ago
        not when accounting for a higher level of crime. In fact, whites are more than half of police victims, while causing way less than half of violent crimes. There are 32 million traffic stops each year. In 2019 the police shot 14 unarmed black Americans. I think every death is unforgivable, but let's not pretend that going to work and back as a black person you're putting your life at risk when meeting the police. There is a bias, sure, but it's just that, a bias. I fail to see the evidence for widespread discrimination. Police should do more stops and preventive interventions, look at Baltimore https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015 https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015 Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltimore-police-not-noticing-crime-after-freddie-gray-wave-killings-followed/744741002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim... I'm deviating, but my point is that police is not a suppressor for the black community, but a helper and an enabler for the honest working people. It can be intimidating and demeaning interacting with the police, but it's still 100x better than interacting with the gangs of Baltimore.
DenisM 6y ago
I must say it also looks rather beneficial to some - while the lower classes are duking it out over a divisive issue the upper classes are safe from social reform. Divide and rule.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  President Lyndon Johnson said >If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. It does not just apply to dynamics between white and non white people, it applies to all people, even within tribes of the same skin color, and probably even other tribal species.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    He didn’t make it up either - the French government did exactly that about 200 years ago in Haiti. They introduced apartheid for the purpose of sowing discord between people and undermining the independence movement.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      An even older example is Indians and the caste system. I would even posit it greatly assisted Britain in being able to pilfer the subcontinent from halfway around the world with a fraction of the population.
- Nasrudith 6y ago
  Why would all social classes be the same in motivations and goals? You can never trust the "loyalty" of groups they never signed up for. A mining company owner, a wall street trader, a tech start up millionaire, a head partner of a law firm and old-money heir(ess) would all have different interests and goals. The same goes for lower classes as well.
  - DenisM 6y ago
    For starters, the rich have uniform interest in taxation policy - brackets, inheritance, wealth tax, loopholes, trusts, offshores.
skyde 6y ago
Totally agree with you. Which explain why African immigrant that speak (proper) English and wear a suit and tie. Don't have trouble in job interview even if they are "black". While the Black American blame it on racism.
xwolfi 6y ago
Racial equality is a moot point since there are no races. Everyone can even make their children a different color/race by simply "marrying" someone of the desired color/"race". Removing the idea people are segregated in races, a fight long won in Europe, should maybe be the first priority in America. I still can't believe pollers are allowed to split vote intention by random color groups (I'd be ok with segregating by "descendant of slaves, recent immigrant from africa, recent immigrant from Canada, things like that - but "black" means literally nothing at all).
splitstud 6y ago
Or, your assumptions of values, ethics, and how humans function is twisted in a knot. Humans are built to synthesize multitudes of facts, signals, etc using a rubric of experience. The result is imperfect.
ErikVandeWater 6y ago
Agree, except > 99% correlation to racial discrimination suggests that other races do not occupy the lower classes in any significant numbers compared to Blacks. I'd say 40ish %, which is still very high.
- vmception 6y ago
  I never said that, the article never said that, nobody ever said that except you. Giving the benefit of the doubt here: I think you are thinking about a specific form of discrimination, which some people of some heritage overcome.
  - ErikVandeWater 6y ago
    Me saying that you suggested something means I understand you did not literally say it.
99_00 6y ago
>A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all. It works so well and so consistently one might be fooled into think it is by design to protect social elites.

9wzYQbTYsAIc 6y ago

There once was a study where they eloquently demonstrated this by putting the same white actor into two situations: one had him lay down acting like he was dying from a hear attack in front of Wall Street wearing a suit. The other had him doing the same thing but wearing worn out sports clothing. They found that people responded more favorably to the actor when he appeared to be of the same social class.

Red_Leaves_Flyy 6y ago
We can thank the wars against poverty, drugs, homelessness, and crime for this. These all serve as foils against considering ones own class and how easy it is to move downwards in America without any support for those not in abject poverty nor consideration for the disappearance of community building locations, events, and organizations, in large part due to union busting.
- Kranar 6y ago
  You are suggesting that draconian actions against drugs, homelessness and crime are causes for people associating with their own class and prejudicing other classes. I suspect it's the other way around; we are prejudiced to favor our own kind across many metrics and the consequence of that prejudice is homelessness, crime, poverty etc... I say this because the kind of prejudice you point out is rampant across all societies, not just America and if anything, America handles it a lot better than any other society.
  - ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    "America handles it a lot better than any other society." How did you come to that conclusion? If I come up with some metrics, like the amount of support and education poor people can access, or the amount of people in jail, or access to justice, America is near the bottomn out of 'developed' nations.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

fighterpilot 6y ago

99 percent correlation is too high and contradicts the spirit of the statement that it's more class bias than race bias. If the correlation is 99 percent then they're nearly completely identical

vmception 6y ago
the point is how to address it and gain support from people that don't experience it but have the power to change it if we tell everyone they have problems with skin tones and phenotypes when really their primary unconscious bias is being pretentious, then we need to adjust the messaging and address it more accurately
Thorentis 6y ago
Correlation doesn't mean causation. If the cause is class bias, and you spend all your energy trying to make people more tolerant of other races, when actually they have no racist feelings whatsoever but have terrible class prejudices, then all your efforts are in vain. Trying to conflate the two things just because a correlation might exist is the problem OP is talking about.

heterodoxxed 6y ago

The two are so incredibly intertwined given our history that it's hard to separate them. While I think talking about race without talking about class is a huge mistake, it's also a mistake to think that class in a way that doesn't take race into consideration. For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all. The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth). That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study. A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.

vmception 6y ago
Yes, and on your first point I think this will be a recurring addendum to my post. My point is that we must address the class issue between and within racial groups or simply put: American culture. It requires compartmentalizing and understanding this more heavily, instead of looking only at the result. We are chiseling at the top of an iceberg, trying to trace backwards and assuming people feel a way that many otherwise supportive people really don't feel, instead of tackling a root cause.
hnxs 6y ago
I think class is primarily dictated by three things on a superficial level, e.g ten minutes or less of a first interaction with someone: - How you speak - How you dress - How physically attractive you are, specifically in regards to things like height, fitness, and angular features. Skin color takes a backseat to these factors in the modern era

twic 6y ago

> A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority There was a study on that recently: https://osf.io/tdkf3/ https://osf.io/tdkf3/

vmception 6y ago
released yesterday, wow nice to see the collective conscious is producing similar paths of study
TameAntelope 6y ago
I've got a lot of problems with this work, but I think I can best summarize my issues with the question: Who are the "Democratic elites"? A list of "Democratic politicians" and quotes from them is given, but I'm curious if that's the full summation of who the "elites" are, or if there are other, thus far unnamed "elites". I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of some of the papers on skull size from the late 19th/early 20th century (Mortonites? A bit fuzzy, it's been a minute). There was an undeniable correlation, but it took decades to undo the false causation that was implied (not directly stated in that paper or this one), and that damage still has not been fully undone, despite the heroic lifelong work of Franz Boas and others. This paper needed to discuss why racial framing isn't persuasive, and it doesn't do that. The whole, "We should trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-very-noble things. White people should be able to hear arguments about racial inequality without losing their collective minds.
- panopticon 6y ago
  While I don't think the study is particularly strong by itself, your criticisms are kind of strange. I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Democrat elites" materially changes the survey responses and analysis. The only way this critique is relevant is if you reject the premise of the paper, but you don't seem to be doing that? Is that a critique of all correlative studies? What specifically is this paper doing that you think bridges on phrenology (or all that other brain-size hokum)? Why must this paper do that? There's a whole field of political science and opinion polling devoted to effective messaging, and they produce studies like this all the time. Maybe you find focus-group-shaped messaging "insulting", but that seems orthogonal to the goals of this paper. But maybe you can crack that nut and then we can purge like half of Twitter and most political talking heads ;)

throwawayboise 6y ago

> class bias is never addressed at all You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial bias claim.

newacct583 6y ago
Interestingly, I see some of the former in online forums. I see a decent amount of the latter, both with and without justification. I've never in my life seen a single poster do that. You have a cite demonstrating this happens "a lot"? This sounds like a strawman. You're taking a criticism often made (again, not without justification) against "your side" and arguing against it by charging the "other side" with hipocrisy despite the fact that e.g. the /r/FloridaMan community has almost no overlap with woke SJWs (or even the surburban families in my neighborhood with BLM signs in their yards).
- kodah 6y ago
  You can search my username and the word "redneck" and you'll find one. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=kodah%20redneck&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815
  - ingleswood 6y ago
    Reading the thread shows a very different story to the one in the GGP. Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol rioters 'rednecks' or for accusing rednecks of being Capitol rioters. I don't see where that poster told someone off for using racist slurs, but I believe you that it happened. Not sure this is even one example of what was claimed above to happen 'a lot'?

flavius29663 6y ago

as a white that grew up very very poor, I can't possibly understand why so many black people try to convince me that I'm guilty of white privilege, when most of them had many more resources growing up.

anigbrowl 6y ago
Sure you can. You're less likely to be pulled over in most of the US than a black person driving the same car and wearing the same clothes.
- flavius29663 6y ago
  I was stopped too by police and one time briefly searched, so what? Being stopped by the police is not a game changer. If you haven't done anything wrong you'll walk away and go to work and back home. Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.
  - lucian1900 6y ago
    Black peoples in the US are far more likely to be summarily executed when interacting with police.
    - flavius29663 6y ago
      not when accounting for a higher level of crime. In fact, whites are more than half of police victims, while causing way less than half of violent crimes. There are 32 million traffic stops each year. In 2019 the police shot 14 unarmed black Americans. I think every death is unforgivable, but let's not pretend that going to work and back as a black person you're putting your life at risk when meeting the police. There is a bias, sure, but it's just that, a bias. I fail to see the evidence for widespread discrimination. Police should do more stops and preventive interventions, look at Baltimore https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015 https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015 Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltimore-police-not-noticing-crime-after-freddie-gray-wave-killings-followed/744741002/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim... I'm deviating, but my point is that police is not a suppressor for the black community, but a helper and an enabler for the honest working people. It can be intimidating and demeaning interacting with the police, but it's still 100x better than interacting with the gangs of Baltimore.

DenisM 6y ago

I must say it also looks rather beneficial to some - while the lower classes are duking it out over a divisive issue the upper classes are safe from social reform. Divide and rule.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
President Lyndon Johnson said >If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you. It does not just apply to dynamics between white and non white people, it applies to all people, even within tribes of the same skin color, and probably even other tribal species.
- DenisM 6y ago
  He didn’t make it up either - the French government did exactly that about 200 years ago in Haiti. They introduced apartheid for the purpose of sowing discord between people and undermining the independence movement.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    An even older example is Indians and the caste system. I would even posit it greatly assisted Britain in being able to pilfer the subcontinent from halfway around the world with a fraction of the population.
Nasrudith 6y ago
Why would all social classes be the same in motivations and goals? You can never trust the "loyalty" of groups they never signed up for. A mining company owner, a wall street trader, a tech start up millionaire, a head partner of a law firm and old-money heir(ess) would all have different interests and goals. The same goes for lower classes as well.
- DenisM 6y ago
  For starters, the rich have uniform interest in taxation policy - brackets, inheritance, wealth tax, loopholes, trusts, offshores.

skyde 6y ago

Totally agree with you. Which explain why African immigrant that speak (proper) English and wear a suit and tie. Don't have trouble in job interview even if they are "black". While the Black American blame it on racism.

xwolfi 6y ago

Racial equality is a moot point since there are no races. Everyone can even make their children a different color/race by simply "marrying" someone of the desired color/"race". Removing the idea people are segregated in races, a fight long won in Europe, should maybe be the first priority in America. I still can't believe pollers are allowed to split vote intention by random color groups (I'd be ok with segregating by "descendant of slaves, recent immigrant from africa, recent immigrant from Canada, things like that - but "black" means literally nothing at all).

splitstud 6y ago

Or, your assumptions of values, ethics, and how humans function is twisted in a knot. Humans are built to synthesize multitudes of facts, signals, etc using a rubric of experience. The result is imperfect.

ErikVandeWater 6y ago

Agree, except > 99% correlation to racial discrimination suggests that other races do not occupy the lower classes in any significant numbers compared to Blacks. I'd say 40ish %, which is still very high.

vmception 6y ago
I never said that, the article never said that, nobody ever said that except you. Giving the benefit of the doubt here: I think you are thinking about a specific form of discrimination, which some people of some heritage overcome.
- ErikVandeWater 6y ago
  Me saying that you suggested something means I understand you did not literally say it.

99_00 6y ago

>A lot of support for racial equality is lost because it is too reductive and invalidates the experience of potential allies in the majority power who experience biases or don't inherit some of the privileges that they are assumed by others to have. A lot of racial discrimination is created and perpetuated by invalidating those potential allies' experience. While the class bias is never addressed at all. It works so well and so consistently one might be fooled into think it is by design to protect social elites.