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My understand for how we measure systemic racism issues seems to typically be predicated on assumed outcomes. For example that if the distribution of employees

My understand for how we measure systemic racism issues seems to typically be predicated on assumed outcomes. For example that if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. What I don’t understand is why that is assumed true. If we want to encourage many different cultures to live together wouldn’t it naturally make sense that different cultures would have different outcomes in job preferences? How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences? My fear is if there are strong cultural differences that lead to disparate racial outcomes so organizations will always be able to point out that systemic issues exist even when they may be eradicated. I don’t know how we measure this.

Slava_Propanei 4y ago
- xctr94 4y ago
  This isn’t Reddit. Sarcasm adds nothing to GP’s question.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mistermann 4y ago
    The ideas within a comment that is stated in a sarcastic form on the other hand, still possess the same value as they would have if stated in a different form. A sarcastic form may render the value invisible from certain frames of reference, but it is still there.
peter422 4y ago
The only issue with this is we can and have isolated clear mechanisms in which certain races are treated differently as compared to others (for example, names on resumes and interview rates, property assessments given a white looking household vs black looking household, pain management in hospitals for women of various races during childbirth, etc), and do I think it is fair to say that the expectation would be if the system were truly unbiased that the proportion of people of different races in various roles would be about similar. Obviously there are a lot of mechanisms that might change that equal expectation, but it still seems reasonable to me that for most jobs the default expectations should be around equal.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  - peter422 4y ago
    Why are you so concerned with the potential aggregate IQ difference of large groups of people? It’s irrelevant to the obvious and provable incidence of racism on the individual level.
    - sacrosancty 4y ago
      Because the different outcomes of those groups is popularly used as a reason that there must be racism causing it which leads to division, hate, and further racist government actions as people imagine that that racism must be very serious to cause such serious effects. But it might actually not be very significant if the cause is something else. And such efforts won't even help the people who are suffering from poverty either. It would be OK if this was a niche opinion but it's incredibly widespread and actually has real world consequences.
  - anon_123g987 4y ago
    I "just Googled" it: > In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence The article is full of references of primary sources that support this claim.
    - renlo 4y ago
      Wikipedia articles for contentious subjects tend to be ... opinionated. Is there anything more contentious than race?
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
bjourne 4y ago
> How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences? By conducting studies where you study the effect of the race variable. This has been done many times over in multiple countries and the results have shown that colored people and racial minorities are discriminated against. But despite the vast amount of empirical data, people still refuse to believe that racial discrimination is a factor in the job market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-applicants-with-black-names-still-less-likely-to-get-the-interview#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli... https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2015-0003/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2015-000...
- mistermann 4y ago
  It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is actually only a means for potentially learning what is going on, and that it can also lead one into a state of confident confusion/misunderstanding. Study results may only suggest something, which can often have the appearance of showing it.
- sacrosancty 4y ago
  - wahnfrieden 4y ago
    >innate qualities measured by IQ is contested/wrong
  - Latty 4y ago
    IQ is a deeply questionable metric to start with (I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are", and as a child I obsessed over them and got very good at them by learning how to approach them, which means it very much isn't measuring something innate), tests are often (and in the case of the historic ones actually cited in the "evidence", all) culturally biased, and the supposed evidence for IQ differences is deeply flawed. (The famous example of "The Bell Curve" citing absurd things like tests in English referencing British culture being given to people who didn't even speak English properly and had never been to Britain as accurate IQ tests). > It's clearly because of some more innate qualities measured by IQ. This is an absurd statement, because even if the IQ differences exist, you are jumping to a conclusion here: that difference in IQ is innate, and not a result of racism or other external factors, with your only justification being: > And the differences appear before school age, so it's hardly any opportunity for racism to cause it. One of the biggest factors for childhood success is how much time your parents spend with you when you are young. If historic racism means your family is poorer, it likely means your parents can spend less time with you. Just one example of many of how this argument just doesn't hold water.
janef0421 4y ago
It's not unreasonable to think that cultural preferences might influence job roles in academia, but in a country with a strong and poorly addressed history of racism, the assumption should be that it results from discrimination. Cultural factor should only be considered if there is strong evidence for them, otherwise they would be used as a rhetorical justification for maintaining discriminatory systems.
- naasking 4y ago
  Or you could just not assume any specific cause and actually study the problem, otherwise you leave such policies open to perfectly justified attacks, to say nothing of the fact that you're potentially persecuting a whole class of innocent people.
- hbrn 4y ago
  > in a country with a strong and poorly addressed history of racism Is there a diverse country that doesn't have a strong history of racism? Is US worse than India, with it's caste system? Is US worse than China, with it's Uyghur genocide? Is US worse than Russia with it's Slavs-only rental ads? Mind you, those are not the examples of past discriminations. Is it possible that the reason you know more about discrimination in the US is not because US had more of it, but because you are better educated about US?
  - janef0421 4y ago
    Nothing about my comment indicated any sort of comparison to any other country.
jhoechtl 4y ago
> For example that if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. The assumption alone is wrong yet any other assumption inevitably leads to stigmatisation and segregation. Whatever study anyone comes up with it will inevitably turn into a discussion if either racism or discrimination.
- curioushacking 4y ago
  This seems to be the largest potential issue then with my understanding of requiring research a-priori to match an assumed outcome or ideal. I wonder if an academic wanted to rigorously attempt to isolate between these, would they be allowed to publish the results were found that systemic issues were not significant. It seems potentially dangerous if we stifle publications of studies that find minimal impact of racism because it could have the impact of only highlighting the cases of racism, but not the net impact.
majormajor 4y ago
In the United States coming from a position of "maybe there is or isn't an effect from racism" is simply naive. A quick glance at history will show you that many differences in both outcomes AND culture have deep-seated intentionally racist historical sources (in different ways for different races). How do you fight intentional racism, with a healthy dose of residual lasting generational effects from past racism, with passivity? It's like creating a game with rules, but having no penalty for breaking them for the first half of the game, and then saying it's just the fault of the loser if someone cheats to beat them. Or saying "I can't tell for sure if it's below freezing, my thermometer has an error bar of +/- ten degrees" and ignoring a bunch of freezing water around you.
- Test0129 4y ago
  Perhaps by not telling the alleged perpetrators they are taking advantage of "power structures" provided by racism. If the US is ~60% white, then simply by the numbers there are more disenfranchised white people than any other race. Are these people also taking advantage of said "power structures"? If the movement to fight this spectre of "institutional" racism would focus less on applying their rules to everyone, and more on applying their rules to actual perpetrators, it would garner more support from the people it needs. To use your analogy if you're sitting in your neighbors pool and he says it's not freezing, but there's freezing water, perhaps don't blame all of his neighbors.
- curioushacking 4y ago
  I'm not trying to say that there hasn't been a history of racism nor even that it isn't prevalent today. I just want to understand how we accurately measure the actual effects of it so that we can understand how much effort to put into solving it or measuring if it is getting better over time. And some of the most used measures I find as evidence seem to be about the distribution of races in various jobs which on its own doesn't necessarily seem like a reliable metric to me. Others pointed out some studies which showed potential biases in hiring and that seems like a great potential proxy to understand the current level of racism in hiring.
BurningFrog 4y ago
> if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. A foundational belief here is that correlation is causation!

Slava_Propanei 4y ago

xctr94 4y ago
This isn’t Reddit. Sarcasm adds nothing to GP’s question.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mistermann 4y ago
  The ideas within a comment that is stated in a sarcastic form on the other hand, still possess the same value as they would have if stated in a different form. A sarcastic form may render the value invisible from certain frames of reference, but it is still there.

peter422 4y ago

The only issue with this is we can and have isolated clear mechanisms in which certain races are treated differently as compared to others (for example, names on resumes and interview rates, property assessments given a white looking household vs black looking household, pain management in hospitals for women of various races during childbirth, etc), and do I think it is fair to say that the expectation would be if the system were truly unbiased that the proportion of people of different races in various roles would be about similar. Obviously there are a lot of mechanisms that might change that equal expectation, but it still seems reasonable to me that for most jobs the default expectations should be around equal.

sacrosancty 4y ago
- peter422 4y ago
  Why are you so concerned with the potential aggregate IQ difference of large groups of people? It’s irrelevant to the obvious and provable incidence of racism on the individual level.
  - sacrosancty 4y ago
    Because the different outcomes of those groups is popularly used as a reason that there must be racism causing it which leads to division, hate, and further racist government actions as people imagine that that racism must be very serious to cause such serious effects. But it might actually not be very significant if the cause is something else. And such efforts won't even help the people who are suffering from poverty either. It would be OK if this was a niche opinion but it's incredibly widespread and actually has real world consequences.
- anon_123g987 4y ago
  I "just Googled" it: > In recent decades, as understanding of human genetics has advanced, claims of inherent differences in intelligence between races have been broadly rejected by scientists on both theoretical and empirical grounds. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_intelligence The article is full of references of primary sources that support this claim.
  - renlo 4y ago
    Wikipedia articles for contentious subjects tend to be ... opinionated. Is there anything more contentious than race?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

bjourne 4y ago

> How do you separate potential racism from cultural differences? By conducting studies where you study the effect of the race variable. This has been done many times over in multiple countries and the results have shown that colored people and racial minorities are discriminated against. But despite the vast amount of empirical data, people still refuse to believe that racial discrimination is a factor in the job market. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-applicants-with-black-names-still-less-likely-to-get-the-interview#xj4y7vzkg https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-29/job-appli... https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548 https://www.jstor.org/stable/40276548 https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2015-0003/html https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/lehr-2015-000...

mistermann 4y ago
It is perhaps worth mentioning that this is actually only a means for potentially learning what is going on, and that it can also lead one into a state of confident confusion/misunderstanding. Study results may only suggest something, which can often have the appearance of showing it.
sacrosancty 4y ago
- wahnfrieden 4y ago
  >innate qualities measured by IQ is contested/wrong
- Latty 4y ago
  IQ is a deeply questionable metric to start with (I have yet to see good evidence IQ tests measure anything more than "how good at IQ tests you are", and as a child I obsessed over them and got very good at them by learning how to approach them, which means it very much isn't measuring something innate), tests are often (and in the case of the historic ones actually cited in the "evidence", all) culturally biased, and the supposed evidence for IQ differences is deeply flawed. (The famous example of "The Bell Curve" citing absurd things like tests in English referencing British culture being given to people who didn't even speak English properly and had never been to Britain as accurate IQ tests). > It's clearly because of some more innate qualities measured by IQ. This is an absurd statement, because even if the IQ differences exist, you are jumping to a conclusion here: that difference in IQ is innate, and not a result of racism or other external factors, with your only justification being: > And the differences appear before school age, so it's hardly any opportunity for racism to cause it. One of the biggest factors for childhood success is how much time your parents spend with you when you are young. If historic racism means your family is poorer, it likely means your parents can spend less time with you. Just one example of many of how this argument just doesn't hold water.

janef0421 4y ago

It's not unreasonable to think that cultural preferences might influence job roles in academia, but in a country with a strong and poorly addressed history of racism, the assumption should be that it results from discrimination. Cultural factor should only be considered if there is strong evidence for them, otherwise they would be used as a rhetorical justification for maintaining discriminatory systems.

naasking 4y ago
Or you could just not assume any specific cause and actually study the problem, otherwise you leave such policies open to perfectly justified attacks, to say nothing of the fact that you're potentially persecuting a whole class of innocent people.
hbrn 4y ago
> in a country with a strong and poorly addressed history of racism Is there a diverse country that doesn't have a strong history of racism? Is US worse than India, with it's caste system? Is US worse than China, with it's Uyghur genocide? Is US worse than Russia with it's Slavs-only rental ads? Mind you, those are not the examples of past discriminations. Is it possible that the reason you know more about discrimination in the US is not because US had more of it, but because you are better educated about US?
- janef0421 4y ago
  Nothing about my comment indicated any sort of comparison to any other country.

jhoechtl 4y ago

> For example that if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. The assumption alone is wrong yet any other assumption inevitably leads to stigmatisation and segregation. Whatever study anyone comes up with it will inevitably turn into a discussion if either racism or discrimination.

curioushacking 4y ago
This seems to be the largest potential issue then with my understanding of requiring research a-priori to match an assumed outcome or ideal. I wonder if an academic wanted to rigorously attempt to isolate between these, would they be allowed to publish the results were found that systemic issues were not significant. It seems potentially dangerous if we stifle publications of studies that find minimal impact of racism because it could have the impact of only highlighting the cases of racism, but not the net impact.

majormajor 4y ago

In the United States coming from a position of "maybe there is or isn't an effect from racism" is simply naive. A quick glance at history will show you that many differences in both outcomes AND culture have deep-seated intentionally racist historical sources (in different ways for different races). How do you fight intentional racism, with a healthy dose of residual lasting generational effects from past racism, with passivity? It's like creating a game with rules, but having no penalty for breaking them for the first half of the game, and then saying it's just the fault of the loser if someone cheats to beat them. Or saying "I can't tell for sure if it's below freezing, my thermometer has an error bar of +/- ten degrees" and ignoring a bunch of freezing water around you.

Test0129 4y ago
Perhaps by not telling the alleged perpetrators they are taking advantage of "power structures" provided by racism. If the US is ~60% white, then simply by the numbers there are more disenfranchised white people than any other race. Are these people also taking advantage of said "power structures"? If the movement to fight this spectre of "institutional" racism would focus less on applying their rules to everyone, and more on applying their rules to actual perpetrators, it would garner more support from the people it needs. To use your analogy if you're sitting in your neighbors pool and he says it's not freezing, but there's freezing water, perhaps don't blame all of his neighbors.
curioushacking 4y ago
I'm not trying to say that there hasn't been a history of racism nor even that it isn't prevalent today. I just want to understand how we accurately measure the actual effects of it so that we can understand how much effort to put into solving it or measuring if it is getting better over time. And some of the most used measures I find as evidence seem to be about the distribution of races in various jobs which on its own doesn't necessarily seem like a reliable metric to me. Others pointed out some studies which showed potential biases in hiring and that seems like a great potential proxy to understand the current level of racism in hiring.

BurningFrog 4y ago

> if the distribution of employees race does not match the general population then there must be a systemic cause for this. A foundational belief here is that correlation is causation!