10 ms·

As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairl

As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this. I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California, people talked about race way less than they do today. When ethnic representation became a common topic of conversation, I had a hard time believing it at first, because it seemed so self-evidently obvious to me that race wasn't a particularly important characteristic of a person. I actually had the experience of thinking back to my time in jr high/high school and thinking "wow, that friend of mine had dark skin, and they weren't from India... I guess they were Black, huh". I'm not trying to claim that I didn't have subconscious biases related to race as a kid. I'm sure I did. But I do suspect they have become a lot more severe as a result of people talking about race so much -- it has become a much more salient characteristic. (I'm also more aware of trying to mitigate my biases and avoid microaggressions and so on, of course.) So yeah, I'm curious to compare notes with other 90s kids in this regard. I'm white, but if I was Black, I imagine that I'd be way more self-conscious about it now than I was when I was growing up. (Like, if I'm the only white person in a group, I feel self-conscious about it now in a way that I didn't feel when I was a kid.)

human_person 4y ago
I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming, the commentator will still be the first/only person of color in the group and there is a discomfort inherent to that even if everyone is trying to be welcoming. Also re “colorblind” policies of the 90a versus the explicitness of today, I think it’s similar to the current reckoning in journalism. We all have biases and pretending we don’t/acting like we are capable of pure objectivity simply hides them and makes them more difficult to combat. On the other hand explicitly acknowledging them allows you to consider how they might be influencing your decisions.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  I certainly didn't mean to invalidate their discomfort -- as I mentioned at the end, I feel the same way sometimes. I apologize if people found it invalidating. I actually wrote the initial draft of my comment with welcomingness as sort of a background assumption in my mind, and then I thought "wait a minute, even if I'm assuming that people would be welcoming, the person reading my comment might not. and given how hostile online discussions can get, it seems safer to err on the side of emphasizing welcomingness." That still seems roughly correct to me -- I think some topics have so much hostility associated with them that whatever you're going to say about the topic, it probably makes sense to also add in a bunch of welcomingness too, just so the discussion goes well.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  For the colorblindness part, I think my core objection to the cultural changes which have occurred since I was a kid is not to increased awareness of biases per se, but rather this phenomenon: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactions. A thought experiment: Imagine a non-Mexican person says "I love celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It's an excellent excuse to drink tequila!" As a culture, we can decide whether that's a positive interaction or a negative interaction. We can make it a positive interaction by laughing and clinking glasses. We can make it a negative interaction by calling the person out for cultural appropriation or trivializing an important Mexican holiday. My intuition is that making it a negative interaction is a big mistake, because it worsens subconscious racial biases and generally makes the world a less pleasant place. I recommend playing this game https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb to better understand my intuition here. (Based on what I've read about Israel/Palestine, the game is an excellent description of why things have been getting so bad there lately.)
  - dinkumthinkum 4y ago
    I know this just your example but I think it demonstrates the larger issue with victim culture. Cinco de Mayo is not actually a very important holiday in Mexico. I agree that it’s not good to turn everything into a negative interaction but it’s not clear to me that having “cultural appropriation” as a top of mind issue is a very healthy thing either.
alphydan 4y ago
The better question to ask yourself (you the white guy), is would you join a group [insert som hobby like hiking] composed 100% of Cholitas. If yes, are you sure? if not, why not? *Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  As I stated, I've had the experience of feeling self-conscious in a group where I was the only white person (or one of just a few). That never happened when I was a kid, but it has happened a few times as an adult. With regard to the Cholitas thought experiment, I think my major source of discomfort is that at least one of them would look at me and think to herself "he's a patriarchical colonizer" and feel hostility from that. I'd feel more comfortable if I had a friend in the group who could vouch for me. Otherwise I'd worry the Cholitas didn't want me to be there. I suppose that works in reverse as well -- an ethnic person might look at a group of white people and worry that one of them was present at Jan 6 or what have you. What I miss from my childhood was the feeling that we're all in this together as human beings and race just isn't important. In the time & place I grew up, if someone was to start denigrating others on the basis of race, everyone would consider them to be an unimportant wacko. In that cultural context I wouldn't feel as much apprehension joining a group of Cholitas.
  - switchbak 4y ago
    I strongly agree. Trading in the "shared humanity" approach for one where we self segregate and pre-emptively expect and search for discrimination at all moments seems like the opposite of progress.
- faddypaddy34 4y ago
  The better question is would that group let a lone white guy join?
  - Baeocystin 4y ago
    In my experience of being that 'lone white guy' more often than not, the amount of general acceptance I get in any group where I've been the odd man out has been great. Life is very different offline.
heavyset_go 4y ago
> As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. I've heard similar things, but as a non-minority, you don't see what happens when you aren't looking or when people think they can get away with something without consequences, including social or professional consequences. Someone who is a minority has to live it 24/7, so they get a bigger picture that you don't. You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  >You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. Yeah I totally buy that. >With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it. If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical? I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It) The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era. Trump's popularity exploded around July 2015: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2... But e.g. the number of NY Times articles on "whiteness" were on an exploding trend by 2014: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th... (The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb ) Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously. I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
steele 4y ago
[flagged]
themitigating 4y ago
"As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them." This isn't an attack and your sentiment seems genuine but obviously this person knows his fears are not logical. I doubt most people can will themselves into feeling accepted even if others, like yourself, do your best to them feel accepted. That's why representation matters
wreath 4y ago
> As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Although I appreciate the intentions of such people, as a non-white guy this always made me feel uncomfortable. That I'm not being welcomed for being a new member but rather a new member who's somewhat different (in color in this case). Whether this is at work, sports groups etc. I guess you call that a token?
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  Yeah that's definitely an understandable feeling. But on the other hand, if representation matters (as others in this thread claim), it seems hard to please everyone? Supposing you had a group that's 100% white by accident, and they know representation matters. Because they're 100% white, they're starting from a disadvantage: If you want representation, it helps to have representation already! So from this perspective, being 10% nicer to non-whites who join the group seems like a natural solution, to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe the right compromise is to just be especially careful not to be rude to people who are underrepresented in the group, and not worry about it beyond that?
  - wreath 4y ago
    But why does representation of different skin colors matter or ethnicity matters? There are very very few occasions where it does, but in most everyday situations like work, sports etc it really doesn't. I'd rather be classified by an attribute that's relevant to the situation such as skill level or expertise rather than arbitrary attribute like my skin color, why not my height or color of my teeth instead?
    - whynaut 4y ago
      Didn't we already establish upthread why it matters? Why are we backtracking 5 comments deep?
Dalewyn 4y ago
[flagged]
- 493579620678 4y ago
  I agree, and I would extend that to sex and gender as well, and say that we should treat every person equally and according to their character.
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  MLK also said this: > I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
  - ShredKazoo 4y ago
    And in I Have a Dream, he said this: >There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. >We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only. >We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. Since then, most of these problems have been greatly reduced. Consider police brutality, for instance. On the scale of the entire population, it is small. The Washington Post says they know of 7 unarmed Black people killed by police in 2022. Of those, the majority were fleeing the scene of the crime. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... There are about 45 million Black people in the US, so those 7 victims represent around 0.00001% of the Black population. And we can hardly say that "basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one" after a 2-term Black president, who many Black people (including in New York) voted for. Since injustice has shrunk since King's day, it follows that our concern for that injustice should be smaller as well. Same way it wouldn't be reasonable to murder a clerk who didn't give you the proper amount of change after a purchase.

human_person 4y ago

I’m not sure > As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming, the commentator will still be the first/only person of color in the group and there is a discomfort inherent to that even if everyone is trying to be welcoming. Also re “colorblind” policies of the 90a versus the explicitness of today, I think it’s similar to the current reckoning in journalism. We all have biases and pretending we don’t/acting like we are capable of pure objectivity simply hides them and makes them more difficult to combat. On the other hand explicitly acknowledging them allows you to consider how they might be influencing your decisions.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
I certainly didn't mean to invalidate their discomfort -- as I mentioned at the end, I feel the same way sometimes. I apologize if people found it invalidating. I actually wrote the initial draft of my comment with welcomingness as sort of a background assumption in my mind, and then I thought "wait a minute, even if I'm assuming that people would be welcoming, the person reading my comment might not. and given how hostile online discussions can get, it seems safer to err on the side of emphasizing welcomingness." That still seems roughly correct to me -- I think some topics have so much hostility associated with them that whatever you're going to say about the topic, it probably makes sense to also add in a bunch of welcomingness too, just so the discussion goes well.
ShredKazoo 4y ago
For the colorblindness part, I think my core objection to the cultural changes which have occurred since I was a kid is not to increased awareness of biases per se, but rather this phenomenon: https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactions. A thought experiment: Imagine a non-Mexican person says "I love celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It's an excellent excuse to drink tequila!" As a culture, we can decide whether that's a positive interaction or a negative interaction. We can make it a positive interaction by laughing and clinking glasses. We can make it a negative interaction by calling the person out for cultural appropriation or trivializing an important Mexican holiday. My intuition is that making it a negative interaction is a big mistake, because it worsens subconscious racial biases and generally makes the world a less pleasant place. I recommend playing this game https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb to better understand my intuition here. (Based on what I've read about Israel/Palestine, the game is an excellent description of why things have been getting so bad there lately.)
- dinkumthinkum 4y ago
  I know this just your example but I think it demonstrates the larger issue with victim culture. Cinco de Mayo is not actually a very important holiday in Mexico. I agree that it’s not good to turn everything into a negative interaction but it’s not clear to me that having “cultural appropriation” as a top of mind issue is a very healthy thing either.

alphydan 4y ago

The better question to ask yourself (you the white guy), is would you join a group [insert som hobby like hiking] composed 100% of Cholitas. If yes, are you sure? if not, why not? *Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
As I stated, I've had the experience of feeling self-conscious in a group where I was the only white person (or one of just a few). That never happened when I was a kid, but it has happened a few times as an adult. With regard to the Cholitas thought experiment, I think my major source of discomfort is that at least one of them would look at me and think to herself "he's a patriarchical colonizer" and feel hostility from that. I'd feel more comfortable if I had a friend in the group who could vouch for me. Otherwise I'd worry the Cholitas didn't want me to be there. I suppose that works in reverse as well -- an ethnic person might look at a group of white people and worry that one of them was present at Jan 6 or what have you. What I miss from my childhood was the feeling that we're all in this together as human beings and race just isn't important. In the time & place I grew up, if someone was to start denigrating others on the basis of race, everyone would consider them to be an unimportant wacko. In that cultural context I wouldn't feel as much apprehension joining a group of Cholitas.
- switchbak 4y ago
  I strongly agree. Trading in the "shared humanity" approach for one where we self segregate and pre-emptively expect and search for discrimination at all moments seems like the opposite of progress.
faddypaddy34 4y ago
The better question is would that group let a lone white guy join?
- Baeocystin 4y ago
  In my experience of being that 'lone white guy' more often than not, the amount of general acceptance I get in any group where I've been the odd man out has been great. Life is very different offline.

heavyset_go 4y ago

> As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them. I've heard similar things, but as a non-minority, you don't see what happens when you aren't looking or when people think they can get away with something without consequences, including social or professional consequences. Someone who is a minority has to live it 24/7, so they get a bigger picture that you don't. You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.

ShredKazoo 4y ago
>You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention. Yeah I totally buy that. >With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it. If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical? I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It) The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era. Trump's popularity exploded around July 2015: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_republican_presidential_nomination-3823.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2... But e.g. the number of NY Times articles on "whiteness" were on an exploding trend by 2014: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th... (The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb ) Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously. I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."

steele 4y ago

[flagged]

themitigating 4y ago

"As a white guy, I'd certainly encourage you not to worry about this -- if we're talking about an upper middle class, professional-ish activity, you can be fairly sure that all those white people feel self-conscious about their group being so white and would welcome you to join them." This isn't an attack and your sentiment seems genuine but obviously this person knows his fears are not logical. I doubt most people can will themselves into feeling accepted even if others, like yourself, do your best to them feel accepted. That's why representation matters

wreath 4y ago

ShredKazoo 4y ago
Yeah that's definitely an understandable feeling. But on the other hand, if representation matters (as others in this thread claim), it seems hard to please everyone? Supposing you had a group that's 100% white by accident, and they know representation matters. Because they're 100% white, they're starting from a disadvantage: If you want representation, it helps to have representation already! So from this perspective, being 10% nicer to non-whites who join the group seems like a natural solution, to overcome the chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe the right compromise is to just be especially careful not to be rude to people who are underrepresented in the group, and not worry about it beyond that?
- wreath 4y ago
  But why does representation of different skin colors matter or ethnicity matters? There are very very few occasions where it does, but in most everyday situations like work, sports etc it really doesn't. I'd rather be classified by an attribute that's relevant to the situation such as skill level or expertise rather than arbitrary attribute like my skin color, why not my height or color of my teeth instead?
  - whynaut 4y ago
    Didn't we already establish upthread why it matters? Why are we backtracking 5 comments deep?

Dalewyn 4y ago

[flagged]

493579620678 4y ago
I agree, and I would extend that to sex and gender as well, and say that we should treat every person equally and according to their character.
heavyset_go 4y ago
MLK also said this: > I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season."
- ShredKazoo 4y ago
  And in I Have a Dream, he said this: >There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. >We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: for whites only. >We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. Since then, most of these problems have been greatly reduced. Consider police brutality, for instance. On the scale of the entire population, it is small. The Washington Post says they know of 7 unarmed Black people killed by police in 2022. Of those, the majority were fleeing the scene of the crime. See https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic... There are about 45 million Black people in the US, so those 7 victims represent around 0.00001% of the Black population. And we can hardly say that "basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one" after a 2-term Black president, who many Black people (including in New York) voted for. Since injustice has shrunk since King's day, it follows that our concern for that injustice should be smaller as well. Same way it wouldn't be reasonable to murder a clerk who didn't give you the proper amount of change after a purchase.