8 ms·

I'm not talking about guilt, I'm talking about getting hurt. Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group. Your examples are all about p

by mcv 3y ago

I'm not talking about guilt, I'm talking about getting hurt. Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group. Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. It's not about benefits they inherited, but obstacles they inherited, opportunities that were denied to them, unjust punishment that they received. This has been structural for a ridiculously long time, and it's still not gone. Black people still receive more severe punishment for the same crimes, are still often denied opportunities that are available to white people (months ago there was an article here about how black founders couldn't get funding if they didn't get a white co-founder who was then assumed by VCs to be the real CEO). Even if they are technically equal before the law, that still doesn't mean that they're treated as equal in practice.

notSupplied 3y ago
This SCOTUS case had heavy emphasis on the fact Affirmative Action as it is practiced at elite institutions today, has a net slightly negative effect on whites, and an extremely large negative effect on Asians applicants. It is in practice, a large transfer of elite diplomas from Asian to Black students. Black people have indeed suffered greatly historically. Yet an awkward question remains: Why are Asians paying the price?
MaokaiLin 3y ago
Surely black americans are hurt, and it's only fair to lift them up, but at what cost? In these cases the asian americans are getting hurt because of it. Why not help lift asian americans up as well? They are also discriminated over a century after all, and now they are paying the price for reparations? Why is that not a discrimination itself?
sokoloff 3y ago
> Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. Lifting one group up is almost always at the expense of other groups, which is isomorphic to punishment. If you have a way to lift some up without any disadvantage to others, we should probably just do that to an infinite extent to everyone.
- lern_too_spel 3y ago
  If some groups were so oppressed that they now put a cost on the rest of society via crime and welfare costs, fixing that will be a long term net benefit for other groups, not an expense. We can discuss the most effective way to fix it, but pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go away.
  - forgetfreeman 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - seneca 3y ago
      Accusing people of using hidden messages, intentionally interpreting their post as negatively as possible, is very against the community standards here. Please don't do that. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
      - forgetfreeman 3y ago
        I made no accusation, I am requesting clarification of the ops intent.
      - sidlls 3y ago
        This is disingenuous. "Dogwhistle" rhetoric is a thing precisely because it is a "hidden message." It's not against community rules to point out that rhetoric is similar to dogwhistle rhetoric, especially when the comment actually is full of said rhetoric. Or it ought not be: if it is, the community rule is wrong.
    - lern_too_spel 3y ago
      > Was that intentional? Of course not. The white supremacists say that these problems are genetic in origin, not due to oppression.
  - slt2021 3y ago
oceanplexian 3y ago
> I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. I don't think people realize how dangerous trying to "repair" or "correct" history can actually be. It could literally go on for thousands of years, look at the Israeli's and Palestinians. While I'm fine if people who committed discriminatory acts are held accountable in the law, it's a period of time we should be ashamed of and need to stop revisiting. In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in.
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  > In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in. Many people alive today in the USA were directly harmed by legal discrimination against black people. Explicit legal discrimination stopped in 1971, not in the history books. And of course, significant administrative discrimination continued long after, probably persisting today in some places.
- vore 3y ago
  How would you feel on the other side of this? Given how recently discrimination was still legal, is it really great that you can shrug and say "well, tough tits I guess"?
  - nwienert 3y ago
    I wasn’t admitted into better colleges while minority friends with worse grades and general resumes were. It upsets me that I was discriminated against. Should I pursue some reparations? How do you factor this in?
    - ludditetech 3y ago
      [flagged]
WalterBright 3y ago
> I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done Most histories of WW2 end on the day the Axis surrendered. I was curious about what happened "the day after" and went looking for it. I discovered that with the collapse of government and institutions, the veneer of civilized behavior stripped away. People took revenge on old grudges, stole from each other, murdered each other, neighbors against neighbors, everyone with an axe to grind. It was savage. It took maybe a year or more for the government to begin functioning, and found they were faced with a horrendous list of crimes. Upwards of half the population were criminals. What were they going to do about it? Put half the country in jail? What they did do, in country after country, was to simply do a general amnesty for any crimes committed before 1947 or so. The slate was wiped clean, and things just started over.
- onos 3y ago
  Interesting, have any references you’d recommend on this?
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-Wor...
- verall 3y ago
  That's in response to individual violence. For state perpetrated violence, well, there were the Nuremberg trials, and Israel became a country.
tynpeddler 3y ago
> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group. This is clearly true, but it also reduces the impact of what really happened. Black Americans were discriminated against on an individual level. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake! She's only 68 years old. It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.
- monetus 3y ago
  > It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy. Have any reading materials off of the top of your head that you can point me towards with this?
vacuity 3y ago
I'm against affirmative action, but I value your points here. I think affirmative action doesn't attack the root of the problem (leaving aside the moral arguments), and we should instead attempt to solve the problems you've stated (and others besides!) more directly. Chiefly, stringent enforcement of race-blind consideration and better funding for public health and school infrastructure to give all communities a respectable baseline of opportunity. Also, reduced or even nullified college tuition. I think that if these are implemented, there may not even be a need for the racial quotas that affirmative action implies. If quotas are to be set, they should be evaluated and gradually rolled back. As for funding...that's a whole other discussion that boils down to unassailable moral axioms, as everything does. I suppose if people were so enlightened to agree on heavily taxing billionaires, this whole mess with equal-but-not-really citizens probably wouldn't be happening either.
- intended 3y ago
  This is where things should be in general. Society benefits with cheaper and accessible medical care, education and policing. That is a great baseline to compare reality against. One of the many reasons reality deviates, is because of racism and discrimination. Both need to be addressed at the same time. (Leaving one, allows the other to recover)
  - slt2021 3y ago
    AI can make education almost zero cost in the future. instead of fighting for limited number of seats at Harvard and blaming AA - we should create AI technology to give Harvard quality education to everyone in the world for (almost) free
    - funcDropShadow 3y ago
      > AI can make education almost zero cost in the future. This is still an open question. LLMs will certainly help to improve teaching. But education is more than teaching. And LLMs have at best a mediocre track record of being correct. So if you are lucky you are taught something correct by an LLM. Going to university to meet other people with which you can learn together by helping, criticizing, or correcting each other is extremely valuable. That cannot be replicated by an LLM at home. Even the experience of just moving to another city, leaving home is a part of education. Education will always cost time and hard work. Because oneself has to change to become educated.
rayiner 3y ago
> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group. Black Americans were not. American descendants of slaves were. Black immigrants do very well in American society. “Controlling for age, education, and disability, the wages of second-generation Nigerian Americans have reached parity with those of third- and higher generation whites.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001971 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...). That’s a critical distinction. Obama did not suffer the generational effects of slavery and segregation any more than Trump or Biden. Affirmative action at places like Harvard is mostly not being used to help the people—the descendants of Americans an slaves—who are invoked to justify the policy: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/17/michaela-harvard-generational-african-american https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/17/michaela-harvar....
nailer 3y ago
You’re talking about punishing people for the sins of their fathers.
soundnote 3y ago
Most of the fixes, the tilting of the scales in their favour, do have victims. Innocent people who just happen to look wrong, who get discriminated against so the favoured people can be quotaed in. Many companies refuse to fulfill positions even if they have qualified candidates if none of the candidates checks the right identity boxes. Microsoft, for example: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-means https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-me... Harvard's admissions rates which are hilariously weighted against Asians: https://i.imgur.com/eB92to4.png https://i.imgur.com/eB92to4.png You're kidding yourself if you think people who have nothing to do with the bad conditions the policies ostensibly try to correct for aren't being hurt. Of course, insistence on policies like that doesn't come from nowhere. The education system is absolutely rotten: A couple samples of the blatant racist rhetoric the universities spew against white people daily. You can write fun shit like this and keep your job since the target is acceptable: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/ Or Zeus Lombardo, who's a professor of education and has been spreading this shit for at least ten years. His recommended reading is "fun": https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/1450083463726518276 https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/14500834637265182... "Whites learn to be white. That suggestion by Thandeka is that whites are not born white. They have to become white. And her suggestion is that white children who were not white originally - they were born human. Little by little, they have to be abused into becoming white humans. And this abuse is sometimes physical - of being physically disciplined into whiteness, such as being bullied into whiteness. That's a phrase I like to use, whiteness as bullying, but it's also psychological and cultural, and it becomes with caretakers and guardians. Not the least of which - the more important caretakers are of course the white family, parents etc. but it extends to the white nationhood as a caretaker, the white social system, the white social welfare, the white governance system. They also discipline and abuse white humans into whiteness." I don't know about you all, but to my 90s brain that looks just a wee bit like blatant racism, but what do I know. I'm just an acceptable target.

by mcv 3y ago

notSupplied 3y ago

This SCOTUS case had heavy emphasis on the fact Affirmative Action as it is practiced at elite institutions today, has a net slightly negative effect on whites, and an extremely large negative effect on Asians applicants. It is in practice, a large transfer of elite diplomas from Asian to Black students. Black people have indeed suffered greatly historically. Yet an awkward question remains: Why are Asians paying the price?

MaokaiLin 3y ago

Surely black americans are hurt, and it's only fair to lift them up, but at what cost? In these cases the asian americans are getting hurt because of it. Why not help lift asian americans up as well? They are also discriminated over a century after all, and now they are paying the price for reparations? Why is that not a discrimination itself?

sokoloff 3y ago

> Your examples are all about punishment, I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. Lifting one group up is almost always at the expense of other groups, which is isomorphic to punishment. If you have a way to lift some up without any disadvantage to others, we should probably just do that to an infinite extent to everyone.

lern_too_spel 3y ago
If some groups were so oppressed that they now put a cost on the rest of society via crime and welfare costs, fixing that will be a long term net benefit for other groups, not an expense. We can discuss the most effective way to fix it, but pretending the problem doesn't exist won't make it go away.
- forgetfreeman 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - seneca 3y ago
    Accusing people of using hidden messages, intentionally interpreting their post as negatively as possible, is very against the community standards here. Please don't do that. > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
    - forgetfreeman 3y ago
      I made no accusation, I am requesting clarification of the ops intent.
    - sidlls 3y ago
      This is disingenuous. "Dogwhistle" rhetoric is a thing precisely because it is a "hidden message." It's not against community rules to point out that rhetoric is similar to dogwhistle rhetoric, especially when the comment actually is full of said rhetoric. Or it ought not be: if it is, the community rule is wrong.
  - lern_too_spel 3y ago
    > Was that intentional? Of course not. The white supremacists say that these problems are genetic in origin, not due to oppression.
- slt2021 3y ago

oceanplexian 3y ago

> I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done. I don't think people realize how dangerous trying to "repair" or "correct" history can actually be. It could literally go on for thousands of years, look at the Israeli's and Palestinians. While I'm fine if people who committed discriminatory acts are held accountable in the law, it's a period of time we should be ashamed of and need to stop revisiting. In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in.

tsimionescu 3y ago
> In my opinion, the best way to respect people who were wronged is to let it go. Yes it will always be unfair, but people in history books are not "us". We are a different generation of human beings with the power to create the world we want to live in. Many people alive today in the USA were directly harmed by legal discrimination against black people. Explicit legal discrimination stopped in 1971, not in the history books. And of course, significant administrative discrimination continued long after, probably persisting today in some places.
vore 3y ago
How would you feel on the other side of this? Given how recently discrimination was still legal, is it really great that you can shrug and say "well, tough tits I guess"?
- nwienert 3y ago
  I wasn’t admitted into better colleges while minority friends with worse grades and general resumes were. It upsets me that I was discriminated against. Should I pursue some reparations? How do you factor this in?
  - ludditetech 3y ago
    [flagged]

WalterBright 3y ago

> I'm talking about lifting them up, correcting the wrongs, reimbursing the damage done Most histories of WW2 end on the day the Axis surrendered. I was curious about what happened "the day after" and went looking for it. I discovered that with the collapse of government and institutions, the veneer of civilized behavior stripped away. People took revenge on old grudges, stole from each other, murdered each other, neighbors against neighbors, everyone with an axe to grind. It was savage. It took maybe a year or more for the government to begin functioning, and found they were faced with a horrendous list of crimes. Upwards of half the population were criminals. What were they going to do about it? Put half the country in jail? What they did do, in country after country, was to simply do a general amnesty for any crimes committed before 1947 or so. The slate was wiped clean, and things just started over.

onos 3y ago
Interesting, have any references you’d recommend on this?
- WalterBright 3y ago
  https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-World/dp/125003356X https://www.amazon.com/Savage-Continent-Europe-Aftermath-Wor...
verall 3y ago
That's in response to individual violence. For state perpetrated violence, well, there were the Nuremberg trials, and Israel became a country.

tynpeddler 3y ago

> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group. This is clearly true, but it also reduces the impact of what really happened. Black Americans were discriminated against on an individual level. Ruby Bridges is still alive for goodness sake! She's only 68 years old. It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy.

monetus 3y ago
> It isn't hard to estimate financial damages due to the Jim Crow era and it's extremely easy to figure out who was harmed due to explicit government policy. Have any reading materials off of the top of your head that you can point me towards with this?

vacuity 3y ago

I'm against affirmative action, but I value your points here. I think affirmative action doesn't attack the root of the problem (leaving aside the moral arguments), and we should instead attempt to solve the problems you've stated (and others besides!) more directly. Chiefly, stringent enforcement of race-blind consideration and better funding for public health and school infrastructure to give all communities a respectable baseline of opportunity. Also, reduced or even nullified college tuition. I think that if these are implemented, there may not even be a need for the racial quotas that affirmative action implies. If quotas are to be set, they should be evaluated and gradually rolled back. As for funding...that's a whole other discussion that boils down to unassailable moral axioms, as everything does. I suppose if people were so enlightened to agree on heavily taxing billionaires, this whole mess with equal-but-not-really citizens probably wouldn't be happening either.

intended 3y ago
This is where things should be in general. Society benefits with cheaper and accessible medical care, education and policing. That is a great baseline to compare reality against. One of the many reasons reality deviates, is because of racism and discrimination. Both need to be addressed at the same time. (Leaving one, allows the other to recover)
- slt2021 3y ago
  AI can make education almost zero cost in the future. instead of fighting for limited number of seats at Harvard and blaming AA - we should create AI technology to give Harvard quality education to everyone in the world for (almost) free
  - funcDropShadow 3y ago
    > AI can make education almost zero cost in the future. This is still an open question. LLMs will certainly help to improve teaching. But education is more than teaching. And LLMs have at best a mediocre track record of being correct. So if you are lucky you are taught something correct by an LLM. Going to university to meet other people with which you can learn together by helping, criticizing, or correcting each other is extremely valuable. That cannot be replicated by an LLM at home. Even the experience of just moving to another city, leaving home is a part of education. Education will always cost time and hard work. Because oneself has to change to become educated.

rayiner 3y ago

> Black Americans were quite clearly discriminated against as a group. Black Americans were not. American descendants of slaves were. Black immigrants do very well in American society. “Controlling for age, education, and disability, the wages of second-generation Nigerian Americans have reached parity with those of third- and higher generation whites.” (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001971 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211001...). That’s a critical distinction. Obama did not suffer the generational effects of slavery and segregation any more than Trump or Biden. Affirmative action at places like Harvard is mostly not being used to help the people—the descendants of Americans an slaves—who are invoked to justify the policy: https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/17/michaela-harvard-generational-african-american https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/2/17/michaela-harvar....

nailer 3y ago

You’re talking about punishing people for the sins of their fathers.

soundnote 3y ago

Most of the fixes, the tilting of the scales in their favour, do have victims. Innocent people who just happen to look wrong, who get discriminated against so the favoured people can be quotaed in. Many companies refuse to fulfill positions even if they have qualified candidates if none of the candidates checks the right identity boxes. Microsoft, for example: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-means https://www.cspicenter.com/p/what-diversity-and-inclusion-me... Harvard's admissions rates which are hilariously weighted against Asians: https://i.imgur.com/eB92to4.png https://i.imgur.com/eB92to4.png You're kidding yourself if you think people who have nothing to do with the bad conditions the policies ostensibly try to correct for aren't being hurt. Of course, insistence on policies like that doesn't come from nowhere. The education system is absolutely rotten: A couple samples of the blatant racist rhetoric the universities spew against white people daily. You can write fun shit like this and keep your job since the target is acceptable: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34039063/ Or Zeus Lombardo, who's a professor of education and has been spreading this shit for at least ten years. His recommended reading is "fun": https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/1450083463726518276 https://twitter.com/MythinformedMKE/status/14500834637265182... "Whites learn to be white. That suggestion by Thandeka is that whites are not born white. They have to become white. And her suggestion is that white children who were not white originally - they were born human. Little by little, they have to be abused into becoming white humans. And this abuse is sometimes physical - of being physically disciplined into whiteness, such as being bullied into whiteness. That's a phrase I like to use, whiteness as bullying, but it's also psychological and cultural, and it becomes with caretakers and guardians. Not the least of which - the more important caretakers are of course the white family, parents etc. but it extends to the white nationhood as a caretaker, the white social system, the white social welfare, the white governance system. They also discipline and abuse white humans into whiteness." I don't know about you all, but to my 90s brain that looks just a wee bit like blatant racism, but what do I know. I'm just an acceptable target.