4 ms·

Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race? I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we

by xracy 3y ago

Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race? I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. And I think we do ourselves a disservice by trying to hide from it. The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off. And my guess here is that the proportion of news about this relative to proportion of people affected by that news is way off.

johndhi 3y ago
is listening to people talk about it on the radio the 'discussion' we need to make progress on an issue like this? compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things
akira2501 3y ago
> The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off. Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?
- TheSoftwareGuy 3y ago
  Not by itself. But if we don't talk about it, how could there possibly be hop of fixing anything?
  - onemoresoop 3y ago
    I think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.
  - rurp 3y ago
    By focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas. My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.
    - redserk 3y ago
      So this would be under the umbrella of "Critical Race Theory" which has been misrepresented and unjustly criticized as of late.
      - recursive 3y ago
        Maybe. Despite the number of times I've heard about CRT and how bad it is, and how good it is, I still don't have the foggiest idea what it is. One time, I tried to look it up on the internet. Signal to noise was so bad, I still don't know. I've written off the possibility of ever knowing what it is or understanding anyone who's talking about it.
        redserk 3y ago
        As with any field, there's a number of detractors and charlatans. With CRT in the political spotlight, I completely understand how it becomes a mess to make heads-or-tails of. Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race. As for my opinion on it: I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law. I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people. A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique. While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.
- cooper_ganglia 3y ago
  The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Things have gotten substantially worse in the last 16 years, not better, and that's because we've been using a spotlight to point out how different everyone is from each other. It's literally counterintuitive.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    > The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity. Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name. But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.
    - jimbokun 3y ago
      It is a legitimate topic of discussion. The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities. When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.
- xracy 3y ago
  On one of my other comment threads someone told me how the world is "so much better then any point in history" :). I'm not sure I believe that. I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions. So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.
dekhn 3y ago
The New York Times, which is the other bastion of the liberal establishment, also covers race a lot (in regular news journalism, opinion, and topical articles). . It's gotten to the point where lots of comments on articles (many articles have active comments sections) ask "why are you making this about race?". I think NYTimes swung heavily progressive a few years ago, and it was very unpopular, and they're recalibrating to be more relevant to centrists.
pessimizer 3y ago
NPR, being the whitest place on Earth, is a bad place to discuss race. And the only reason they discuss it constantly is because they think that Democrats own any issue relating to it. Actual interest in issues around America's race problems would result in knowing a single person with two black parents, who is not an immigrant or the child of immigrants, and who is not wealthier and more privileged than you are. This probably describes a single-digit percentage of the people who produce content on NPR. They know the two or three black people who hung out in their circles in the elite colleges they went to, and only stay in contact with zero to one of them. They pretend to know every famous black person they met at a dinner party, or a conference; there are probably 100 black professors, writers, and entertainers that a million or two white NPR-Americans are pretending to be friends with. Black wealth peaked in 1997. NPR supplies itself from the most elite circles in American society, who largely control its wealth. They're not actually concerned, they're consistently using race as a cudgel to attack other white people for their own purposes.
- otterley 3y ago
  > NPR, being the whitest place on Earth Come on, they're about as diverse as America itself is: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented. Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great. I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)
taeric 3y ago
Converse hot take, the shallow "race lens" that is all too often used is not helping anyone. Quite the contrary, it is growing counterproductive. Especially with stories like this where they are working backwards from the framing, not using it to learn something.
thegrim33 3y ago
It completely, utterly, baffles me how other people live in such a different interpretation of reality than me. For myself, the last decade of media has been completely dominated by race-based and identity-based ideology and discussion. I've given up all mainstream media and I still cannot escape it. The fact that someone exists where they can with a straight face say that they think race is an under-discussed topic just blows my mind. To the point where I seriously have to consider whether I'm even replying to a real human being and not a shill / LLM.
- afavour 3y ago
  My perception is the opposite of yours so I guess we can be as equally confused as each other. Every time I tune into the news it's usually dominated by foreign policy, domestic horserace politics coverage and soft human interest stories. There was definitely an uptick in racial discussions during all the BLM stuff but "completely dominated" is very, very far from my lived experience. But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?
- uejfiweun 3y ago
  I don't know what that guy is smoking. It is objectively the case that the topics of race, identity politics, etc have skyrocketed since the mid-2010s [1]. [1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
  - drewrv 3y ago
    Do those charts actually show a shift in content, or is it merely a shift in terminology?
    - uejfiweun 3y ago
      I'm not sure if any studies accurately measure the subject content, and it also seems like it'd be easy to get any result you want by tweaking the experiment parameters. I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.
justin66 3y ago
> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race? Heh. If you tune into the AM band you'll hear plenty of guys "discuss race." It'll make you fear for the species, but still.
burningChrome 3y ago
>> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race? Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future. They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become. Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will
jimbokun 3y ago
Yes, race is a topic that is almost never discussed in 21st century USA.
- xracy 3y ago
  This person gets it. They read what I wrote. Definitely didn't just respond to a straw man version of what I said. /s
AnthonyMouse 3y ago
> I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them. Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control. Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it. So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.
xracy 3y ago
This take appears to have been "too hot for HN to handle" For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.

by xracy 3y ago

johndhi 3y ago

is listening to people talk about it on the radio the 'discussion' we need to make progress on an issue like this? compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things

akira2501 3y ago

> The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off. Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?

TheSoftwareGuy 3y ago
Not by itself. But if we don't talk about it, how could there possibly be hop of fixing anything?
- onemoresoop 3y ago
  I think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.
- rurp 3y ago
  By focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas. My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.
  - redserk 3y ago
    So this would be under the umbrella of "Critical Race Theory" which has been misrepresented and unjustly criticized as of late.
    - recursive 3y ago
      Maybe. Despite the number of times I've heard about CRT and how bad it is, and how good it is, I still don't have the foggiest idea what it is. One time, I tried to look it up on the internet. Signal to noise was so bad, I still don't know. I've written off the possibility of ever knowing what it is or understanding anyone who's talking about it.
      - redserk 3y ago
        As with any field, there's a number of detractors and charlatans. With CRT in the political spotlight, I completely understand how it becomes a mess to make heads-or-tails of. Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race. As for my opinion on it: I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law. I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people. A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique. While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.
cooper_ganglia 3y ago
The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Things have gotten substantially worse in the last 16 years, not better, and that's because we've been using a spotlight to point out how different everyone is from each other. It's literally counterintuitive.
- majormajor 3y ago
  > The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity. Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name. But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.
  - jimbokun 3y ago
    It is a legitimate topic of discussion. The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities. When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.
xracy 3y ago
On one of my other comment threads someone told me how the world is "so much better then any point in history" :). I'm not sure I believe that. I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions. So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.

dekhn 3y ago

The New York Times, which is the other bastion of the liberal establishment, also covers race a lot (in regular news journalism, opinion, and topical articles). . It's gotten to the point where lots of comments on articles (many articles have active comments sections) ask "why are you making this about race?". I think NYTimes swung heavily progressive a few years ago, and it was very unpopular, and they're recalibrating to be more relevant to centrists.

pessimizer 3y ago

NPR, being the whitest place on Earth, is a bad place to discuss race. And the only reason they discuss it constantly is because they think that Democrats own any issue relating to it. Actual interest in issues around America's race problems would result in knowing a single person with two black parents, who is not an immigrant or the child of immigrants, and who is not wealthier and more privileged than you are. This probably describes a single-digit percentage of the people who produce content on NPR. They know the two or three black people who hung out in their circles in the elite colleges they went to, and only stay in contact with zero to one of them. They pretend to know every famous black person they met at a dinner party, or a conference; there are probably 100 black professors, writers, and entertainers that a million or two white NPR-Americans are pretending to be friends with. Black wealth peaked in 1997. NPR supplies itself from the most elite circles in American society, who largely control its wealth. They're not actually concerned, they're consistently using race as a cudgel to attack other white people for their own purposes.

otterley 3y ago
> NPR, being the whitest place on Earth Come on, they're about as diverse as America itself is: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented. Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great. I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)

taeric 3y ago

Converse hot take, the shallow "race lens" that is all too often used is not helping anyone. Quite the contrary, it is growing counterproductive. Especially with stories like this where they are working backwards from the framing, not using it to learn something.

thegrim33 3y ago

It completely, utterly, baffles me how other people live in such a different interpretation of reality than me. For myself, the last decade of media has been completely dominated by race-based and identity-based ideology and discussion. I've given up all mainstream media and I still cannot escape it. The fact that someone exists where they can with a straight face say that they think race is an under-discussed topic just blows my mind. To the point where I seriously have to consider whether I'm even replying to a real human being and not a shill / LLM.

afavour 3y ago
My perception is the opposite of yours so I guess we can be as equally confused as each other. Every time I tune into the news it's usually dominated by foreign policy, domestic horserace politics coverage and soft human interest stories. There was definitely an uptick in racial discussions during all the BLM stuff but "completely dominated" is very, very far from my lived experience. But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?
uejfiweun 3y ago
I don't know what that guy is smoking. It is objectively the case that the topics of race, identity politics, etc have skyrocketed since the mid-2010s [1]. [1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/the-nytimes-is-woke.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
- drewrv 3y ago
  Do those charts actually show a shift in content, or is it merely a shift in terminology?
  - uejfiweun 3y ago
    I'm not sure if any studies accurately measure the subject content, and it also seems like it'd be easy to get any result you want by tweaking the experiment parameters. I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.

justin66 3y ago

> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race? Heh. If you tune into the AM band you'll hear plenty of guys "discuss race." It'll make you fear for the species, but still.

burningChrome 3y ago

>> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race? Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future. They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become. Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will

jimbokun 3y ago

Yes, race is a topic that is almost never discussed in 21st century USA.

xracy 3y ago
This person gets it. They read what I wrote. Definitely didn't just respond to a straw man version of what I said. /s

AnthonyMouse 3y ago

> I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country. The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them. Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control. Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it. So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.

xracy 3y ago

This take appears to have been "too hot for HN to handle" For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.