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I don't think the other people are at fault here. I think it's reasonable to assume that someone with a stereotypically black name is black, just like it's reas

• irl_zebra 12y ago
  We all make decisions and assumptions based on our past experiences. It's perfectly natural that if we keep seeing the same input leading to the same output over and over, we begin to associate that input with that output. Sometimes the input doesn't lead to the output, which helps us inform our future actions, but there's nothing inherently wrong with making assumptions and taking actions based on our experiences.
  • Retra 12y ago
    We all have to make decisions based on incomplete information. This means the decisions you make are approximations; their accuracy is contingent upon a lack of good information. It's not about assumptions per se: whatever you assume will be partially wrong. With that said, if you want a high degree of accuracy in matters like this, you're going to have to give up many of those highly efficient heuristics we've evolved. That may not be a good idea. Instead we develop more heuristics that tell us when to apply simplifications and assumptions, and those will often fail.
• emodendroket 12y ago
  Yes and no. Surely the people handing his credit card to his black friends after receiving it from him have reason to know better. Besides that, I think the point is not just that people assume he's black, which would just be a curiosity, but that that assumption shapes their attitudes toward him.
• deleted 12y ago
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• calibraxis 12y ago
  Our bureaucratic preoccupation with racial and gender categories is much like those who segmented bloodlines into Untouchables, or royalty. (As if it was ever impressive to be related to some glorified dictator called a "king".) Consider that, depending on your racial category, it may be ok for the US state to choke you to death in public. Even just to speak normal English, you have to basically surveil into people's genders. (He/she. One consequence is you have to cram many people into a false category, like a bureaucrat only having yes/no on the form.)
  • rrss1122 12y ago
    "Consider that, depending on your racial category, it may be ok for the US state to choke you to death in public." It is never OK, ever.
    • deleted 12y ago
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    • hyperpape 12y ago
      I think they clearly don't mean "really ok" but "will be treated as ok by the government".
  • proveanegative 12y ago
    Your jab against monarchy is unwarranted. A hereditary monarch who is recognized as legitimate has better incentives than a garden variety military dictator.
    • GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
      Jabs against monarchy are always warranted.
  • krapp 12y ago
    >it may be ok for the US state to choke you to death in public. For a certain value of 'ok' that accepts that most Americans find such behavior repellant, and that it's not actually legal (much less mandated by the state) for cops to murder people for being of the 'wrong race' (despite it being, apparently, easy for them to get away with.)
• lotsofmangos 12y ago
  I think it's reasonable to assume that someone with a stereotypically black name is black It's easy to assume that. It really is a very rough guide though, so if you stick to it, don't be surprised if you end up looking like a complete idiot on several occasions throughout your life.
  • commandar 12y ago
    At the same time, I can kind of understand the point he's getting at. Similar issue: I worked with someone via email for several months thinking they were female because their name is Kim before a coworker mentioned "uh, pretty sure Kim's a dude." You run into similar issues with e.g., women named Chris. I don't think being thrown by situations like that makes anyone look like an idiot. Looking at it from an ethnic perspective, I'd be similarly thrown by finding out a guy named Santosh was a European white male. Ideal world, sure, we wouldn't make assumptions about identity based on names. But it happens. I'm not sure that there is an answer that'd make everyone happy, to be honest.
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      > Ideal world, sure, we wouldn't make assumptions about identity based on names. But it happens. I'm not sure that there is an answer that'd make everyone happy, to be honest. Of course we would, unless in the ideal world names would be uniformly distributed among population in a completely random way. But they're not. The only problem here is seeing reasonable inference from a known probability distribution as ethically dubious.
      • lotsofmangos 12y ago
        Wasn't meaning ethics, just the risk of looking silly over time. If you tend to make a lot of assumptions about someone just from their name before encountering them, then you are pretty much guaranteeing that you are going to get burnt a lot over time, unless you don't meet many people, as it simply isn't that good a guide.
        • 12y ago
• rrss1122 12y ago
  We can make excuses for this behavior, but we shouldn't make it look OK by using the word "reasonable". It's certainly understandable why people make those assumptions, but those assumptions are neither based on reason nor fair.
• anthonymartinez 12y ago
  I would push back on that view and say other people are absolutely at fault here. if thats not something we can't or won't own up to as a society, then we will have to continue to live with the consequences of stereotyping which, good and bad, harm us all in many subtle and not-so-subtle ways. difficult, but necessary.
  • fixxer 12y ago
    Are generalizations really not allowed? Do we have to handicap our brains? I actually worked for the progressives and saw campaign analytics first-hand. It was one of the most racist things I've seen. And it works.
    • deleted 12y ago
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      • fixxer 12y ago
        Well, ideally you can observe behavior for a large group of people and tie that back to observable characteristics (i.e. "black", "poor", "urban"). Then you can project characteristics from a new population onto unobservable behaviors (i.e. support a candidate). Pretty simple. Pretty effective. EDIT: I've actually seen "race-from-name" models. Jamaal would totally be black. Despite a lone white Jamaal, I'd still use that model.
      • numeromancer 12y ago
        Ok, quick: see me as an individual. You have 5 seconds. Note: Don't draw any conclusions about me that are based only on what little you know about me. You cannot, eg, draw conclusions upon that fact that I have an account on Hacker News. You must see me as an individual.
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          • 12y ago
• kaa2102 12y ago
  It is absolutely unreasonable. When you say it "works out more often than not" I would ask "For whom?" Many snap judgments based on race lead to the death of unarmed black men and women. Studies have shown that resumes with black-sounding names get fewer callbacks and we treat black men like white men with a criminal record. Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 Norton Pscyhology: Devah Pager and Dalton Conley discuss racism and the stigma of criminal record https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofLE3q3Qh0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CofLE3q3Qh0
  • the8472 12y ago
    You are conflating the observation that a person who has a name predominantly used by african-americans is most likely african-american with further, discriminating, acts based on that observation.
    • nickbauman 12y ago
      Much more succinct than how I said it.
    • kaa2102 12y ago
      "We are blind to our blindness." Where do the generalizations stop?
      • the8472 12y ago
        As others have mentioned, we generalize all the time. We have to. No single stone is like the other, and yet we we talk about stones and pebbles like they were some uniform set of platonic ideals and some sharp boundary separating one from the other. We lack both knowledge about each individual and the capacity to hold all detailed information of all individuals in our heads to not shove them into categories. Of course once you know someone better you slice them into finer categories ("polite person", "work-a-holic", ...) and thus add facets and tidits to your model of that other person. But that in itself is a continuum from broad categories to unique bits of information about a person. If you're walking down a street at night in a city with a high crime rate and a group of tattooed, muscular youths comes around a corner then you're likely not going to treat them as individuals. You will at least consider crossing the street because you categorize them as potential threat. Even if that particular group of youths is no threat, it's still a matter of probabilities they might be and avoiding them seems a reasonable risk-avoidance strategy because it costs you little. You simply don't have the time or necessary information to treat them as individuals. So as long as your generalizations are statistically sound (instead of outdated stereotypes) they are useful and should only stop once better information becomes available.
• nashequilibrium 12y ago
  This is what amazes me about white America: 1: 14% of the population is black, 2: 90% of white America have never spoken to a black person let alone have a black friend. 3: So where do their stereotypes come from, rap?, news?, (with regards to height) NBA? 4: They don't like to talk about this and this will be flagged off HN. It amazes me with so little to no interaction with a group, white America can infer a black persons character and be so confident in doing so. EDIT: "In fact, PRRI's data show that a full 75 percent of whites have "entirely white social networks without any minority presence." The same holds true for slightly less than two-thirds of black Americans." Look at it another way 66% of black people say they do not have a white person in their social network. So roughly 34% of 14% of the population have a person in their social network from the white population. So how the hell can all these white people claim to have all these black friends? How can all these white people know so much about people they don't have meaningful interactions with?
  • Mc_Big_G 12y ago
    >90% of white America have never spoken to a black person let alone have a black friend. Are you being serious? Citation needed.
  • hyperpape 12y ago
    So, your overall question is a good one, but #2 is a howler. The reported statistic I've seen is that 40% of Americans say they don't have a close friend of a different race. But I'm confident that 99% of white Americans have spoken to a black person. Except for a few states like Vermont, most states and most cities have significant black populations. See, for instance: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-are-often-the-most-segregated/ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-most-diverse-cities-.... Even in spite of that segregation, people do talk to each other (they may not live on the same block, but they do eventually meet each other). Do you live in the US? If you don't, please do try to get basic facts about us right. Our country has a lot of problems, but you can't understand them without having a basic factual grasp of our demographics.
    • nashequilibrium 12y ago
• kazinator 12y ago
  "No, I'm not Japanese, you idiot; 100% white European descent, in fact!" "Oh, I'm sorry Mr. Shigeru Kobayashi, I just ass ... " "Yes, like other members of the rubble, you just assumed, thereby making an ALL out of U and ME."
  • dangle 12y ago
    'I just ass'
• rayiner 12y ago
  Using name is a reasonable way to optimize figuring out someone's race. The question is: why are we trying to figure out someone's race? If you're talking about reducing effort, isn't the easiest thing to just not ponder the question of someone's race? People wouldn't bother to try and answer that question if they didn't care about what the answer was. Now, the fact that people care is not in and of itself evidence of racism. To some extent, people just want to put a face and a narrative to a name. The question is, what's in that narrative?
  • deleted 12y ago
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  • erydo 12y ago
    That's roughly right in a moral sense, but in a Bayesian sense I don't think it's unreasonable. If race (or background or country of origin, etc.) and some attribute (education, wealth, etc.) are correlated, and names and race are correlated, it's intuitive that names and that attribute are likely correlated. It's a huge problem when you reverse the process and say, "Despite evidence of having X attribute, I'm going to treat you as though you don't because you belong to a set where X attribute is less common." So overlooking someone's resume because of their race/class/background/etc. is absolutely racist and unreasonable. Having a biased expectation a priori, however, is not necessarily unreasonable. However it may be morally wrong because having and acting on those expectations reduces the opportunities given to members of those groups who are outside the norm, which in turn reduces the group's ability to change those correlations and expectations.
    • rayiner 12y ago
      Nobody meets you and says: "While it's reasonable, in a Bayesian sense, to conclude that someone with a 'black' name like mine grew up in a low-income, low-education household, in fact both my parents have graduate degrees and are high-income professionals." A lot of those assumptions that people make, while statistically justified, will never be rebutted in individual instances because it's socially impractical to do so.
• Jun8 12y ago
  I think you are absolutely right. The other point that can be made is that P(person is black | name=Jamaal, person is US citizen) is much higher than P(person is black | name=Jamaal), since that is a common name in Arabic and in Muslim countries http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamal. One can argue that the extra "a" in the spelling of Jamaal as opposed to the more common transliteration Jamal is a marker but I don't think regular people notice this. Note that the other weirdness is that the common US usage of "black" to commonly refer to African-Americans is very problematic: An arab may look dark skinned but most would never consider themselves "African" or there are African-Americans that have lighter skin colors than, say, people from Sri Lanka. Similarly for the label "white". For example, when we say "white men's advantage" there is an implicit assumption, not always stated or well-understood by users, that this refers to white men in the US, or perhaps more broadly to countries where there's a large population of "non-whites" that have been historically repressed. Personally, when faced with a form that requires me to fill in race, I mark "other" or "does not want to disclose" rather than "white", since I don't feel I fully understand what the connotations of that label are for the purposes of that form.