Re:Tech Companies and Diversity Hiring
by tzs on Friday July 15, 2016 @10:03PM
(#12104901)
> These are extremely different places, but I'm pointing this out because while race matters, waaaay too much emphasis is placed on it compared to the structural factors that impact people independent of ethnicity.
I think that is one of the big impediments to actually solving many of the current problems that involve race.
For instance, take the issue of people getting shot by police. It is a fact that blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites in the United States. It is also a fact that blacks commit violent crimes at a higher rate than whites. Most people get hung up on one of those two facts and won't go farther.
The liberal side (I'm going to be doing some broad generalizations from here on...) gets hung up on blacks getting shot at a higher rate and attributes it to obvious racism on the part of police. They don't want to consider that the police may be shooting blacks at a higher rate for non-racist reasons.
The conservative side points to the higher crime rate among blacks, takes that as a satisfactory explanation for the police shooting data (and they are probably reasonably right, at least for the proximate cause of police shootings), and then gets hung up on that. They don't want to consider that there may be some factors that are disproportionately pushing blacks into conditions that tend to foster higher crime rates among people in those conditions regardless of race.
In particular, there is a pretty solid correlation between race and wealth in the US. Black people are disproportionately in poorer cites and states, where schools are worse, prospects are dimmer, and there is high population density. Those kind of areas tend to produce higher crime rates regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people that live in them.
(Well, to be accurate, that should be "higher crime rates for the kind of crimes that often gets you shot by police". White collar crime tends to be a lot safer during the arrest, because those arrests tend to come at the end of a long investigation and the arresting officers know your movements and can put a lot of planning into your apprehension. When you get arrested for robbing a liquor store or shooting a rival gang member, the arrest tends to be a more hastily organized affair, with a lot more improvising).
I've seen dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines that have looked at the police shooting data, and heard numerous stories about it on my local public radio station, but none that I've seen/heard have looked at how this relates to wealth levels. I realize that would be harder to do because that's generally not something that is directly in the data. But without that analysis being done, we are just going to be stuck at the "police are racists"/"blacks commit too much crime" level, which is not productive.
I think that is one of the big impediments to actually solving many of the current problems that involve race.
For instance, take the issue of people getting shot by police. It is a fact that blacks are shot at a higher rate than whites in the United States. It is also a fact that blacks commit violent crimes at a higher rate than whites. Most people get hung up on one of those two facts and won't go farther.
The liberal side (I'm going to be doing some broad generalizations from here on...) gets hung up on blacks getting shot at a higher rate and attributes it to obvious racism on the part of police. They don't want to consider that the police may be shooting blacks at a higher rate for non-racist reasons.
The conservative side points to the higher crime rate among blacks, takes that as a satisfactory explanation for the police shooting data (and they are probably reasonably right, at least for the proximate cause of police shootings), and then gets hung up on that. They don't want to consider that there may be some factors that are disproportionately pushing blacks into conditions that tend to foster higher crime rates among people in those conditions regardless of race.
In particular, there is a pretty solid correlation between race and wealth in the US. Black people are disproportionately in poorer cites and states, where schools are worse, prospects are dimmer, and there is high population density. Those kind of areas tend to produce higher crime rates regardless of the race or ethnicity of the people that live in them.
(Well, to be accurate, that should be "higher crime rates for the kind of crimes that often gets you shot by police". White collar crime tends to be a lot safer during the arrest, because those arrests tend to come at the end of a long investigation and the arresting officers know your movements and can put a lot of planning into your apprehension. When you get arrested for robbing a liquor store or shooting a rival gang member, the arrest tends to be a more hastily organized affair, with a lot more improvising).
I've seen dozens of articles in newspapers and magazines that have looked at the police shooting data, and heard numerous stories about it on my local public radio station, but none that I've seen/heard have looked at how this relates to wealth levels. I realize that would be harder to do because that's generally not something that is directly in the data. But without that analysis being done, we are just going to be stuck at the "police are racists"/"blacks commit too much crime" level, which is not productive.