You see this a lot in online forums, e.g. a person will blithely mock "wal-mart shoppers" or "rednecks" without rebuke and then jump down your throat with "white privilege" if they perceive the slightest possiblity of you questioning a racial bias claim.

This sounds like a strawman. You're taking a criticism often made (again, not without justification) against "your side" and arguing against it by charging the "other side" with hipocrisy despite the fact that e.g. the /r/FloridaMan community has almost no overlap with woke SJWs (or even the surburban families in my neighborhood with BLM signs in their yards).

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25702815

Another poster describes the Capitol riot as a "day-out for rednecks". You say "there aren't many rednecks in San Diego" and the other poster replies to say that they believe there are a lot of 'rural conservatives' around San Diego. Then you accuse them of using a slur, although it's not really clear if you are rebuking him for calling Capitol rioters 'rednecks' or for accusing rednecks of being Capitol rioters.

I don't see where that poster told someone off for using racist slurs, but I believe you that it happened.

Not sure this is even one example of what was claimed above to happen 'a lot'?

What the commenter I originally replied to was doing was using the term to refer to white people, any white person. When I pointed out that a good portion of the people in the article are from San Diego (I followed a doxxing thread on Reddit during this, nearly all of these people were business owners or people of means), another person tried to reframe the original posters context as "rural conservative". Again, pretty plainly misses the mark, and again, the people in that article are not rural at all. They live in this city, where it costs $600k to get a basic house. One of them owned a coffee shop of all businesses. I don't know about you, but I generally do not see people who call themselves rednecks opening coffee shops in the middle of a major city.

I can't speak to the frequency that this happens. The person I responded to in this thread claimed they'd never seen it, so I linked to an instance of it that I remembered.

- that's not a group

- they're not affiliated with x

- anyone can join

- no true Scotsman

- not enough data

Plausible deniability is built-in. That's why I only responded to the bit about frequency, because someone saying it never happens is quite surprising, someone implying it's a norm is equally surprising, at least to me.

I am not the same person you were replying to here, FYI: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26961742

I am guessing you are mixing me and the person you were originally replying to up. If you'd bothered to read my response I said that I find statements regarding "never" and "norm" around this equally surprising. The thread I linked you to has me correcting two posters use of the term. I never asserted it was a norm.

Furthermore, in another of these replies I very clearly stated that I don't think allegations against SJW or "woke" people are worth chasing because nobody is really out collecting data and studying their behavior, both online and in person.

They found that people responded more favorably to the actor when he appeared to be of the same social class.

I say this because the kind of prejudice you point out is rampant across all societies, not just America and if anything, America handles it a lot better than any other society.

How did you come to that conclusion? If I come up with some metrics, like the amount of support and education poor people can access, or the amount of people in jail, or access to justice, America is near the bottomn out of 'developed' nations.

I could never join a sports team in school or other extra curricular, that shit's expensive.

I had to steal food to get enough to eat.

I've been pulled over multiple times, nearly every case because my car was shitty and the cop was shaking me down.

I've been stopped by cops for walking through a hospital parking lot to go visit a friend.

I've had a cop pull a gun out at me and order me to the ground. I was 14.

I was told at a young age to follow cop orders exactly and be non threatening else I may get shot.

My mom didn't come to a complete stop at a side street stop sign. Pulled over and the entire car tossed. The cop told my mom she likely stole it and they will find out what she did.

A white buddy got the shit beat out of him by a cop. His crime was being poor and skating.

I've seen a lot of nice cars going to a car race and then there was my buddy and I in a shitty car. We got pulled over and harassed.

I was constantly excluded from most of my peer group because I was poor.

I had to work multiple jobs to put myself through college -- little financial aid there.

I spent over a decade scraping by because I didn't have a single role model on how to grow my career (or even really start one). Living in a low socio-economic area makes it hard to earn enough to get out.

I was the first and only person in my family to go to college.

I've been ghosted on interviews, called racist names, and hell, my wife had rocks thrown at her as a kid because she was one of like 5 white kids at her inner city school.

Classism is elephant in the room nobody seemingly will acknowledge. But, hey, I'm white, so it can't be that bad, right? /s

If so, why?

If not, why do people focus so much on race instead of wealth?

It would be far healthier to recognize discrimination is anyone not exactly like the person discriminating; which includes ALL the factors. Not just race. (Though that was historically the easiest to notice filter in many terrible and egregious ways that were more obviously systemic.)

I stand by what I said, and my main point was that this is a highly textured aspect of human experience. It's hard to reduce that to a > or a <.

And also I think in the United States, the impact of wealth is quite high compared to other places. I think one's perspective on this would likely depend on where they grew up.

The articles beating this drum are actually overwhelmingly written by white people.

I think the term was popularized precisely because it is needlessly incendiary, as controversy means better click-bait. If you ignore the blanket term entirely and focus simply on meaning, people mostly agree with one another.

For instance, it's uncontroversial to suggest that most white people will not face racial discrimination on the level that black people do in America. It's uncontroversial to suggest that there is a disprivilege by virtue of discrimination. But the term "white privilege" is employed to convey that all white people get "special treatment". That is literally what privilege means, after all. And of course people don't respond so well to that.

If you ask a proponent of the term whether they would tell a homeless white man they have "white privilege", they will hem and haw, finally suggesting that it would be "impolite" but that they do indeed have it. *Why the hesitation* if it's innocuous? Cognitive dissonance is why. When they have to explain it to people, white privilege is typically defined in terms of black dis-privilege, but the literal meaning is that every white person gets special treatment. Of course that will be met with resentment.

All of which to say, if use of language isn't well designed to create an understanding, it's not designed to further social causes. It's designed to create friction.

Like you said, it would have been so much easier for everyone to acknowledge the black dis-priviledge. In the current state of affairs, the poors of Appalachia are somewhat privileged? That's laughable, they haven't had a good chance in generations.

Maybe "accused" and "guilty" are not the right framing here - you inherit white privilege because of your ethnicity, it doesnt necessarily make you guilty of anything, but you benefit from it whether you want it or not.

You can think of it in the same way that the wealthier people you mention have inherited a better social class by just being born. They can profit from the privilege of their wealth, while suffering from racial discrimination. You can suffer from poverty, while not being hindered by your skin color. People are multi-dimensional.

I think a fairer way to compare would be to compare people from the same social class when looking for privilege and inequality here. Is a poor white person doing better than a poor black person? Is a rich black person doing better than a poor black person? Is a white rich female doing better than a white rich male? Etc...

Going by your second paragraph, a black person born from wealthy parents who send their kid to harvard, has much more priviledge than a trailer park white kid.

So why are you grouping "whites" together as priviledged? What the hell does race have to do with anything?

The idea goes something like this. You have white privilege because you are visibly white. By being visibly white you gain an automatic differentiation from those who are non-white. The belief is that the system, being largely run by white people will extend courtesy and nicer treatment to those who look like it whilst those who differ in appearance must "earn" the position you are given by the elements of your birth. It's a bit more complicated than that but that's my understanding of the core of it.

I am not trying to strawman the argument and if I have it wrong, please explain where I wandered off course.

Thought experiment. Two crazy looking homeless people approach you yelling. They are dirty in ripped clothes and look to be high on strong drugs. One is black, one is white. Do you feel better about, or differentiate the white person because he is "your people"?

Homelessness is a problem that must be solved at the highest possible level of government. Since the 'problem' is able to move around the entire country that is the only way to fairly have the collective whole (society) integrate and restore the individual in need to either being a productive member of society, or at least a dignified living solution for when medicine or some other aspect has failed.

Seen in an even wider view, much of illegal immigration is quite likely driven by the homeless or persecuted ignoring the borders of nations that have failed them, as they seek the natural birth rights of anyone on their planet.

Unconscious biases are likely to have much more effect in ambiguous situations where it's harder to try to understand someone's motivations or how to react, than in a situation where those things are clear. Their absence in the latter does not imply their absence in the former.

To continue, briefly. The difference between the various other types of benefits vs "whiteness" is twofold but interconnected. It is obvious who is and is not in the group and the group has institutional power. Most other sets of parameters do not work together in this way.

Again this isn't my position so if it is yours and I've misrepresented it, chime in please.

Regarding the point itself, rich people or higher classes people as a group also have "institutional power", much more than white people as a group. It is pretty easy to differentiate people background after some sentences as the research shows. So the only difference between those two disadvantages is exchanging some words. Even if it is a significant difference, it still doesn't change or cancel other circumstances in a person life and doesn't make this difference overruling any other difference.

Why is being stopped by police such a big deal? I think the police should do more of that in the US, it would reduce crime considerably.

Deal with it. The police stopping you is not them thinking you are a criminal necessarily.

That's a very different situation which is obviously non-discriminatory. But consider how you'd feel if they just stopped some and waved others through, don't you see the potential for unfairness?

If you're doing crimes, you're paying for them. Now the police, the argument goes, lets white people walk away with warrants. In the same time, they let less black people walk away. Is that the argument?

This might be true, but my problem is the letting people walk away in the first place. I don't want the police to do that at all. If the crime is not too bad, then don't emit warrants to begin with. But if there is a warrant, then that should be enforced.

I don't see how not enforcing warrants for black people or criminals of any color will make things better. It won't make things better for the society at large or for the black community. I believe the hard working black people also want less crime on the streets.

There is a problem with longer sentencing for black people, from what I heard. That is not a police issue. Police violence is a police issue, for all races. But police trying to arrest based on a warrant is not an issue, even if it devolves in violence.

What am I getting wrong?

There are several things wrong with this statement: the idea that most crimes are commited by individuals and not corporations, the idea that they are commited on the street, and the idea that searching a person somehow can prevent crime.

Firstly a large chunk of crime, is commited by corporates, thats wage theft, consumer law breaches, money laundering, environmental protection, etc. Secondly most crimes are white collar crimes, and we do a very poor job of investigating both.

Lastly even for street crime, which is a small percentage of all crime, stop and search is just a populist show of force that does nothing usefull.

You know what actually reduces crime? Having competent detectives, investigators and prosecutors who can actualy arrest not the individual weed smoker but the kingpin running the show, or bring a complex case against a major company have it stand up to their highly paid team of lawyers.

Real life experiment, look at Baltimore homicides https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015

Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...

All the police did was not getting proactively involved on the streets, those stop and search you were mentioning. They still responded to calls and did their investigations. The result is 50% more deaths from homicides, each year.

I did make my point and tried to support it with (some) data.

Jacob Blake was wanted for rape and he violated a restraining order(approaching the said rape victim). He fought the police and even choke-hold one of them. He was preparing to run away with a stolen car with the kids in it (that he did not have custody of). Their mother was the one that called the police, and the police knew who they were dealing with. If he would have been let go by the police, I assume an amber alert would have been issued.

Floyd was being arrested for passing counterfeit bills.

Brianna Taylor was shot after her boyfriend started shooting at the cops. The cops were executing a warrant for drug dealing. They didn't find anything, but that is beyond the point.

The guy that was shot at Wendy's (Rayshard Brooks -had to look him up)was so drunk that he fell asleep at the drive through, and the employees had to call the police to clear the lane. He had prior DUIs and he fought during the arrest, stole a taser and fired it at the cops.

These were the big cases of last year that I can remember right now. None of these were because of mere stops in traffic.

The 3 shouldn't have died, sure, but I am addressing your point: It was more than a benign stop for any of the big cases last year. I am assuming there are traffic stops where innocent people died, but BLM of 2020 was not protesting for them.

There are 32 million traffic stops each year. In 2019 the police shot 14 unarmed black Americans. I think every death is unforgivable, but let's not pretend that going to work and back as a black person you're putting your life at risk when meeting the police.

There is a bias, sure, but it's just that, a bias. I fail to see the evidence for widespread discrimination.

Police should do more stops and preventive interventions, look at Baltimore https://homicides.news.baltimoresun.com/?range=2015

Look at pre-2015 and post-2015. The homicides increased from 200s to 300s. All because of a police crime and BLM protests in 2015. Now you have 100 extra people each year losing their lives. US needs more police, not less. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/07/12/baltim...

I'm deviating, but my point is that police is not a suppressor for the black community, but a helper and an enabler for the honest working people. It can be intimidating and demeaning interacting with the police, but it's still 100x better than interacting with the gangs of Baltimore.

Do you understand that this is exactly what people who say 'the police are racist' mean when they say it?

... Think about it. How does higher levels of crime among black Americans explain why more unarmed black Americans are killed by police? Think about it ...

That talking point still assumes that the killings of armed people was necessary. It doesn't tell you if they were legal holders, responsible concealed carry holders, the type of weapon or anything.

Supporting this frame of thought requires being too much of an apologist for an institution that just has too many options with too little accountability.

It is a false dichotomy to simplify it to more police or less, the same goes to people saying defund the police. Accountability is an overarching theme. Overpolicing certain areas is a self fulfilling prophecy that even pollutes your own stats. Black and white people commit arrestable crimes at a similar distribution while the areas black people live in are policed more, or enforced more.

I was making an argument that the police is about as shitty for whites and blacks. It's not a matter of racism, but of bad policing. I want police to be better to everyone, not just black people.

If we don't address the root of the problem (and racism isn't it), you just end up with other Baltimores. For example just the other day I saw in the news that NYPD is losing officers at twice the rate since 2020.

People upset with the police should be asking for funding the police and more training, not defunding them.

https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...

Note: I am not making a statement about the propriety of this, but merely working through an example of applied statistics.

https://www.hamiltonproject.org/charts/rates_of_drug_use_and...

nobody is going to call the police on you for simply walking in a neighborhood

nextdoor and facebook groups arent going to have messages from vigilant bored housewives just because you walked down the street

sundown towns and the ideas that reinforce them don't exist for you

but saying “privilege” suggests other things are handed to you that wouldn't necessarily be true

The people calling the cops are likely the white neighbors on their black neighbors and not the other way around. In your nextdoor example, it's not just "bored housewives", it's "white bored housewives". I don't suppose you feel that black bored housewives are also posting those messages.

>If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.

It does not just apply to dynamics between white and non white people, it applies to all people, even within tribes of the same skin color, and probably even other tribal species.

A mining company owner, a wall street trader, a tech start up millionaire, a head partner of a law firm and old-money heir(ess) would all have different interests and goals. The same goes for lower classes as well.

There was a study on that recently:

https://osf.io/tdkf3/

I can't think of a better example, but this reminds me of some of the papers on skull size from the late 19th/early 20th century (Mortonites? A bit fuzzy, it's been a minute). There was an undeniable correlation, but it took decades to undo the false causation that was implied (not directly stated in that paper or this one), and that damage still has not been fully undone, despite the heroic lifelong work of Franz Boas and others.

This paper needed to discuss why racial framing isn't persuasive, and it doesn't do that. The whole, "We should trick white people into being kinder to minorities" argument is, frankly, insulting to white people, among many other not-very-noble things. White people should be able to hear arguments about racial inequality without losing their collective minds.

I think this is missing the problem with that framing.

You're kind of assuming that the reason people oppose a bill purported to solve a problem for minorities is that they hate black people and want them to be miserable.

Suppose you're a white fisherman just scraping by on the Gulf Coast. Things are bad. You wish something would change.

The media reports there is a bill being debated in Congress. It's a thousand pages long and you don't understand it, but they say its purpose is to help black people. Gosh, you wish they would do something that would help you for once. Probably going to raise your taxes to pay for it, too. This bill sucks.

Compare this to saying that the bill is to help working class people. Hey, working class, that's you! Finally!

It's the same bill. It helps black people because they're disproportionately working class. To specifically tell other working class people that it's only meant to help someone else is how you destroy solidarity. It's what you do if you want them to fight each other even though they have a shared interest.

I think it's the responsibility of the white fisherman in your story to read the parts of the text and listen to the parts of the arguments that address him and his problems (and there are plenty), and to be glad that it also helps minorities. His failure to figure that out is his fault, not the people trying to help's fault (I'm not great at softening my tone, you may notice; I'm genuinely sorry about that).

So it's pretty unrealistic to expect every fisherman to go out and read every bill that comes before Congress. Members of Congress don't even read the bills.

It's supposed to be the role of journalists to convey what the bills do to the public. And then that's what we're talking about.

If the media is telling everyone that the bill is to help someone else and not you (with the plausible implication that it could come at your expense in a zero sum game), it can't be that surprising that this gets less support than putting more emphasis on the fact that it also helps you.

I find that hard to believe that defining a roster of "Democrat elites" materially changes the survey responses and analysis. The only way this critique is relevant is if you reject the premise of the paper, but you don't seem to be doing that?

Is that a critique of all correlative studies? What specifically is this paper doing that you think bridges on phrenology (or all that other brain-size hokum)?

Why must this paper do that? There's a whole field of political science and opinion polling devoted to effective messaging, and they produce studies like this all the time. Maybe you find focus-group-shaped messaging "insulting", but that seems orthogonal to the goals of this paper. But maybe you can crack that nut and then we can purge like half of Twitter and most political talking heads ;)

The issue as I see it is that this supposes there's a selective group of people setting an arbitrary agenda, whereas the reality is closer to the idea that the majority of Americans are expressing this point of view and these specific politicians are repeating it.

They're committing the very sin they're trying to study, dividing the point of view into a class-based one, by claiming it's the "elites" holding the viewpoint, and not the people themselves.

I would scrub the word "elite" from the paper, it creates needless tension and isn't accurate (or at the very least, define the term specifically). Additionally, I'd directly address the idea that these results could be confounded by latent racism, and I'd probably do that by introducing the concept in the introduction, and refer back to it in the conclusion.

In other words, "Future research should investigate the causal mechanisms behind this." is not enough. Maybe end with this, but do more.

nice to see the collective conscious is producing similar paths of study

It works so well and so consistently one might be fooled into think it is by design to protect social elites.

if we tell everyone they have problems with skin tones and phenotypes when really their primary unconscious bias is being pretentious, then we need to adjust the messaging and address it more accurately

> 99% correlation to racial discrimination

suggests that other races do not occupy the lower classes in any significant numbers compared to Blacks. I'd say 40ish %, which is still very high.

Removing the idea people are segregated in races, a fight long won in Europe, should maybe be the first priority in America. I still can't believe pollers are allowed to split vote intention by random color groups (I'd be ok with segregating by "descendant of slaves, recent immigrant from africa, recent immigrant from Canada, things like that - but "black" means literally nothing at all).

For instance, AAVE is seen as "low class" despite there being plenty of speakers of it who are not lower class at all.

The kind of racial reductionism we've seen come from (often well-to-do) liberal circles that presents being white (or not Black) no matter the class background as a walk in the park is a dead end of course, but we have to be careful to recognize that there are a number of structural racial problems that don't always have a targeted class character (unless you get to the very upper echelons of wealth).

That said, the popular discourse in America is woefully under-prepared to understand class divisions between and within racial groups. That lack of nuanced discussion is why we end up favoring an understanding that is fully rooted in upper-middle-class experiences and study.

A Black writer who grew up poor, went to a city college and still lives in their neighborhood will never get an op-ed position at the New York Times no matter how good of a writer they are, so their experience gets completely lost in the mainstream, despite being so important to understanding class and race in America.

- How you speak

- How you dress

- How physically attractive you are, specifically in regards to things like height, fitness, and angular features.

Skin color takes a backseat to these factors in the modern era

What is "good speech"? What is "good dress"? What is "attractive"? To much of society, those answers are, "Whatever sounds/looks like the popular culture I consume." and that's a problem.