I was a poor white kid in a wealthy white area. While I lived in that area, I only got to briefly attend a private school because of my mothers boyfriend. Everyone knew I was the "poor kid", and my mother, who did her best, was _obsessed_ with the fact that everyone knew we were "imposters" - not wealthy, not married, from a broken home, "gold-digger", etc etc etc. The list of victim-tokens is miles long. It was an illusion - I don't think more than a small handful of adults and certainly no kids ever held my status against me.

When I lived on my own as a teenager, I had no shortage of people explaining why I was a victim due to my life experiences. Obviously, this isn't even close to the the same level of experience as racism, but I completely agree with "they never let on, and frankly I think I'm better off not having dwelt on what was in their deepest thoughts".

Fearing what was in the "deepest thoughts" of others crippled many people in my life. If anything, in my experience, that fear of judgement "in a deep thought" is a _much_ larger hindrance than any actual action that was taken against us. I see echos of this in the politics of people I've met all around the country. And the great irony is that kids who grew up in wealth and surrounded by healthy parents seem oblivious or to not care whatsoever about such judgements from others. Are they ignorant or inoculated?

I'm _extremely_ cautious of even inhabiting the thought that the victim mentality hurts more than the victimization, as obviously that can turn callous incredibly quickly... But it's not a _useless_ thought either.

Although I've been aware of this learned fear and done what I can to mitigate it, this means I might sometimes fear interracial interactions which means I might not give a black person an equal chance as a white, which then comes across as systemic racism, and so it's a vicious cycle.

On the topic of breaking the cycle, I had an eye-opening encounter with an Iranian Christian who said that he felt the US oppressed Iran (sanctions leading to economic and political instability) but as a Christian, he chose to forgive the US and pray that they'd see the harm they're causing. In this scenario, because he offered forgiveness, I feel more comfortable around him even despite agreeing that "my people" have been making life harder for "his", and not in vague systemic ways or hundreds of years ago, but right now in concrete ways.

The culture can have an effect on evaluation of the "safest" victim. If everyone knows that no one important will care about a black kid being bullied... And in a different town, maybe everyone knows that no one important will care about a kid from a poor family.

I don't think bullies usually care about race or power, they just want to be respected by their peers - using a distorted definition of respect. Of course there's also a group that are just psychopaths, but I don't think they care about race either. For them it's just a means to an end.

And finally, yes, racists do exist, I personally think that's passed down from adults.

I like how I get downvoted for my own experience...

I think that we learn from experience, and experience has shown these people that judgement from others do not have any real effect on their lives.

Oppose that with people in less favorable positions, who have been badly affected in real life as a result of the judgement of others.

That’s where a lot of the difference comes from I think, in how different people later in life relate to judgement from others.

I can assure you it is the healthy parents and not the wealth that create children confident enough to ignore the judgments of others. The wealthy are far more susceptible to social judgments when they lack confidence themselves.

I had to win a ton of coin flips to get here, and thinking and planning and caring about perception was something I did to maximize my chances, and they didn't/didn't have to.

I try to manage the resultant base day-to-day anxiety by noting they don't care as much as I do, they're more secure, and also noting it's a bit of a 'superpower' - I tend to be better at disappearing into esoteric subjects and reappearing in a couple months with a pristine, novel, solution to a big problem, because I obsess and master every detail.

Seeing how kids diss kids with old iPhones or even shoes, I have a hard time to believe that.

So when you hear "learned behavior" don't think as in this is what my parents told me or taught me. It means this was learned by being mistreated as a child, not given consistent care and attention, and such.

> You don’t need to have been victimized, physically abused, for example, in order to exhibit TIV. But the people who score very high on TIV are generally those who have experienced some kind of trauma, like PTSD

> when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created

> This is just my hypothesis, but there are certain societies, particularly those with long histories of prolonged conflict, where the central narrative of the society is a victim-oriented narrative, which is the Jewish narrative

In this situation, one thing is supported by data, the other is inferred from what you think the researcher thinks.

Generally this forum looks down more on "they're indoctrinating our children with X!" claims without some actual data.

There’s also little a priori reason to believe that might be true.

What? You don't believe that constantly telling someone they are a victim during their entire childhood can make them feel like a victim? There are really no a priori reasons to believe that such a thing could be true?

You could argue that there are little evidence for it, but you can't argue there are no a priori reasons for it being true. If I take a white kid and tell that white kid that he is a victim of black oppression, do you think that the kid will be more or less likely to feel like a victim of black oppression?

These "narratives" are just that, fictional stories told to support a prevailing social ideology, and yes, they are dangerous, not the least because they ignore the facts.

It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.

Because “systemic racism” is a term used mostly by college educated white people for other college educated white people. Not only that, it deliberately repurposes a label that ordinarily refers to prejudiced beliefs, and applies it to structural forces that operate without any individuals being consciously racist. The same academics who talk about “systemic racism” readily admit that prejudiced beliefs have actually declined.

If you educated people about the history of e.g. FHA redlining and how that affects people today, I think you’d find far fewer people deny that those effects exist.

Besides that, we’re now teaching it to all children of color, who definitely don’t suffer from systemic racism. Asians and Latinos are on a course to achieve economic parity with whites, just like previous immigrant generations:

https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353

> It may be better for children of color to be ignorant about it, but certainly not adults of any racial background.

Sure, we should definitely teach kinds about the history of these things, how they create structural barriers, statistics on persistent disparities, when they’re old enough to understand. But even then, we should actually say what we mean instead of using rhetoric chosen by activists for shock effect.

Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian). Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.

Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.

And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.

Immigration quotas that you speak of were created to increase diversity of immigrants. If we didn’t have them, then Chinese and Indian immigrants would get most of the visas pushing out other countries. It’s actually the opposite of systemic racism since it’s increasing racial diversity of immigrants.

Must be systemic racism.

In the US economic disparities drive pretty much everything else.

> Immigration comes to mind, where profiling is rampant in enforcement (but only really for people who look Mexican, not for people who look / sound Canadian).

As a brown guy with a beard, maybe I get screened more at TSA, or maybe I don’t. (I definitely do outside the US.) At most that’s just regular racism caused by the preconceptions of TSA officers. It doesn’t lead to some systemic or persistent disadvantage.

> Or even immigration quotas -- there's the same annual green card cap per country, whether it's India or China or Iceland, thereby implicitly biasing toward smaller countries.

I’m not sure I would even call this racism.

> Or, affirmative action being used as a wedge issue for Asian Americans especially.

This is backward. It proceeds from a false premise “non-white solidarity” that’s broke by the use of wedge issues. The opposite is true: Asians have distinct interests and people trying to get them to support affirmative action measures are trying to get them to vote against their own interests. Ibram Kendi-style “equity”—where races are represented in proportion to their share of the population—would be disastrous for Asians. We would go from 20-40% in top universities to 6%. We’d go from 35% in Silicon Valley to 6%-10%. And that’s not a hypothetical thing. I went to TJHSST, where progressives voted to eliminate the admissions test. That will cut Asians from 70% to 20%. NYC is trying to do the same thing.

Asians, and to a great extent Latinos, have very little self-interest in rocking the boat. While immigrants in Europe are seeing generational poverty, Asians and Latinos enjoy similar or even higher levels of income mobility as whites. Cubans and Vietnamese came over as refugees with nothing, and achieved economic parity with white Americans within a single generation. There’s only a handful of countries (UK, Canada, Australia) where that sort of thing happens. We have very little self interest in messing with the current system.

It’s fair to argue that we should give up some of our privilege to help reduce systemic disparities. But that’s a completely different argument. But telling us that these changes are in our own self interest, because the existing system is racist against us, is just gaslighting.

> And just because some Asian populations are doing well, doesn't mean that _all_ of them are.

Yes, virtually all of them are. When you see people incoming intra-Asian disparities it’s almost invariably based on pointing to Asian groups that are recent immigrants. That’s why you suddenly started seeing articles about the plight of “Bhutanese Americans.” Virtually all of them came here during the Obama administration, as refugees. They might be poor now, but that’s to be expected at this stage.

I’m Bangladeshi. Bangladeshi Americans are one of the poorer Asian groups. But Indian Americans are one of the richest. That’s not the product of “racism”—that would be absurd, even we can’t usually tell each other apart by sight. Instead it’s because Indians started immigrating in the 1960s and Bangladeshis only did so in significant numbers since the 2000s. But even Asian groups who come here in poverty quickly move up the ladder. In 1980, Vietnamese were among the poorest ethnic groups, having come here as refugees. Today, they have reached economic parity with whites.

(Immigration quotas are a weird one -- on one hand, you want to keep all the H1B visas from going to the mega-consultancies like Tata or Infosys that end up not paying very much, but on the other, of the 18 most populous countries, US is at #3, Russia is at #9, and the rest are outside of Europe. It's probably not racism! But at the same time, it does limit immigration from these larger countries which disproportionately skew Asian in favor of smaller countries that skew white. Europe is split into roughly as many countries as Asia, despite having a sixth of the population!)

I mean, affirmative action as a wedge issue for Asian Americans is already in place, whether it's achieving proportional representation or not -- the premise is that there are already higher admission standards at elite universities for Asian Americans than even whites (see: Harvard lawsuit). I agree with you there, that on the face of it, when taken in isolation, affirmative action is bad for Asian Americans! At the same time, you know which group is really under-represented at Harvard and would benefit from proportional representation? Non-hispanic whites (with "only" 40% of the student body, versus 60% of the US population).

I'm honestly curious to what extent the stats on median household income or whichever metric(s) you're using to gauge economic parity are skewed by the tendency of Asian Americans to concentrate in high cost-of-living urban areas. For instance, it's not a fair comparison to say "oh, Asian Americans who disproportionately live in NYC / SF make more than the median white American who lives in Wisconsin".

But we can agree that it exists, right? Whatever term you’d use, the phenomenon it describes is real. And it refers to present injustices as well as historical ones.

If you want to understand why, I'd encourage you to read Discrimination and Disparities by Thomas Sowell.

Here's one example:

> These various facts might be summarized as examples of racism, so that the causal question is whether racism is either the cause, or one of the major causes, of poverty and other social problems among black Americans today. Many might consider the obvious answer to be "yes." Yet some incontrovertible facts undermine that conclusion. For example, despite the high poverty rate among black Americans in general, the poverty rate among black married couples has been less than 10 percent every year since 1994.

> The poverty rate of married blacks is not only lower than that of blacks as a whole, but in some years has also been lower than that of whites as a whole. In 2016, for example, the poverty rate for blacks was 22 percent, for whites was 11 percent, and for black married couples was 7.5 percent.

> Do racists care whether someone black is married or unmarried? If not, then why do married blacks escape poverty so much more often than other blacks, if racism is the main reason for black poverty? If the continuing effects of past evils such as slavery play a major causal role today, were the ancestors of today's black married couples exempt from slavery and other injuries?

The problem is the language around "systemic racism" cites outcomes as proof of preexisting conditions. That is, it asserts a tautology without presenting causal links, or ruling out other factors as causes.

When you do consider other factors, the detection of systemic racism collapses into one of point-stupidities (bad policies) and fairly ordinary economic forces not subject to racial choice. This is especially so when you start examining things like South Africa during apartheid (which was an example of systemic racism), or America at the turn of the 20th century.

There are a bundle of assumptions rolled up into that term that each merit discussion. If we're going to ever seriously talk about what behaviors and policies we should adopt, we ought to at least get the causes straight rather than leaping to the conclusion that "it" exists.

The effects of Systemic racism is quantifiable and reproducible. You can simply do things like sending resumes to different employers with no meaningful changed but making the resume seem more like it's written by somebody of a different race. From what I see westernized Asians and Caucasians are preferred, anybody who sounds too foreign or too much like another minority is not.

Affirmative action is meant to counterveil this but in itself is the most brazen and blatent example of systemic racism in society, involving both power and prejudice, since affirmative action has teeth. The entire function of it is to put your finger on the scale to ensure certain racial groups get hired in preference of others.

Sure prejudiced beliefs have likely declined in general since say the 60s but racism is prevalent and omnipresent and hidden behind euphemisms and not called racism. The big reason why "systemic racism" specifically has come into vogue is that people are more opaque and dishonest about their prejudices for the sake of social survival.

People advocate for systemic racism while proudly calling themselves anti racists. Those against affirmative action and such also consider themselves anti-racists, but seem unconcerned that no affirmative action would effectively lead to a society where certain groups will certainly disperportionatey suffer from systemic racism - often conveniently to their own benefit.

I can't see racism as not pervasive, although I think it's easy to start fearing prejudice and microagressions from others that simply don't exist out of paranoia, to end up getting oppressed by phantoms.

Though anecdotal, I know several adults who have fallen into the "it's because systemic racism that I can't get ahead" trap. One example is a low-achiever socially awkward friend of mine that complains about not being able to find a tech job, yet spends the vast majority of his days playing video games. Instead of recongizing that his skills (social and coding) are subpar and addressing it, he chalks it up to systemic racism, makes an angry post on Facebook and calls it a day.

A lot of what we're teaching now is the opposite. It's like anti-CBT. Teach everyone they are helpless against the nefarious powers that be.

At the same time there is systemic unfairness both in the legacy of racism that has created inequality and in how society operates to this very day and I don't know how you solve those problems if you don't address them. The status quo is not acceptable to myself or a lot of other people

By conditioning people into believing that an outside force is the primary, if not only factor impacting their lack of success, you demotivate them from trying to adjust other factors that could improve their situation. The issue isn't that we address racism, it's that racism has become the end-all rationalisation for any deficiency at the individual level.

I get that you're of the opinion that telling people about racial inequality can demotivate them and make them feel fatalistic about their futures, but I don't necessarily agree with your assessment to the degree this is the case and you seem to think there is no room for nuance here. We must stop talking about this immediately. People are too simple to understand that there is still some unfairness that needs to be resolved, but that they should do their best regardless. No we must lie to them and tell them the system is fair and through their ignorance they will magically overcome the disadvantages they face.

You seem to think fear of systemic racism is a bigger obstacle to the success of black people than actual systemic racism and I just think that's absurd. Your basic premise that fear of institutional racism can be demotivating is valid and worth consideration. You're elevating it to the root cause of all problems is absurd. A black job applicant will receive half as many callbacks for job interviews compared to an identically qualified white applicant. There are little obstacles like that all over our society. Can they be overcome through tenacity and perseverance? Yes. Does that mean we shouldn't work to fix that %#@#? Hell No!

One encourages them to hold out as it gets better, the other for them to give up till it gets better.

I'm not calling it the root of all problems either, so please don't put words in my mouth. I'm saying it's not even a solution, it's the opposite, worsening the situation and feeding itself.

And to be specific here, I'm referring to the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.

Principally because "the framing" isn't some well-defined objective thing, it's all a matter of perception, which means it's always possible to read whatever narrative you like into the facts.

Like this:

> the narrative around racism being the sole and primary cause of failure.

This perception is yours, not the facts on the ground.

Outside of very liberal strongholds identity politics can't get passed and they get in the way of any progress you want to actually make at trying to minimize the difference in outcomes between races.

People define systemic racism as different outcomes for black people than white people.

Basically no one denies that.

Which environment is easier to influence, one in which you are more aware of underlying factors, or one in which you are less aware?

In the case of that particular individual I'd say it's less laziness and more of systemic racism being deterrent to attempt self-improvement. In the "even if I try, I won't get ahead because these systems will hold me back" sense.

The point I was trying to make is that it's a lot easier to point the blame at something than admit to yourself that you suck - even if you're capable.

I don't know what your definition of systemic racism is, so I can't make a proper argument for/against it.

In any case, your comment has given me some food for thought in how I approach this person.

I would just say that anyone who claims they won't get ahead even if they try because of systemic racism is being ignorant. They might have to try harder than a white person would. They might face some adversity, but there really is no excuse for not trying. It would literally perpetuate the problem.

Not only does systemic racism exist, not only has the environment succeeded in inducing a victim mentality in this person, you are now blaming them for it? Classical "pull yourself by your bootstraps" bullshit. Do you really not see how dehumanizing your viewpoint is, and how such attitudes help perpetuate that person's inaction?

>As someone who also spends a lot of time thinking about global warming there is a tendency to have bouts of feeling doomed here and there.

Not to belittle your own existential fears, but feeling doomed due to global warming at least doesn't make you feel like there's something wrong with you in particular.

It's strange - people with a victim mentality are victims of their victim mentality. It's recursive and self-fulfilling, and it does take some amount of bootstrapping - which is, however, perfectly impossible in the absence of a bootloader and someone to push the power button.

Not really my point. But what you're saying is legitimate too. Though who are we to judge, considering we don't even have unambiguous language to discuss the subject without risking to offend each other's sensibilities.

>I was most concerned about pushing back on the notion that this subject should be taboo because somehow discussing systemic racism is the real cause of inequality.

I'm not sure if I can resolve the nesting of those clauses. IMHO, taboos are generally counterproductive because avoiding the taboo gives it more power. And enforcing a particular language, tone, or other mode of discourse about race relations can be used to perpetuate thinking that reinforces racism "in the name of fighting racism".

This whole thing is starting to look more and more like we need to find out if we're even capable of discussing systemic racism without freaking out, so we can try to conclusively establish what systemic racism is, so that we can look for a solution to systemic racism, so that we can finally stop cops from shooting civilians for being the "wrong" color. This yak shaving is truly the work of a higher intellect...

We went from "teaching about systemic racism might be harmful", to "systemic racism doesn't exist", to "Blacks are inherently different from other races, which will naturally lead to different outcomes" to "critical race theory might lead to nazism."

This is a wild rollercoaster of a thread and I want off of it. To jump off the original commenter's point, if you're concerned that there might be harmful outcomes from teaching students that society is keeping them down, why aren't you worried about similar outcomes that might come from teaching them that their race makes them inherently less suited for certain tasks?

I mean, think about what you're implying here. To claim that inherent race differences is the reason there's a Black wage gap -- ignoring everything else about that statement, it's way more fatalistic than telling kids that there are adverse social structures they should be aware of. Imagine being a teacher in a poor neighborhood and telling your class that the negative experiences in their life exist because of the fact they're Black -- not because of systemic racism, not because of laziness, not because of luck, but because of how they were born. You really can't get more fatalistic and harmful than that.

It's so utterly embarrassing to see comments like this on HN, directly under other comments that claim that racism is a solved problem. Sometimes this community really creeps me out, I'm watching people in the same breath argue that racism is solved and that Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor. How does this pass muster?

Because if they genuinely believe that blacks are inferior, then racism truly musn't exist from their perspective. They think that blacks will naturally be worse off and thus elevating them from there to a level where they're equal is actually unfair and racist to whites.

It's insane, I know, but it really is how people like that think.

Since racism is too shocking an idea for you, consider intellectually disabled people instead. How would you make them equal? We can provide special support services to improve their quality of life but we can't turn them into engineers if they're not capable.

There is zero scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps exist because Black people are genetically inferior to whites, and there is a ton of scientific reason to believe that Black wage gaps are influenced by systems we have set up that have nothing to do with the individual. Equality means fixing those systems.

Equality means giving kids who are born in a ghetto the same education opportunities and investment opportunities as someone who is born in a rich white neighborhood. It means engineering our society so that success isn't a lottery based on the income level of your school.

The color of your skin has no bearing on your innate ability to be an engineer, so what when we try to address structural inequality we're not trying to suppress anyone's unique abilities. Quite the opposite, we are trying to remove the structures like racism, education gaps, and investment gaps that get in the way of people's unique abilities. How many Black engineers never get a chance to discover their potential simply because their school is too poor to afford computers or software?

We are also not trying to force everyone into a single uniform outcome, we are trying to remove systems that enforce uniform outcomes based on attributes like social connections and income that have nothing to do with innate talent. How many otherwise successful Black businesses were destroyed by openly racist policies like redlining, or because investors have an unscientific, biased view of what a successful businessperson "ought" to look like or what people they "ought" to know?

Now, separately, equality also means guaranteeing the same basic rights and social assurances to everyone regardless of their race and ability. That doesn't mean that everyone can do everything equally as well, it doesn't mean that everyone should have the same job or that success is evil. But even people who are not qualified to be engineers should be able to at least live normal lives without the threat of extreme poverty. They should be able to find housing. They shouldn't be put in situations where they're frightened of their local police. Equality means that Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness belongs to everyone, regardless of where you were born or what other people think about the color of your skin. So we're not looking to get rid of success, be we are looking to build basic social safety nets that guarantee that people are not left behind or discarded by society just because a company doesn't think they're useful enough to deserve a livable wage.

And yeah, that applies to intellectually disabled and differently abled communities as well. Being born with a learning disability is not a good reason for someone to be homeless. Those people also deserve dignity and a place in society.

That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school. Also, people have tried special high quality schools for poor blacks and it doesn't solve the problem. The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.

You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems. So far, the only politically correct scientifically based reason I've seen has been that it's mostly due to the behavior of black mothers. There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life. If that's really the problem, then that's where the solution needs to be focused, not on whatever fits your personal political ideology.

You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic. I've looked for it, and asked people like yourself who I would expect to be motivated to find it, and it doesn't seem to exist. If there's no evidence either way, then you're not being intellectually honest by rejecting one hypothesis on ideological grounds.

Your research is out of date on these topics. General scientific consensus today is that nurture is as important as nature for IQ, particularly among younger children (the Flynn Effect alone makes this conclusion obvious).

You're also placing an over-emphasis on IQ, Black wage gaps exist in industries where IQ is not a strong measure of success. There's also good research indicating that Black wage gaps continue to exist after you correct for experience/education, and that hiring rates are influenced by non-intelligence based factors like how "white" your name sounds on an application resume.

This has been the case not just in Black communities, but in many of the "they're just biologically different" debates that spring up, particularly around gender. There's a statistically significant difference in how many women-created pull requests get accepted into Open Source libraries based on whether or not names are obscured/anonymized before the requests are submitted. I think it's pretty clear that IQ is not a sufficient explanation for those results.

So we're going to get into the IQ stuff, but to be clear, your view of IQ is skewed. IQ is not as important as you're making it sound for income (there's some correlation, but it's a lot milder than people assume). This is particularly true when you start looking at high-paying management roles where intelligence tends to matter a lot less than social skills. No engineering job has ever given me an IQ test before they hired me or asked me about one. Resumes are based on experience, which is largely determined by opportunity, connections, and free time. So I think it's really problematic to focus on IQ to this degree or to try to reduce success to a pure factor of IQ, but since you brought it up...

> The IQ gap also persists despite black kids being adopted into wealthy white families, so it's not an investment or income gap.

Check your research on this, it's actually the complete opposite of what you claim. Black kids raised in higher-income white homes have dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.

Interestingly enough, test results actually go down as they age and interact more with the broader adult world, indicating that there might be something about the surrounding world that makes those gains recede over time. I wonder what that could be?

> You can't find effective solutions to problems if you willfully ignore the scientific evidence for the causes of those problems...

Oh come on. I'm not the person here disregarding decades of research that say that socio-economic status is a leading indicator of school performance, influencing everything from teaching resources, to pre-adolescent stress, to nutrition, to exercise, to time spent on homework and extracurricular activities. Cut it out with the "you're just biased" nonsense, very few scientists seriously believe that poverty doesn't affect IQ.

> You say there's zero scientific evidence for it being genetic, but you conspicuously fail to even claim that there's any scientific evidence for it not being genetic.

First of all, that's not really how science works. You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.

And people have tried. Race science was big in America's history. But it turns out, there is no good evidence for it, and there is a ton of evidence that environment is as influential as anything else for education levels. This is generally accepted science, and I don't understand how you're seriously arguing that environment doesn't affect education. It's not intellectually dishonest when looking at a theory that has never produced evidence in its favor and that doesn't really make sense based on our current understanding of genetics, to instead go with the theory that actually does have evidence.

But if you believe otherwise, I have a teapot orbiting Mars to sell you.

> There seems to be some unknown thing they do to their preschool children which cripples them for life.

So you support free preschool, childcare, and increased resources for low-income parents in Black neighborhoods? Would you support enforcing maternity leave to make it easier for low-income parents to spend more time with their kids, since early-childhood parental involvement is a statistically significant indicator of future intelligence?

I mean, you seem to be pretty confident that you know what the problem is, so you must have a list of solutions.

I get kind of tired when people who are not lifting a finger to help Black communities try to guilt activists and argue that they'd be more successful if they just focused on the "right things." So I'm curious what you're doing to help.

> nurture is as important as nature for IQ

Yes, I know that but how does it show that group IQ certainly isn't determined by genetics of race?

> You don't get to propose a ridiculous theory and then make it everyone else's job to disprove you. Secondly, there is plenty of evidence that this is not genetic, not the least being that genes for intelligence don't work that way and there is no single gene for intelligence, and also race doesn't work that way and there is no single genetic makeup of everyone who is Black. No one has ever found a set of genes solidly linked to intelligence that is shared across every Black community.

Why is the idea that the effect of genes on life outcomes is correlated with race ridiculous but the idea that effect of genes on life outcomes cannot be correlated with race is not? How are you making the decision for ridiculousness?

Why does the number of genes need to be 1 or a common genetic makeup for every member of a race need to exist? You should explain that to link those facts to your conclusion.

(Some of) the reasons we're claiming that IQ is insufficient to explain racial disparities in the US are:

A) people have spent over 100 years trying to form this bullcrap correlation going back to the early days of slavery, and they've been disproved over and over again and we've started to notice a pattern here with how race scientists work.

B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.

C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.

D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.

E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.

You say you understand that both nature and nurture are a part of IQ. Then surely, there are policies we can pass that will affect the nurture side of things. You're not denying that nurture exists, so even if you genuinely believed that 50% of these outcomes were from biology, I'd still expect you to at least support housing and education policies that can help with the other 50%. I expect that you'd still be on-board with scientifically-backed improvements that have been proven to affect IQ.

And yet you're on here claiming that measures to reduce poverty in Black communities can't possibly help. That's not a claim that's consistent with an acknowledgement that IQ has a behavioral component, the only way you'd assume that factors like poverty aren't at least part of the problem is if you believed the gap was 100% purely genetic. So do you?

> Why is the idea that the effect of genes on life outcomes is correlated with race ridiculous but the idea that effect of genes on life outcomes cannot be correlated with race is not?

First, because extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming. Linking skin pigmentation to the brain is an extraordinary (and silly) claim, and you need to show some evidence for that kind of claim.

Secondly, it's a ridiculous claim because it's not being made in a vacuum. It's being made as the next step in a long chain of claiming that Black people on average couldn't possibly be educated, and then that they could never read well, and then that they could never own their own businesses, and then that they could never self-govern or take care of their own communities. And after a while of watching the same claim get disproved over and over again, you start to realize these people don't know what they're talking about and they're just making stuff up out of thin air. In this comment section, we follow Bayes.

So in that context, when somebody comes up to me and says, "okay, I know the last 20 arguments people made about biological inferiority in Blacks were wrong, and fundamentally I'm about to make the same argument again, but this time is special and you have to take it seriously..." Just, no, you're wasting my time at that point unless you're bringing some kind of real compelling evidence to the table.

And I don't see any compelling evidence you're bringing to the table.

> Why does the number of genes need to be 1 or a common genetic makeup for every member of a race need to exist? You should explain that to link those facts to your conclusion.

If there is a shared set of genes linked to intelligence that show up the same in every Black person regardless of their country of origin, or regardless of their percentage African/European ancestry, then I would expect people to be able to point to those genes. But they can't.

You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?

You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan. And yeah, that's kind of silly and ridiculous. A comparatively small number of genes control skin color, and it's not really consistent with our current understanding of genetics to think that intelligence is based off of something so specific.

Measures to reduce black poverty can certainly help reduce black poverty, but I don't think it's known that they can bring blacks up to the same level of poverty as whites. So we may never completely solve the problem of black poverty with assistance.

> disproved over and over again

Can you identify even one of those disproofs? I've never found any and nobody who's tried to convince me they exist has ever produced any.

B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics.

How is that?

C) the disparities we're studying show up in contexts that can't be explained by IQ.

There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors.

D) the disparities we're seeing are larger than we would expect to see given IQ gaps.

That's consistent with my idea.

E) the IQ gap itself has decreased over time in ways that are inconsistent with a view that is purely biological.

Straw man.

> It's not intuitive or expected that a biological adaptation to sun level would affect the brain to the degree you're claiming.

I'm not talking about skin color but "black" in the commonly used meaning of the word. Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.

> You're claiming that there's a shared racial genetic outcome. So what are the shared genes for people with that race? Where are they?

I'm not claiming there are shared genes causing it. It might have appeared independently for different black ethnicities.

If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.

> You don't know what these genes are, or how they affect intelligence, and how they're linked to skin color, or even what percentage of the Black community shares them, but you're super-convinced that there's a strong link between our brains and our ability to get a sun tan.

You're putting words in my mouth. I'm not super convinced. I just think it's a realistic possibility.

Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist. Even Darwin discovered evolution without knowing what genes were. Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.

Can I identify a proof that Black people can read and self govern? I mean... the modern world? Are you arguing that early race science claims haven't been disproven? Are you familiar with the early claims that race scientists made? You should look up some of them if you're not.

The vast majority of early race science claims can be disproven by your own claims. A 10-15 point IQ gap is not high enough to render someone unable to read, vote, or understand mathematics. If early race science claims were true, then we would expect to see a much larger gap than we currently see. And we don't.

So what's been happening is we've spent a large portion of American history (and pre-American history) listening to people make strong claims that Black people were biologically unable to accomplish certain tasks. Then Black people accomplished those tasks, and scientific racists moved the goalposts a bit and said, "okay, they could accomplish those tasks, but they won't be able to do these ones." And that's continued basically unabated to modern times, where the goalposts are now at, "okay, but they can't achieve equal pay/productivity, they don't have the genetics for that task."

And at no point has the race science community had the presence of mind to take a step back and think, "maybe given that all of our testable predictions have been proven wrong throughout history, we don't understand genetics as well as we think we do."

----

> B) the race/IQ link doesn't line up with our modern understanding of genetics. How is that?

See the remaining paragraphs I wrote in that comment. If you need more clarification, our modern understanding of racial categories is that they are more socially designated than genetically designated (more on that below). Our understanding of intelligence is that it is enormously complex and not likely to be controlled by a small number of genes behind, say, skin color. Increasingly, modern scientists don't even really think of genetic intelligence as being reducible to a single number anyway. Most modern geneticists have rejected a race/IQ link. There's still a lot about intelligence that the scientific community is still learning, but the people in the labs right now doing that research on intelligence do not think your theories are likely to be true.

> C) [...] There can be other differences besides IQ, and there are environmental and cultural factors [...] D) [...] E) [...]

So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.

We've had a really long conversation at this point for you to just now let on that you think Black outcomes are in fact at least partially influenced by external factors that aren't related to innate ability (ie, systemic racism and/or inequality).

> Indians and Australian Aboriginals don't count regardless of the color of their skin.

??? I'm not sure how to respond to this. African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection. It also doesn't change anything about the fact that African American genetics are also not uniform at this point. A large percentage of the Black community is multiracial, and your "commonly used" definition of Black is primarily determined by who looks Black, regardless of the percentage of African American heritage that person actually has.

> If the idea of a correlation happening independently is too far fetched for you then another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA.

Your research is once again out of date, recent studies suggest that early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.

And again, if your ancestry claim was true we'd expect to see very different outcomes in individuals with mixed ancestry, and... we don't see that. So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities. That is not a result you would expect to see if this was genetic.

----

> Not knowing about the genes is not a reason to dismiss the possibility they exist.

Yes, it is. I don't know how else to get this across to you, so maybe an analogy will work. I'll entertain your idea once you're able to disprove to me that the the liberal/conservative divide in our current country is based on innate intelligence.

You say there are other explanations for rural/urban income gaps and college demographics that fit that data better? You say that class divides, culture, and location are obviously better explanations? I'm sorry, I'm sure those are contributing factors, but until you conclusively disprove the genetic connection, then we have to entertain the possibility, even though the evidence is spurious and it doesn't really make sense as a causal relationship in the first place. You say that even if it was true, it shouldn't derail conversations about bias or political equity or censorship? That's certainly a perspective, but maybe we should bring the theory up on every conversation about liberal bias anyway. I'm not saying it's the reason, just that it's a realistic possibility that no conservative has ever conclusively found proof against.

Do you see the problem here? It's really easy to make silly and even outright harmful claims like the above and then retreat back behind "just asking questions". That's why (particularly when we're dealing with a field like race science which has a history of being incorrect and harmful) we demand a certain standard of evidence. Like a set of genes. Or at least a correlation that can't be better explained by external stimuli.

> Should that whole theory have been rejected until genes were discovered? Should dog breeders have stopped doing their job until genes were discovered? Of course not. This idea that we can't know it exists without identifying the genes is obviously ridiculous.

But not half as ridiculous as the idea that now that we know genes exist we should ignore them. We have better standards now. This is like arguing that we don't need to identify viruses because some people in olden times washed their hands occasionally.

And to be clear, we knew that dog breeding worked because we could run experiments and see it working. We knew that evolution existed because we could make testable claims and predictions that were proven true. Both of those things are a million miles away from "I have no evidence for this, but you can't disprove it." Evolution was not running around claiming that it should get the benefit of the doubt until it was disproven. It brought real evidence and testable predictions to the table that made sense based on what we knew about the world.

That's clearly not what we're talking about. Why would you mention that something obviously false has been disproven? It's a strawman. It's hard to read so much of your writing when you can make such extreme misinterpretations of what I'm saying.

> African American skin color exists for the same reason that Indian skin color exists, it's an adaptation to living close to the equator. This is a pretty weird objection.

That's quite simply not what black means in common language. It doesn't matter what the cause of the skin color is, the correlations with IQ and income are not the same.

> early African Americans also had Neanderthal DNA.

Yes. That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me. This is getting frustrating.

> So I'm still waiting for an explanation for why mixed-ancestor Blacks with European ancestors have the same outcomes as everyone else in Black communities.

Oh. didn't know that. Reference?

Anyway, still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.

Look, it's not my fault you don't know the origins of race science or what the claims were that your predecessors were making. If the origins of your theory are embarrassing to you, then... I mean, I don't know what to tell you, maybe reflect on why those origins are embarassing.

More recently, the modern wave of race science has been largely driven by people like Murray, who posited in the Bell Curve that the 10-15 point IQ gap is primarily genetic and highly heritable. Murray suggests that social interventions are unlikely to significantly lower that gap, and that instead we should focus on eugenics (he uses nicer language of course).

You and I have already disproven Murray's theory in previous comments by noting that gaps decrease when race is hidden from hiring managers, and by noting that wage gaps persist in industries where success does not have a high correlation with intelligence. So we don't need to rehash that theory, you're already on board with me that Murray is wrong to say that the current IQ gap can be mostly explained by genetics. You've already softened that claim, and now you say that the current gap is partially explained by genetics.

The point is, the entire history of race science has been people like you making claims about Black inferiority, getting those claims debunked, and then shifting the goalposts a little and making the same exact claim just to a slightly lesser degree. There's a pattern here.

> That's quite simply not what black means in common language.

Yes, it really is; the person on the street is not using ancestry tests to determine what percentage "Black" people are, the common denominator is skin color. Black communities do not have the uniform genetic background you're assuming, and common metrics people on the street use to determine "Blackness" do not line up with ancestry.

This is broad scientific consensus, the position of the AAPA since the late 90s can be summed up as: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations. [...] Notably, variants are not distributed across our species in a manner that maps clearly onto socially-recognized racial groups."[0] This is the general consensus of people who are actually studying genetics and anthropology in the real world.

And in fact, when you actually go over the studies even from race scientists, what you find is that in the majority of cases the racial phenotype even they use to categorize their subjects also lines up with the AAPA's view. You know how the majority of these race science studies determine who is and isn't Black? Skin color and heckin self-reporting of racial identity. So it's just pure revisionism to claim that "actually, we meant something different by Black the entire time".

If you are trying to make a claim here based on purely percentage of African American heritage, then you need to throw a lot of existing race research out and start over, and that includes books like the Bell Curve which were almost entirely based on metrics like self reporting and not actual measurements of ancestry.

> That's consistent with what I wrote. Again, you seem to be intentionally misunderstanding me.

My deep apologies. Just to make sure I understand, when you said that "another possibility is their shared lack of recent Neanderthal DNA", what you actually meant was that African Americans do have recent Neanderthal DNA?

And not to keep harping on this, but "shared" is putting in a lot of work here, because as I keep mentioning, African American populations do not have the genetic uniformity you claim.

> Oh. didn't know that. Reference?

Take a look at stats released from companies like 23AndMe and Ancestry. Our best guess is that the average African-American genome is about 20-30% European (although we've only recently started really measuring this, so those numbers might change over time). That range can vary drastically as well, it's not that all Black people are uniformly 25% European, they might be close to 50%, or as low as 10%. I'm not sure what kind of reference you're looking for with that, but there have been a couple of press releases and cooperative studies using 23andme data that go into detail on their findings.[1]

It's pretty clear that the Black IQ gap is consistent across demographics and geographic regions in the US, which... like I said, leads us to question why we're not seeing more variation, even in studies from people who believe in scientific racism -- because the actual racial makeup of those groups is not consistent across geography.

----

> still no clear evidence against "Blacks are genetically predisposed to being poor.". So I assume it doesn't exist.

And still no clear evidence against "Conservatives are genetically predisposed to being lower education/poorer than the average population", so I also assume that evidence doesn't exist.

I will make you understand how burden of proof works. If you believe that it's my job to disprove that Black IQ gaps are genetic, then I want you to disprove to me that rural/urban Conservative/Liberal IQ and wage gaps are genetic -- or I want you to explain to me why you think that theory shouldn't be factored into every discussion about university bias, voting rights, and industry discrimination against Conservatives.

And of course, I'm still waiting for a response to the below quote:

> So what's your objection to the equality movement and racial activism? It sounds like you agree there are environmental and cultural factors that suppress Black outcomes, so it should be easy to get on board with eliminating those factors. We can have a debate about genetics after we've eliminated the external non-genetic factors that you agree exist.

You say that you agree with me that a purely biological difference, even if it does exist, is not enough on its own to explain the gap we see. So you should be fine with progressive policies that attempt to eliminate the non-heritable reasons for inequality.

----

[0]: https://hysanth.org/about/position-statements/aapa-statement...

[1]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/12/genetic-study-reveal...

No doubt there is also discrimination. Especially if there's a real effect, it's easy for people to be aware of that and exacerbate it with discrimination. Same as women can't do X man's job until they could.

> dramatically better pre-adolescent test results.

Childhood interventions to raise IQ are known to wear off at adolescence. It's not necessarily because of the adult world but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use or something like that. I don't know but you have to look at post-adolescent IQs for the effect on adult-income.

Then what are you arguing about? You're calling into question the entire concept of equality activism for job/housing/education opportunities, and you don't disagree that discrimination exists?

> but perhaps because the interventions are just bringing out latent childhood abilities that normal kids don't get the opportunity to use

That is an extremely worrisome trend if you're trying to argue that IQ tests measure innate intelligence and not training. The whole point of an IQ test is that you shouldn't be able to "cram" for it, you shouldn't be able to "cheat" and temporarily influence the results so that they don't accurately reflect intelligence.

So at the very least, this puts your claim that IQ is a permanent number that can be accurately measured before adolescence into question. You're admitting here that you don't believe IQ is a static number. You're suggesting that external interventions can bring out latent abilities that won't be captured or accounted for in a normal IQ test. That's an idea with pretty big implications. Essentially, what you're saying is that given the right environment/early-education/nutrition/etc, that test results can be artificially primed.

So given that claim, why are you so certain that IQ is set in stone before preschool? How do you know that there aren't external factors that can lower IQ over time? What makes you sure that an oppressive or high-stress environment couldn't suppress or encourage those latent abilities even later in life?

You don't really have any way to know that IQ tests given later in life wouldn't be subject to environmental effects that could dampen or inflate results, do you?

Not my claim.

As you surely know, IQ tests are scaled by age according to how normal people develop. So an individual who undergoes unusual life experiences can easily have their IQ change with age since their development would deviate from what the rest of the population has. If every person had all the best IQ enhancing interventions, then I would expect IQ scores to be more consistent with age since the environmental factors are controlled, leaving the inherent factors to dominate. But that's not the world we live in, and you can "train for the test".

> That won't work. We know from science that the IQ gap appears before school age so it's not caused by school.

I'm not going to waste my time on this if you're not going to stand by your claims.

The IQ gap that appears and is measured before school age can be reduced by external intervention. Therefore, if the tests are accurate, then something is happening to those kids as they age to make their skills regress. If the early tests are not accurate, then it stands to reason that adult tests could suffer from the same problems and should be similarly distrusted.

Either way, your claim that IQ tests prove that the sole cause of gaps must be introduced before children reach school age is unsubstantiated.

If that's the case, the parent comment, while embarrassing for this site, has a valid claim - that at some point blaming everything on the system could become detrimental to everyone.

This video goes over a lot of the problems with the book.

https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo

https://youtu.be/UBc7qBS1Ujo

Where's the evidence that there is no significant inherent biological such as genetics? Just because it's a popular belief doesn't mean it's strongly supported by evidence. I haven't seen any. I even saw an adoption study that attempted to answer that, and when it embarrassingly turned out that black kids still had lower IQs despite their white adopted families, the authors suddenly discovered they'd forgotten to control for age at adoption and that must surely have been the cause of the differences. They were silent on the effect of the race of the biological parents even though it could be clearly seen in the data that the more black biological parents a child had, the lower his IQ despite the race and income of his adopted parents.

No. You're confusing group outcomes with individual ones.

To avoid the emotion of racism, you can look at all Americans instead. Average income in the US is $30,000/year. Is it wrong to teach that to kids? No. Does it cause them to fatalistically assume they can't earn more than that because they're unlucky to be American? No. Each individual kid might not be one of the destined-for-low-wages people.

This is a weird kind of selectivity. You weren't making this argument when OP claimed that teaching about systemic racism would be fatalistic. You were perfectly fine with the conflation between group outcomes and individual outcomes on that front.

So why the sudden change in heart?

You just hopped onto it to say you want off of it?

That is not what Nazi Germany believed. Also, coincidentally, German Jews were not more rich then average, there was no persistent difference like that. They were lower middle class that clustered in the few cities. Portion of them were refugees from Eastern Europe.

Also, Germany had actually very small Jewish minority which was very integrated.

Racism of course. Since it’s selecting people based on race.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

43% of white students at Harvard are legacies, athletes, or related to staff and 75% of these 43% wouldn't have been admitted on merits.

Around 1/3 of white people at Harvard are there because of effectively white affirmative action.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/study-harvard-finds-43-...

A drive to pick people solely on merits would sound more meritorious if we applied it to white people first. I say this as a white man who believes in theory colorblind meritocracy in an imaginary world where such a thing can actually exist.

This can also apply to antiracism, which as I understand it [1] is policy that attempts to undo structural racism, not policy that is absent of race-conscious treatment. I think this question would also be more interesting to answer because everyone already agrees that affirmative action literally does factor in race. The more controversial part is whether it serves to reinforce or counteract some forms of systemic racism.

[1] From a modern viewpoint (e.g. Kendi), although I'm not sure if this word previously had different uses.

Hmm, is this racism or anti-racism? Because it's literally what Harvard does.

[1] Police stop black drivers significantly more than white drivers when the sun is up and they are able to see that the driver is black, but not at night when they can't see the race of the driver. Meaning race is often the determining factor for why black drivers are pulled over.

[2] Unarmed black people are 3.49 times as likely to be killed as unarmed white people and local crime rates have zero effect on this statistic.

[3] Black and white officers use force at similar rates in white neightborhoods, but White police officers use force significantly more compared to black police officers when responding to calls in minority neighborhoods.

[4] Police in oakland find contraband at the same rate regardless of the race of the person, but search black drivers 4x more often.

[5] The more white a suspect appears to be the less likely police are to use force. The more black a suspect appears the more likely it is that police will use force.

[6] Black police officers are more likely to be shot by their fellow police than white police officers.

[7] Oaklad police disproportionately handcuff blacks at stunning levels regardless of which area of the city you look at.

[8] In San Francisco, “although Black people accounted for less than 15 percent of all stops in 2015, they accounted for over 42 percent of all non-consent searches following stops.” This proved unwarranted: “Of all people searched without consent, Black and Hispanic people had the lowest ‘hit rates’ (i.e., the lowest rate of contraband recovered).”

[9] The DOJ investigation into Ferguson PD, found “a pattern or practice of unlawful conduct within the Ferguson PD that violates the 1st, 4th, and 14th Amendments to the Constitution, and federal law.” The scathing report found that FPD was targeting black residents and treating them as revenue streams for the city by striving to continually increase the money brought in through fees and fines.

[10] In Chicago, a 2016 report found that “black and Hispanic drivers were searched approximately four times as often as white drivers, yet Chicago PDs own data show that contraband was found on white drivers twice as often as black and Hispanic drivers.”

[11]2014 ACLU analysis of Illinois DOT data found: “Black and Latino drivers are nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be asked during a routine traffic stop for ‘consent’ to have their car searched. Yet white motorists are 49% more likely than African American motorists to have contraband discovered during a consent search by law enforcement, and 56% more likely when compared to Latinos.”

[12] Black people are more likely to be wrongfully convicted and more likelt to be framed for a crime they didn't commit.

[13] Black kids are more likely to be tried as an adult.

[14] Black people get 20% longer prison sentences for the same crimes even when you control for criminal history.

[15] Black students are more likely to be arrested at school. This appears to be a function of increased security at predominantly black schools and not because black students commit crimes at school at higher rates.

[16] Security levels in schools are determined by how many black kids go to the school and not crime levels.

[17] Predominantly black schools are chronically underfunded compared to predominantly white schools.

[18] An identical resume with a white sounding name like Stephen or Susan is twice as likely to recieve a call for a job interview compared to the same resume with an ethnically black sounding name like Jamal or Latisha.

[19] Minorities who alter their resumes to seem white get more job interviews.

[20] Banks targeted black homeowners for predatory homeloans and refinancing in the lead up to the 2008 crisis. Causing black families to be disproportionately harmed by the forclosure crisis.

[21] owner-occupied homes in black neighborhoods are undervalued by $48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses. This study controls for crime rates. Neighborhood amenities like schools, parks, walkability, and public transportation. The size and age of homes etc.

[22] In an experiment landlords responding to emails treated Blacks, Arab males, Muslims, and single parents unfavorably.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1

[2] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w26774?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_me...

[4] https://stanford.app.box.com/v/Data-for-Change

[5] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/194855061663350...

[6] https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/centers/wien...

[7] https://sparq.stanford.edu/opd-reports

[8] https://sfdistrictattorney.org/sites/default/files/Document/...

[9] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...

[10] https://chicagopatf.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/PATF_Fina...

[11] https://www.aclu-il.org/en/press-releases/traffic-stop-data-...

[12] https://www.law.umich.edu/special/exoneration/Documents/Race...

[13] https://www.wnyc.org/story/black-kids-more-likely-be-tried-a...

[14]https://www.ussc.gov/research/research-reports/demographic-d...

[15] https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/01/25/black-students...

[16] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160608180824.h...

[17] https://psmag.com/education/nonwhite-school-districts-get-23...

[18] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

[19] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

[20] https://www.aclu.org/files/field_document/discrimlend_final....

[21] https://www.brookings.edu/research/devaluation-of-assets-in-...

[22] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01660...

There was a strongtowns article that literally had nothing to do with race, merely about getting rid of single family zoning. It didn't take long for someone in the comment section to post how building affordable housing in those places will ruin everything and everyone is naive because they haven't had to live in a ghetto.

There was an economics explained video about real estate that even implied that race was one of the factors was how far the homeowners are away from other races.

Coming from Europe this was completely unexpected for me, turns out, segregation in the USA never went away it merely became more socially acceptable.

http://projects.andrewwhitby.com/uk-ethnicity-map/

but it's more fine grained than that. Bangladeshis are separate from Pakistanis, for instance.

The statistics on unarmed people being killed by police account for differences in population sizes. Also while that is a hot button issue it's really the tip of the iceberg for this subject. The body of work showing systemic racism is an ongoing problem in the US holds up just fine if you ignore police shootings altogether.

May I recommend an organized note taking system copying the literal text and link for reference. I like org-roam with a hotkey to capture title and if existent any highlighted text.

https://github.com/org-roam/org-roam

There are of course about a million ways to skin this particular cat and plenty of them are good.

The benefit of using your own system is that you can trivially reference information from many websites via one method instead of relying on the many and varied features of many sites. The benefit of copying the full relevant text is both that you can search that text and if a site or a comment goes missing tomorrow or 5 years from now you aren't out the information.

There are of course other ways to save comments, such as bookmarking with your browser or other bookmark applications.

Could you point to such a law or even better cite a paragraph from such a law where you feel it targets certain minorities? How do police officers from minority background do their job?

Also the war on drugs started under the Nixon admin was an intentional effort to target black people and anti-war activists.

https://www.businessinsider.com/nixon-adviser-ehrlichman-ant...

Why "Even" ? It does not say anything about racism if you do not control for other factors, like criminal history and society inclusion. It's phrased as if it would still hold without control variable, and the author is doing a favor to potential nitpicker. It may be true, but the "Even" does not make me confident of the scientific value of the publication and the absence of confirmation bias of the author.

So a normal black kid can safely pursue life without worrying that he or she has been held back by systemic racism.

Is there a meta-source you got your list from?

https://twitter.com/_SAWI__/status/1299096866789834754

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/mpabvz/serious_r...

For me it's 3 main things.

1. The way historical oppression can set a group behind another group even after any specific policy has been repealed.

Poverty is often a cycle that can go on indefinitely for generations especially depending on things like upward mobility which has coincidentally been getting weaker since the period of official apartheid ended in the USA. Strange that we seem to be uninterested in spending much on the uplifting of our people now that such spending would need to include all people.

2. The way that bias against a group can result in that group being disadvantaged despite there being no rules or laws in place that require that and even in spite of it being contrary to policies.

Like the way that black people are half as likely to receive a callback for a job interview as an identically qualified white applicant or that despite being less likely to be found with contraband black people are twice as likely to be searched by police.

3. Would be laws and rules that do not target racial groups, but unfairly benefit or disadvantage racial groups.

This would be local property tax based school funding resulting in poor neighborhoods getting inadequate funding for schools resulting in predominantly black schools being underfunded. This is also drastically harsher penalties for crack compared to cocaine.

https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/minorities-who-whiten-job-resumes...

Later, in the 1920s, African Americans had a higher rate of employment than White Americans! But after the federal minimum wage passed, their economic power was destroyed and has yet to recover.

Today, most people don't consider it as having anything to do with race, but when it was first put on the books, it was specifically designed to hurt them.

To posit the issues as 'merely explaining' is kind of to strawman people's legit concerns.

CRT, for example, goes way beyond 'explaining' - on purpose.

If this were an in issue of merely 'explaining to people who systematic limitations might work' - and being sufficiently nuanced about it, then I think this whole thing would be a lot less controversial.

I think there's a way for us to talk to kids about the potentialities of systematic racism without using the language of activism.

That is not true. Critical Race Theory is a framework for viewing legal and social structures through the lens of race and racism.

I’m not an expert here, but this seems to be a fairly balanced summary: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_r...

The link you provided is a nice reference, but it's a very small-c conservative description and avoids the harder parts of the issue.

The notion that 'minorities face challenges that majorities will have difficulty perceiving' is not unreasonable. But CRT uses language such as 'White Supremacy' - reminiscent of Men in Pointy White Hats' to describe those 'majority systems'. Their stated objective is to 'deconstruct and destroy Whiteness', implying that the 'majority culture must be removed', and that those who do not realize this and actively participate are holding up structures of White Supremacy.

So they use 'whiteness' in kind of an abstract way, something that 'stands in contrast to blackness' - but they also mean every classical cultural trait.

Things like a 'focus on the correct answer', 'focus on literacy', 'objectivity' etc. - these are artifacts of 'whiteness and white supremacy'.

The link you provided actually is fairly decent, if that text represented CRT then I think there would be controversy, but much less so.

But CRT in practices uses the language of race war: 'Destroy Whiteness or you are a White Supremacist'. In that case 'Whiteness' is effectively an ethnicity, broadly 'Westerners' or 'White People'.

Finally, even if we can agree on what CRT is, it plays heavily into ideological victimhood: 'the student failed to learn to read at a high level because that's a racist, colonial imposition, and shouldn't have to achieve literacy to graduate high school' etc..

When we're talking about 'systematic issues' then those who have a propensity for victimhood can view racism/sexism in literally everything. The 'truck' toy with the 'boy' on the front cover? Gendered language? Your company founders are white and male? It's all oppression.

On one hand, while the notion of systematic racism has legitimacy, CRT ideology opens up an ugly pandora's box that allows people to take an activist perspective on the basis of conjecture about literally everything and it plays directly into, and validates people's worst bigotries.

This article about how 'the sidewalks are racist' is not a joke. They make completely unsubstantiated and bigoted notions about how 'White people walk on sidewalks' at Northwestern U. This is the kind of crude, fantasy racist bigotry, supported and endorsed by CRT thinking. [3]

From the University of Toronto [1]

Wikipedia [2]

[1] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

[3] https://dailynorthwestern.com/2021/04/05/opinion/allen-are-t...

Less than one full generation has passed since redlining was made illegal. It's been less than 60 years since segregation was ruled illegal across the board.

Do you really believe that the entirety of society has been reshaped in that amount of time and every negative system has been eliminated? In what is essentially less than the lifespan of a single generation?

People treat the civil rights movement like it's this very old event that we've all moved past. I don't necessarily blame people for having that perspective, because that's the way we're taught about it in schools. But the civil rights movement was very recent.

You think we overhauled the entire housing market in 60 years? We have not yet had even a single president that was born after the civil rights movement. So from my perspective, even ignoring the stats and research on this subject, I keep hearing people tell me that when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 or the voting rights act of 1965 passed, all the racists just, I don't know, died or something. That they can't possibly exist anymore, and they can't possibly have taught anything negative to their immediate kids who went on to be CEOs and politicians.

I've met plenty of people who I believe would actively discriminate against someone because of their race, and I'm an asocial white person who avoids public spaces. I just replied to a comment on this very page that openly argued that unequal outcomes in Black communities were the result of biological differences. I don't know what word to use for the belief that Blacks are biologically inferior other than the word 'racist'. I can't speak to anyone else's experiences, maybe you've been fortunate to interact with better communities than me, but I don't personally think this stuff is particularly rare.

If we're going off of what is and isn't hard to believe, I don't find systemic racism to be far-fetched. There was, objectively, an omnipresent, elaborate rouse being played on Black communities for the entirety of American history leading up to at least the civil rights act. That part isn't debatable. So for me, the wild conclusion to draw is that after >180 years of targeted oppression, everyone involved in those systems immediately vanished after a law was passed.

60 years is not enough time to fix wealth gaps in a preexisting neighborhood, not unless we take active steps to fix them. It's just really obvious to me that the reason many ghettos exist is because we built them; there's records of banks deliberately choosing not to invest in those areas because of race. We never did any kind of restitution plan or went back and gave those communities the investment money we denied them earlier. Those areas didn't immediately become rich or get better schools just because a law was passed.

But if you want to look at statistics instead of anecdotes, this is also something that has been studied a lot if you're willing to put in the effort to research it. There's a lot that people can debate around systemic racism, but at the very least, it's pretty hard not to acknowledge that there are unequal outcomes happening. I know you saw breakyerself's comment, do you think that none of those stats are worth being concerned about?

I have seen people giving white guys changes again and again and again. And then make them fall upwards. Some took up those chances, others did not. I am not even calling something sinister in all those situations (through in some yeah). Just stating that giving a white guy a chance is not something rare.

I do.

https://www.vox.com/2018/8/10/17670992/study-white-americans...

> Respondents were asked how important their race was to their identity on a five-point scale ranging from “not at all important” to “extremely important.” They were also asked a question measuring their feelings of white solidarity: “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?” This followed the same five-point scale. Finally, we can assess survey respondents’ feelings of white victimization from their answers to the question of how much discrimination whites face in the U.S., also on a five-point scale, ranging from “none at all” to a “great deal.”

These people are opposed to affirmative action. The Biden administration is literally excluding white people from things like farm loan forgiveness and SBA loans. Cities are excluding them from things like mortgage subsidies. Companies are openly talking about quota systems. “White men” is used as a pejorative.

Maybe these people are like the “war on Christmas” folks and are blowing this stuff out of proportion. But when there is literal discrimination against white people being baked into our laws, calling them “white supremacist” for saying in a survey that white people should try to get those laws overturned is totally psychotic.

https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

As to Black voters: https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/ge...

> Majorities of whites (74%), blacks (69%) and other minorities (82%) say voters should be required to show photo identification before being allowed to vote. Voters under 40 support voter ID laws more than do older voters.

Appropriate advice at the individual level is often very different than, and sometimes the complete opposite of, appropriate advice at the demographic scale. It's fine to tell your brother to quit the shit and pick himself up by his bootstraps or whatever; it's both inappropriate and ineffective to translate that notion into social policy.

Systemic racism is a macro concern. Talking about it, and what to do about it, is a conversation totally different than the conversation you have with your kids about their lived experience. Being aware of systemic racism doesn't make anyone a victim. It makes them cognizant, smarter, better actors in the system.

Are these really opposites? Hannah Arendt famously tied those together in her work "Eichmann in Jerusalem".

She pointed out that Eichmann, convicted architect of the Holocaust, wasn't necessarily a sociopath, but instead an extremely average and mundane person who relied on clichéd defenses rather than thinking for himself, was motivated by professional promotion rather than ideology, and believed in success which he considered the chief standard of "good society". Banality, in this sense, does not mean that Eichmann's actions were in any way ordinary, or even that there is a potential Eichmann in all of us, but that his actions were motivated by a sort of complacency which was wholly unexceptional

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem#The_bana...

The question that gets skirted when discussing "systemic racism" is this: what does this actually mean? How does it manifest itself? make it concrete?

The notion "systemic racism" covers a vast territory of human interactions and feelings. Mostly the uncomfortable one's that aren't easily discussed: indifference, complacency, egoism, irrational fear, insecurity, mistrust and so on.

Right now, there's another post on HN's frontpage about toxic workplaces. A toxic workplace is the result of emergent behavior of many individuals in that workplace. Both leadership that acts complacent rather then address human issues, and workers who don't feel engaged, incentivized or motivated and put their own interests, frustrations, irritations, fears,... up front.

In that regard, formal public policies - social, economic, political,... - are also a representation of emerging behavior, the fluctuating emotional state of a large group of individuals, a community, and the norms and values which grow prevalent and come to dominate collective thinking as time marches on.

Eichmann himself didn't pop up overnight, after all. He ended up becoming because both personal circumstances and factors, as well as the larger societal and environmental circumstances pushed him in that direction. That doesn't excuse what he did, but it does explain why it happened. And it's a relevant lesson to keep in mind when discussing inequities in modern day terms.

And then I became an adult and life did not go how I thought it would and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what went wrong.

I will suggest that it can be counterproductive to try to hide the ugly truth from children that the world is often not a nice place, that there are prejudiced people and who you are can impact how other people react to you, among other things. I have been slow to take off my rose-colored glasses and get better at handling bad actors in a more tactical fashion.

Girls tend to be taught to worry about the feelings of other people more than their own and to conform to social expectations and to cave to social pressure. Trying to live up to high ideals about all people deserving to be treated well while I was not being treated well by them was something of an Achilles Heel for me.

That seems to generalize. I seem to not be the only woman who keeps trying to find some high road long after it's become obvious that the person in question is simply abusive and taking advantage.

Do you consciously notice this change in your own perspective? In real time?

I only do this in retrospect. I can look back and see the thing that should have been obvious, but wasn't at the time. All the red flags.

I have found my ability to detect them has accelerated and my tolerance for them has declined.

We are supposed to be tolerant, work hard, do more, stay late, go the extra mile... and, as you said, it's taken advantage of.

At some point, I realize people are taking advantage of my good nature. And so then I just walk away.

But I wish I could not feel bad about it. Guilty somehow.

I feel like my gender still contributes to some people wanting to play the sympathy card and justify their crap. I think they actually know better and they know it's BS but they think I will fall for it anyway for whatever reason.

It gets tiresome to deal with people like that and I think my next big development stage is getting better at shutting people down and finding some way to signal "That's a hard no and stop bothering me. You know better."

Some people will just keep pushing on the slightest excuse or opening and they have very selective hearing where if 98 percent of what you say is no and 2 percent is something that could be twisted into a justification, they are all over that 2 percent. And I think the fact that they are clearly being abusive at that point is on them but as a purely tactical thing I am trying to figure out how to deny such cretins that slight opening.

They are manipulators. Their skill isn't in getting their job done, it's in manipulating other people into doing it for them.

I think for me, it's about boundaries. If someone continually pushes or crosses my boundaries, then that's the biggest red flag. If I push back and they push harder, then something is going wrong.

You giving of yourself should be an act of freewill in pursuit of something greater for all, not to avoid the negative repercussions of saying no.

When I find myself saying yes to avoid being lashed out at, threatened, extorted, coerced, insulted, etc, then it's time to go.

I'll tolerate it once or twice or even more times than that. I excuse bad behavior from others away with "I'm too sensitive" or "I know what they say isn't true" or "they don't understand what they just did."

But after too much of it, it doesn't matter. At some point, the math tips to it being worse to be around them than not, so I won't be around them anymore. In fact, I suppose, it adds up somehow, I don't know the formula.

Like... if someone does something, I let it slide, but if they do it again, then it's not just 1 + 1 = 2, it's more like 1 + 1.25 = 2.25. When it gets to 10, I'm done.

A memory multiplier, if you will.

"You've done this twice now. I laughed it off the first time, but I'm noticing a trend and I don't appreciate it."

Then the third time, it's 1 + 1.25 + 2.50 = 4.75.

Why?

1 for the first strike. 1 + 0.25 for the second strike, because it includes the memory of the first one. 2.50 for the third strike, because 2 memories, plus violating a direct ask to avoid repeating the bad behavior.

Something like that.

I did some volunteer work in town for a couple of organizations that are supposedly trying to do economic development and I was trying to use that as a means to make connections and develop a better income.

I had applied for a job locally and the guy that got it fits your terrific description: He's a manipulator and has no talent for doing the job. He was stealing ideas from me and actively denying me credit, thereby killing my hopes of establishing a better income on the ground locally.

He and other people were loading me up with volunteer work because I was actually getting things done and he apparently wasn't. He measured his so-called productivity in terms of the number of meetings he attended each month.

I quit all my volunteer work last year in May. It wasn't any one thing and he wasn't the only reason. Part of it was the pandemic and I just didn't want to become "the dog everyone kicks" because we are all losing our marbles during a pandemic.

I am absolutely certain that after I quit in part to try to escape his abusive bullshit, this awful guy continued to cyberstalk me and steal ideas from me without giving me credit, like he did when I was doing volunteer work in a good faith effort to help my town become a better place. And I cannot tell you how burned, used and pissed off I feel about his amazingly shitty, abusive behavior. It's gone way beyond the pale for being anything understandable or excusable.

But I think one element of why he was able to get away with his crap is that I did a lot of volunteer work when I was a homemaker and a number of people involved in these organizations are married women doing volunteer work themselves (mostly retirees in this case). And I think some of these people failed to connect the dots that I was obviously very poor and clearly trying to improve my income.

I think some of them just sort of mentally lumped me in with other women there who weren't there with any goal of improving their own income because they have enough.

That one guy who was stealing my ideas and intentionally screwing me over -- his behavior is outright unethical and wholly unforgivable. But I have mixed feelings about the part other people played and I can see where some of them just sort of assumed on some level that I was a comfortably well off homemaker whose man was taking care of her even though that clearly was not true.

And that's partly because I am a former homemaker and likely behaved a lot like these other women who have well-heeled husbands and don't need to network to try to establish an income. I "read" as being enough like them that kind of on autopilot they failed to get the memo that "I'm here because you people are supposedly doing economic development and I'm dirt poor and need more earned income."

Like you, I also take time to gather information and make a decision based on context and patterns over time. Abusers, like the guy stealing my ideas, like to interpret that as "She's put up with it this long. She will keep putting up with it."

That seems to be a key difference. Decent people seem to be more aware that "I've got two strikes against me already. I need to get it right from here on out or I'm through." and abusers are like "They let it slide twice. They will clearly let it slide again and I can count on this indefinitely." (And then they actively try to con you into "just one more chance...just one more chance.." ad infinitum.)

And it's a case of "I know you actually know better and are intentionally being abusive because you keep trying to take more from me even after I've tried to cut your sorry ass out of my life, you piece of shit of a human being."

This is far beyond "I gave freely and he just was too stupid to realize that I expected him to actually do his job and help me improve my income." He's not qualified to do the job. He knows that. He obviously knows that and has zero plans to actually do the job and had zero compunction about actively denying me opportunity -- in direct contradiction to his duties -- so he could pretend to have ideas of his own and pretend to work just enough to keep his paycheck.

Keeping his paycheck was his only real goal and he doesn't care that he's not only crapping all over me, he's crapping all over this small town that is paying him to make the town better.

He's basically a vampire. I think he absolutely knows that and isn't at all bothered by it. He has zero ethics or conscience.

It's a small town. I post online under my real name. There's limits to how much I'm willing to say for the sake of an argument with an internet stranger.

You have a great day.

They have an advantage. Lauded in silicon valley, politics, corporations.

Sociopaths and psychopaths. I don't know what the solution is. I don't think they can be fixed. Sometimes, removing the leeches causes more damage. They come after you and come after you. They are relentless in their defense of ego and pursuit of undue fame and fortune.

Most of the others are cowards, who won't stand up to them. Afraid of the abuse. "Is that the hill you want to die on?"

"Why are you causing conflict?"

Just go along with it.

Keep your head down.

Tall poppy syndrome.

Etc.

Etc.

Etc.

We are in real trouble.

The facts are clear. We can look at them and see what reality is. But we are intentionally choosing another path.

Why?

I don't understand why.

I think we've relied on a formula for human interaction that seems good for a little while. Stable. Beneficial. Suddenly collapsing into chaos.

Unethical, unconscionable people slowly gain power until revolution erupts. They will not. They refuse to give up any power. They shape the the violence and conflict to profit from that too.

We are still driven by primitive emotions. Fear. Lust. Those emotions are used to manipulate the unconscious masses into poverty and powerlessness.

A society built on a set of rules that benefits attributes of human character we resent in the individuals around us can't lead to good attributes.

That guy was wrought full of greed. He would steal your ideas. Lie. Cheat. We hate those character traits, but reward them handsomely.

It'll never work.

We have to think of something new. Sadly, it's probably too late. We've predicted it for thousands of years and seen it happen countless times without changing our ways.

Why now?

Following the rules is a disadvantage. Integrity is an evolutionarily disadvantageous trait. Honesty is the worst policy.

Ulterior motives. Plotting. Conniving. Betrayal. These will always win the game against someone playing by the rules.

Whose rules?

I don't know. I don't know what the rules are anymore.

I'm going to be good anyway and hope it rights itself. Someone is going to have to clean up all the rubble and feed people and give them shelter.

Who is that going to be?

Look for the helpers.

This is an assertion many people make without any actual factual basis or proof. It sounds like what we think is true so we believe it is true, but that's often how many societies make their biggest blunders.

>I seem to not be the only woman who keeps trying to find some high road long after it's become obvious that the person in question is simply abusive and taking advantage.

Most people do this. In fact this is a teaching of Jesus Christ, to turn the other cheek even in extreme and dangerous circumstances. I'm not Christian, but it's the largest religion in the US, so you could presume most people would learn this trait (wrong or right as it may be). And you could assume that their religious upbringing is more influential on them than some cryptic, unable to pinpoint, way in which "people" teach girls one thing and teach boys another thing about how to be respected.

The serenity prayer: "God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference."

This is going to cause issues with a whole generation of kids until we realize the damage it’s done and ban it.

My local PBS station recently aired a series on Asian Americans. The first episode was all about how they were ill treated in the past, and their fight for civil liberties.

I didn't bother watching the other episodes. Certainly not a show I'll ever let my (Asian) children watch. It was a good episode if the topic was specifically about civil right struggles by Asian Americans, but deciding to start a series about a whole group of people with how they were mistreated is problematic. There's a lot more to Asian Americans than just their treatments by whites. Why not begin with their achievements and cultures, and leave this for a later episode? Is their mistreatment so important to their identity?

If I watched a series on African Americans, and it began with all the (real) systemic racism - their low graduation rates, high teen pregnancies, high unemployment, and tied it to the centuries of slavery, it would be equally problematic. Why not begin the series with things like "Every single new genre of American music in the 20th century (rap, rock n roll, etc) was pioneered by African Americans"? How many people know the negatives, and how many know this accomplishment? Ask yourself: Would a documentary series starting with their problematic statistics result in more people knowing the negatives vs the positives?

When I talk to people from my home country, you'll see this dissonance: They all sympathize with the "plight of the black man", and they'll all tell me to stay away from them. They watch documentaries like these.

I don't want my children growing up believing they are victims of society, even if there is truth to it. I grew up in a third country, and my race was definitely discriminated against in nasty ways. Yet my parents and school did not try to inculcate a sense of victimhood, and I can tell you - it's extremely beneficial not to be weighed down by that belief. And the racism there was more overt than here - often having to deal with it in stores and in school.

Of course, there will be conversations with my kids about it. But it will be somewhere in the middle of the list of important discussions to have, not on the top.

My voice isn’t worth much and I am afraid, but if you stand, I will stand with you.

Though she grew up in a really tough situation and has worked hard to overcome it, she does not make herself out to be a victim.

She has strong principles and can sometimes overstate her case, but from what I can tell she listens carefully, genuinely wants to help people, and is doing everything she can to make positive change. I have watched a lot of congressional hearings in the past few years, and Omar is more careful, more prepared, and more serious than the vast majority of her GOP colleagues.

This is a problem with progressives, which have disproportionate power in the media, and academia. As a group (for example Elizabeth Warren supporters) they’re as disproportionately white as the Republican Party. But they trade on the moral authority of purporting to speak for people of color. To that end, they amplify voices like Omar and Tlaib, whose politics are indistinguishable from those of secular white progressives, and not representative of Muslims. There are probably more Muslims who voted for Trump (about 1/3) then ones who are as extreme in their politics as Omar and Tlaib. This pisses odd people like my parents, who are typical Muslim voters (moderate socially conservative Democrats).

It’s particularly problematic when, as the OP points out, whites people are judged differently for amplifying the voices of someone like Omar or Tlaib versus the voice of one of the many Muslims who voted for Trump. It suppresses conservatism within the community—progressive Muslims can count on getting tenure, getting in CNN, because white people are allowed to agree with and amplify them. But when conservative Muslims speak, white people are afraid to agree, and progressive whites often feel comfortable attacking them as tokens. This happens to other people of color as well—in the dozens of Asians you saw on CNN talking about the Atlanta shootings, how many were Trump voters (like 1/3 of Asians?)

Omar gets “amplified” predominantly because Fox News inter al. keep dumping on her all the time, and shrieking about what an “extremist” she is (generally without any reference to specific actions – as I said it’s a pure identity politics thing for them). If you have come to think that Omar is an extremist, ask yourself who keeps telling you that.

It seems like you are upset that progressives don’t put a lot of effort into boosting the political influence of Trump supporters. But why ever would they? It’s not progressives’ fault that GOP-aligned media made Muslims the bogeyman du jour after 2001 and amped racist people up into believing that Muslim = terrorist, to the point that conservative Muslims can’t get anywhere in GOP politics.

As for CNN: CNN is a center-right pro-establishment pro-corporate media outlet that does some good journalism but like all cable news also fills hours every day with bloviating pundits and sensationalized nonsense. People should stop watching cable news so much.

Not even Democrats think she’s a “mainstream Democrat.” Political she’s squarely in the progressive wing. But my point was theological. She has extreme views on social issues recognized by virtually no American Muslim scholars.

I didn’t form any opinions of Omar from watching “Fox News.” I’m a longtime Democrat, from a Muslim country, who started watching Fox News during the Trump era because I was sick of progressives trading on the moral authority of purporting to represent Muslims while amplifying people like Omar whose views are highly unrepresentative of Muslims.

Progressives shouldn’t amplify the voices of moderate and conservative Muslims. They should stop acting like they represent “people of color” when the progressive wing of the Democratic Party is as white as the Republican Party.

She does not purport to be a religious scholar or an authority on religion...

Her politics seem broadly comparable to the majority of young Muslims (say, born > 1980) I have met in cosmopolitan American cities. These tend to be secularized and at least roughly share the values of their non-Muslim peers. Should such people not be allowed to participate in the political process?

I don’t understand at all where you are going with this line of criticism. You think young Muslims should be forced to have the same views on e.g. women’s rights, LGBT rights, inter-ethnic relationships, and reproductive health that their immigrant parents and grandparents had? You want secularized Muslims to stop wearing headscarves? You think Muslim-American politicians should ask Saudi clerics to decide their political positions? ...?

Which represents a very small fraction of all American Muslims. Also, note that in “cosmopolitan cities” you’re probably not interacting with a representative cross section of Muslim Americans.

> Should such people not be allowed to participate in the political process?

This is the third post where you try to turn it back to the politician, when I repeatedly make clear I’m talking about the media. These people are welcome to their politics. My problem is with the white people who control how Muslims are portrayed politically. Whenever you see a panel of Muslims speaking on issues, for example, they are always selected to agree with white progressive views. They never sound like my mom or aunts.

Then those political actors (organizers, activists, political staffers, policy analysts, campaign staff, journalists, NGO staff, ...) put effort into sharing their message and ideas and some e.g. end up getting elected.

If large numbers of people who “sound like your mom and aunts” get heavily involved in their local and regional political process, some of them will end up with their faces on cable news or whatever. It’s not like typical media outlets dial random telephone numbers until they hit on interview subjects who match the ideology of some secret cabal.

For better or worse though, in general older first-generation immigrants (of whatever background) are less involved in politics than more established groups. This comes down substantially to their own preferences about what to spend their time on, as well as cultural comfort/fluency, etc.

It's fine to be an extremist, I am as well along some axes. But it is just dumb to think that everyone who is not as extreme as you is a Republican/fascist/communist/white supremacist/critical race theorist. Worse, it hurts your cause by tainting the center-ey people who can actually get things done with the stink of rabid activism.

And teaching kids the truth in these matters is rarely a bad thing. Being able to identify things like using prison populations to prop up the population of conservative districts is something that only can be addressed if recognized to begin with.

[1] A couple example incidents: 1) I wasn't even made aware of AP classes because I didn't look like the kids in those classes. I had to do self study to take the test after I learned about it, which I ended up aceing. 2) I lost out a big scholarship that I would have easily gotten if my counselor had worked with me the way she worked with the white kids.

It’s amazing to me that brown people, like myself, who do really well in this country relative to most minorities, live to pretend as if they should just be the model minority without realizing that the only reason they can is because of all the blood sweat and tears spilt by the minority, often black, activists before them.

Of course, the ultimate irony, is that there is no evidence that victim hood is practiced by actual victims. If you consider the past 4 years, for example, it was spent with the President of the United States complaining on a nearly daily basis about everything. His entire base is built on little more than a laundry list of grievances. Their entire political movement at the moment can be reduced to complaining about “cancel culture” which is little more than complaining that white people cannot get well paid speaki by spots to spout racist bullshit.

If victim culture exists on a racial basis in the US, it exists almost entirely within the majority community, which shows that there’s absolutely no evidence that discussing real victimization causes a sense of victim hood amongst victims.

In fact, there’s good reason to believe that understanding that the racism they face might be systemic both allows the victims of the racism to not feel like victims anymore, but instead look for ways to succeed despite it, and allows them to not look negatively upon individuals anymore, because they learn that the racism is systemic and endemic, and as a result, is something that is exhibited by them as well.

But it doesn’t, right? Asians are one third as likely to be incarcerated as white people, half as likely to be shot by the police, and overrepresented in elite schools. Teaching my Asian kids that “white supremacy” is working them is absurd.

> It’s amazing to me that brown people, like myself, who do really well in this country relative to most minorities, live to pretend as if they should just be the model minority without realizing that the only reason they can is because of all the blood sweat and tears spilt by the minority, often black, activists before them.

This thread is about my Asian kids. Black people face unique barriers, and they should educate their kids as they see fit. But people shouldn’t project that experience onto Asian kids, or assume the same solutions should be applied to Asian kids.

> If victim culture exists on a racial basis in the US, it exists almost entirely within the majority community

There are just a handful of countries in the world where foreigners can come and be more successful than the natives, and the US is one of the few. The majority seems to have done a pretty great job building a welcoming society.

> which shows that there’s absolutely no evidence that discussing real victimization causes a sense of victim hood amongst victims.

This article is about precisely that!

> In fact, there’s good reason to believe that understanding that the racism they face might be systemic both allows the victims of the racism to not feel like victims anymore, but instead look for ways to succeed despite it

Generations of Asians who grew up and succeeded in the US without being taught about “systemic racism” proves that it isn’t necessary.

What really makes me nervous is the talk of "white privilege". Although it is not meant as such, it is saying that in the world as is, all things being equal, white people are superior to people of color. For example, if you had to evaluate totally objectively whether you should hire a white CEO or a person of color as CEO, and they were otherwise equal, if you believe in the framework of systemic racism/white privilege, you should hire the white CEO.

Moral persuasion, and aiming for an ideal world, will only be effective so far, and then people will turn to what gives them an advantage.

I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess? To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish.

That said it's not a bad thing to look for areas in society for race based discriminations and eliminate them.

That’s, yes, the central complaint about White privilege. But from the rest of your comment I suspect thst you actually meant to attribute this problem to mentioning White privilege, rather than to White privilege itself.

> IMO one of the big civil rights achievements was to get rid of that divide.

That...didn’t happen. Though the same kind of White moderates whose indifference Dr. King complained of did, after the successes of the 1960s, like to say that it had as a new rationalization for the same indifference.

> I'm white, my wife is not. I fear where my kids will land in all of this. If we are drawing hard lines between people how will half white children find their place in all this mess?

American society has drawn strong lines on race [0] forever, and, yes, that has special (not necessarily uniquely bad, but distinct) impacts on those of mixed race. (Source: nearly half a century living mixed race in America.)

> To me it shouldn't matter they have multiple cultures they come from, in the same way I'm Scottish and Irish.

Black and White in the US isn’t a simple divide of culture, its a divide of shared experience of still-prevalent racism.

[0] Particularly black/white, which is not to say others aren’t issues, but, e.g., the One Drop Rule, intermarriage bans through most of thr country through the mid-20th Century (and the entire South until struck down federally in 1967), and other things particularly focussed on the black/white divide.

If I were to go back in time, I would have written.

"one of the big civil rights achievements was to move towards getting rid of that divide."

Also yes, the problem is not the concept of white privilege. As a metric to show the experience of individuals in society it's not a bad thing. As a way of defining individuals it's bad, and as a focus it's not great.

This never happened. You can't just eliminate explicitly racist laws from your books and expect all the racism and bigotry which led to those laws in the first place to disappear by magic. Pretending like there aren't different outcomes and general experiences between races also doesn't magically eliminate those differences. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it applies to racism as well which is why understanding and talking about systemic racism is so important.

>This never happened.

Speaking as an American raised in the 1990s, the cultural programming of my childhood at least made progress in that direction. I was raised on popular TV shows like Sesame Street, Captain Planet, and Power Rangers, which showed people of all races coexisting in settings where race did not divide them. When the issue of racial prejudice did surface, it was clearly marked as a backwards and wrong-headed way of thinking.

These TV shows (and movies, books, etc.) were fiction, and did not change the reality of racial prejudice or de-facto segregated communities on the ground. However, they did set my and many childrens' expectations for how the world should be, and how people of different races should treat each other (i.e. as equals and as they would want to be treated). I see the then-mainstream prevalence of such messages, and absence of countervailing messages, as a tangible victory of the Civil Rights Movement.

I worry that today's mainstream cultural programming will have an opposite effect. Teaching children to focus on racial differences, and constantly drawing attention to race more generally, only teaches them to divide each other along racial lines. I believe a happy medium exists where concrete examples of racial prejudice get called out, but race is not otherwise constantly in focus.

Nowadays, many people may reject POC in social and business settings because of political fears. For instance, if I hire, could I fire without being viewed as racist? Or, if I befriend someone, could they end up accusing me of racism in a devastating way?

https://imgur.com/a/pxz1qCS

Completely bizarre. Looks like a bunch of 0's got written into memory at random intervals. Is it flaky RAM on the HN server? Has anyone else seen HN content render like this? Reloaded the page, and now everything looks normal. Running memcheck on my laptop as a next step...

Memcheck never reported any problems with the RAM itself. I haven’t experienced any such problems after installing the Auto Tab Discard extension which allows me to have lots of tabs opens without suffering excessive memory pressure.

At the end of the day we will never be color blind. Color is just too obvious of a characteristic. At best we can view the colors as equals. But we need to get rid of the systemic biases to do that.

If you think that a founder being black makes it very hard for him to access debt because of systemic bias and his company plans heavily on debt financing, then yeah, it makes total sense to pass on it if you think the risk is too high.

On the other hand, if you're a black founder and the company you want to build requires you to heavily rely on debt financing, it makes perfect sense for you to spend less time worrying about injustice and more time making this thing work however you can knowing full well that people will pass on you (perhaps "unfairly"). After all, you can play and maybe lose or not play and definitely lose.

A founder I knew used to look for schools that had strong candidates but had low social cachet. He believed he would have an advantage hiring from there.

One particular liberal arts college had him hire almost their entire founding CS year. Almost all of those graduates were great. Other times the strategy didn't work out.

I can't blame them for making this misdiagnosis though. I grew up in a single-parent household. My mum was essentially a deadbeat mum who could hardly be arsed to take care of her kids (or be arsed to do anything else for that matter, like, say, have a job). While she was only rarely physically abusive, she was very emotionally abusive, as well as just neglecting in her parental role. She always acts like everyone else is wrong; to this day she bitches and moans about how everyone else wrongs her all the time. Everything I did as a child was wrong somehow. Her TIV is high.

Furthermore, I was bullied a lot at school; I was already quite insecure, and this only made it worse. Kids can be very mean, and the insecure shy kid is a good target. This was at a time when it was shrugged off with "boys will be boys" so little was done about this from the school other than send me to Teakwando lessons :-/

For most of my teens and twenties I felt horribly insecure in all sorts of ways. I didn't have the courage to actually apply for a programming job until I was 25. For a very long time I felt like people being nice to me were just humouring me; this was extremely silly and paranoid, and I let many potential friendships pass me by just because I was too insecure to actually ask people if they're keen to have a drink or whatever. At the time though, it was extremely hard to get over this. This didn't really change until I had my first girlfriend at 27.

It's no surprise I was diagnosed with autism, even though it was wrong. My problems mostly weren't inherent to my character, they were just results from my attitude.

This only made it worse; well-intentioned and empathic as the youth care[1] people were, they basically just see you as a victim to be pampered. It certainly didn't help me move forward, as all you feel is "woe is me", and the constant focus on your shortcomings is essentially just an assault on your self-confidence.

If I look at myself from 15 years ago vs. now then in many ways I'm the same person: I still like the same things, my politics are still similar, I have the same sense of humour, etc. But in many ways I couldn't be more different. It was a slow change that took about 4 years; there was never an "aha!" epiphany. This isn't an intellectual thing anyway, it's an emotional thing and overriding emotion with intellect is often very hard. People with depression can't be fixed by telling them there is nothing to be depressed about, and insecure people can't be fixed by telling them there is nothing to be insecure about.

Now, the context and situation is completely different than yours, but the point of the story is that how you see yourself, and see yourself in relation to others is extremely important. In fact, I'll go out on a limb here and claim it's one of the major factors determining your success and happiness in life (however you may measure these things), perhaps even the most important factor.

Perhaps I'm applying my own personal experiences a bit too much here, but what worries me especially is the effect is has on self-confidence of these kids. It's fine to have these kind of discussions in politics or academia, but teaching them to kids? I find it worrying. I think a more "deal with it" message along the lines of "yeah, you're gonna encounter racism and it sucks, you're still a great person with a lot of talents, so just deal with it" would be a lot better. It's unfair, but it is what it is, and if the end-goal is to empower black people then we should focus on what is effective, not what is perceived as "fair".

Perhaps this is also partly why both Asians and Latino people tend to do so much better than black people: a more positive empowering attitude in spite of racist obstacles. I think it's unfortunate that questions such as "what do these people do better?" are often explained as victim blaming of black people. In spite of mountains of text being written on this, especially in the last year, I find there's a sore lack of careful analysis on this topic as everything is infused with judgements and morality which clouds everything. Just the other day a HN discussion on the best messaging on these topics netted me a "white supremacy apologist" accusation/insult :-/

In the end, a lot of these questions are empirical questions, and should be answered as such. What you then do with the answers is very much a morality question, but it's an entirely different thing.

[1]: (presumably the US works different, but in the Netherlands kids with these kind of issues are more or less automatically enrolled in our communist Nazi socialist despotic "youth care" service, more or less like CPS except also for every-day normal guidance and counselling, and not just protection).

> Perhaps I'm applying my own personal experiences a bit too much here, but what worries me especially is the effect is has on self-confidence of these kids. It's fine to have these kind of discussions in politics or academia, but teaching them to kids? I find it worrying.

Agreed. I think "systemic racism" is a bad name for quantifiable disparities that, in an academic context, can be show to exist using facts and statistics. That doesn't mean you should teach it to kids, especially using labels that were specifically chosen to make them think their neighbors are out to get them.

"White supremacy," by contrast, doesn't exist, and it's absurd to pretend it does in a country where whites are poorer than several immigrant demographics, and are effectively underrepresented in elite colleges, Silicon Valley, etc.

As you observe, these discussions are politically fraught. I would prefer to stay out of them. But this sort of teaching and rhetoric has been extended to Asians now, and as someone with Asian kids I can't ignore it anymore.

Just because you personally haven't experienced it does not mean it doesn't exist. That's such a self-evident logical fallacy it shouldn't even need to be stated.

Systemic racism means that people are treated badly for the same reasons. It's why black lawyers are regularly asked if they're the defendant in court, why black youths are stopped and searched far more often than white youths, why there are obvious differentials in sentencing for identical crimes... and so on.

If you think these discussions are fraught, consider the position of those for whom this is about everyday experience and not just about "discussion" or "rhetoric."

> So when a child is very young, and care is uncertain, perhaps the caregiver, or the male figures in the child’s life, don’t act consistently, sometimes they may act very aggressively without warning, or they don’t notice that the child needs care. That’s when the anxious attachment style or ambivalent attachment style is created.

and followed by the following:

> Yes, normally children internalize the empathetic and soothing reactions of their parents, they learn not to need others from outside to soothe themselves. But people with high TIV cannot soothe themselves.

It is quite odd to take that quote out of context and make it argument about something completely different, as if surrounding context in article supported the other claim.

Seriously, go give money to https://www.feedingamerica.org/ or https://www.savethechildren.org/ or give to a local food bank. Five bucks even.

I think that the idea that discussions of systemic racism or white supremacy are teaching kids to be victims isn't a fair assessment of how such education is structured.

It's just like how kids are taught about climate change, as best I can tell. It's a problem, and they all need to be aware and do their part. Teaching kids about climate change hasn't lead them to all give up since the planet is likely going to be in bad shape from global warming, it's empowered them, at least some of them, to fight for a future in which we change things and make things better.

The thing is, racism doesn't go away if you pretend it doesn't exist. Maybe you didn't experience it, but per the 2000 census, about 1 in five Virginians are Black.

You being one of the few brown kids means you likely grew up very differently from many Black and Brown students in Virginia, and I expect that is likely the result of decades of white Virginians working to end school bussing and other integration efforts, creating new school districts and private schools, shifting school attendance boundaries within districts.

I think you have to remember that racism is not natural, that it's effects and results, which have been normalized, need not exist, and consider how much our country fails to do right by kids who are BIPOC.

That's what systemic racism is. It's structures and institutions and systems which perpetuate unequal outcomes. We know that integration helps Black students (and their kids) succeed, and that studies generally fail to demonstrate any significant negative effect on white students. https://www.chalkbeat.org/2019/7/1/21121022/did-busing-for-s...

There doesn't have to even be any outright in your face animosity against Black and Brown people, it's just that, places with higher levels of Black and Brown people in Virgnia are more likely to undertake school district or school attendance rezoning, and rezoned areas are more likely to concentrate people who are poor and Black or Brown, or who are middle to upper class and white.

https://cecr.ed.psu.edu/sites/default/files/School_Segregati...

And that's just how it's failing kids with school segregation, do you want to know the stats on childhood hunger? as of March 2020, about 1 in five families surveyed said they didn't have enough food. Just the lack of subsidized school lunch during Covid in many places means kids are going without necessary nutrition. And, surprise, Black and Hispanic kids are twice as likely as non Hispanic white kids to face hunger in America. That is, again, systemic racism.

I imagine that probably doesn't help their personal or professional success, not to mention their mental health.

I linked two places people could donate to help feed hungry kids above, you can ignore me or disagree with what I said, but seriously, if you are doing well, you can spare a few bucks at least.

Learning this history is the first step of "doing something about it".

Brown/black people should know their history too, we can't just paper over the historic criminality of certain groups of people because it feels uncomfortable or somehow may make people unpatriotic. Everyone has a right to their history and black/brown people have been denied it in certain parts of the world, thanks in many cases to censorship and/or propaganda sucking the air out of the room.

I do find it interesting when new immigrants come to the US and "model-minority-explain" to the people (African Americans and others) that built this country for free and are actually the only reason non-white immigrants are even allowed into the country, that they should just move on or not pursue a better understanding of the history it was illegal for them to learn.

Sucking up to the majority for better standing at the expense of the purposely created minority underclass is a huge disservice to the people of this country/planet.

And as importantly, that doing things in the other direction may have the effect of blunting that.

Which, given that it's pushed so strongly, and mostly by upper class whites, is starting to feel like the point.

When is the holocaust and other info about historic anti-semitism introduced?

I would be surprised to hear that they delay this, I believe some of these historical stories/events are part of their religious studies as children.

Giving the oppressive system a pass for X number of years and letting children walk through society ignorant of the threats they face is an even bigger disservice that any demoralization that may or may not occur in my opinion.

Black children literally get murdered by the state for benign activity, I think by 13 (the age Tamir Rice was murdered) they are old enough to start learning why.

Likewise, in a documentary series on any given people, perhaps episode two could focus on the difficulties, after episode one contextualized them with their successes?

I don't believe anyone suggested hiding or otherwise not sharing the history of oppression of any people in this comment thread. I recommend that you look back through and consider why you came away with a different impression.

Please give me some examples of these "facts that are more important" where racism and WS are concerned.

>I don't want my kids to be taught that there's this amorphous but pervasive "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" out to get people who look like them, but which they can't do anything about.

That final qualifier is the red flag to me, nobody teaches that "they can't do anything about it" (stating that seems purposely dishonest), the goal of these teachings is in large part about changing/fixing systems through awareness.

Side note: This history is also for white children who in many cases are negatively affected by these systems in non-obvious ways and are an important population to inform as they are potential future participants in the correction.

My intuition tells me when important and uncomfortable historical facts come up and certain people bend over backwards to make you look away, the goal is to distract, hide, and obfuscate.

As to your claim of immigrants “sucking up”—if I wanted to suck up to elite whites I’d embrace teaching kids of color about “white supremacy.” If I didn’t think it would hurt my kid I would have no incentivize to oppose it.

I completely disagree. White supremacist systems have operated across the globe for a few centuries now, the actual white elites/beneficiaries (not just the group I suspect you dislike), the British Royal family for example, hate the idea of history like the 1619 project being spread to the masses because the affected may find the common thread that weaves through their histories. WS thrives on ignorance and inaction.

When 90% of the planet has a common understanding of white supremacist systems and the vulnerabilities, the fragility of these systems is exposed and the foundation starts to crumble with minor shifts in behavior (especially economic) at the individual level on a mass scale.

TLDR Anyone arguing for less exposure of WS history and the history of racism in general is very suspect.

So did WSWS: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html

When even self-avowed socialists have to distance themselves from a putatively Marxist attack on American capitalism, that tells you something.

The idea that teaching kids flawed history will bring about some utopian future is suspect. I would deem it none of my business, but as you note, people are now trying to draw Asians into the same retrospective thinking. They talk about how the British stole $42 trillion from India. How does that help? The British are never going to be able to give back that money—they can’t afford to.

Agitating and waiting for some utopian future to come about is just a recipe for countries like India to stay poor. I’m not interested in that.

Oh yes the British bourgeoisie can afford to.

The west can give up it's ridiculous intellectual property regime that kills millions of people and blocks innovation. IP is nothing more than an (artificially scarce) monopoly right on a bit of knowledge. That knowledge belongs to all.

US slaves were securitized and used as collateral for loans/leverage/etc (slaves were the first assets to be securitized in America). People around Europe, in countries where slavery was illegal/unpopular, and the rest of the US could invest and profit from the trade without getting blood on their hands directly.

Each slave was approximately the value of a single family home (~1kg of gold) which means the British/Americans were able to "create" the value of 10,000,000 or so single family homes worth of wealth (~$1,171,852,800,000) out of thin air using African men, women, and children's backs before cotton production (which was more valuable than all other exports combined), other labor, and other investment activity is even accounted for. (Note: I'm not even counting the slaves that were domestically produced in this calculation, this is just the number brought across the Atlantic.)

Cotton misdirection is what Jacobin is attempting, they (or their quoted 'experts') lack awareness of the financial ecosystem that operated with slavery at its foundation. The volume of money/gold involved built the first stages of a large % of early US/UK/etc cities and accounted for a much larger % of GDP and US/UK wealth than Jacobin is attempting to claim.

That fact that I need to explain this very recent history to educated US adults is yet another signal that this history is inadequately covered and should be compulsory. There is nothing more American than understanding the foundations of American Capitalism, and its evolution from the slave economy.

Final note: Speaking of India, destroying Indian and Chinese cotton production allowed the US/UK to dominate 2/3rds+ of the global cotton trade, not technical know-how or advanced intelligence... it was mostly torture,murder, and destruction (historical record has many accounts of invaders breaking/cutting off hands of poor Indian/Chinese textile laborers en masse, at the time these workers produced the finest muslin and other textiles in human history).

Ghandi's promotion of textile (yarn/khaadi) production during his protests/boycotts wasn't a fluke/random...

Words said by the man who has no conception of individual variance.

The sexually addicted compulsive rapist would do well to ignore this advice, for instance.

This is often regurgitated without forethought- differently people clearly want different things, and go about seeking those things in manifestly different ways enough to make this almost surely - bad advice, despite it "coming from a good place".