I think we have a biological tendency to be somewhat racist, but among every person that I've met who could be classed as being marginally racist, usually they do not really mean the things they say. Nearly every one of them will create an exception once they have a reasonable conversation with someone from another race. I say, marginally racist, because I have never met a full-fledged racist (in U.S. here). Peronally, I think they are a very small insular group, if they exist at all.

> Nearly every one of them will create an exception once they have a reasonable conversation with someone from another race.

Daryl Davis¹, through conversation, convinced a number of Klansmen to leave and denounce the KKK. See “Accidental Courtesy: Daryl Davis, Race & America”².

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daryl_Davis

² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Courtesy:_Daryl_Dav...

They exist. I once helped a needy young man in Seattle by taking him to get some food. The lady at the checkout counter was black, and oh, man did he spout some shit. It turned out he was a legit neonazi. I actually picked his brain for quite a while to get an idea of the “why” behind things.

Anyway, this experience is the reason I roll my eyes when someone calls ____ a nazi. There are legit nazis in the world, and they’re a truly unpleasant bunch.

> There are legit nazis in the world, and they’re a truly unpleasant bunch

Used to play airsoft with a guy who had a totenkopf tattoo. He wasn't pleasant at all. Not sure anyone wanted him there but so long as he didn't break any of the rules they weren't sure if they could refuse him service.

Though as a counter my friends dad has a bunch of neonazi tattoos under his hair (he doesn't shave it any more) and was a very solid bloke who had a troubled path getting there.

Even the actual neo-nazis can reform.

I don't deny they exist, but they have been marginalized in society. They don't hold any significant power in terms of holding people back.

The problem isn't overt racists so much as subtle, persistent bias, which absolutely holds people back in very significant ways. See my comment about my grandmother.

And... unless you're in a marginalized minority group, you really aren't in a position to know how racist people are.

Oh yeah, I just remembered, we also recently had a president for four years who was overly racist. Remember his attacks on Judge Curiel? Remember Mexicans "are rapists"?

Not true. Any body can understand it. It's a basic human empathy characteristic. Telling people they are not in a position to know anything about it, is merely an attempt at thought control by disregarding their opinions. It's not really a discussion.

I don’t think this is correct. Just yesterday I was thinking about the many brave white people who fought as abolitionists to end the slave trade, risking their lives. But they could never truly understand what it was to be a slave, because they went home at the end of the day, whereas the slaves were not only forced to work without pay, they were also bred like horses, with the “strongest” ones forced to mate to make strong slaves. It doesn’t mean the abolitionists can’t understand and sympathize and even work at great personal risk to free slaves. So yes maybe anybody can “understand” it as you said - I’m not debating that. But it’s completely different to live with the constant humiliation and discrimination, getting things said and done to you that are not illegal, that ghe discriminating group then dismiss as you being a snowflake etc.

So yes you’re right anyone can empathize. But I don’t think that’s what OP is saying. You really cannot fully understand unless you live it. Just like you cannot understand true poverty in African countries, when you’ve spent your whole life living in a (relatively) rich one.

So, what's your point? Do they need to actually suffer in the same way in order for justice to be achieved? Because that's the implication he is essetnially driving at. The important thing is those abolitionist recognized a moral wrong for what it was and strove to counter it. To insist in such a way that they can never understand not only invalidates their efforts but only tries to set the stage for some kind of further remediation. But maybe that's their aim, to make sure it is never ultimately remedied and preserve the well of victimhood. How else can you read that.

You’re making it either / or and it’s not. I can feel sympathetic to the Uyghurs, fight for their rights, canvass my representatives, donate to charities etc.

But I (a black African man) can never truly know or experience what the average Uyghur goes though day to day, because I just haven’t lived it.

So no, when we say that, we are not “excluding” anyone - in fact the more allies a minority has, the more likely they will achieve equality. But lived experience is different.

Not what I said. I'm saying why else harp on the fact that white abolitionists could not understand their lived experience other than to disparage their contribution. I have no dispute with the idea that someone is unable to understand another's lived experience in the same way, because that's self evident. It is a truism. Why even say it other than to invalidate their contribution? Because thats essentially what they are doing.

As a POC I relate to your point of view and lived experience certainly provides us sensitivity to certain issues that would not be front of mind for people who don’t share those experiences.

However lived experience can also introduces biases — for instance, would you trust a court of law to deliver justice if the victim was also judge and jury? That lived experience which provides sensitivity and also can make one too close to the matter at hand to see things clearly.

I think people with and without lived experiences can pull together and make positive contributions.

I say this because there are so many examples of solutions proposed by people with lived experience that are utterly counterproductive, because they shut out the voices of those without lived experience but who might have balancing views drawn from the broader human experience.

Indeed. This is the fallacy of special pleading: https://www2.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Special%20Pleading....

> And... unless you're in a marginalized minority group, you really aren't in a position to know how racist people are.

My experience is that people are more likely to share racist views with other people of their ethnic group but would likely never be overtly hostile to a person of a different race.

Also, I think if you are in a marginalized group it's extremely hard to disambiguate racism from general assholery.

If you don't get hired for a job you'll never know if it was because the interviewer was racist or because he just didn't like you

Your claim of overt racism is incorrect, it was shaped from the filter of the news media. I would recommend that you look outside the bubble and look at the framing.

A great example was how shutting down travel at the start of Covid-19 was seen as racist. Yet, there should have been no issue as it was the only thing we can do in our global environment to slow the situation. Yet, the people in charge came up with that as racist.

This is purely observation. A few examples that come to mind:

"When Mexico sends its people, ... they're rapists." - Donald Trump

That time he said April Ryan (reporter) should "go set up the meeting" with the congressional black caucus for him.

Shithole countries.

The Muslim ban. Which for a while people around him tried to get him to pretend wasn't a Muslim ban, but really wanted to keep using those words, so he did.

I don't have any complaints about shutting down travel over COVID-19. It should have happened sooner, and I don't know anyone who ever disagreed with that. On the other hand, he did go out of his way to unneccessarily try and rename COVID the "China virus," which sure looked like racial scapegoating to me.

But, I would say that his mysogyny is much worse. And, his love for dictators. ("love" being his term)

<<And... unless you're in a marginalized minority group, you really aren't in a position to know how racist people are.>>

Does this mean that it is not empirically measurable then? That would explain a lot because actual data is what I find missing from the claims of how prevalent racism is.

I certainly didn't mean to discredit empirical studies. I meant to remind a white guy saying that in his experience racists "don't hold any significant power in terms of holding people back" that if he was black, he might have a different experience.

As for empirical data, there's tons. Maybe start with this Brookings report since it's on the topic of the OP (housing) https://www.brookings.edu/research/biased-appraisals-and-the...

This study, by it's own admission in the summary, does not have a cause for the 23% net difference in house values (55% gross, 23% remaining after adjusting for home quality, maintenance, and other market characteristics). Specifically:

"The question is: What explains this? We don’t know with any precision. In our paper, we reviewed literature on racial bias and pointed to its potential as an explanation, writing: “Our findings are generally consistent with the widespread presence of anti-Black bias.” We left it for future work to explore some of the relevant mechanisms that link bias to valuations and quantify their importance."

So the thought is that it MIGHT be bias (a bit presumptuous then to title the study "Biased appraisals..."). And we are waiting on future studies to actually provide the causal link.

But even if every bit of the 23% delta is caused by racial bias, we need to consider the trend. As far as I can tell every important sociological data point on this matter (employment, wealth, marriage, laws, etc.) has been improving decade after decade. I don't know what numbers this same study, or one equivalent to it, would reveal from say 5 or 7 decades ago, but I assume it would have been substantially worse.

All of which is to say that proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse does not seem to be supported by the data. To the contrary, it would seem that it is less than it's ever been and continues to decline.

EDIT: To be clear, I am not suggesting you or anyone here is proposing a narrative that racism is rampant and getting worse. But I think it's safe to say that proposal is prevalent in pop culture.

Good for you for actually critically assessing the study. I haven't, and your criticisms sound valid.

I'm not familiar with a narrative that racism is getting worse. My impression (and I thought this was in line with US liberal thinking) is that we are now beginning to admit that racism didn't go away with the end of slavery, it didn't go away with the end of segregation; it's still here. I'd say things are getting better, because many white people acknowledge racism instead of pretending it doesn't exist.

If you believe that, you should look more into the history of ethnic discrimination in the US. "Holding people back" is a systemic issue, and one that is still present.

But it is already bad enough that Afroamericans had been kept from acquiring wealth by various means, judicial and extrajudicial for much of the last century. They are closing the wealth gap, but extremely slowly.

Ignoring that history is part of a basically racist system.

Racism is often subtle and insidious. I'll never forget asking my grandma what she thought of Obama when he was running for president the first time. She said "I like his ideas, but he just doesn't... LOOK right."

The dog whistle version of this, which you heard public figures using on TV, was "he doesn't look presidential."

Even assuming that your grandma was coming from a place of racial animus (itself debatable), nobody is arguing that America is devoid of racism — there's no country on Earth that has truly eradicated racism.

The real point is that the conversation you described happens ten times over in most peer developed countries. If you think it's bad that a few people say this about Obama (who ultimately was elected President twice), imagine what it's like running for office as a person of color in France, Germany, the Nordics, Japan, South Korea, or Italy — it's nigh impossible. Whereas in America, the kind of racism you're describing has been relegated to retirees and people who generally lack power, in Europe, this kind of thinking persists in board rooms, popular culture, and even the British Royal Family (just ask Meghan Markle) — institutions with real cultural influence and power.

Ultimately, while racism continues to be a problem in America, it's much further along in solving that problem than pretty much any other developed country, save for maybe Canada, the UK, and ANZ.

Agreed. I've lived for several years each in Japan, Brazil, Sweden, and England, and each of those countries have their own particular flavors of racism. Some of my white friends in England were overtly racist against people Indian and Polish descent. The US isn't alone, and it's not the worst.

That seems like mind-reading on your part. Even if you are partially right, any individual's thoughts on this are generally more complex and likely to be expressed in different ways on any given day, and in the long term, tend to shift in ways that aren't easy to map.

Am I missing something? Did you know my grandmother?

> Nearly every one of them will create an exception once they have a reasonable conversation with someone from another race.

An exception like "oh well you're one of the good ones"?

> I have never met a full-fledged racist (in U.S. here). Peronally, I think they are a very small insular group, if they exist at all.

Talk to old people if you want some disappointment then.

The "exceptions" is where racist attitudes get broken down. It creates the cognitive dissonance. It doesn't happen right away, but its a significant step in the right direction.

Yes. This includes most "old people". A lot of the talk an jabs or using racial epithets is superficial when you get right down to it. At least, in my experience.

Well allow me to throw my two anecotes into the ring. My grandfather is an asian immigrant who dreamed of coming to the US, which he did late in life. He died in a hospital angrily denying help from black staff members. My grandmother is a sweet old italian lady. She got real mad when one of her grandkids started dating a black guy. She doesn't believe in mixed race couples / people. I'm mixed race but of course I'm "One of the good ones" largely because I'm whiteish. I assure you her liking me has not changed her general opinion at all.

They're very nice at the surface level. You wouldn't expect it, but oh boy was it there an it was deep.

I really, really do not believe that the racial epithets are superficial. It's not a uniquely old person problem by any definition, but it's extremely common.

My main concern is that people are not held back because of it. At some point, everyone needs to develop an innate resiliance (a thick skin) in how they deal with negativity. I think that, in the U.S. at least, there is a greater danger of a social thought-police where people feel like they can't say what they think.

When my grandmother was dying in a hospital, she had some dementia. I don't think she ever uttered a racial epithet to anyone in her whole life, but one day a hospital worker was trying to clean her room up and making a bit of a commotion, she sat up and told him to go away, that she did not like black people. We apolized to the man who seemed to understand the situation. My point is that people are complicated, sometimes they say things on reflex they would not say in a healthier more positive frame of mind.

> greater danger of social thought-police

People are concerned about existing as they were born as well. I think those people are less concerned about whether or not your grandma can be honest about her feelings towards black people.

> I don’t think she uttered a racial epithet to anyone in her whole life

I’ll start by saying this is an assumption and likely untrue.

As previously stated, lots of people who are racist are never overtly racist.

Their existence can not be negated by inner thoughts or insults. My only point is much of racism is reflexive and most of the time not acted on in any measurable way. I've heard many other instances of people using racial epithets or politically incorrect jokes that are nothing more. People generally find a way to get along and don't like to waste energy on unnecessary strife if they can help it.

This just seems so willfully naive.

>The "exceptions" is where racist attitudes get broken down. It creates the cognitive dissonance. It doesn't happen right away, but its a significant step in the right direction.

This is why I've never liked the notion of sneering at those who say "some of my best friends are race/ethnicity", as if that is proof of that person's irremediable evilness. Isn't it a good thing for people to, however superficially or insincerely, consider "exceptions"? To put another way, if people instead said "I consider race/ethnicity to be 100% bad", would this be better? Of course not.

>classed as being marginally racist, usually they do not really mean the things they say.

As someone that moved to a very very racist part of the US in their teens (near a sundown town), this is by far the most scary statement you could write. I believe you would be far more concerned if you understood the enormity of it when you look at it in the converse.

This person you mention that creates an exception 'for one of the good ones' will also create an exception for their buddy when they lynch someone and they just forget to tell the police about it.

I recommend 'Neoslavery' by Knowing Better as a little chunk of more recent American history a lot of people would like to erase. Racism runs very deep in some places.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA

When is the last time a racial lynching happened that was not prosecuted or was utterly ignored by the local authorities?

I don't deny such attitudes. But I would be suprised if such attitudes extended to a complete abnegation of local authority to prosecute a lynching. Even in a sundown town.

Let's turn around and say "When was the last 'lynching' that WAS the authorities?"

If George Floyd's murder had not been filmed Derek Chauvin would still be on the police force and not in prison. This is why you should watch the video attached in my previous reply. Especially in the south the local authorities were actively involved in gathering slaves (remember prison slavery is legal to this day in the US).

First, Derek Chauvin was prosecuted, and not just because there was video evidence. Every time a black person gets shot by the police (even when it is justified) we still know about it. There have been other such situations that were investigated. They are not ignored.

Second, George Floyd was not "lynched". It's even debateable if there were even racial motivations to the case. He ultimately died of a fentanyl overdose, and there is video evidence he was out of control at the time. Not to excuse Chauvin, but I'm not going to try to read his mind or judge his character on the basis that "he looks like a white supremicist" sitting in court.

Saying cases exist but we simply don't know about it, is dodging the question. You can't prove a negative. That's just being disingenuous. Where is the proof that lynchings are occuring but they are just being swept under the rug?

> He ultimately died of a fentanyl overdose, and there is video evidence he was out of control at the time.

Neither of these things are true.

It was a debate in the trial, but the presence of drugs can not be ruled out.

"An autopsy found methamphetamine and fentanyl in Floyd’s system at the time of his death. Investigators also found pills contained methamphetamine and fentanyl inside Floyd’s SUV and the backseat of a squad car officers tried to push him into.

"Schleicher pointed jurors toward the testimony of a forensic toxicologist who found fentanyl levels were “well below the ratio” of people who die from an overdose and a “very low” level of methamphetamine in blood taken from Floyd at the hospital."

https://apnews.com/article/trials-us-news-death-of-george-fl...

I’m gonna suggest you do some self reflection into why you believe this narrative despite your own evidence to the contrary and how it might be linked to your trivialization of racism. I promise you they’re connected.

> He ultimately died of a fentanyl overdose

No, two autopsys and a jury determined that he died from a knee on his neck.

Not so clear cut. The forensic expert Michael Baden said there was drugs involved.

https://apnews.com/article/trials-us-news-death-of-george-fl...

A lot of this feels too much for me, as semi-dismissive of problematic & discrimatory parts of folk. One thing that I like a lot though is,

> Nearly every one of them will create an exception once they have a reasonable conversation with someone from another race.

Shifting somewhat off race, one of my biggest hopes with some of the covid / work-remote urban-to-rural diapora is that- by finally having some reverse brain drain- less urban places might finally see & hear from some more diverse people. Some cultural mixing & injection of other people can (I hope) add some empathy & sense in places that have had fewer & fewer huddling together & weathering the slow-but-ever-ongoing worldwide march of economic-stratification.

No, sorry, no. When you put two children together at age 3, they play together, skin color is definitely out of consideration.

> You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman

It's quite contradictory with what happens in practice. You can absolutely go live in France and be considered a Frenchman. However Americans will always identify you by your family's origin, even if you're born in the US.

Actually that difference in how countries see nationality was well illustrated when France won the soccer World Cup, and American commenters didn't see an issue with denying the French players they belonging to their country, and insisting they were from Africa and couldn't have changed that because of their ancestry. The French saw that as profoundly racist. See https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/7/19/17590302/t...

Oh yeah, Trevor Noah doesn't speak for me, and I (and many minorities, especially most Asians and Latinos) find his brand of progressivism to be the exact opposite of what we think America should be about. The author of the Vox piece you linked says just as much:

> "After the 2016 election, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla wrote a New York Times essay, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” making an argument similar to Araud’s (a piece that also follows a long tradition of liberal hand-wringing about identity in the US). In the piece, Lilla even cited his time taking a sabbatical in France as formative of his opinions on this subject.

> American liberalism’s emphasis on identity and difference, Lilla argues, is destroying the foundations of democracy in the country — helping the far right in precisely the way that Araud says

To be absolutely clear, I don't deny that modern American liberals employ rhetoric directly at odds with Reagan's quote, it's in fact exactly the point I'm trying to make. You can pretty much draw a straight line from that brand of progressivism to the predisposition to draw the (in my opinion false) conclusion that America is more racist than other peer countries. From my experience as a 1st-generation immigrant, that has been not only false, but I see my success as mostly being capped by the color of my skin in every other country except for the US, UK, Canada, and ANZ. I know that to hold true for basically 100% of my peers as well.

You don't just have to take my word for it, it's been true for pretty much every single immigrant group in American history. I recommend reading this thread which makes the argument better than I ever could: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1469031915768279045

> The American immigrant story -- arrive with little, work hard and move up over three or four generations, win a place in the middle class and a place in the national tapestry even in the face of discrimination -- is still firmly in place, folks.

American progressives (especially those like Trevor Noah) take this for granted in the world, and tend to undervalue just how unique it is; this kind of economic convergence within 3-4 generations is extremely atypical in the developed world. It's well and good that a handful of Africans go on to become successful football players in France, but normal non-athletic Muslim immigrants to France actually tend to suffer from multi-generational poverty.

Also, while the Vox piece you linked paints the French as tolerant and proud of their footballers, scandalized by Trevor Noah, the reality is a bit more complicated: https://twitter.com/footballfactly/status/102113333053048422.... Across Europe, footballers of color are only conditionally accepted.

Probably biased, but as someone who grew up in the UK then lived in the US for 20 years, the US seems orders of magnitude more racist.

The Reagan quote is great. I was talking with my dad about this the other day. He pointed out that he’s been called “bideshi” (the Bangla word for foreigner) while traveling in a different village in Bangladesh than the one his family is from.

Yup, I'm from India, and I'm now considered "firaang" (foreigner) — even my own people won't fully accept me! "ABCD" is an acceptable pejorative, because the culture is by and for the people that were born and raised in India, and they won't have it any other way.

In America, as long as you're a hard worker, believe in America's institutions, and are civically engaged, it doesn't matter where you're from, you will eventually be accepted as "American", and if anyone were to suggest otherwise, they'd likely get ostracized by most (if not all) institutions that hold power/influence.

I'm glad for you, but that quote is a huge simplification of a nuanced theme. Maybe it's hard for a completely different ethnicity to become parisienne, but I'm sure France is a big country. Maybe it applies to Japan, but not to Spain. Etc.

I have been to America and it feels lots of different countries living in the same place, not necessarily a good thing. Again it's a subject full of nuances, but I have seen different people being completely integrated after just a single generation. What I think is relevant is how much a culture is exposed and capable of absorb different people from different cultures.

I presume your sense of belonging may have something do with your socio-economic status.

It certainly does! But that's different from racism, which is the entire point. I have never felt like my race has been a barrier to reaching my current socio-economic status, and do not believe there to be some magic socio-economic ceiling imposed by the accident of my skin color / heritage. A middle-class Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, or Latino doesn't have much (if any) disadvantage relative to a white American from West Virginia or Alabama of the same economic status.

This has been true for pretty much every group of immigrants to America. I recommend reading this thread which makes the argument better than I ever could: https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1469031915768279045

> The American immigrant story -- arrive with little, work hard and move up over three or four generations, win a place in the middle class and a place in the national tapestry even in the face of discrimination -- is still firmly in place, folks.

And it's easy to take this for granted, as Americans, but this kind of economic convergence within 3-4 generations is not universal. Muslim immigrants to France suffer from multi-generational poverty.

I know for a fact that if I tried hard enough, I could become the CEO of Google (like Sundar) or the CEO of Microsoft (like Satya), or even "fail" into a Director/VP position at any Fortune 500 corporation. I know I can probably become the Mayor of a major city, or a Governor of a major State, or even a member of Congress. I know that my Indian-American wife who is accomplished in her own right can potentially become the CEO of Vimeo (look her up!). I know I can probably become a star stand-up comedian (like Hasan, Hari, or Aziz). I know I can probably become a star actor in a Hollywood Blockbuster (like Mindy or Kal).

I type this comment while on vacation in Stockholm, where the streets are currently littered with campaign posters for the upcoming election in September 2022, and I do not believe that I or my children can ever see ourselves on those posters and be accepted as Swedish — no matter how hard we tried. I'm not confident that I'd ever be considered to meaningfully lead H&M or Ikea or Volvo, at least not over a white blonde Swedish person with generations of Nordic lineage. As I said above, I'm sure I'd be comfortable living in Sweden — it's a remarkably easy place to live — but my success is capped by the color of my skin in a way that it simply isn't in America (or Canada, UK, and maybe ANZ).

Ah, I get your point, now. Thanks.

People on the right in the US tend to say everywhere in the world has ethnicities underlying their social fabric. America has a constitution.

That’s part of why you see such frustration on the right when people oppose things listed in the constitution (gun rights, censorship of any kind, etc). In their world view, it’s an assault on America. It’s why they call the left un-American. It’s also why the left in the US always refers to “our democracy”, in their world view the US is a “multi-cultural democracy” (not a constitutional republic - which it technically is).

Both parties tapping into the same mojo