is listening to people talk about it on the radio the 'discussion' we need to make progress on an issue like this?

compare to Car Talk - a show that entertains you and teaches you about engineering. different value propositions of these two things

> The more we talk about it, the easier it is to pick up a discussion where we left off.

Sure.. but.. does it lead to problems actually being fixed?

Not by itself. But if we don't talk about it, how could there possibly be hop of fixing anything?

By focusing less on race and other identity issues, and working to remove racist policies across the board regardless of which group they benefit or harm. The 20th century saw immense improvements for almost all underserved groups, without any talking heads bickering about intersectionality or identity. Now that kind of coverage is everywhere and progress has stalled or even reversed in many areas.

My impression is that a huge portion of identity politics and coverage is more about picking fights where each side can feel smug and superior, rather than actually changing things for the better.

So this would be under the umbrella of "Critical Race Theory" which has been misrepresented and unjustly criticized as of late.

Maybe. Despite the number of times I've heard about CRT and how bad it is, and how good it is, I still don't have the foggiest idea what it is. One time, I tried to look it up on the internet. Signal to noise was so bad, I still don't know. I've written off the possibility of ever knowing what it is or understanding anyone who's talking about it.

As with any field, there's a number of detractors and charlatans. With CRT in the political spotlight, I completely understand how it becomes a mess to make heads-or-tails of.

Broadly speaking, it's the study of how law and media impacts society's view and treatment of others through the lens of race.

As for my opinion on it:

I generally support it because it advocates for another mechanism to study the impact of law.

I think most legislation should be regularly studied for impact, effectiveness, and fairness. For example, stimulus bills ought to be reviewed for economic impact, regulation ought to be reviewed for effectiveness/relevance, laws with social impact ought to be reviewed to ensure it doesn't harm the people.

A number of scholars seem to adopt a blameless mentality to figure out how laws (even unintentionally) have negative impact, and use that to propose solutions. I admire this approach to legislative critique.

While I think a few ideas some scholars advocate for are infeasible to implement, the broader field has a lot of merit.

How does one address racist policies without discussing race? That's a knot I can't tie myself into.

I think it's a question of measure. When things are talked about fairly and equally then progress is made - there are serious pressing issues right not and they're not only about identity/race/gender, that these things are ignored is a big problem. When things turn full on on one direction they don't accelerate any progress, it may actually do more harm than good.

The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met. Things have gotten substantially worse in the last 16 years, not better, and that's because we've been using a spotlight to point out how different everyone is from each other. It's literally counterintuitive.

> The more we talk about it, the angrier people get. That's truly the only reason to even have a conversation about my ancestors I never met owning your ancestors you never met.

Maybe the "statute of limitations" for these things should be long - not to mention the idea that racism wasn't magically fixed by ending slavery and the "owning" you mention. You don't think anyone was actively racist and causing harm 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 50? So if person Y's grandparent was harmed by, say, person X's racist grandparent in the 1950s, and that caused person Y's family to suffer for generations compared to what likely would've happened otherwise, and that's leading to ongoing societal harms, it could be legitimate public policy interest to try to even out opportunity.

Of course, this hasn't actually changed in the last few decades - terms like "equal opportunity" and "affirimative action" have those words in their very name.

But certain interests have made very successful pushes in the past few decades to brand policies under those umbrellas as "actually the real racism", or paint everyone supporting them as "actually trying to guarantee equality of outcome," while continuing to beat the very-old drum of "people being worse off implies worse ability, it's just science" which couples oh-so-very-nicely with the more active forms of denying people opportunity that hardly ended in the 1960s.

The last time slaves were held in the US was by Native Americans in 1865. The country was founded in 1776. That means in a country that is nearly 250 years old, we haven't owned slaves for more than 160 years, well over half the nation's entire existence. No, we do not need a statute of limitations that encompasses generations for the sins of their fathers.

In fact, how far back do you even take this? Should we also hold the people of the modern-day Republic of Benin responsible for what their ancestors, the Kingdom of Dahomey, did, which was abducting and selling their African brothers for a bit of cash?

To address your other point, if my grandfather did something to hurt your grandfather in the 1950s, and it's been 70+ years and the only thing your family has figured out how to do since then is complain about how some guy was mean to your ancestor that one time, and that life is so unfair and you're so oppressed because of it, the issue may not be my grandfather, it may just be your family and their victimhood mindset. It feels good to "be oppressed" and have personal responsibility taken away, because when it's always someone else's fault, it can never be yours.

It's hard to read

> I was giving a lecture on genealogy and reparations in Amite, Louisiana, when I met Mae Louise Walls Miller. Mae walked in after the lecture was over, demanding to speak with me. She walked up, looked me in the eye, and stated, “I didn’t get my freedom until 1963.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/437573/blacks-were-enslaved-...

It's an unspeakable evil. The "statute of limitations" on sins of the fathers is "until atonement".

That's awful that happened to those people, but this doesn't really serve the point imo, as this was already illegal by then. They even said that people hearing their story suggested they should've gone to the police for help, but the land was too large for them to escape.

Even today, there's plenty of forced labor and sex slaves that exist in the USA. That doesn't mean it's an active systemic issue of oppression, it just means that bad people do bad things when they can get away with it, in spite of a system to stop it.

We shouldn't hold people who didn't do bad things accountable for the actions of people who have done bad things. I don't think that's a radical idea.

It is a legitimate topic of discussion.

The problem comes when it’s the ONLY topic of discussion. Inflation is only relevant in how it impacts minorities. COVID is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Climate change is only relevant as it impacts minorities. Quality of schools is only relevant as it impacts minorities.

When it’s your only lens, it can distort your views, and in the case of NPR, caused them to get some stories wrong. Which then destroys your credibility which is really the only currency a journalist has.

On one of my other comment threads someone told me how the world is "so much better then any point in history" :). I'm not sure I believe that.

I think in general being able to have these conversations means that we can progress slowly. It's tough recently, cause we've definitely regressed a lot. It would definitely help if the internet weren't effective at telling us only what we want to hear. I guess, in general I think the problem is we aren't actually able to progress discussions.

So my original wording "pick up where we left off" was wrong. We can already do that, we just can't move on from there. I think if we can figure out how to do that without hitting each other then maybe the problems would get fixed.

Converse hot take, the shallow "race lens" that is all too often used is not helping anyone. Quite the contrary, it is growing counterproductive. Especially with stories like this where they are working backwards from the framing, not using it to learn something.

The New York Times, which is the other bastion of the liberal establishment, also covers race a lot (in regular news journalism, opinion, and topical articles). . It's gotten to the point where lots of comments on articles (many articles have active comments sections) ask "why are you making this about race?". I think NYTimes swung heavily progressive a few years ago, and it was very unpopular, and they're recalibrating to be more relevant to centrists.

> NPR, being the whitest place on Earth

Come on, they're about as diverse as America itself is: https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179803822/people-at-npr

In fact, Black people are proportionally overrepresented relative to the U.S. population at NPR, while Hispanics are underrepresented.

Sunday morning's Weekend Edition host, Ayesha Rascoe, is a Black woman. Unfortunately they lost Audie Cornish, also a Black woman, from All Things Considered. She was great.

I do think it's fair to argue that NPR is far more liberal than it ever was, and Uri Beliner's inside story provides some credence to that. But that's different from being "white." (Keep in mind that the vast majority of Trump voters are white and would bristle at NPR's news programming; support by non-whites is relatively low.)

It completely, utterly, baffles me how other people live in such a different interpretation of reality than me. For myself, the last decade of media has been completely dominated by race-based and identity-based ideology and discussion. I've given up all mainstream media and I still cannot escape it. The fact that someone exists where they can with a straight face say that they think race is an under-discussed topic just blows my mind. To the point where I seriously have to consider whether I'm even replying to a real human being and not a shill / LLM.

My perception is the opposite of yours so I guess we can be as equally confused as each other. Every time I tune into the news it's usually dominated by foreign policy, domestic horserace politics coverage and soft human interest stories. There was definitely an uptick in racial discussions during all the BLM stuff but "completely dominated" is very, very far from my lived experience.

But I guess that's exactly what an LLM would say, isn't it?

Agreed. I’ve stopped watching anything recent. Theres a few Apple TV shows that I’ve enjoyed but it’s always so predictable that an engineered and coerced social justice issue is forced in. This is what the theory of equity is about, it goes over and beyond equality and actively helps by increasing exposure, opportunities, resources for historically disadvantaged people communities groups.

I wish we could stop making everything into a war and fight and just let things speak for themselves. Show don’t tell.

Lately I have been working in DEI committees to better understand. I believe in helping the poor and marginalized but having officially reviewed equity theory I feel a bit disgusted with myself.

I’m curious to hear about your media diet because that has not been the case for me.

Coleman Hughes shares a good perspective on this in his new book. He cites surveys showing that people changed their opinions for the worse regarding racism in america around 2010. This could be explained by an increase in racism or by increased awareness of racism. But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police. The rise in media coverage has led them to think that certain events are much more common than they are.

> But he shows it is not based on these things because surveys also show that people significantly overestimate the number of black people killed by police.

What is the proper number of people to be killed by the police that we shouldn't worry about it? (hint: don't answer this question) The fact that people think the number is more than it actually is feels pretty moot when the number is more than zero. It's also more as a percentage of police killings than one would expect if we were just talking about police incompetence. If this has improved in the years since, then I think that's probably a good thing? Hot take, In general I think the police killing fewer people is a good thing.

According to a 2001 poll, nearly 50% of the population drastically over-estimated the black population: https://news.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-bl...

I’m pretty sure more recent polls show the same thing is true now but I can’t find something more recent so take that with a grain of salt.

Think of one of the 17% of people polled who think 50% of America is black. First, it’s baffling to me to understand how that’s even possible. They must be living in an extreme bubble where they seldom interact with other races. Likely this isn’t even their fault, so how would they ever know to correct it?

Second, if I was one of those people, I would probably think the US is hopelessly racist seeing white people “over-represented” in basically every area of life.

I don't know what that guy is smoking. It is objectively the case that the topics of race, identity politics, etc have skyrocketed since the mid-2010s [1].

[1] https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

Do those charts actually show a shift in content, or is it merely a shift in terminology?

I'm not sure if any studies accurately measure the subject content, and it also seems like it'd be easy to get any result you want by tweaking the experiment parameters.

I can tell you that from my own life experience and what I can recall, it has certainly felt like a shift in content. All the anti-white stuff, the social justice stuff, the pro-censorship stuff, etc. It existed before in tiny bubbles like Tumblr, but it was during the mid 2010s that the major news sources started adopting those viewpoints too.

They don't even show it as a percentage of articles.

It's suspicious to me that they went for the hockey stick curve to demonstrate their complaint rather than adjusted for the number of articles that they are sampling from.

Yeah... I don't know what you think I was saying. But I'm making the case that the news should cover issues that people actually face... And that an uptick in representation of different people's viewpoints and experiences is actually a positive and reasonable thing. It would be more informative if your data had that as a percentage of total articles. Because the case I'm making is that we went up from like <1% of articles talking about race to closer to 20-30% of articles talking about it. The other thing to consider is what qualifies as an "article" in there with the advent of the internet.

It's actually making my exact point that "diversity and inclusion" were mentioned in 0 articles in the 1990s. I'm saying that this is a relevant thing to more than 0% of the population, so there should be representation of that accordingly. And now that we have more articles talking about it, it seems reasonable that some percentage of news articles (above 0) would be discuss these topics.

> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?

Heh. If you tune into the AM band you'll hear plenty of guys "discuss race." It'll make you fear for the species, but still.

>> Hot take... How many other news sources discuss race?

Almost all the conservative media outlets and all their pundits do simply because the whole topic has been an arms race for years. Conservatives are finally attempting to sway the popular narrative that race and identity politics are the only thing that determines your future.

They often discuss race within the context of identity politics and the far-left idea that "all white people are racist" versus their notion that race doesn't determine who you are, how smart you are and how successful you can become.

Its the age old philosophical idea of determinism vs. free will

Yes, race is a topic that is almost never discussed in 21st century USA.

This person gets it. They read what I wrote. Definitely didn't just respond to a straw man version of what I said. /s

> I think this is an under-discussed topic for how pervasive a problem it is in our country.

The parts of it that are under-discussed are the parts they're still not discussing. The unsolved parts are unsolved as a result of bipartisan unwillingness to solve them.

Example: Historical racism caused black people to lack the generational wealth to own a home. The solution to this is to make home ownership more affordable, i.e. to build more housing and bring down the market price of buying a home. But many of the existing homeowners, who don't want home prices to become more affordable, are Democrats, so this problem is unsolved even in areas like San Francisco under 100% Democratic control.

Example: Parents want their kids to attend schools with smart kids so the other students aren't disruptive and don't require the teacher to slow the pace of the class. The solution to this is to put kids of similar intelligence in the same class, which also helps smart minority students who can get in based on test scores rather than money. But then affluent parents with disruptive or less intelligent kids don't get into the smart class, so they prefer solutions where the metric is parental income (e.g. ability to afford a home in the "good" school district) rather than test scores, and then get to feel good about themselves because even though this result is even worse for poor minority students, they can point to the statistics that minority students from poor backgrounds have lower test scores as a reason to refuse to use test scores and wrap their self-interest in the flag of anti-racism. Then many of those parents are Democrats, and moreover the alternate solution where you break up the "income buys a good school district" system would be things like school vouchers, which are opposed by public school teachers unions because they allow non-affluent parents to choose a private school if it's better, and those unions are a Democratic constituency. So again the problem goes unsolved, even in areas controlled by the people who claim to want to solve it.

So these aren't the problems they spend most of their time talking about, because that would be goring the wrong ox. Instead they talk about identity politics and historical circumstance which cannot be solved because they are just abstract ideas and empty rhetoric instead of anything attached to a reasonable policy proposal that might actually do some good.

This take appears to have been "too hot for HN to handle"

For everyone downvoting, I'd be interested in the proportion of articles that discuss race as a percentage of total articles. If the number is more than the number of black people in America, I'd be willing to consider that we've "overcorrected". But a quick search around the web isn't yielding any clear results on this to me.