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Comment by powertower | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone explain how you can immediately attribute any of this to outright racism and his brown skin, when the staff and students are predominantly non-white in that school.

School body is 86% non-white:

http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/texas/dist...

And in the entire disctrict, whites are 12%, and "browns" are 70%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Independent_School_Dist...

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You pulled a fast one there by linking to student body data and claiming admin and teachers are non-white.

It is quite likely that the school district administration and teachers are mostly white. Multiple reasons for this,

1. Brown people are recent (~last 25 years) immigrants in most cities. Remember, up until 1960s you had citizenship quotas and racist immigration policies.

2. By being recent immigrants, they are less likely to be part of the police force, political establishment, city administration, and so on. It takes a minimum of 10-15 years before someone who has entered the US becomes a citizen. School districts, etc. seldom employ H1Bs or other immigrants.

3. Most brown immigrants come to the US as refugees, illegal immigrants, or skilled labor. That creates a bit of a bimodal distribution in everything from income to educational outcomes of their children. Teachers, school administration, etc. do not, in general fit into the ends of this bimodal distribution. There are obviously many, many, exceptions, but I'd hypothesize that brown people are severely underrepresented among school district administrators, school teachers, policemen, etc.

From the picture on the schools's website, the school panel looks to be at least 50% non-white.

The school administrators- http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/1670

That appears to be the wrong high school, it's this one instead - http://www.irvingisd.net/domain/2031

> You pulled a fast one there by linking to student body data and claiming admin and teachers are non-white.

What I'm claiming is it's unlikely to be blatant white on brown racism when 9 out of 10 students are non-white and 50% of the school admin panel is non-white.

The media is making this out to be some type of a racial profiling case... Where a lone brown student in a class of all whites is singled-out due to his skin color and name.

Racism is the unequal distribution of privilege, and goods dependent on race. It does not deal with race distribution in a population. However seeing racism should even be more apparent when the race with power is in the minority population. A good example would be South Africa in apartheid; or the south during segregation.

But basically if this kid was white, and was named Chris(the christian equivalent of Mohamed).. He would not have been subjugated to any of this. That is privilege that is racism.

Since when does "the distribution of [whatever]" have anything to do with the definition of racism?

The problem with that definition is that it assumes all groups contribute equally to the larger collective. Or at least that if one group contributes less, it is entirely because the other groups have already disadvantaged it in some way.

There are a large number of examples where this is simply false.

That definition makes no assumption about a groups contribution; as the definition is indifferent of the socio-economic system at hand (free-market, closed market, communal, etc) if the distribution of privilege and goods is different for individuals depending on race then there is a system of racism at hand.

So if 1 racial demographic group does better than another group, and they profit (in some way related to privileged) from this, while the other group does not, how is this racism?

Racism is the individual or collective act of blindly favoring one race over another, or hurting one race over another. There's this thing called the dictionary. If you don't like the definitions in there, come up with a new word and definition!

You have no evidence that this wouldn't happen to a white kid, but that's the most likely outcome. If this were pre-9/11 (pre-Patriot Act BS), I'm not so sure. Racism and prejudice to some extent is just part of the human condition. Perhaps one day we'll advance enough to make it a non-issue, but we need to stop the hysterics about "only in America" and "whites always get favored" without some concrete evidence and historical context.

1. I never said "only in America". Racism, and classism are prevalent all over the world. My example even lists both a US and Foreign example. And racism isn't only with whites.

2. There is tons of evidence that whites get favored in pretty much everything from home loans borrowing rates, being accepted to rent a house, pay, and the number of times they get pulled over by a cop.

http://www.jconline.com/story/news/2015/05/06/among-favored-... http://mije.org/mmcsi/criminal-justice/white-crime-victims-f... http://ndsn.org/march93/favored.html

Fair enough. I was alluding to some other comments I had seen.

As for your evidence, I think you're going out on a limb with "whites get favored in pretty much everything". While that may have been true up until the 1960s, we've progressed to Barack Obama and Oprah. Still a very long way to go with regards to the specific things you mentioned (some of which may be more socioeconomic factors rather than skin color), but your claim just doesn't hold water.

Are you conflating the phrase "whites always get favoured" with the notion of "white privilege"?

Perhaps. Can you give me a concrete example of "white privilege"?

Watch nearly any episode of the TV show, "What would you do". There are often examples of people giving some* the benefit of the doubt when they are in fact stealing, etc, while others are reported immediately to the police.

In the context of this show: * "some" are always white and/or female "others" are some white males, and all non-white males.

This "benefit of the doubt" is a privilege.

> This "benefit of the doubt" is a privilege.

I've never watched the show, but when one group of people is disproportionately represented in crime statistics, in some cases by a factor of 30x, then it's just common sense rather than benefit-of-the-doubt.

I also find it odd how this is immediately chalked up to racism instead of simply assuming that the school administrators are simply overzealous about "something that somebody thought looked/sounded like a bomb". I mean, it certainly _could_ be racism, but there isn't really any evidence at the moment to say that it _is_ racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamophobia

People want to see the problems their preferred media has taught them to be enraged about (or, has taught them is a problem the other team is irrationally concerned about).

Sometimes it's wanting to find the racial injustice that increases the sensitivity to other injustices.

While the student's race might have played a role in the punishment, I'm at least as suspicious that it has played a role in increasing media coverage of it. Of course both assessments are non-falsifiable when limited to this one specific case.

No big brand really focuses on the increasingly authortarian nature of American society, especially not in the treatment of minors. Although they'll pay lip service to it every now and again when it's useful fodder for other topics.

You think Black and East-Asian teachers are immune from racially profiling a student?

How does their non-whiteness protect them from seeing Brown men and boys, or just Muslims in general, as potential threats?

Racism is currently fashionable in the press and it plays to a core progressive narrative. The people doing so mean well, but unfortunately don't realize the price of this intellectual laziness is to completely alienate anybody else. People mostly care about problems that apply to themselves, so framing a problem as happening to "others" is actually extremely counter productive.

PS: read for understanding instead of just trying to stoke your fauxrage.

I think people are downvoting you because of your implied suggestion that the issue of racism in the US should be approached from the perspective of white people, which is pretty messed up.

How, exactly, is it "pretty messed up" ? I'd think if your goal was to convince the majority of something, you would look for ways to convince that majority of something. Like perhaps that their own kids could very well be arrested and traumatized in exactly this manner.

Reducing racism gets us more "benefit of the doubt" that might have resolved the situation informally. But it does nothing to change school administrators thinking that turning a 14 year old over to the police on a whim is an appropriate thing to do.

In this specific case I'm just glad this kid is actually innocent so that he can hopefully disassociate the event from himself and see that the school and police are horribly broken. Imagine if the arrest had been "justified" for accidentally bringing a pocket knife or aspirin to school - what kind of lasting psychological damage does that cause?

What is the ethnic makeup of the teachers and administrators?

Race data in the US typically groups Middle Eastern people into the white box. And I think people are specifically calling out perceived anti Muslim bias. Even though almost all domestic terror attacks are done by white men

Contrary to popular belief, xenophobia is not the monopoly of pink-skinned people.

Yeah, pink-skinned people in the Middle East will get even harsher xenophobic treatment.

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