Is everybody a racist? | Hacker News Reader

Is everybody a racist?

aeon.co

18 pointsDiabloD334 comments

Project Implicit has an online test to try to surface your individual level of latent bias. https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/

Is there a reason to believe this test corresponds to bigoted attitudes?

It measured me as less biased the second time I took it, so this test not only measures bias, it cures it.

Note that this appears to be unusable without the Flash plugin.

The touch version has a user interface issue. When swiping on iOS it's very easy to accidentally swipe too far in the left and accidentally page back. I did this several times and have no idea if it altered my results.

Does everyone hold the conscious belief in the inferiority of groups based on racial characteristics? Clearly not.

Why does racism need to be conscious?

It's the line of culpability, if we have instinct that causes racial bias then we couldn't have done any better.

While I agree with some elements of that line of thinking, I also think that surfacing latent biases can help us to double-check some of our "gut reactions", particularly in high stakes situations (hire/fire/promote as just one example).

I do not believe in any form of quotas or similar affirmative action items, but if I am sub-consciously biased against someone, I'd rather know that, so I can make an attempt (which will still have some bias) to make a fact-based decision.

That's completely fair, I hadn't considered critical situations.

"I do not believe in any form of quotas or similar affirmative action items"

Same here, but apparently that's what makes me "a racist", or so the media has informed me.

False; even if racism isn't conscious that doesn't mean that it can't be identified and racist actions percent d by sufficient conscious choice and self-examination. Doing better than what unconscious instinct would lead to alone is often possible.

And this is why society has focused too much an moralizing the means and making taboos out of them. It's the ends that matter.

Defining it that way incentivizes people to lie to themselves.

That's how I feel. Clearly the infrastructure of the NBA is racist for having a majority of black players when it is WAY off statistically from a population standpoint of the United States.

This indicates a likely inherent and possibly unconscious structural racism within the organization. Not active racism per se, but more unconscious or subconscious selection favoring black players statistically. From this we know that the NBA consciously or unconciously believes that blacks are superior to whites and even asians in the game.

Over/under-representation doesn't imply racism. Look at the pipeline to the NBA. Top college basketball programs are predominantly black as well. Take a look at the pipeline there - a large percentage of inner-city kids who grew up playing basketball because courts are abundant and equipment is cheap.

This seems very reasonable to me, but I feel like this could also be used as justification for there not being a sexism problem in programming, it's just that lots of middle class white boys grew up playing with compilers.

Are you saying that compilers were available to middle class white boys and not to middle class white girls? Because that's not true. Saying that more of them do it because more of them do it is not the same as saying more of them do it because more of them had access to it.

No more than basketball courts were only available to young black boys?

Sure, and we'll always have guys more interested in CS than girls because of how girls and boys are traditionally brought up. I think the gender problem comes from women who are discouraged by sexism when they are already interested in CS.

Or it could be that in an employment environment that systematically discriminates against blacks that you would expect that they would end up over-represented in fields that didn't? Or that in a country where blacks are systematically undereducated that they would be over-represented in a profession that didn't require education? Or that in a system of higher education that is expensive and places value on what high school you went to, that black people with lower wealth/income who went to segregated schools that aren't valued as much would gravitate towards sports as a way to go to University?

None of these come up in your head before anti-white racism perpetrated by whites?

You're not making much sense. What schools are segregated? None. That's against the law. And you're saying that no the NBA isn't subconsciously overrepresenting blacks, and talk about poverty. There are more impoverished and undereducated whites than blacks. More whites overall means more white players to pick from. And yet NBA has a racial disparity. It points to unconscious bias toward recruiting black players over whites.

I'd also call out specific black scholarships that black athletes and black students are only eligible for.

Not necessarily. Golf is a very highly white dominated sport. This I'd not because of racism by anyone choosing golfers for tournaments. Its note likely in my estimation to be because of subcultures that can afford and do promote the game. Basketball is fairly popular in inner cities, is cheap to play and become good at. Golf costs more money and has a long history among more country club culture. Demographics alone if those groups could drive the apparent bias

No, but unconscious biases can have equally pernicious consequences.

Take tech for example. When hiring companies select for candidates with "culture fit" and that effectively rules people out based on their race/ethnicity or religion. Those people get fewer opportunities as a result which results in lower compensation. It's very difficult to judge who is qualified for a job and who is not. So people take shortcuts. Reject those who didn't graduate from a good college. Reject those who didn't get the right internships. Reject those who don't have relatable hobbies and life goals. All of these hiring shortcuts effectively discriminate against qualified minorities, even if the intentions of all involved are pure as snow.

So wanting a new hire to enjoy programming on the side to try to screen out those who aren't really in to programming is racially discriminatory? Cause that's going to require some profound evidence.

And yet all these shortcuts have argumentatively a moderate to strong correlation to job performance. Also there is from my understanding very little discrimination toward asian minorities, wouldn't the same "shortcuts" also then discriminate against them, yet asians are seen as hard working and smart employees...

Whether there is a correlation is immaterial. I'm saying that it's immoral and discriminatory to judge an individual by extrapolating from group characteristics.

(And there is a ton of discrimination against Asian and Asian-American tech employees, for instance the degree at which they get promoted to management positions: http://fortune.com/2015/05/06/silicon-valley-asians-report/)

Good article! We're all racists to some extent; that is, if your society's racist, you'll have to internalize its bizarre logic in order to function. (It's like sexism; I'd better know how not to transgress gender dress codes, or even I'll be in big trouble. God forbid you naively transgress the dominant political economic system... you'd face state violence embodied by bureaucrats with guns...)

Those people who say, "I don't see race; my best friend is X!" at the very least don't understand a big part of their best friend's life...

I'm glad to see more things like this on HN.

Race is a bullshit social construct that needs to be irradicated.

Luckily with globalization and massive migration it's well on its way out.

Why are you so optimistic? I can't think of a single example of two ethnically distinct / reproductively isolated but geographically intermixed groups that merged after centuries of staying isolated.

Even places like Brazil, where race is more of the sort of spectrum one would hope would convolve away, have plenty of issues that aren't abating.

Are you saying that after 100 years of mind bogglingly fast improvement on this issue (in terms of the history of humanity) we've stopped improving? Hardly.

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