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Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

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

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