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dogruck

Is this both sexist and racist?

> Supertasters are mostly women, and people of European ancestry are usually not supertasters.

Edit: The quoted statement does not offend me personally. I’m wondering:

1. When is it not sexist or racist (e.g. pointing out statistics about height, hair color, or skin tone)?

2. When is it definitely (I’m told) sexist or racist (e.g. James Damore asking about capability to write software)?

3. When is it in the middle (e.g. being a “super taster”)?

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Are you asking if statistics are racist or sexist?

Off-topic, but sometimes statistics can certainly be deemed as "racist". For example, in many European countries it would not be tolerated to report crime rates by nationality. Not sure if it's illegal or falls under media self-censorship duty though.

The statistic is not the "racist" part. It's the context, which is usually reflective of other conditions that certain races are exposed to, often through racism, that leads to lower income levels, worse housing and neighborhoods from a sociology standpoint, and eventually increased crime rates. I suspect that the countries refrain from reporting crime rates by race because most people will not look at those deeper causes but take them to imply that race X is more delinquent than race Y. You see that type of logic all the time in the US.

I would say the solution is to add that context to the statistics when reporting them instead of not reporting at all, but I don't think even whoever is choosing to not report the crime rates by race believes the statistics themselves are racist.

You are right, of course, statistics without context cannot possibly be racist (how could it be? it's just a bunch of numbers after all). That's why I said "deemed as" not "can be".

Are you implying that some sexes or races have superior (aka super) capabilities that others don’t have?

Statistical fact: there's higher rate of naturally blonde people in Scandinavia than Africa. Do you find it racist/offensive too?

No, it doesn’t offend me.

I simply asked a couple questions (which are being downvoted).

Maybe James Damore shouldn’t have been fired by Google?

You are (willfully) conflating biological characteristics with social ones. Statistically, more women are physically abused than men. Do we shrug and say, oh well, tain't nothin' you can do about it -- it's biology, like being blonde or a super-taster?

Nevermind. Don't answer that. :(

Would you please stop posting such off-topic, blatant flamebait? We ban users who just come here to trash the discussions.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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