The left thinks of racism in terms of outcome and the right thinks of racism in terms of intent.
We could benefit from better language around these concepts, and honest dialogue about them too.
I believe this is a very under-rated problem today's public is facing. Not just these concepts, but many political terms are misused in today's climate, making for a conversationally ignorant population.
You gonna back that up?
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/racist
No mention of what the person I was responding to was talking about.
Your formulation also misses another very important nuance. I don't think most people on the right don't consider effects. They mostly know that such effects exist, and quite often feel bad about that. However, they also believe that addressing only intent (or "procedural fairness") is sufficient to make those effects go away, and that more assertive measures create "reverse discrimination" and/or infringe upon liberty. I'm not going to argue whether they're right or wrong, but it's not about consideration. "Strategy" might be closer to the mark. Most on the right (not counting the true racists) do want to end racism. They just reject the left/center prescription for doing so.
we move, I go back to a more diverse school. fights, my graphing calculator stolen... what’s the possible benefit of having poor people in your school? until social programs make it so my lunch doesn’t need to be stolen to feed a kid, I fail to see how the non poor students are better off.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/06/magazine/the-resegregatio...
To touch on your point specifically, I am sorry you had such a poor experience. You are right when you say that social programs need to exist so that children are not hungry at school. Education is supposed to be the great equalizer and yet America has provided education almost only for the rich and has consistently attacked the poor. But I also feel bad for the kid who had to steal from you every day just so that he wasn't hungry at school. Education and wealth are a combined, intractable problem in a capitalist country, but there are hundreds of places making the problem worse.
Perhaps we need a DSM for society level malfunctions, with strict definitions?
It’s just that racist intend is almost always impossible to prove. Outcome therefore becomes a needed proxy, but only after excluding other factors, by, for example, normalizing for age and income.
Two landmark studies in this regard come to mind are (a) how the success rate at an orchestra doubled among women after auditions were changed to a “blind” format not allowing the decision-makers to see the applicants’ gender, and (b) how changing applicants’ names (and nothing else) could impact their chances to be invited to interviews.
The basketball team being all black isn't racism and it isn't due to racism.
If I saw a basketball team (in the NBA) of all white people, I would suspect racism, but it's important to point out that the outcome (an all white NBA team) is NOT racist in itself. Even if it is likely due to racism.
So, I think we should stop calling the outcomes 'racist' and say what we mean: "I suspect this outcome is due to racism"
I think that will make the whole conversation a lot easier to have.
I don't think its advantageous to certain political entities, however, if we have this conversation. There is one party in particular that I think relies on people to believe that their problems are outside of their control, so that maybe they'll outsource the problem solving to the government.
Maybe I have it pinned all wrong, but I will never know if we can't talk about racism and outcomes of what may or may not be racism as two separate things.
> There is one party in particular that I think relies on people to believe that their problems are outside of their control, so that maybe they'll outsource the problem solving to the government.
That’s a rather unfair characterization of the Democratic Party. But I find it even more interesting to know why you feel the need to superficially obfuscate who you are talking about?
I’ve also provided two examples above that clearly prove that racism and sexism do exist. If gender-blind hiring doubles the chances of female classical musicians, aren’t they right in pointing the finger at that result and complaining about white men playing life on easy?
But apart from such narrow situations, most left-wing advocacy is decidedly altruistic: college students supporting a raising of the minimum wage aren’t doing so for their own benefit. Unless, that is, they are terribly pessimistic about their personal future. Neither are voters and politicians advocating for DREAMERs, who by definition are neither. Nor are Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Bloomberg, LIN-Manuel Miranda, or any number of billionaires or otherwise successful people advocating on behalf of the less fortunate.
I don't think the left-wing advocacy is altruistic. If it was altruistic, it would promote altruism. It, instead, promotes redistribution of wealth.
Do you think redistribution of wealth is altruistic? How so?
Is a robot arm that kills anyone who stands near it a murderer?
It's an old tactic, I don't think changing the terms will make much difference.
Some cultures value family life over money, others value money over family life, for example.
But as the article states in it's conclusion:
>Just because something is expressed in numbers doesn’t make it right
Many statistical social differences are often automatically attributed to discrimination based solely on "numbers".
If the computer system doesn't have access to race, like in the FICO example, then can it be discriminating based on race (racist)?
Even if that were the case, you're still left with a small set of conclusions about race and its correlation to FICO score. 1) Non-white people are worse at maintaining credit scores because of something inherent to the condition of non-whiteness. This conclusion quickly points in the direction of racist psuedo-science. 2) Social and economic forces do not act equally on people of different skin colors. This is easily proven true by the example discussed by AOC and ta'nehisi coates of people of color being explicitly excluded from provisions the New Deal, an issue that has compounded the inequality between people of different racial backgrounds. This is directly applicable to FICO scores as white people are more often able to access generational wealth to pay of debts and avoid low credit scores whereas people of color are not.
Sooo, in the case of FICO, even if the score doesn't contain subtle proxies for race which I doubt, it is still predicated preserving a system that contains intense racial bias.
If you cannot accept the FICO as non-racist, then I do not know if you could create a system that others would not find racist. I cannot think of a way that your system would not end up with some form of explicit race-based corrections. I think that concept is less palatable in America due to the focus on freedom/individuality. Each person should stand on their own, not colored by the groups that you could fit them in.
Just curious if you have an opinion: how do you propose correcting for the past?
Lastly, you can look up the determinants of a FICO score for yourself as you can use sources that you trust.
I think you want FICO scores to mean something that they don't mean.
Are you saying that this is racism. Most people would define what you outlined as not rascist.
Claiming that racism can be evaluated only by the intent is simply moving the goal posts into an area where we can't clearly observe. It's a tactic.
In terms of this specific issue, algorithms by their very nature lack intent. Thus this particular argument has no validity; we can only judge the algorithm by it's results: the outcome.
Claiming racism is anything but intent is changing the definition of racism. Which is:
"prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior."
If you start changing the definition of words to suit a political goal, only the people who already agree with you will listen.
As I said, I agree with you. But our position can lead to hiding some genuine racism under the "unintentional" disguise. It also leaves unintentional systematic biases unaddressed. While those may not exist as often as the left claims, they do at least sometimes exist, and do need to be addressed.
If we need to accurately gauge their intent, that's not really possible. In the case of an algorithm we've divorced the process from the source of intent (the author of the algorithm), there is no intent to evaluate.
and colloquially nobody thinks of it the same way, with themselves always exempt from being racist until convinced that their 'normal behavior' is considered racist and this does not change their view of their normal behavior 'so be it'
this is a challenge. at this point the word itself is polluted.