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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

The world is less racist now than it was in the past. What mechanism do you posit for this?

I can't reply to the sibling comment that suggests education, but a corollary to education is that many of the people who had deeply-engrained racist beliefs are dying/dead from old age. I agree that the world is less racist now than it was in, say, the 1950s, but my personal experiences with the elderly suggests that the people who were racist in the 50s and are still alive are just as racist now as ever.

That just begs the question. Young people today are not less racist because each generation magically improves. If they're less racist, then there had to be a mechanism for it.

This is totally an unsupported hypothesis. I have no data.

The mechanism I'm proposing is that the current generation has not been exposed to many of the toxic things that reinforced racist beliefs. Slavery, segregated schools, etc. Kids in school are taught why those things were bad and why racism is bad. While not all of society has abandoned racism, there's been enough of a push that the public institutions educating the next generation are making efforts to reduce it.

But... slavery and segregated schools aren't weather. They didn't just happen. You seem like you're working really hard to avoid the idea that maybe some human convinced some other humans at some point to go from bad behavior to better behavior.

Absolutely some humans convinced some other humans! Enough, in fact, to make change! I'm not at all trying to avoid that idea. But I'm wholly unconvinced that when those things went away, a majority abandoned their racist notions. Rather, the next generation, when raised without the same degree of racism surrounding them, didn't take up those ideas to the same extent. It's not so much that people were convinced "I need to stop being racist" but rather that a subset was convinced "we can't teach this in our public schools"

That's all just observational though. Around here it's not so much racism against black folks but rather against aboriginal folk (and to some extent, middle eastern folks). I hear almost none of that crap from my generation or the younger generations, and still hear horrible amounts of it from older generations. Yes, some people in those generations changed, but it sure seems like the "racism rate" is significantly lower than the mean in the younger generations and significantly higher than the mean in the older generations.

Edit: it's also quite possible that it hasn't gone away in the younger generations either, it's just not considered something that is acceptable to say in polite company.

Edit 2: and thank you very much for making me think more about this!

Youre saying that free speech can't cure racism because racism defeats reason. But in the very next breath you're claiming that education is responsible for winning over racism.

Don't you see the contradiction here? It can't be both.

The world is less racist because people have chosen to suppress racist speech and policies.

Are individual people any less racist than in the past? Who knows? Probably unprovable.

But our perception of the world is not governed by how people are, it is governed by what people do. And every person has a choice to promote, tolerate, or suppress racism. Choosing the latter is what makes the world seem less racist.

What made people choose to suppress racist policies?

Education. The world is radically more educated than in the past.

That's not a product of free speech, it's a product of teaching people how to evaluate thoughts they come across in the wild.

Well, it's a theory. How do you plan to support it with evidence? I mean, the world is radically richer than in the past -- perhaps wealth causes less racism.

To suggest education cures Racism is to say that reason defeats racism, which in turn brings us back to free speech.

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