Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

Comment by benrbray | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience, I think the biggest problem is that due to structural and historical racism, race is correlated with economic status in the United States. It sucks to be poor, no matter what color you are.

If you're not surrounded by people who have had success in their careers / education, it's hard to know which opportunities are available to you. Often, you only know about your parents and their career choices.

Also, the problem isn't entirely that some people don't understand the value of "showing up". It's that they don't always where and when to "show up" in the first place. For instance, I know a first-generation college student whose parents, while he was in high school, didn't even realize college was an option for him until his teachers started pestering everyone about college apps. He was lucky to attend a school where most students go to college, but I can imagine that in a poorer area he would've missed the opportunity entirely, thinking that he's not smart enough (which he certainly was!).

Correlation is definitely an important factor, but there are multitude of studies demonstrating an important inherent race/gender/origin bias in many important decisions, from hiring to housing to financing and more.

It comes to mind an experiment carried in France where they sent fake housing applications where the only difference between two sets of applicants was a Muslim-sounding name vs a Christian one. The results showed a much higher response rate for the latter, despite everything else being equal. I can't find the original, but found this similar one working with job applications (https://www.pnas.org/content/107/52/22384).

Not to negate the main point about "showing up", but there's more to it. When I've had the chance to hire someone and there are two similar candidates, I preferred to choose the one with the lower ranked school credentials. My thinking is that if this person has reached the same level of achievements with less environmental help, they probably have more grit and get-it-done in them than the candidate from the top school. Much more than that can be done in a systemic way, but it's a start.

I think it's important to consider the effect size when we talk about race or class bias. My personal feeling is that class (money) plays a much larger role than race (at least in the U.S. , I can't comment on France). I believe that now, when certain minorities have lesser outcomes than the white majority, it is primarily due to a higher prevalence of poverty.

Consider East Asians, a minority who have historically been victims of racial injustice in the U.S. As recently as 1945, Japanese people were placed in internment camps in the United States. Despite all of this racism, they have better economic and health outcomes than the white majority. Why? I believe it is due to class.

If we were to spend more energy fighting economic inequality I think we would see better outcomes for racial minorities. That is not to say that racism doesn't exist today, and that it's not important to fight against racial injustice. Both are important, but I tend to see much more discussion of race than class.

As far as resume studies go, here is one that shows significant bias based on class: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/000312241666815... .

This works both way. Another study in France asked by associations about anonymous résumé was made. The surprising result was that with anonymous ones, the non-white people were discriminated more. Why? Because more often than not, when a recruiter was looking at a foreign sounding name, he was more lenient about gap-year, not-the-best-school etc. So in the end the idea of imposing anonymous résumé was ditched.

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