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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

I like the More in Common Project. But it overlooks the disproportionate representation of the extremists in our institutions. This happened at my alma matter earlier this year: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator....

They also voted to abandon entrance exams at my magnet high school: https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=4979

It’s not comforting to know that only a tiny minority of people are standing up and declaring themselves “gatekeepers of white supremacy” when that person is the Dean of a school or a School Board Superintendent. Just because folks fighting the culture wars might be few in number doesn’t mean they don’t have their hands on a lot of levers.

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I know those diversity sessions... They claim everyone who is white or passing as white is racist. I had to "confess" that i'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. Sidenote: I volunteer at a refugee center and took in a syrian family. Literally hitler, i know. A colleague got fired because he wouldn't confess and left the session.

So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's probably not unless you warp the definition of racism.

Is there any real proof that these diversity sessions actually help people work in diverse environments? The way you describe this, it reads like a really, really weird cargo cult where just confessing to one's supposed racism will somehow make you more open to people of differing backgrounds. How exactly does this help?

In the manner of all business consulting, it 'helps' by letting management say, "Look, we hired a consultant! We care deeply about ____ and have given it our best shot. If any problems related to ____ arise in the future, blame the consultant." In this case, the blank is diversity and inclusion.

Demanding people declare they are racists sounds very strange to me - I'm not sure that would help things much.

But I've also seen some people do some pretty oblivious things in my time - like ordering company tee-shirts for their mixed-gender team, but only getting male sizes. Or evaluating every interview candidate's communication skills and cultural fit based on a conversation about rock climbing and craft beer.

And other stuff managers might need to get good at aren't taught at home or in college. If you get performance complaints about an otherwise-good employee who is fasting during Ramadan, what's the right way to address that while respecting privacy and being fair to the complainant, complainee and the company?

I can understand why an employer might want their employees to have a bit of extra training, above and beyond what college and life experience have already taught them. At least for the employees destined for promotion to senior positions.

While I'm sure there are complicated issues around race and gender that training can give you the tools to solve these examples seems pretty easy to fix.

> Or evaluating every interview candidate's communication skills and cultural fit based on a conversation about rock climbing and craft beer.

I feel like any cultural fit test is going to be inherently sexist/racist/classist. Better to just throw them out. Also why waste time talking about anything not relevant to the job to judge communication skills when you could be having job related discussions.

> If you get performance complaints about an otherwise-good employee who is fasting during Ramadan, what's the right way to address that while respecting privacy and being fair to the complainant, complainee and the company?

Is the complaint this person isn't doing their job? Then it should be treated like every other complaint. Is the complaint is "They aren't eating lunch" then it should be treated very differently.

> Is the complaint this person isn't doing their job? Then it should be treated like every other complaint.

Sure, but how is that? Different performance problems call for different solutions.

Do you treat it like the newly hired dyslexic person? Like the person who's going through a difficult divorce? Like the person who likes to party and sometimes comes in tired or hung over? Like the person with gaps in their education and training? Like the parent who sometimes gets called for child-related emergencies? Like the person who disagrees with the policies, but can be convinced with better explanation? Like the person who finds the work too boring to be able to concentrate on? Like the person who doesn't like the job, but hasn't found another yet?

A competent manager will have half a dozen different tools in their toolbox - and it takes some forethought to be able to reach for the correct one first time on receipt of a complaint.

Like any other performance issue limited to a month each year. If it's mild and they're otherwise a great employee probably just ignore it. If it's large drop in performance that is having a material impact on the team, document the performance impact, take any steps necessary to mitigate the impact of the drop in performance and ask if there is anything you can do to help them improve their performance.

These are all valuable things to address, but in my experience they're not what corporate diversity programs do. I'm scrolling through my company's diversity page right now, and the front page from top to bottom contains:

* An affirmation that we stand with the black community.

* A list of political organizations we should donate to in support of the black community.

* TED talks on how news, policing, etc. are sometimes implicitly racist. (We as a company aren't involved in news or policing.)

* A reimbursement offer for up to $1,000 per person on anti-racism materials.

* Recommended articles, books, etc.

There's a lot of other stuff in tabs and menus and such. But if I didn't know how to handle an employee with poor performance during the Ramadan fast, none of the information I see would help me figure it out, and it's my understanding that this is typical.

No. But the goal isn't for it to work, the goal of the advocates is to bill a lot of money and the goal of the company is to virtue signal.

https://hbr.org/2012/03/diversity-training-doesnt-work

> he goal of the advocates is to bill a lot of money and the goal of the company is to virtue signal.

You miss the biggest goal: for departments of diversity, inclusion, etc to gain more power and hires.

My observation at past employers has been that D&I teams are consistently under-staffed and overwhelmed.

I've long wondered if this is the reason large, established companies (tech or non-tech) pour money into these seminars. It acts as a barrier to entry for smaller competitors who don't have giant piles of cash to spend on things like this, but now they have to because, well, they don't want to be the "racist startup".

My understanding is that it's to placate activist employees (or, if management are activists, to play out their beliefs).

>Is there any real proof that these diversity sessions actually help people work in diverse environments?

I'd say no for the most part.

It's mostly hypocrisy and everyone knows is theater, which creates boredom at best, and bad blood at worst.

Diversity is built organically, not through sessions.

It's like those bogus "we're a big family" pep sessions -- and then the company screws you over.

>Is there any real proof that these diversity sessions actually help people work in diverse environments?

I read a study a while back, which I can't find right now, that concluded that these sessions do more harm than good in the workplace.

One study I could find, which might be of relevant interest, is that diverse workplaces are far less likely to come together and organize in terms of unions or worker rights[0], which might go some way to back up the suspicion this whole shitshow we've been submerged into is merely a big-money attempt to turn normal people against one another by provoking racial tensions to prevent them from becoming class conscious and instigating a movement like Occupy Wall Street again.

>How exactly does this help?

It doesn't. The entire purpose of it is ritual humiliation.

[0]https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0019793915602253

Not yet, but these are still pretty new to corporate environments. I've been in "harassment prevention" training sessions for years, but only within the last year sat through my first "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) training. (It was not an inquisition; quite helpful in the opinion of this middle aged white guy.)

There is research that shows that companies with diverse leadership and staff financially outperform the average. See for example:

https://www.mckinsey.com/featured-insights/diversity-and-inc...

The problem is, no one knows for sure how to take an existing corporate culture with low diversity, and transform it to one with higher diversity and higher performance. Cultures can be extremely resistant to change.

DEI trainings are just the latest attempt to find something that works. It will take a few years to see if they do.

> There is research that shows that companies with diverse leadership and staff financially outperform the average

Ah, that looks like a nice bit of marketing from McKinsey. Huge companies that work on global markets with clearly recognizable brands are naturally more diverse (sourcing people from all over the world) and also care about their public image enough to increase their diversity in management positions.

Of course this doesn't mean at all that by increasing diversity your performance will improve, the causal arrow goes in the opposite direction.

I'm super suspicious of research like that for a couple of reasons.

One it would it be impossible to publish research that came to the opposite conclusion. Imagine seeing a headline that said "replacing female and black executive leadership with old white dudes increases profit" by McKinsey.

Second the magnitude of the impact seems insane. This seems larger than the difference most studies find between good leadership and average leadership. And while I wouldn't be surprised if diverse leadership is marginally better than non-diverse leadership I would be surprised if it's larger than the difference between average and good.

Three they're pulling from many different countries which could potentially create huge confounds.

In general "research" that comes out of a place like McKinsey and Bane is pretty suspect but something like this is even more.

Even if none of the other problems are real they still don't establish causation. It could easily be the case that diverse candidates are harder to find, so more competitive/better firms are able to better attract them.

I think diversity is great and there are lots of great reasons to increase it but I doubt the impact on profitability would be anything beyond marginal.

The issue a non-diverse team will hit is getting blind-sided by lack of perspective on emerging phenomena. Given that aspect, I don't find it surprising that the benefits from a diverse team could exceed the benefits between the difference in average and good leadership.

Both an average and a good leader will drown the same army if they lead them into a swamp because they've never seen a swamp before.

Agreed, but there's conflation in these reports between cognitive diversity and demographic diversity.

A blue collar factory worker, a harvard grad management consultant, and a business researcher who are all white males try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation.

A black woman, a white man, and Asian woman who all graduated from Harvard and worked for McKinsey try to reduce car part inventory through logistical innovation.

I wouldn't be surprised if the more diverse group came up with a better solution.

To take your contrived example regional diversity will have a much larger impact on making sure someone has encountered a swamp than racial diversity.

I think it's easy to overestimate the effect of racial diversity and underestimate the effect of other types of diversities on problem solving style because one is so easy to see.

No disagreement here, but if we're talking non-contrived examples, actual facial recognition cameras for video conferencing have gotten all the way to sold on store shelves with an inability to recognize black faces.

I think it's fair to assume that had there been at least one black individual in the development pipeline, the company that made that camera would have avoided an embarrassing mistake.

I wonder if the effect works backward - excellence attracts the best and remaining on top requires assimilating the best from all sources. Diversity essentially is a side effect of their paradigms and world views in terms of openness to new things and experimentalism.

On a related note successful Empires become more diverse over time - one of the few virtues of Imperialism and they need the edge to expand further while the most xenophobic ones tend to be shorter lived or more limited in their success. One insulting but true observation about national flags flown by white supremacists is that they are all flags of losers (Nazi Germany, Confederacy, Rhodesia).

I would expect a company with more diverse leadership to outperform, because they are able to access more talent.

White men are like 35% of the U.S. population in total. So on the back of the envelope, a corporate culture that inclines toward hiring white men, also inclines against hiring from 65% of the population. That's a lot of talent available for your competitors to hire.

And the numbers get even more dramatic the younger you look. Non-hispanic white U.S. residents under 16 made up less than 50% of the population at that age as of last year. And the trend direction is obvious. Source:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/new-census-data-shows-the...

The left-hand side of this chart is what the future of the American workforce will look like. The right-hand side is what it used to look like:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/07/30/most-common...

If a company does not figure out how to hire, retain, and promote people who are not white men, they are going to see a shrinking talent pool for decades to come. The data is obvious to corporate leaders, which is why so many companies are treating diversity as an issue for management of the business.

> If a company does not figure out how to hire, retain, and promote people who are not white men

Agreed. Not hiring the best talent is always bad for a company. If you are biased against your best talent, you've selected worse talent.

However, diversity goals keep moving - they are well past bias issues. Note that tech companies aren't hiring mostly white men at this point - they are in fact outnumbered by Asian men (Google was at 30% and 39% in tech hiring respectively last year.). And yet, we are still talking about the lack of diversity in tech (women remain underepresented, but in terms of ethnicity it's a very diverse place)

> I would expect a company with more diverse leadership to outperform, because they are able to access more talent.

You implicitly assume that the performance of a leadership team is the sum of the talent of its members.

I'm sure that's important, but the more direct variable to study (somehow) would be how similar people's backgrounds are. If they are all precisely alike, then they'll miss perspectives and be blindsided. But if they are totally different, then they will struggle to communicate their assumptions, and also won't perform well.

So I'd expect honest research to show a U-shaped loss curve. Or more realistically, to have gathered cautionary tales of companies that fell apart for both of these reasons.

Remember this research was done across the globe including countries like Brazil and Japan.

But to focus on the U.S. most really competitive institutions in the U.S. like medical institutions are not running into the problem of having too many white people. Medical institutions have too many Asians, and not enough Black and Hispanic people to have a representative graduating class.

https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/allopathic-distrib...

Yes I suspect some one suggesting to HR that one of the ways to increase diversity and combat institutionalised racism would to be a transparent pay survey might be in trouble.

It sounds like someone took Alcoholics Anonymous, kept the bit where you admit you're an alcoholic, and then dropped the rest of it. Not that having the rest of it would be any better, but the whole thing sounds utterly regressive.

They do sometimes cause Googlers to out themselves as a hostile work environment hazard and get fired.

So, benefit there. ;)

The goal isn't really to "help people work in diverse environments". That's just a euphemism. What it really is, is a power grab to push white men out and people of color and ironically also white women in (who can always fall back on their gender to acclaim victim status and oppression).

> So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's probably not unless you warp the definition of racism.

Please elaborate on what you mean by "warp the definition of racism".

> Please elaborate on what you mean by "warp the definition of racism"

changing the definition of racism so a specific targetgroup is included. For example instead of "discriminate minority groups" they say "disadvantage minority groups" and then include things like those entrence exams as a disadvantage. In the end everything is somehow racist.

> For example instead of "discriminate minority groups" they say "disadvantage minority groups"

But to intentionally disadvantage a minority group is to discriminate against that minority group.

Are you suggesting that intentionally disadvantaging a group is not discriminating against that group?

Or are you suggesting that unintentionally disadvantaging a group is not only not discriminating against that group, but that also it is is also excusable and needs no correction? i.e. that the consistent, albeit unintentional, disadvantaging shall continue?

---

With respect to entrance examinations specifically - while I have zero experience of context with the situation today, I fully appreciate how entrance examinations can be intentionally and unintentionally exclusionary - and yet still be seen as innocuous. A good example is in the (historical) [entrance exams for the UK's Grammar School systems which are sat at age 11[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus#Controversy); while the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.

> But to intentionally disadvantage a minority group is to discriminate against that minority group.

I would argue that depends on the intent. Do i put them in a disadvantage because they are part of that group or because a large part of that group wouldn't fit the requirements i have.

Lets say i'm looking for someone doing voiceover. Someone without an accent. That would probably put a lot of non-native english speaker in a disadvantage. Would you argue, that i'm discriminating against them or have racist intentions?

In this diversity session they would then argue my knowledge that non-native english speaker are put in a disadvantage by this requirement was the reason to put it in and therefor i'm racist.

What if I want my company to feel like family, so I only hire people who look like they could be related to me? What if I don't think brown skin matches the decor of my offices, and I want to present a certain aesthetic to potential clients? What if I want to do business with people who think women shouldn't be seen in public unaccompanied by their brothers or husbands?

What if I'm not racist, but the rest of my employees are, and I want my team to be cohesive and productive?

> Someone without an accent.

Everyone has an accent. When you say "without an accent," what you mean is that you are looking for someone with a particular accent that is meant to be free of features that identify someone as coming from a particular region.

In a way, it's discriminatory, because you're saying that people who do not speak your preferred dialect are not speaking "proper" English. Even if they grew up speaking English their entire life.

>Everyone has an accent. When you say "without an accent," what you mean is that you are looking for someone with a particular accent that is meant to be free of features that identify someone as coming from a particular region.

Thats what an accent is, yes. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accent

> In a way, it's discriminatory, because you're saying that people who do not speak your preferred dialect are not speaking "proper" English. Even if they grew up speaking English their entire life.

thats not what i said/wrote. Thats how you interpret it.

> Or are you suggesting that unintentionally disadvantaging a group is not only not discriminating against that group, but that also it is is also excusable and needs no correction? i.e. that the consistent, albeit unintentional, disadvantaging shall continue?

It depends on the policy. Is the height of a basketball hoop a policy that is unintentionally discriminating against me because I can't jump that high? Is the Nobel Prize racist because Jews are massively overrepresented among winners?

The debate here is over whether any policy that results in racial disparity is racist. To me, that argument is obviously wrong.

> A good example is in the (historical) [entrance exams for the UK's Grammar School systems which are sat at age 11[(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleven-plus#Controversy); while the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.

To you, tests like the one you mention are racist (or classist) because you assume that certain races or classes will be more likely to know certain things and others less likely. But, ironically, to me, your assumption is racist (and classist) because we have different definitions of racism.

Finally, I think there's a serious flaw in your thinking. If "studies show" that rich kids test better in math, does that mean math tests are classist? Is it even possible to create a test so that every group you consider (ethnic or socio-economic) will achieve the same average score? And which groups shall we consider? Isn't it common knowledge these days that there is no canonical way to divvy people up into "races"? Why is it that, for the purpose of college admission, "Asian" is an ethnicity but "Jew" isn't? Furthermore, imagine I am born to rich parents and my parents hire a math tutor from the age of 3 until I graduate high school. By the time I take the SAT, I will probably be much better at math than the average high school student. Is there anything wrong with that? Why is it correct for tests to attempt to discern innate ability rather than current ability?

>Why is it correct for tests to attempt to discern innate ability rather than current ability?

The issue was that they were testing for neither; rather, they were testing knowledge irrelevant to the thing ostensibly being tested (but specific to a class group).

From Wikipedia: "For example, questions about the role of household servants or classical composers were far easier for middle-class children to answer than for those from less wealthy or less educated backgrounds".

> they were testing knowledge irrelevant to the thing ostensibly being tested

That's a good argument but it's not the argument that I was responding to:

> the grammar-school system was ostensibly universal and open to all, the entrance exams with questions predicated on a familiarity with middle-class culture naturally disadvantaged working-class students.

Is there any evidence that these types of questions are currently driving the majority of the difference in test scores?

>Or are you suggesting that unintentionally disadvantaging a group is not only not discriminating against that group, but that also it is is also excusable and needs no correction? i.e. that the consistent, albeit unintentional, disadvantaging shall continue?

The problem arises when the only opportunity is to replace measurable discrimination with non-measurable discrimination. For example, SAT results are easy to measure, and because of this we take correlations with X, Y, and Z, and find that SAT slightly discriminates against people in subpopulation Z.

So we replace the SAT with a holistic interview-and-quiz format that is only used at our institution. The data is kept internal (for student privacy) and there aren't enough datapoints to derive meaningful correlations with X, Y, or Z.

Is there less discrimination? We don't know! What you accomplish is to replace a standard within which you can detect discrimination with one where you can't.

So yes, using metrics that have small but measurable inequities may be preferable to using metrics where inequities cannot be measured. In the metrizable case the "disadvantage" is at least bounded.

Now, in the alternative case where you actually have options, i.e. you have one measure with some inequities and another measure that you know has fewer inequities, then of course it would be racist to choose the first measure over the second. But this is not an analogous situation to university entrance exams at all.

Even worse. If these high ranking people are so afraid for their careers that they will say these things even if they don't believe them then the few people who do believe it are indeed quite powerful.

Yet they still don't see themselves as the establishment.

Not necessarily. Preference falsification is a thing; it's quite possible for a organization to enforce compliance with a principle which no individual member of the organization sincerely holds. In cases of large scale preference falsification, everybody lies to fit in with everybody else, who are also lying for the same reason.

Such scenarios may be susceptible to preference cascades though, when people realize that they're actually in good company and suddenly feel free to act and say as they truly wish. When that happens, change is rapid. The personal guards of a hated dictator may switch sides overnight and execute the leader they would have killed others for the day before.

This is basically a Chinese struggle session.

I didn't realize it was Chinese, that makes it much worse.

I think the official term was "Maoist struggle session."

lol the Chinese eventually pushed back against Maoism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

> I had to "confess" that i'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career. Sidenote: I volunteer at a refugee center and took in a syrian family.

It's almost like making generalisations about people's actions only by their skin colour or ethnic background is somehow wrong. Weird to think that basically anyone studying social science or humanities is being taught this stuff and that it is at this point basically accepted as fact.

> I had to "confess" that I'm racist and promise to do better or it would have consequences for my career.

So, basically inquisitor wannabees and pseudoscience cultists. Your colleague dodged a bullet.

The idea that claiming that you are racist makes you not racist is totally gaga, random, and based in magical thinking, not in science. It only helps to hide in plain sight the real racists making much easier to admit it for everybody.

He signed the document to stay at the institution. I wouldn't call it "dodging a bullet" I'd call it "securing his own yoke".

God forbid large firms employing people from diverse backgrounds require employees to take training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

Are you suggesting it's required to "confess that you're a racist" in a Mao-style struggle session to work with people from diverse backgrounds?

I'm definitely not. I also hold such descriptions of these trainings in high skepticism, because I've been through a similar training and had a coworker describe it as such when all the training was doing was surfacing the scientific evidence suggesting unconscious bias is a real phenomenon that people aren't aware of.

The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.

You might have visited different seminars than the ones this thread was originally about, or you might just experience them differently given that you appear to be a staunch believer in white privilege & the post-modern theory of racism.

Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.

Conflating trainings derived from theory based on research and evidence with religion is also strange.

I think research & evidence is vague when you include gender & diversity studies in sciences. There's a lot that's barely above an essay, it'll stick for a few years and then get retracted (gender pay gap anyone?) The cultish behavior surrounding it ("I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning, I'm worthless, oh please, Lord, forgive me, I submit myself before your will") makes it look like a replacement for religion, not anything stemming from science.

I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.

The "school of thought" behind the cultural revolution was twofold:

1) Mao had been frozen out after the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, and this was his way of discrediting his enemies and getting back on top.

2) Young people full of fervor are fucking vicious.

None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy in general or with the things Mao in particular had said before he'd been frozen out. But it says a lot about power.

> None of it really had much to do with marxist philosophy

Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.

> "I'm a sinner, even though I never know when I'm sinning"

The entire point of the courses I've seen is to bring people awareness of unconscious bias and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of error to awareness of the potential for such error. And unconscious bias doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior.

Disclaimer: I realize the below could be interpreted in an inflammatory manner. I DON'T MEAN IT THAT WAY. I just find it absolutely unbelievable that someone could honestly claim not to see the clear religious parallels here.

The entire point of the [bible camp] I've seen is to bring people awareness of [unconscious sinning] and thereby help them transition from ignorant commission of [sin] to awareness of the potential for [sin]. And [unconscious sinning] doesn't make one "worthless," it's (as far as we can tell) pretty ordinary human behavior [since we're all born in sin]. (https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/what-is-the-biblical-ev...)

The parallel is obvious and I fail to see your point.

Original sin is a concept couched in Christian mythology. Unconscious bias is a concept derived from statistical study and observation. The similarity is that unconscious bias, like original sin, appears to be innate to the human existence---a byproduct of the way we think about the world, the thousands of quick decisions we make subconsciously to go about our days. The parallel doesn't make it untrue.

The entire point of some exhibits in science museums I've seen is to bring people awareness of optical illusions and help them transition from not knowing that the human eye has some fascinating corner case failure modes to awareness of the existence of those failure modes. And the eye being imperfect doesn't make it "worthless," it's a pretty ordinary side effect of evolution in the context where those failure modes are rare to observe.

There's also the similarity of the class alignment behind today's "neo-Maoist" stuff and the actual Cultural Revolution. https://www.thebellows.org/the-new-cultural-revolution/

In my experince, the true believers find the diversity courses validating.

You don't have to believe the description of the session--there are screenshots in the article.

Nothing about the article suggests that text was forced. I'm not going to trust the Free Beacon's interpretation of some out-of-context screenshots.

The statements standing alone are damning, whether forced or not. That's not how faculty and administrators should be speaking in front of students.

Agree to disagree

What you’re doing is called a motte and bailey fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

You’re defending diversity training, which nobody is attacking. We’re talking about a particular kind of rhetoric where people take personal responsibility in behalf of their race and label themselves with words that, in ordinary usage, have extremely inflammatory meanings.

I’m from a “diverse background.” I think diversity training and making organizations more diverse is great. But this rhetoric is an explosively bad approach to race relations, and as a non-white person I am very worried about what the result will be.

You'd have to nail down what rhetoric you mean for me to have any response to that.

I don't think specific examples are really useful here. At the end of the day, either I'm allowed to say "I am not a racist" at work and be left alone for making that statement, or I'm not. If I'm not, it's a cryptofascist struggle session.

Without specific examples, I have no idea if I am committing a motte and bailey fallacy because the specific examples I have in my mind are the weaker example, the specific examples the speaker has in their mind are a different example, I've never experienced their example (but have experienced people experiencing my example and treating it as something more draconian that could, perhaps, approximate their example).

So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.

The example is in my OP: It's a session where white people acknowledge that they take personal responsibility for participating in a system of "white privilege" and admit to being "racist" and "gatekeepers of white supremacy." (That's the bailey.)

By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.

Honestly, I don't see much distinction between teaching people about structural privilege and suggesting they admit they benefit from it. Difference of degree, perhaps, but not much.

You trusted your alma mater when you were taught there; not trusting the direction it's taking now? Is it possible you're not seeing the picture the way they are?

Benefitting from structural privileges is very different from being a racist though.

In computer security, we often talk about the lack of distinction between malice and ignorance---if the security system is bad, it doesn't matter if the attacker is intent on causing harm or merely innocently curious and hack-sawing away through your computer security for fun. The outcome is the same.

I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.

I'll bite, what the fuck is passive racism?

The unconscious biases people walk around with in their heads. They're things people pick up without realizing it that lead to friction for minorities in society.

Studies have shown that people who don't think themselves to be actually racist still act in race-discriminatory ways. For example, people with non-ethic-names get more callbacks for their resume controlled for qualifications on the resume (https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...).

So a bad way to say unconscious racism.

"Ism" is a suffix that implies a philosophy. An ism is a suite of beliefs. Anything that is unconscious is, by definition, not an ism. Racism refers to people with a philosophy of racial hierarchy, or ideas about race that evoke or imply such a philosophy.

For instance, Buddhism is a suite of beliefs about enlightenment and transcendence. We don't refer to people as "structural Buddhists" simply because they have equanimity.

But do you see the difference between teaching people about structural racism and having them stand up and declare "I am a racist" and "I am a gatekeeper of white supremacy?" Two things about that are outside acceptable norms:

1) Having people declare personal complicity for a general social ill; and

2) Using words that have widely-understood connotations to mean something different in order to achieve shocking rhetorical effect.

It's not just inconsistent with social norms, it's alienating to many non-white people. I don't think the well-meaning white people doing this (and almost everyone involved in this is white) really understand that we have to actually go on and try to interact normally our professors and administrators after this.

How does that change the normal interaction dynamic?

I generally try to avoid racist people, because they'll treat me and many of my friends poorly. That's what "racism" meant in the culture I was brought up in - a racist person was by definition one who treated certain races poorly.

Because of that, it's very hard for me to have normal interactions with people who explicitly identify as racist, even if they say they're a special kind of racist who intends to treat me well.

So it's a matter of definition, not behavior. Because the point of unconscious bias training is to help people see the ways in which they are racist even if they don't think of themselves as racist.

In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.

It's a magical, shifting definition that means whatever the high priests need it to mean at the moment.

Making people confess to being 'racist', at institutions where being Racist gets you fired, is a power-move.

Those of us who can see that aren't objecting to the idea of unconscious bias, we're objecting to the power move.

If only there were some kind of, I dunno, training to help clarify and de-magic these words. ;)

Do you believe racists should be shamed and fired?

I don't believe people should be shamed and fired for having unconscious bias and confronting it.

There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.

And, we're back to the magical shifting definition.

If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?

That's a question for the English language and dictionary authors, not for me.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...

Any thoughts of your own on the matter? We're way in the sidebar, don't worry about downvotes. Tell me why.

> suggesting they admit they benefit from it

Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.

There's nothing wrong with bringing privilege and systemic racism up and taking a "course" as a way to make it poignant. Forcing white people to say "all white people, including myself, are racist P's of S" is garbage and I would get up and walk out at that point, no amount of money or "this position is cool" would convince me to do otherwise. If you don't have standards then why even be alive or call yourself an individual? Sure if you're racist speak up and would like to fix it, otherwise it's blackmail and you are working with garbage people.

And their friend was fired.

We talk about an institution that will only hire people as long as they came out as racists first. Wow!.

Looks like the type of workplace to avoid at any cost.

(It feels important to point out that my post is based on the text above, not based on having read the document being referred to nor the full context of the document. A company that would, say, require 100% of the employees to sign a document saying, in effect, that "everyone has inherent predilections towards folk they most relate to" and that "here we expect everyone to rise above that" would be pretty cool but what was described seemed weird to me.)

If you go around asking who the "real racists" are, you'll never find any. Turns out self-reporting is dubious.

The alternative is hardly declaring people such based on skin color.

If you declare everyone a racist then finding the actual racists becomes a much harder problem.

Firstly, if everyone is a racist then the word racist loses meaning. So when you have an actual racist and say this person is racist, it's meaningless. Everyone is racist.

Secondly, the amount of false positives will just be crazy high. How can this possibly ever work?

I don't know what they think they are achieving?

>I don't know what they think they are achieving?

They don't think they're actually hunting down people who hate others based on race. They're self-consciously building class power that serves themselves as individuals and the material interests of their class.

Klansmen and neo-Nazis are perfectly happy to call themselves racists.

Are you a real racist?

The trainings I'm familiar with have the opposite intent: to help people who don't believe they are racists (or believe racism doesn't exist) understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended.

> understand the unconscious mental processes that feed into racism and the nature of structural discrimination, even when unintended.

I wonder how scientific this understanding is

UCSF has a useful overview on the topic.

https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscio...

Quite biased. At least the Wikipedia page includes a Criticism section. Also, as with most psychology, the prior should be that all these studies are a result of p-hacking and publication bias (i.e. that the effect is actually noise).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit-association_test#Crit...

Also pretty obvious biased cherry picking on that page. Counterexample:

Women preferred 2:1 over men for STEM faculty positions

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9372481

I don't see how the provided counterexample is a counterexample. It appears to indicate unconscious bias favoring women in STEM faculty positions for hiring.

No evidence is given about whether the bias is unconscious.

I believe it can be inferred that it's not conscious, because if women were actually being hired intentionally at a 2 to 1 ratio, that would be an obvious violation of law against gender discrimination.

Doing "X" intentionally would be illegal, therefore it could be inferred that whoever did "X" wasn't doing it consciously.

Exactly what the Chinese government says about Uighur reeducation centers. They only want to help them to understand the unconscious mental processes that feed,...

How is that not the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they confess to racism?

I believe the fact some people perceive it to be is the root of, perhaps, quite a bit of consternation on the issue.

But I see it is the same as forcing people to stay in an unpleasant class until they understand type theory. We teach people things they need to know so that they know them, because knowledge is useful. We're certainly not calling the question of "having education seminars" into question, are we?

But the 'knowledge is useful' stance presupposes that these classes have value, that what they're teaching is actually true or useful. That's precisely what many of us don't believe.

Suppose we were discussing a risk management seminar which you had reason to believe was teaching a flawed methodology, one likely to cause serious harm if widely adopted. Would you be similarly sanguine in that case?

> That's precisely what many of us don't believe.

With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.

I've known too many tech-savvy folk who think humans can be reduced and deconstructed like a computer, declare humanities research bunk because it doesn't fit their mental model, and get profoundly surprised when their mental model doesn't fit actual human behavior. The psychologists and sociologists have a better track record on modeling and predicting human behavior.

With respect, these careerists subscribe to journals that will literally publish translations of Mein Kampf so long as a few buzzwords are exchanged. On a less sensationalist but more quantifiable note, 70% of the research comprising the field can't be replicated. I think my scepticism is warranted.

Even still, my Bayesian priors suggest that techies get worse than chance results on second-guessing them.

> With respect, I'll defer to the career sociologists and psychologists on the topic, much as I'd defer to the risk management PhD on the topic of risk management.

This isn't a good heuristic, without some way of judging the entire field. Would you defer to expert career scientologists about E-meters? Would it help if they published papers on the topic and held conferences and you picked only the best-cited ones from that process? Why not?

I think the relevant question is: If they were completely wrong about how the world actually works, would this have had any negative consequences for them?

This would lead you to some degree of skepticism of risk management professionals, too. If the risks are small and frequent (like estimating how many car crashes per month) then you can trust that people & methods that are badly wrong will have been weeded out. But when the risks are of rare events (like, say, housing market crashes, or nuclear war) then professionals can pass an entire career without being tested against reality. So you should be wary that the most prominent voices are chosen for reasons other than actually predicting the risk.

And career sociologists, of course, aren't heavily rewarded for accurate predictions.

Psychology and sociology departments are radicalized echo chambers. No one in he street has any of the imaginary problems they concoct.

Morgan Freeman (black) has said it years ago: "Stop talking about it".

Having to publicly humiliate yourself is pure Maoism. How can you compare it to learning type theory?

It's only public humiliation if people perceive it to be public humiliation.

what's humiliating about having the same problem that basically everyone does?

Most people (luckily) perceive racism to be a bad thing. Being forced to publicly confess to being something you should be ashamed of is the definition of humiliation.

If it's true and uncomfortable it's still true.

My point is that public humiliation is much more likely to create resentment than to remove unconscious bias.

That's a funny stance given the context in which the material was introduced: as evidence that powerful people are racist "by their own admission". Doesn't sound like the no-big-deal definition of racism they might have thought they were confessing to.

It also suggests it's up to session-organisers to decide what justifiably humiliates a person.

Humiliation is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see them as humiliated. They don't appear to think they are humiliated.

Perhaps it's just not humiliating.

> They don't appear to think they are humiliated

How do you know? It doesn't sound like the kind of session where honest (dissenting) exchange is encouraged.

We don't have a lot of signal on what kind of session it is. It's not the conclusion I'd jump to from one Free Beacon screenshot.

Do you think multiple people would naturally volunteer to say those things in a regular session?

I don't have nearly enough insight into the inner workings of the minds of Northwestern University Law School administrators to guess.

We have been teaching people about unconscious bias for years without these theatrics.

How well has that worked?

Pretty much every civil rights victory that has been achieved had been done through appeal to universal principles.

People in America really don’t understand what the alternative is like. Academic theater seems workable, or at least harmless at best so long as we’re standing on solid bedrock. But that’s a framework that exists so long as you maintain it. What society really looks like absent this framework is what happened in Iraq after in 2005. The first time people voted, they did so strictly along ethnic lines and then tried to annihilate each other. Or in my home country where we went to war to separate ourselves from people who had the same skin color and same religion, but spoke a different language.

The United States is the most successful multi-ethnic democracy in the world. For example, while Muslim immigrants to the US achieved economic parity within a generation or two, in countries like France they’re facing multi-generational poverty. We are not perfect. While we have successfully integrated (socially and economically) wave after wave of immigrants. We are doing it again right now—income mobility among Hispanic people is similar to white such that within a few generations incomes for these groups converge. Our persistent failure has been our inability to fix the legacy of our shameful history of slavery, segregation, and Indian removal. But nobody else has figured out how to do that either. In countries like the UK, the Black-white income gap is just as large as in the US. The gap in maternal mortality rates is even larger. And in most of the rest of Europe, it’s not even legal to keep statistics about these disparities.

Maybe some professors have figured out a better replacement for our universal values that will work better—one that replaced a broad, shared commitment to equality with individual white people admitting complicity in perpetuating systemic racism. But they probably didn’t.

I believe you are conflating quiet with success.

The United States is currently undergoing a massive upheaval in multiple major cities about its willingness to sweep racial discrimination under the rug and call it "success." It's an unstable equilibrium; it works until it doesn't.

But what have we been teaching them?

"there is no good evidence that people are unaware of their biases. While people do often express surprise at the score they get on the Implicit Association Test, that often reflects the labels that are used to express the degree of bias rather than the presence of some difference in attitudes toward different groups"

-- https://www.psychologytoday.com/ie/blog/ulterior-motives/201...

The IAT is only one measure. https://cos.gatech.edu/facultyres/Diversity_Studies/Bertrand...

I mention the IAT specifically b/c it can be used in "teaching people about unconscious bias" as a coercive tool to prove to people that they are racist i.e in the context of OP: "to help people who don't believe they are racists".

I have no problem with teaching accurate information wrt bias; but on the other hand, that metric doesn't impel people to label themselves racist, which seems to be a goal.

The IAT is pseudoscience.

The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]

> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.

The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]

> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.

Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]

[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21/

[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...

[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...

>The trainings I'm familiar with have the opposite intent

The person who ties you to a stake and burns you alive to cleanse the devil from you can sincerely intend to save your soul, but what they are doing is still horrible. Intent is vastly overrated.

This is terrifying, almost cult-like.

The fact that this is what "fighting racism" looks like when forced hysterectomies are performed on undocumented immigrants in concentration camps show that it's not really about racism for the people that are doing this.

They are just conformists. PG wrote an excellent piece about conformism here: http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html

True progressives are out there fighting current battles. Corruption, bribery, current-day slavery etc. Conformists are out there marching about battles already won like gay rights, slavery in the United States etc.

Gay rights is hardly a settled issue. If it were, the GOP wouldn't have adopted reversal of the Obergefell v. Hodges precedent as a party platform plank in 2016.

https://news.yahoo.com/richard-grenell-addresses-rnc-gop-220...

The US isn't the world.

Obviously, but calling gay rights a "battle already won" when the third largest country in the world by population still has one of its two major political parties fighting tooth-and-claw on the issue seems premature.

What do the 2 largest countries by population do?

Sadly, it's not solved in the rest of the world either.

LGBT rights in Poland and Russia are in dire straits. In Chechnya, I think they still deport gay people. In far too many countries, homosexuality is still illegal. Even in the Western world, growing up gay or trans often is associated with a measurably higher level of stress.

Of course, it got better, but it's still not over.

OK. It's missing my point, though. Gay rights is a bad example in some parts of the world, clearly. But my point was these people are usually vocal about issues that aren't really controversial.

>it's not really about racism for the people that are doing this.

It's about power and is using something people are very unlikely to disagree with to grab at power.

"We're anti-racists, therefore if you oppose us or our actions you must be racists".

"We're anti-fascist, therefore if you oppose us or our actions you must be fascists".

And it's very effective. Just look at the choke-hold it has corporate America in, in particular, at the moment.

> And it's very effective

Yes, the CRT/Woke crowd learned well from the success of Frank Lunz and similar conservatives in the 80s and 90s.

Their ideology may well break apart the country, but their linguistic propaganda is very effective, indeed.

I've been in such trainings, and I've seen lots of people get offended at hearing "you benefit from racism" as if it meant "you're racist".

Racists in positions of power may tilt the playing field in your favor whether you've asked for it or not. And it may not even be you personally, but people in your neighborhood, your social groups in general.

Jumping from generalizations about groups to specifics of individuals is inherently unjust - as is the inverse, generalizing about a group from a few individuals. Generalization from systematic group aggregation is useful for exposing systemic biases, but action should be specific to the circumstances of individuals independent of group membership or the risk of injustice is very high.

Unsafe generalization is at the root of prejudice. Racists / sexists / bigots generalize from the worst instances of individual behaviour to a group, or aggregate statistics about a group, and then apply the generalization in specific individual scenarios. A crude example, taking the generalization "Jews run global finance" - and it's true that they have been historically over-represented - and then applying the generalization to specifics: "you're a Jew, I don't like Jews because they run the world".

A good rule to bear in mind before leaping to prejudice is that the variance within groups is larger than the variance between groups.

White privilege is a prejudice concept built along the same architecture as racism and sexism. It takes aggregate group attributes and tries to enforce it in the particular against individuals. You've just rehearsed the line yourself - "you benefit from racism" - you've given an example of instantiation of a group attribute upon an individual without evidence. It is literally prejudice, and it's unjust, even if it's more likely to be true than false.

Identity politics and group thinking are the cancer of society. Everyone can be oppressed, everyone can be an opresor. Just give them a reason.

Identity politics and group thinking squished together loses a dangerous amount of nuance. Identity poltics is how self-identified liberals assert their form of universal subjectivity by splitting the working class racially (read Wilderson, Hartman, Moten and afropessimistic thought and of course Lacan). While Groupthink is naively but generally defined as: " a psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of people in which the desire for harmony or conformity in the group results in an irrational or dysfunctional decision-making outcome". The distinction thus becomes clear. Identity politics is born of the desire to divide the working classes using the disharmony of racialization causing irrational decision making, while Groupthink has the same ending but with explicitly the opposite desire.

Let's get down to the core of your argument, which to me seems to be that white privilege doesn't exist. I can spend five minutes on google and turn up a cornucopia of studies that demonstrate otherwise, so why deny the exist of racial privilege?

No, the core of my argument is that treating individuals based on aggregates is unjust, as is generalizing to aggregates based on individuals. The former is prejudice in action - from the general to the particular - and the latter is prejudice formation - unsafe generalization from the particular to the general.

I have zero doubt that many people are treated differently based on skin and other overt characteristics. But that's not my argument.

What exactly is the goal? How is this supposed to enhance the work environment?

>I've been in such trainings, and I've seen lots of people get offended at hearing "you benefit from racism" as if it meant "you're racist".

The core of the issue is that this is a stereotype being applied on a person because of their race. At no point is someone going through that person's own individual history and determining specific points where they have benefited. Instead, there is just the stereotype (which might even be true on average) that is being applied to each individual person because of their (perceived) race.

What was the word for stereotyping someone based on their race?

Well that's the thing. These diversity training people do use a different definition of racism then what you are thinking of. The diversity training definition of racism doesn't simply mean prejudiced, it means a part of a system of power that benefits people considered "white" at the expense of others. By that definition, most white people are probably "racist". If you understand the context used when they call themselves "racist", it's really not that big of a deal. It's basically just them saying, "I'm white, and I recognize that society treats me a little bit better cause of that".

I will say, I think it's strange they are asking them to admit to being racist, and "be better". It's a systemic thing, so it requires systemic change. Asking them to say they are racist and that they need to be better seems unneededly divisive.

Edit: As others have pointed out, the last sentence is kind of wrong. The paraphrase should probably say, "I recognize I'm a part of a system or systems that uphold racism". Look at the ADL's definition for racism to see what I mean:

https://www.adl.org/racism

By their definition, you are racist if you help uphold any of the "systems, institutions, or factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity."

Yes but the term "racism" is an extremely loaded term with a long history that is widely understood throughout American society. You can't just say "oh, we don't mean actually racist, we mean 'woke-racist'" and expect everyone to agree with this new definition and feel good about calling themselves woke-racist.

This stuff barely flies with hyper-progressive elites, and many of them are deeply uncomfortable with it. This is possibly the dumbest thing ever pushed by those who think they are doing good.

Why didn't they use the term "privileged" then? I'm very happy to acknowledge my privilege, but I'd have to push back if someone was asking me to declare that I'm racist. I'm also happy to hear about times I was unintentionally so, but to lump me into the same boat as the people that were screaming in my face that I'm a race traitor for holding a black lives matter sign doesn't feel fair.

>Why didn't they use the term "privileged" then?

They use that too, interchangegly and confusingly...

> Why didn't they use the term "privileged" then?

Because that word lacks any form of punch. Being "privileged" does not imply any personal responsibility; it's essentially saying you got lucky.

My understanding is that this tactic of taking very strong words like "racist" or "nazi" and superextending their definitions is just an attempt to harness the strong emotional response people have to these words and direct it at a very large group of people.

The unfortunate side effect is, that it slowly weakens the terminology, to the point where some day being a "racist" might just not be a big deal anymore.

The more direct danger of this strategy is that, in the short term, while most of the population still associates a term with a different definition, it allows quickly invoking very strong emotions with an accusation that is not technically wrong by the newer definition.

This becomes even more obvious when you look at how people often dance around these definitions to deliberately keep the newer definition as esoteric as possible, so the word retains its connotations for as long as possible.

That's not even slightly what "racist" means, though. The accepted term for what you are describing is "privileged". If you're going to assert that every white person is "racist" regardless of their beliefs, you render the term meaningless and might as well just say "white".

Well, I said "most". I was a bit wrong. It's not just benefiting from racism that makes you racist by the definition, it's being a part of one of the systems that props up racism.

Here's a definition from the ADL for systemic racism.

"A combination of systems, institutions and factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity. One person or even one group of people did not create systemic racism, rather it: (1) is grounded in the history of our laws and institutions which were created on a foundation of white supremacy;* (2) exists in the institutions and policies that advantage white people and disadvantage people of color; and (3) takes places in interpersonal communication and behavior (e.g., slurs, bullying, offensive language) that maintains and supports systemic inequities and systemic racism." [1]

So if you support one of the "systems, institutions and factors", you are by this definition, racist. I just said most white people probably are, by this definition.

[1] https://www.adl.org/racism

Don't you think that the definition of racism from a organisation that profits of fighting racism is a little bit biased?

Yes, that's my entire point. They are working with a different definition then most people.

So you agree that this definition is biased and we shouldn't use it?

I think it would be better if there was more understanding of what people were talking about when they said "racism". I personally think that this definition of "racism", is more useful, but it clearly causes misunderstanding.

I personally don't think individual racists are that big of a deal anymore. Systemic racism is much more harmful.

I even think that a little bit of the prejudice-type racism can help people overcome racism. More on that: https://qz.com/398723/slavoj-zizek-thinks-political-correctn...

Could you give me an example what constitutes systemic racism from your point of view?

It's just systemic things that end up, on large scale, hurting minorities more. For example, the judicial and prison system. Black people aren't incarcerated at such a high rate [1] because the judicial system and the police are full of KKK members or anything. It's due to a bunch of systemic problems and America's history of racism and slavery. It's a result of when America was clearly straight-forwardly racist. Like when black people couldn't buy houses in white neighborhoods. Now they have on average 10x less wealth than the average white family [2] and have access to worse schools, etc. This of course will lead more black people to turn to crime, because they have less good options, because they are on average, poorer and less educated. All the old laws and our history going back to slavery still has effects today that are compounding and allow the problem to continue to exist.

[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/graphs/raceinc.html

[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/racial-wealth-gap-costs-economy...

[3] https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-...

> It's due to a bunch of systemic problems and America's history of racism and slavery.

How do you explain then, that asian-americans (on average) outearn whites, have a higher SAT score and are less likly to be in prison? They have been impacted by racist policies too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

> This of course will lead more black people to turn to crime, because they have less good options, because they are on average, poorer and less educated. All the old laws and our history going back to slavery still has effects today that are compounding and allow the problem to continue to exist.

poverty and education dont explain those numbers, but there is (at least partly) the growing number of fatherless homes that correlate with many factors influence positive outcome. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/06/18/533062607/poverty... https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/line/107-children-in-s... You want black people to get out of this cycle? Dont be a criminal, comply with police, educate yourself, help others do the same. But somehow this is called "acting white".

> How do you explain then, that asian-americans (on average) outearn whites, have a higher SAT score and are less likly to be in prison? They have been impacted by racist policies too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

It's ridiculous to say that Asian Americans have experienced anything near the racism that black people have in the United States. I don't think they should even be included in the conversion when talking about racism. The racism they experience is mostly prejudice-type racism, not systemic.

> the growing number of fatherless homes that correlate with many factors influence positive outcome.

Well yeah, that's another systemic problem, that's partially caused by fathers being in prison and such.

> You want black people to get out of this cycle? Dont be a criminal, comply with police, educate yourself, help others do the same. But somehow this is called "acting white".

I don't follow your logic. If it's so easy for black people to get out of the cycle, why don't they? Why is it that so many black people are in the cycle vs. white people? Are you saying that black people are inherently worse?

Of course it causes misunderstanding (and so is not useful after all), because "racism" simply means something else. Use the word "complicit" maybe, but redefining words at a whim is counterproductive. Dangerous even, in the case of highly charged words like this one.

I mean, if you are using a wildly different definition than what most people understand what the word means, then it seems like you are the one making a mistake.

You should pick a different word, to describe this, since you are mostly just confusing people with the new definition that you are using.

> I think it would be better if there was more understanding of what people were talking about when they said "racism"

You do realize that one of the main reasons for redefining words is to cause confusion?

As in, we'll take this word with narrow meaning and then massively expand the meaning in order to fight our cause?

As in, nobody wants to be accused of being racist so if we reuse the word "racist" for something else we'll be able to manipulate the discourse?

If they actually used the words as they mean, people would realize that they're complaining about nothing.

Well, about real things. But using the wrong words, perhaps out of frustration.

The other unfair argument is to refute a minor point and claim there's nothing left to discuss. Like you did right there.

It's a bit troubling that the definition of racism specifies what colors the actors must be to meet the definition. That fact alone makes the definition suspect.

So the first thing you do to combat racism is to make a negative generalization of people based on their skin color? I can only imagine how effective this program is.

> The diversity training definition of racism doesn't simply mean prejudiced, it means a part of a system of power that benefits people considered "white" at the expense of others

But then everyone is racist. Including black people. Everyone is part of this society that has systemic features tht benefit whites.

So if everyone is racist, what’s the point of labeling?

I wouldn't say everyone is racist, by that definition. If you want to and are working to change or get rid of these systems, then you are not racist.

I think it’s more complicated than that based on some of the diversity books I’ve read.

For example I wasn’t even “white” until I moved to USA a few years ago. Took me 6+ years to even grok how “white” works and what it means but I’m told I was racist all along.

And yeah sure I want the system to change, but honestly I have enough work with being an immigrant without inherent rights. Hell I’m technically a visitor so I don’t even have immigration rights yet. This is not my fight to fight ... but folks say that makes me racist and privileged and how dare I.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I wasn't a "person of color" until 2009! (I distinctly remembered when it happened. I was reading ad copy about my law school, and saw that our incoming class was 30% "people of color." I had never seen the term before, and was confused by what it could mean, until I realized they were grouping all non-white people together.)

It includes some white people too! No Latino would think for half a second before identifying me as white, but because I'm also Latino, I end up as a "person of color" whenever these statistics are aggregated. And this isn't a minor edge case - something like 10% of the US population is white hispanic.

So whether you’re racist is determined by whether you are “working to change the system”? What does that mean?

If I do yes to BLM does that mean I’m not racist? What if I speak in support of BLM? Is that a blanket dispensation against being racist?

Idk, I'm just trying to logically apply the definition. I don't think you could say Malcolm X, John Brown, or MLK are racist for example. It's at least possible not to be racist by their definition.

That reminds me of "war to the death" - the only way you're not the enemy of the people is if you give up everything you had actively join the fight on our side.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_of_War_to_the_Death

What you say might be the case - that some people are trying to take a word with certain connotations and change it's definition. If they had read more, they would see the self-parody that creates.

> 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'

>These diversity training people do use a different definition of racism then what you are thinking of.

Sure, but this only reinforces u/rayiner's point. Nobody amended or replaced the Civil Rights Act. No vote was held to enshrine a broader definition of racism as legally and ethically binding on all citizens. Instead, a small clique of well-connected professional-class people are imposing this stuff top-down through their control of ostensibly private (but in fact, pseudo-private, often dependent on donations, subsidies, tax breaks, or public funding) institutions.

To my mind, the solution is simple: bring major public institutions back under full public governance and control. No more "we're on private property" rubbish from people taking tax dollars.

And, preferably, a fresh labor law enshrining protection for political opinions in the workplace that do not violate extent civil-rights laws.

> it means a part of a system of power that benefits people considered "white" at the expense of others.

This definition doesn't even bother me on face. Obviously, systems can be designed to advantage one group and disadvantage another group. And, obviously, Jim Crow effects the distribution of family wealth to this day.

What bothers me about BigCorp diversity training is something a quite different. Choose a random public company. Its stocks are almost certainly disproportionately owned by white people. Many of the older companies even did business with apartheid states in the USA (and elsewhere) pre-1960. The ones that have been around for a century might've even done business with Nazis or were even run by anti-Semites (eg Ford). But even if not, just due to the fact that wealth is disproportionately owned by white people, so too are most stocks in large companies.

Racially skewed allocation of large company's stock due to a combination of historical discrimination lumping capital into white folk's pockets until ~60 years ago and the compounded nature of wealth is EXACTLY the sort of thing actual social theorists mean when they say "structural racism".

The problem with diversity training at BigCorps is not that they talk about structural racism per se. The problem is that they use the training as a way to distract from the actual structural inequalities in our financial system and instead put the onus of change on low-level employees who have almost no access to actual power and agency within the org (or larger society). I'm half convinced that this sort of diversity training is intentional miseducation.

When I listen to these training seminars, I can't help by hear them as the board/CEO saying "please don't pay attention to our mostly white and ivy-educated executive's stock-based compensation plan or our disproportionaltely white stockholder's dividends, which are actually excellent examples of structural racism in action; look over there instead".

Focusing on things they can reasonably change is a legitimate approach. It would be defacto illegal for them to engage in racially discriminative stock sales. Asking their ownership to please give away their stocks to random minorities sounds like a fast way to get booted by the board for crashing the stock value by creating a needless controversy .

Only fanatics seriously consider large scale forced redistribution for good reason - the damage to property rights causes the market to come tumbling down as it undermines trustworthiness. Would you work for someone who just decides one day "You know what? You worked for us for a decade - we're going to need all of your remaining salary back."?

> Asking their ownership to please give away their stocks to random minorities sounds like a fast way to get booted by the board for crashing the stock value by creating a needless controversy

That's kind of my whole point, right?

It wouldn't be "systemic" or "structural" if a single CEO or a few CEOs could unilaterally fix the problem, because one man isn't a "system" or "structure". The thing that makes systemic/structural racism systemic/structural is that you'd have to radically change of the normal order of things to address the underlying problem. It's not personal, and it therefore can't be fixed by a few personal actions. It has to be fixed at the systems level.

BigCorps can't change anything about systemic racism because they are the system.

> Focusing on things they can reasonably change is a legitimate approach.

"Mandatory HR training made me rethink my views on systemic racism" -- no one ever.

In fact, I'm 100% convinced that these diversity trainings are actively counter-productive to actually changing any minds.

If you take structural racism seriously, then the idea of BigCorp "doing something" about structural racism via HR lectures to low level employees is prime facie absurd. Cindy in accounting can't do shit about structural/systemic racism... that's kind of the whole point of distinguishing it from more personal forms of discrimination/prejudice.

Training on systemic racism might make sense for powerful people with the ability to effect the functioning of systems over years/decades. Politicians, boards, CEOs, execs, VCs, maybe some managers, etc. And it's the sort of thing that activists should try to explain in public forums.

But at the individual contributor level, a much simpler regimen of "what is explicit discrimination" + "we will fire you for overt explicit discrimination because it is illegal and not aligned with our corporate values" + "dear god don't do stupid shit like wearing blackface to the company party" + maybe a short module on implicit bias is much more effective. Because that's the sort of material is actionable at the IC level, and it's the sort of thing people are open to being told by HR drones.

Half day trainings on systemic racism for Cindy in Accounting or Bob the Admin Assistant makes no god damn sense, and probably does more harm than good.

Like, seriously, HR is not the right place for this conversation. You'll lose more people than you gain by shoe-horning such a complex topic into a BigCorp training module. Stick to shop ethics.

>It would be defacto illegal for them to engage in racially discriminative stock sales.

Well, maybe they shouldn't be declaring themselves society's chosen vanguard against structural racism, then. After all, it wouldn't be forced redistribution if they volunteered to just mail every black person in the country $16,000 worth (to take an example from a film about reparations) in company stock.

> Racially skewed allocation of large company's stock due to a combination of historical discrimination lumping capital into white folk's pockets until ~60 years ago and the compounded nature of wealth is EXACTLY the sort of thing actual social theorists mean when they say "structural racism".

Ironically Ibram X. Kendi uses this exact example in "How to Be an Antiracist."

> "I'm white, and I recognize that society treats me a little bit better cause of that".

That's a complete crock. East Asians top the charts in income by ethnicity, college admissions, and have the lowest rates of criminality. For a supposed system created to benefit white people it sure is doing an awful job of it.

The common definition of racism is (from Webster but also colloquially):

"A belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race"

By broadly redefining racism in a way that removes individual agency you can declare anyone you want as racist. Then you can conveniently and selectively conflate it with the common definition to produce individual responsibility. It's a huckster tactic it's how you get things like

"I will say, I think it's strange they are asking them to admit to being racist, and "be better". It's a systemic thing, so it requires systemic change. Asking them to say they are racist and that they need to be better seems unneededly divisive."

By ensuring that the target they want is inherently racist and also individually responsible but with no possible power to change this, you can ensure an endless need for racism seminars and donations to assuage inherited guilt.

Even on its own terms, the "white privilege" theory is deficient. In terms of structural aspects of society that perpetuate race-based disadvantages, the main difference isn't between white people and everyone else, it's between Black and Native American people and everyone else: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353

> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations.... Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.

> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.... If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions that would prevail if differences in mobility rates remained constant across generations.

In terms of rhetoric, moreover, it's deliberately inflammatory. Critical theorist academics appropriated existing terms with weight connotations, like "racist" and "white supremacy," to mean more abstract, systemic things that don't necessarily imply prejudicial intent.

People should be wary of adopting this rhetoric even if well-intentioned. Just because some academics thought this rhetoric was clever doesn't mean that people of color generally want race-relations to be defined by such inflammatory rhetoric. As a purely practical matter, there is a ceiling on the fraction of white people who will actually respond in a productive way to being called a "racist" and a "white supremacist" (even if you explain to them the academic twist on the words). There is a reason we do things the way we do them. There is a reason civil rights movements have been built on appeals to universal values and the goal of color-blind equality as the ultimate ideal.

Even by their definition, how am I supposed to "be better"? If it's not my choices that are creating this system of power that benefits people considered "white", then what, specifically, am I supposed to do?

You are supposed to “be better” by being an active part of a counterbalance force so that the white-benefiting system you happen to be a part of can become everyone-benefiting.

In terms of specific actions that can mean a lot of different things! The diversity session can probably suggest a few concrete steps towards this end (I am not a DEI professional etc)

I'm sure you have sincere intentions, but I think you might benefit from being introduced to the concept of Motte and Bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

The point here is precisely to equivocate between two terms to manipulate others. You get your target to accept one claim using a relatively acceptable defintion, and the force them to concede rather more extreme claims by implicitly switching to a more self-serving definition.

They are called Struggle Sessions[0].

> Struggle sessions were a form of public humiliation and torture used by the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) at various times in the Mao era, particularly during the years immediately before and after the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and during the Cultural Revolution. The aim of struggle sessions was to shape public opinion, as well as to humiliate, persecute, or execute political rivals and those deemed class enemies.

> In general, the victim of a struggle session was forced to admit various crimes before a crowd of people who would verbally and physically abuse the victim until they confessed. Struggle sessions were often held at the workplace of the accused, but they were sometimes conducted in sports stadiums where large crowds would gather if the target was well-known.

0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session Sorry for the Wikipedia reference.

> I had to "confess" that i'm racist

Good old Struggle sessions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

If you have the opportunity, please find a way to be a whistle-blower. IANAL, but this seems like a textbook "hostile work environment" and there are lawyers out there who are definitely interested in fighting this nonsense. Your sympathetic back story would definitely help.

There's also push back at the federal level against this, and public awareness is growing.

That school appears to be abandoning the exam in favor of GPA. I certainly don't know their own data on the utility of the test vs. GPA in predicting student success, but I do know that data with respect to college admissions: HS GPA is consistently as good or slightly better than standardized test scores.

Even if the balance is tilted the other way for this particular magnet school, it's quite inflammatory to claim this initiative is in any way similar the destruction of 1,500 year old religious icons by an extremely violent group of religious extremists.

The people who "rearranged their lives" to try to get their children into the school are also in no way entitled a spot. If this school is doing an excellent job teaching students, and that absolutely appears to be the case, then more energy should be spent on expanding those same opportunities to a greater number of people, not worrying about the speculative incremental decline in quality that might be incurred when switching from one set of entrance criteria to another.

> but I do know that data with respect to college admissions: HS GPA is consistently as good or slightly better than standardized test scores.

The data I've seen says the reverse, that SAT is a better predictor than GPA, but both together contain more information.

https://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/underreview...

> then more energy should be spent on expanding those same opportunities to a greater number of people, not worrying about the speculative incremental decline in quality that might be incurred when switching from one set of entrance criteria to another.

Making all schools better is a noble goal. But I thought the point of selective magnet schools was largely to gather selected students in one place. It's not so much that you give superior teachers to some, it's that a whole class of kids who are all into math (or whatever) can be taught more, faster, than an average class.

GPA seems much more likely to be entangled with various aspects of privilege than SAT.

For instance, I attended a HS where GPA was graded on a 4.0 scale, even for advanced placement and college credit classes. The consequence is that you had a bunch of "Valedictorians" with perfect GPAs that attended spitwad classes.

Other schools I've seen grade on a 5.0 (or even a 6.0 I believe) system, to differentiate.

I would also suspect that GPA is more easily influenced by parental involvement than SAT (or just a plain IQ test).

In the first link, some administrators took part in an anti-racism training and in the second a school got rid of an entrance exam. What’s extreme about either of those things?

The first describes a quasi-religious ritual in which all participants ritually affirm that they are unworthy sinners, racists. Those who believe get the satisfaction of publicly proclaiming their sin, signaling their superiority over the outsiders. Those who don’t believe have their faces rubbed in the fact that other people have the power to make them lie in public about who they are and what they believe. It shows who is in charge.

The second is the destruction of an institution. A school for the gifted and talented with no mechanism to keep out those who are neither rapidly becomes just another school. Once the City University of New York was one of the major public research universities of the USA. Then it moved to open admissions. Now it’s nothing special. In contrast Berkeley instituted affirmative action which allows for different standards for different ethnic groups. It’s probably the top public university.

The first link is obviously against such training (as judged by links below): I can't tell the screenshot is what it is. I highly doubt the information.

The second is obviously an opinion piece as well: Being more inclusive isn't "ruining an institution" nor is changing things. It isn't like entrance exams are perfect.

Thats an over-reaction.

The first is not religious in any sense. It appears to be an acknowledgment of the bias's we all have as humans. We all have bias's, unconscious and conscious - its part of being human. In that sense we're all 'racist' to some degree and its important to acknowledge that so as to overcome it.

As far as the second example cited I think more information is missing before jumping to a conclusion.

I think there is a fair argument to be made that acknowledging bias and calling yourself racist aren't the same thing.

If you're endeavouring to acknowledge, understand and overcome biases, that isn't racism, it's anti-racism.

It is completely baffling that anyone could not see the cult characteristic of a ritual where you're required to tell everyone around you that you are inherintly guilty.

Seriously? What else do you need? Proclamation of the believe in unseen powers?

"cult characteristic of a ritual"

Thats a big stretch.

Respond with an actual argument, or don't respond at all.

> In that sense we're all 'racist' to some degree and its important to acknowledge that so as to overcome it.

No. I reject this. No matter how many times you or others tell me that I’m racist and can’t help it, and if I just pray... I mean take enough sanctioned training courses it’ll go away I will not partake. Period. Nobody is racist until proven otherwise, or racist until they’ve taken enough unconscious bias training courses. That’s something you and others are making up to deal with your own insecurities and racism. Being uncomfortable walking down the street at night because you see a black man is your racism. Not mine. No thanks.

This entire “movement” looks exactly like a witch hunt or the Soviet gulags. When someone is inconvenient, you just call them a racist since everybody is magically, automatically guilty of being racist and off they go.

I’m really sick and tired of seeing this crap. It’s ruining western civilization and creating conflict. It’s not even about race anymore. It’s just white people telling everyone they are racist so they can feel good about themselves and create positions of power and authority. Some genuinely believe this, but some also genuinely believe they are saving your soul when they pray for you.

I reject racism. I’m not a racist and you’re not going to tell me or others that we are racist just because you are or you think others are.

I suspect that a lot of people forget the concept of mens rea (sometimes through lack of critical thinking, sometimes for deliberate conflation). Labels are easy to throw around; unconscious bias gets lumped together with racism. One is culpable behaviour, the other not paying attention. But again if someone wants to push a particular point of view it's just easier to label someone else as "bad" without having to explain exactly what is bad or how bad.

For every problem there is a solution that is simple, neat—and wrong. -- H.L. Mencken

and from a different social issue but highlighting how easy it is to go from "good guy" to "bad guy";

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why they are poor, they call me a communist. -- Hélder Câmara

Mens rea as a cultural notion has been undermined by the growth of strict liability laws to be "tough on crime" plus it spares any prosecutorial inconveninces like having to prove the barest level of intent.

I am no domain expert but an ammendment to require mens rea for far more felonies as opposed to the farcical nonsense where picking up an unidentified feather could be a crime if the feather turns out to be from a bald eagle.

>No. I reject this. No matter how many times you or others tell me that I’m racist and can’t help it, and if I just pray... I mean take enough sanctioned training courses it’ll go away I will not partake. Period. Nobody is racist until proven otherwise, or racist until they’ve taken enough unconscious bias training courses. That’s something you and others are making up to deal with your own insecurities and racism. Being uncomfortable walking down the street at night because you see a black man is your racism. Not mine. No thanks.

Racism comes in many forms, it's not just about being scared of black men on the street. That's a wildly exaggerated strawman.

Everyone has biases and prejudices. Everyone. Yes, that includes you.

But people don't have the same biases and prejudices. People differ in what they're prejudiced against (or for!) and they differ in the magnitude of their prejudice.

And let's be clear: this is not just about skin colour. Gender, sexual orientation, class, accent, formal education... people have prejudices against all of these things and more.

Unconscious bias not a type of prayer or cleansing ritual. You don't stop being biased or prejudiced because you do UB training.

It is supposed to help you identify when and how that prejudice manifests itself so that you can take a step back and try and consciously try and remove your prejudices from your decision-making.

And if you reject racism, why not arm yourself with this tool? If you're not racist (or sexist or classist etc...) Why not take a couple of seconds to think "has some stereotype about this person lead me to this conclusion? No? Okay, let's carry on..."

> Everyone has biases and prejudices. Everyone. Yes, that includes you.

Everyone is a sinner (not the Pope, tho). Yes, that includes you! Go confess and do your penance

Congratulations for completely missing the point of my comment. Please go back and read it in good faith.

It's _not_ a value judgement. People aren't evil for having biases. They're not sinners because they do, and they don't have to do penance.

congratulations on missing the point of the whole thread.

Also, for having biases, people are actually getting called evil (racist, nazi, bigot, etc) every day, and are expected to apologize/be fired/read more sacred texts/participate in group exorcisms/etc

Political activists regularly equivocate between "racism as unconscious bias", "racism as benefiting from systemic forces", and "racism a overt discrimination" at will, going to whatever definition is expedient to achieving their tactical aims. It's not a truth-seeking process, it's psychological manipulation. A growing minority of people are recognizing those tactics for what they are and rightly rejecting them.

And for the record, unconscious bias training has not been shown to have any correlation with actual discriminatory behavior, and the the researchers who developed the test reject how it is being used in these training sessions.

> I’m really sick and tired of seeing this crap. It’s ruining western civilization and creating conflict.

It’s ruining western civilization and creating conflict for whom? Western civilization has always been marked by conflict for some.

On the first, you’re overreacting. I’ve gone through such training and it was nothing like you describe.

Did you have to say "I'm a gatekeeper of white supremacy" to complete the training? Either your threshold for "looks cultish" is very high or you didn't go through that kind of training.

I was never compelled to say anything at all; however, it did cause me to think more subtly about racism and white supremacy in my life rather than simplifying it to a reactive good/bad:racist/not racist dichotomy. Perhaps this is all more subtle, complicated, and bonding than the fringe culture warriors would like us to believe.

As with many things, nuance is important. Sensitize people to larger issues is one thing, creating a cult they have to submit to is another.

You can tell people about factory farms without screaming "cow rapist". You can tell people about privilege without spiraling into some racist cult. But that would probably be class privilege, which is much better at predicting success than the color of your skin.

Based on the experiences that I - and my wife - have had in trainings of this type, I am somewhat skeptical that any such “cult” exists. There were moments of discomfort, but I was never coerced or made to feel negative about myself as a white man. I have always walked away from these events with a better sense of myself (for good and bad) which I view as a positive thing.

I’m not white, and the presence of the things we call white privilege and racism is blindingly obvious to anyone who grew up like me.

However, I have also routinely seen cult-like, and racist behavior in diversity training, and frankly in anti-racist activism.

I’m glad you didn’t experience these. I also think that the work can be done in a nuanced way that avoids the pitfalls.

Unfortunately I think this is becoming less and less common as a drive to scale delivery of these kinds of trainings causes the quality to drop.

> The first describes a quasi-religious ritual in which all participants ritually affirm that they are unworthy sinners, racists.

Why would being racist make someone an unworthy sinner? Racism is just treating others differently based on their race. It’s not weird or evil. In fact, it’s perfectly normal and even understandable. Humans have probably always separated themselves into groups. Even chimpanzees do it. I think that’s what the trainings try to get at.

> The second is the destruction of an institution. A school for the gifted and talented with no mechanism to keep out those who are neither rapidly becomes just another school. Once the City University of New York was one of the major public research universities of the USA. Then it moved to open admissions. Now it’s nothing special. In contrast Berkeley instituted affirmative action which allows for different standards for different ethnic groups. It’s probably the top public university.

Meanwhile, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and UVA all have affirmative action and are doing fine. Decades of supposedly different standards haven’t hurt their standing. They continue to graduate a diverse class of high achievers that are well-represented in just about every field imaginable. How does that square with your claims?

Are you sure you’re not the extremist? You seem to have an axe to grind.

> Meanwhile, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Stanford, and UVA all have affirmative action and are doing fine. Decades of supposedly different standards haven’t hurt their standing. They continue to graduate a diverse class of high achievers that are well-represented in just about every field imaginable. How does that square with your claims?

That’s the entire point of comparing CUNY and Berkeley. You can maintain prestige while having different standards for different ethnic groups. You can’t while having no standards. Eliminating entrance exams is how CUNY did it. Different standards is how Berkeley and Harvard etc. do it. That’s not what is being proposed for the gifted school in question. It’s the elimination of standards.

Fine, the University of Chicago, Wake Forest, and almost all of the elite liberal arts colleges (Williams College, Swarthmore College, Bowdoin College, etc) are test optional or test free and no worse for it.

Standardized tests are one measure of academic merit and not even the best one. There are plenty of 1500s reporting to 1250s.

Elite colleges relying on high school grades and letters of recommendation instead of objective blindly marked tests open to all is replacing one test with others. The others allow much more room for picking the right sort of person. That was the entire point of instituting holistic admission at prestige US universities, to keep out Jews. The modern drive to eliminate tests is in large part to keep out Asians. Nothing ever changes. Those in power change the standards to stay in power.

Standardized tests could also be considered a way for picking the right kind of person: namely, people who know that standardized tests are something to prepare for. I’ve tutored students at both elite and underperforming high schools. Students at elite schools, irrespective of their socioeconomic status, are highly aware of the importance of standardized tests. Some of the underperforming high schools don’t even administer the PSAT. Many, if not most students at the low-income schools think the SAT is an IQ test where the results are predetermined. I’ve had kids go from the low 30th percentile to the mid 80th percentile with just a few months of tutoring. After I’ve taught them how to practice the test, they improve dramatically. I’m not making them smarter, just passing along some cultural and educational capital they literally would not get otherwise. Their parents and teachers do not know this stuff.

As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans.

> "As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans."

If you're Asian and you're reading this, never forget that the above is what progressives believe about how society treats Asians: transgressions against you get simply waved away. Think twice about supporting them.

For the record, I am Asian and a liberal but definitely not progressive.

You’re right.

I was wrong to minimize the struggles of Asians in this country. There is real discrimination against Asians. Your comment and others have changed my view. Thanks for helping me work through my own blind spots on this issue. I didn’t mean to wave away your pain.

Bravo

Studies disagree that you on avg. see large gains from test prep on the SAT.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/sat-prep-courses-do-the...

>As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans.

Looks like the courts found that Harvard's admissions system did not qualify as legally discriminatory, but did nonetheless somewhat disadvantage Asian-American applicants. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/01/us/harvard-admissions-law...

> As for affirmative action being an effort to keep out Asians...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans.

Are there any elite school (so sourcing students from the same pool of applicants) that don't include race in their admission process? Would be interesting to compare the demographics.

I believe it is illegal in california to consider race for public universities, so you could look at Caltech and Berkeley which fit most definitions of elite schools. Caltech is 48% Asian, while MIT is 25.7% for undergrad.

There is the in-state vs out of state tuition distinction, so it's not exactly the same pool as east coast universities.

Sources: https://registrar.caltech.edu/records/enrollment-statistics https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/massachusetts-instit....

> I believe it is illegal in california to consider race for public universities, so you could look at Caltech and Berkeley which fit most definitions of elite schools. Caltech is 48% Asian, while MIT is 25.7% for undergrad.

These are interesting stats but they don't actually mean anything unless you can prove that the applicant pools for Caltech and Berkeley are similar to that of MIT. It's entirely possible, that Caltech and Berkeley have a higher proportion of Asian applications. It's also possible that underrepresented minorities that could be admitted to Caltech or Berkeley pick Harvard or Princeton because they're more well-regarded and more diverse. I wouldn't be surprised. Elite schools compete for the same kids.

Caltech and MIT sounds like an interesting example: They are both extremely highly ranked (systematically among the top 5 in the world) and engineering/science focused.

Considering their ranking I would be willing to bet their applicant pool might significantly overlap (seeing as they attract world wide talent).

>...have you been to Harvard’s campus? There are many, many Asian students there. In fact, nearly one in five students at Harvard are of Asian descent. The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face....

So, as long as you see some people of a given race and it meets some arbitrary % in your mind, that's enough, is that the argument you're making? No discrimination going on then?

This level of lack of critical thinking here is astounding, and it's sad (actually scary) that opinions like this might guide admissions policies.

Harvard makes an effort to create a diverse class of students. That includes race but it also includes geography. Is Harvard excluding kids from New Jersey and New York because it goes out of it's way to admit kids from Nebraska and Montana?

Look, sir, friend, random person on the internet --

I'm likely not going to change your mind, and I'm not going to revisit this thread again after I click away, so take this just as one person to another giving some advice as if we were strangers talking to each other honestly with no consequences.

Check yourself once in a while that you don't go falling the hole of deceiving yourself that you're right, using any cobbled together argument you can find. Because you sound like you're ready to trade off people's lives using whatever traits you think are equivalent, in the name of diversity or some symbolic goal you wish to achieve.

When someone lives in a certain state and applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to new geographies, all to the better.

When Harvard says that no matter how good you are, because you're Asian, your achievements will be weighed a little less because we have enough of them, I cannot believe that you are unable to see how that's different.

And your principles of how you judge whether there are "enough" Asians, well, sir, they could equally be used by someone to say there are "enough" black students or Hispanic students, or any minority, by someone less well-intentioned.

I would rather have the approach where no one is deciding that there's "enough" of some group based on their favored characteristic of the day.

> When someone lives in a certain state and applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to new geographies, all to the better.

When is applies to university, they have the opportunity to show their worth and skills by their achievements. When Harvard seeks to broaden their search for those people to underrepresented minorities, all to the better.

I understand why the parallels make you uncomfortable. You’d need to ask yourself why you’re fine giving the kid from Montana a leg up. Better not to think about it.

> Is Harvard excluding kids from New Jersey and New York because it goes out of it's way to admit kids from Nebraska and Montana?

"According to enrollment data from the Office of Admissions provided by Faculty of Arts and Sciences spokesperson Anna Cowenhoven, 51.5 percent of the non-international students who enrolled in Harvard’s Class of 2018 hail from just four states: New York, New Jersey, California, and Massachusetts." https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/3/26/regional-divers...

The following has numbers by state that seem consistent with the article from the Crimson: https://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/harvard-university/s...

It suggests that (New York and New Jersey) have over an order of magnitude more students admitted to Harvard per capita than (Montana and Nebraska).

> The idea that elite schools are purposely excluding Asians is absurd on its face. The people pushing the idea have an axe to grind and it usually isn’t actually in the interest of Asian-Americans.

My high school was 70% Asian. Projections are that getting rid of the entrance exam will drop it to about 30% Asian. (Ironically, the group that will benefit the most from the lottery is white people.) The elite schools are capping the percentage of Asians--you can see this by comparing against schools that don't practice holistic admissions.

Affirmative action and lottery-based admissions in particular is, in at least a narrow and direct sense, contrary to "the interest of Asian-Americans" just as its contrary to the interests of white Americans. Standardized testing offers a direct path to the middle and upper middle class for Asian immigrants (as well as other immigrant groups such as Nigerians who come to the U.S. with lots of education but not necessarily money). Asians have extremely high levels of income mobility in the U.S.--an kid growing up in the bottom 20% has a 27% chance of ending up in the top 20%; double the odds for a white kid born in the bottom 20%. My dad was born in a village in Bangladesh. Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc.

In "How to be an Anti-Racist," Ibram X. Kendi defines "equity" as the representation of a group in an organization reflecting the representation of the group in the general population. Any other distribution, he declares, is the product of systemic racism. I don't think Kendi was thinking about the implications of that statement for non-white, non-Black people, but they are alarming for Asians, Jews, Nigerians, etc. Imagine cutting Harvard down from 20% Asian to 5-6% Asian. Or Google or Facebook! What do you think that would do to Asian income mobility?

Now, I happen to support measures to reduce disparities for ADOS people, because all Americans have a common obligation to remediate the nation's history of slavery and segregation. To that end, I support things like traditional affirmative action.

At the same time, Asians are a minority and have to be realistic about the fact that they are not similarly-situated to either white people or Black people and do not have identical interests to either group. Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.

> Thanks to the SAT, my brother and I are comfortably in the top 1%. The U.S. system of "meritocracy" (such as it is) is extremely effective at helping us distinguish ourselves from upper middle class white people who have more cultural competency, social connections, etc.

I would argue that understanding the importance of the SAT is a form of cultural competency.

> Holistic measures that limit the Asians at elite educational institutions and businesses to 20-25% may be tolerable. Measures like lotteries that would reduce Asian representation down to 5-6% would be a dramatic negative change.

We shouldn't limit the number of Asians at top universities or companies. But we shouldn't be content with a system that perpetuates a status quo built on our country's original sin. We have to do something proactively. Maybe it's reparations. Maybe it's universal pre-kindergarten or means-tested baby bonds. But it's something instead of nothing.

> Why would being racist make someone an unworthy sinner? Racism is just treating others differently based on their race. It’s not weird or evil. In fact, it’s perfectly normal and even understandable. Humans have probably always separated themselves into groups. Even chimpanzees do it. I think that’s what the trainings try to get at.

Chimpanzees murder. Just because primates have been doing something for millions of years doesn't make it acceptable. We have the capability to rise above our instincts and make rational decisions about who we want to be.

Treating others differently based on their race is fundamentally unethical. You're not an irredeemably broken person just because you've done something unethical in the past, but saying "well everyone does it" or "it's just natural" is just refusing personal responsibility.

Maybe some people honestly can't accept the idea that they have done something wrong, and would cling to a belief that deep down they knew was wrong if they didn't have such an "out" to preserve their view of themselves. They'ed rather double down on racism than admit they've knowingly treated people incorrectly.

For most people though, acknowledging a problem is the first step to solving it. Everyone alive today has spent the vast majority if not the entirety of their lives in a world where the idea of racial superiority has been thoroughly discredited. The emphasis on certain features like skin color over others like hair color in segregating people is an entirely learned behavior. For racism to endure to the degree it does today, enormous numbers of people must have actively chosen to learn this behavior and refused to change. It hardly seems unreasonable to conclude that for many, telling them that something is normal and natural robs them of their imperative to change.

Why would being racist make someone an unworthy sinner?

Because those who were enlightened before you now hold the power. They removed the scales from your eyes, so now the power structure has been set. All you need to do is obey.

> Are you sure you’re not the extremist? You seem to have an axe to grind.

I'm sure once you're downvoted to invisibility, you're takeaway will be that "HN is a bunch of extremists", instead of the more reasonable "why are a bunch of mild-mannered software developers whose culture has always been open to different types of people strongly disagreeing with what I say?".

Could it be that we see a danger in this that you do not? It's seems fairly obvious to me that our country is starting to crumble around us. Perhaps you're living in a situation where that's not apparant.

The issue is these institutions cast a way wider net for their admission pool compared to a high school.

Really, MIT gets applicants from everywhere in the world and kids will gladly relocate to Boston to attend. A high school, especially a public one, can only expect applicants from its county.

The comparison to religious rituals is interesting. As someone who is Catholic, this looks to me sort of like an attempt at a group confession, but at least in the Catholic tradition we perform examinations of conscience [1] and go to confession [2] and we are told to come to terms with what we actually did wrong. You don't get away with some vague acknowledgement of being a sinner. As the Catechism says, "Through such an admission [a person] looks squarely at the sins he [or she] is guilty of, [and] takes responsibility for them."

Whether one agrees with Catholics on any number of things (and many reasonable people do not), there is a certain logic to the idea that before you can be better, you have to actually say what's wrong. Forcing a group of people to self label as racist in the way described above is unmoored from reality: even if one had done things that were racist in the past, there is no looking squarely at one's short comings, and there is no taking responsibility for anything. And for someone who hadn't done anything racist, or for someone who claims to have never done anything racist, it's just a show, and things won't actually get better in a meaningful way.

[1] https://www.usccb.org/prayer-and-worship/sacraments-and-sacr...

[2] https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p2s...

Not to mention that the Catholic form of confession doesn't require you to publicly proclaim your "sins" in front of your peers!

It's arguably a Protestant heresy (specifically a variant of the Social Gospel) which removes God, Jesus, and the forgiveness of sins.

I’m one of those “extremists” who went to TJ and supports the end of the test. What can I do to convince you that I’m a real person and not a lunatic?

I don’t believe you’re a lunatic. I believe your values are inimical to excellence and that you support destroying one of the tiny number of schools that support accelerated education for gifted children in the USA. That benefits no one and harms the children deprived of the opportunity to go to a school where they are challenged.

And how is this disagreement not only "extremism," but only "extremism" on the opposite side than the one you support?

But you led with people like me as example of extremism in modern discourse. What makes me not an extremist but my peers extremists?

It is true that we probably have somewhat different values. I don't personally value TJ having some high rating as decided by magazines and would happily sacrifice scores if I believed it was possible to better provide education to gifted students across Fairfax County. And I do believe that the test makes it harder for FCPS to do this well, though it certainly allows TJ to select for specific kinds of students that make it score well in magazine ratings.

I also believe that it is not good to separate students into many strata earlier in life and believe that the lottery limits the effect of wealth and other inequities on young kids. You may believe that we should reward students who studied their brains out in school, did test prep on weekends, and joined clubs so they could round out a resume. Those are different values and that's okay.

It is also very likely that we have different opinions about the expected outcome of ending the test. I believe that it will make it easier, not harder for students to access high quality education and recognizing that there are so many students that could succeed at TJ will encourage FCPS to allocate more resources to magnet programs so there can be more slots for these students. I also hope that this will demonstrate the need for a humanities-focused alternative, which currently does not exist (the humanities education offered at TJ is atrocious, IMO). I also believe that moving away from strict testing as the primary mechanism for excellence will help TJ recover some of its creative side that is so valuable for young learners. The creativity available during 8th period has been slowly crushed under the weight of standardized learning processes over the last several decades. A lot of the skills I learned during 8th period are no longer made available to students in order to serve the almighty test score. I hope that admitting smart students who aren't bound to testing will help this.

It is also very likely that we have different opinions about the ability of the test to separate students into strata.

I do not support destroying TJ. I believe that this makes FCPS education better and encourages more TJs.

We disagree. That's fine. But you list my peers among extremists and you claim that I intend to sabotage quality education. Why is your position not extreme?

If you read what I wrote you will not find the word extremist anywhere. I didn’t say you you intend to sabotage quality education. I said you were against excellence. Turning a gifted school into a normal one will in practice be the end of academic acceleration. There’s no reason to believe getting rid of an option for the gifted will benefit anyone. If you have any examples to the contrary please share. Academic acceleration is rare in the US.

> If you read what I wrote you will not find the word extremist anywhere.

I missed that you were a different poster than the one I responded to.

> I didn’t say you you intend to sabotage quality education. I said you were against excellence. Turning a gifted school into a normal one will in practice be the end of academic acceleration.

But it isn't turning a gifted school into a normal one. The proposal still requires accelerated math background, high test scores, and recommendations from administrators. The teachers will remain strong. The proposal isn't a raw lottery among all FCPS students. The proposal isn't cutting funding for the astronomy lab. The option for the gifted won't vanish. The same population of people will be able to apply to TJ.

I am not "against excellence". I do value other things in different ratios, perhaps. If somebody told me that the average AP scores at TJ would go down by 0.2 points and the school would have a population of free-and-reduced-lunch kids that matched the general population of FCPS, I'd say that was a good trade. I may value "excellence" less than you (for some definition of excellence) but I don't oppose it.

I also believe that TJ's test focus (and AP focus) leads to a suboptimal pedagogy. Look at how 8th period has changed over the last several decades. Gone are the opportunities for wild experimentation and creativity outside of the norm. I believe that students are being forced into boxes at TJ and that eliminating the test will make it more clear that TJ can better serve its students with a wider set of opportunities for its kids.

I know a fair number of alumni who wouldn't encourage their kids to attend TJ because the "excellence" it provides is so limited in scope. Students can feasibly be exposed to better curricula in IB and to wider ranges of human experiences at accelerated programs within base schools. I don't know if I fully agree, but the fact that very smart, successful, and educate people can look at TJ and say "I do not agree that this is a pinnacle of excellence" should make us all step back and understand that we don't agree on what excellence means.

You did also use the phrase "support destroying..." when describing me and my beliefs. I think that "sabotage" is a reasonable match to that.

I do not support the entrance standards you describe but if the school is as AP test centric as you describe not that much will be lost. I oppose any standards that for a gifted and talented school that allow anything but test scores on blindly marked tests to count because I trust that they will be used to keep the wrong sort out, whether that’s currently Asians or Jews.

IB is at best very little better than AP. If you’re not teaching actual college level material like Bard College at Simon’s Rock[1] a limited amount will be lost by allowing administrators more leeway to discriminate against Asians.

I apologize for my overwrought language. I pattern matched your opposition to the current regime to the Ed school orthodoxy or the San Franciscan attempt to actually end Lowell.

[1] https://simons-rock.edu/academics/index.php

> if the school is as AP test centric as you describe not that much will be lost

The school is stunningly AP centric. When I attended, total number of AP courses taken was the primary measure distinguishing students. There were entire core classes that were not offered as non-AP courses. It is a major metric in what makes the school so highly rated in magazines.

The school does teach advanced classes, but the best stuff isn't in the test-driven structure. I'm married to a college professor and friends with many of them. The idea that APs are equivalent to college courses is largely bunk.

> a limited amount will be lost by allowing administrators more leeway to discriminate against Asians.

How precisely is a random lottery that requires certain education history and grades to enter discriminating against asians? Asian students still disproportionately make up lottery-eligible students.

> How precisely is a random lottery that requires certain education history and grades to enter discriminating against asians? Asian students still disproportionately make up lottery-eligible students.

Don’t forget the administrator letters. Or that the random lottery’s purpose is to move from admissions by moving from highest score down until the classes are filled to fulfills minimum requirements. That latter is to reduce the proportion and number of Asians. It’s phrased as a student body more reflective of the district’s student population but the effect, which is both foreseen and desired is to reduce the number of Asians.

I didn't call anyone a lunatic. But believing that we should abandon testing entire is an opinion that is extreme in the sense it's not widely held: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/02/25/most-americ...

Super majorities of people believe race should play no factor at all in college admissions. And grades and standardized test scores are the two things people list first as criteria that should govern admissions decisions. I do not believe that folks who would advocate abandoning standardized testing entirely based on the premise that they're irredeemably flawed are not expressing a widely-held opinion.

Notably, TJ isn't a college.

And a full 12% of surveyed people in the article you cite think that testing should play no role in college admissions. It 12% is below the bar for "extreme" then a tremendous number of beliefs that are common among the tech crowd should be labeled as "extreme".

I think you are using a rhetorical trick to retreat. I'm not coming for your children.

Separately from the admissions testing debate: what is your view on the "gatekeepers of white supremacy" and the assorted "I am a racist" declarations?

I don't believe that you believe that this is actually separate. Why else would my opinion matter here?

I know very little about HR departments and bias training. I do know a lot of academics who study race in fields like history and sociology and I do know that people scream at some of them and call them anti-white even though their scholarship is very rigorous. So I would expect there to be a range of quality among bias training and that both high and low quality bias training causes certain groups of people to lash out. But I also have basically no information here.

Well one matter is about inclusivity and the other is about innocent people being coerced into declaring themselves racist.

Separating the two helps the audience determine if you’re speaking in good faith, or if you’re trying to rationalize and cover up an injustice.

Screeds generally indicate the latter.

Maybe you're aware, but your first source is far from unbiased.

I'm not even American but I've found the more pompous a thing is named, the more likely it is to be Republican backed. I guess it's their penchant for drama :-)

I wasn't able to find the details about this course the faculty participated in but I wouldn't read too much into it. For some of these you must describe yourself as a racist and apologise for your evil. Suggesting that perhaps you're not that bad means it's even worse than we feared.

I don't think someone who really was a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" would describe themselves that way.

Being racist isn’t the same as being evil. Just about everyone, to some extent, is racist. I don’t see how that’s an extreme claim. Humans are a social species. We have in-groups and out-groups. Often times the most salient marker for whether someone is in your group is whether they share certain phenotypes or language. There’s nothing weird about that. It’s expected. It’s our default setting. But it does lead to treating some people differently than others. That’s racism.

In racism training, you simply acknowledge that by being human, you are racist. You can’t cure it anymore than you can cure alcoholism. It’s always with you and if you care to not be racist, you have to be aware of that.

Why is that claim uncomfortable?

We may tend to prefer in-groups as humans, but there's no reason why one's "in-group" should be defined by race. Indeed the whole notion of 'race' itself is largely artificial, historically- and locally-contingent, and thus so is racism. If the claim was that as humans, we're all naturally driven to be more broadly biased and perhaps intolerant towards some others, that would be far more defensible.

> We may tend to prefer in-groups as humans, but there's no reason why one's "in-group" should be defined by race.

I agree! There’s no reason in-groups should be defined by race...but, at least in the United States, it was quite literally legislated in law for centuries and formed the basis of a slave state and then segregation. So it seems like race has historically been one way we define in-groups and out-groups. Based on current events, I’d argue race is still pretty important to a lot of people. Otherwise our politics wouldn’t be...whatever you want to call them.

> Indeed the whole notion of 'race' itself is largely artificial, historically- and locally-contingent, and thus so is racism.

Race is socially constructed but it’s definitely real. Racism is also real.

This is a cult like approach. The main proposition "Everyone is a racist, whether you know it or not", is an overstatement. There is no way you can tell "everyone" is a "racist", is just an aphorism with multiple interpretations. This has become the tool of identity politics and group thinking, throw and aphorism and let people fight over it. Unfortunate.

Hm. Humans are built to identify with a group, absorb culture, and be uncertain and uneasy when not in their group or their culture. That can easily lead to treating different people differently, and to the conclusion.

It's not completely true though. We usually reserve the term for active, conscious acts. Not just unconscious bias. So maybe we need a new word for that?

The claim is uncomfortable because the word "racism" has a connotation in some circles of basically being a klansman (or at the least of actively hating people based on nothing except for their race).

Admitting said claim for those people does not feel like acknowledging the system we live in against their will or that they have unconscious biases. It feels like acknowledging a serious character defect, worthy of ostracism, being fired, and possibly having a mob show up at your house.

Now, I'm not a prescriptivist. I acknowledge that language evolves, but it does not evolve the same way in every place at the same time. It tends to evolve in a particular place and spread out from there. The particular definition you're using has not spread to the entirety of society yet. Your pitch could really benefit from some localization to the various sub-dialects of the english language if you'd like less push back in the future.

As the product of another of the Governor's Schools in Virginia, I've been in favor of the move away from admissions tests to increase diversity opportunity. A lot of students can't afford $100 for testing, and GPA should be a fine proxy for student performance.

Give it a few years to see if the drop-out rate changes.

They sound like people who've been through a re-education camp.

The event described in that article about Northwestern was voluntary, as were the statements of that Dean.

Statements of that sort are meant to be acknowledgement that systemic racism is universal and perpetuates through us at the individual level, and usually in ways far more subtle than police brutality or the use of racial slurs.

One of the most anti-racist things that one can do is acknowledge the racism in themselves, and keep that in mind and in check when making decisions that affect others. Never trust when someone says they are absolutely not racist - it's something we all struggle with because of our shared conditioning.

A Dean saying they are racist and a "gatekeeper of white supremacy" is just acknowledging that through the power of their position, thet exercise a system that furthers white privilege.

If anything, that Dean should be applauded for confronting and acknowledging their own role in racist systems.

All the same, I can acknowledge that part of me becomes somewhat racist when walking through a less white part of town at night (and I'm not white).

It doesn't matter if they were voluntary. They were hostile and cult-ish. This was a Zoom meeting attended by hundreds of students, many of them not even American and most likely unfamiliar with how academics are defining those words today. As a non-white person I would have been extremely uncomfortable sitting through that. We can talk about systemic racism and implicit bias without the theatrics and personal confessions of responsibility.

> They were hostile and cult-ish.

Hostile to whom? People who deny the existence of systemic and institutional racism?

> As a non-white person I would have been extremely uncomfortable sitting through that.

Why? I ask because I'm also a non-white person who has sat through just those kind of discussions. They weren't "comfortable" - no introspective discussion of racism is - but they certainly were not hostile because the participants came with charity and a desire to understand themselves and the context better.

The tone of any conversation, defined by the attitudes of those who participate, has a great deal to do with the way people experience it.

The 'Founding Fathers' in the US were landowners, merchants, and publishers. This is a common pattern.

Spoken as a skilled cultural warrior that knows which weaponized stories to deploy to generate outrage for their side.

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