So even if that Dean said he is a racist, he's probably not unless you warp the definition of racism.
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.
"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...
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 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-...
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.
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 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?
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?
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.
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.
Morgan Freeman (black) has said it years ago: "Stop talking about it".
what's humiliating about having the same problem that basically everyone does?
It also suggests it's up to session-organisers to decide what justifiably humiliates a person.
Perhaps it's just not humiliating.
How do you know? It doesn't sound like the kind of session where honest (dissenting) exchange is encouraged.
I wonder how scientific this understanding is
https://diversity.ucsf.edu/resources/state-science-unconscio...
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
By contrast, your motte: "training on how to work with people from diverse backgrounds.
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?
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.
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.
In other words, there's no magically non-racist person out there. Everyone's a little bit racist.
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.
There's a world of difference between confronting one's unconscious bias and unapologetic, willful racism.
If there's such a world of difference, why conflate the two using the same word?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/10/us/merriam-webster-racism...
I think the same principle applies here. Malicious racism and passive racism have the same effect.
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.
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...).
Not "suggesting" - demanding, and specifically labelling themselves "racist" - not just admitting that they benefit from it.
So not much more to say on this topic without specific examples.
The fact my colleague took it so personally says more about them, I think, than the training.
Religious rituals seem totally normal to the initiated and strange and cult-ish to others.
I don't believe the similarity to Maoist struggle sessions is an accident, it's born from the same general school of thought.
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.
Nonsense. The Cultural Revolution had much to do with Marxist philosophy. For goodness’ sake, read the May 16 Notification and Sixteen Points.
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.
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...)
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://news.yahoo.com/richard-grenell-addresses-rnc-gop-220...
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.
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.
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 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
You miss the biggest goal: for departments of diversity, inclusion, etc to gain more power and hires.
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.
* 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
So, benefit there. ;)
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.
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.
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).
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.
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)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
I have zero doubt that many people are treated differently based on skin and other overt characteristics. But that's not my argument.
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?
Good old Struggle sessions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
There's also push back at the federal level against this, and public awareness is growing.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What if I'm not racist, but the rest of my employees are, and I want my team to be cohesive and productive?
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:
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."
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.
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...
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.
The other unfair argument is to refute a minor point and claim there's nothing left to discuss. Like you did right there.
You should pick a different word, to describe this, since you are mostly just confusing people with the new definition that you are using.
[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-...
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".
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?
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".
Ironically Ibram X. Kendi uses this exact example in "How to Be an Antiracist."
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."?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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?
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)_/¯
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?
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.
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.
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.
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)
> '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.'
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.
They use that too, interchangegly and confusingly...
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.