"It's a bit repugnant."
Wow, really? Suggesting that a more diverse leadership team would better understand the potential downside of a police state is now distasteful?
Wow, really? Suggesting that a more diverse leadership team would better understand the potential downside of a police state is now distasteful?
That said, the parent poster said that many leadership positions, plural, were filled by people of color. I think it's probably reasonable to say that a community of many political leaders of color are more familiar with systemic racism. These are folks who specifically choose to get involved in politics and leadership, and likely represent fairly large constituencies. It's not unreasonable to assume that they broadly have experience or are able to communicate with their communities that have experience with systems that negatively impact people of color.
There's a big difference between, "These are the observed results" and "These people are inherently X". And especially different than, "Person is Y, therefore they are good/bad at X".
The first statement is open ended, it keeps the door open to systemic factors outside of race that might correlate with race. It also doesn't suggest that everyone of a particular group is better/worse at something.
The second statement says that there's something intrinsic to that everyone of that race. It sets up expectations for a group of people. Maybe you are an Asian who isn't good at math? How does that make you feel? How will you be impacted by other people making assumptions about you?
The third statement is applying stereotypes to individuals, which is just never going to be a good idea.
The differences between the first and second statements are subtle, but important.
And as parent pointed out, it's the leap from observed results to expectations about a racial group (or many groups in this case) that makes it racist.
So what would be the proper way to describe an ethnic group that, when examined purely statistically, really has performed well above average in mathamatics?
Do we simple never acknowledge that such differences exist, as some people have signalled?
Exactly the way you said it. "Statistically speaking, controlling (or not controlling) for relevant factors foo, bar, and baz, group X outperforms other groups such Y, and Z in tests of skill A". Which isn't the same thing as "X is good at A". "X is good at A" is a meaningless statement. It's devoid of context and prone to overgeneralization. It's not useful for anything.
Or even statistics like that to show what cloud hosting company overall has the best uptime?
I guess your saying that for any group, statistics are "not useful for anything"
I'm genuinely somewhat dumbfounded by this apparent difference.
"The Patriots have statistically scored more yards per game than average." Vs.
"Patriots team members are good at scoring yards." Vs.
"You are on the Patriots, therefore you are good at scoring yards"
In aggregate, the players perform in some positive or negative way, but you can't just apply that statistic to any individual player or even say that the players are unusually good at that thing. Maybe they have a great coaching staff, maybe they are cheating, maybe they have a few star players who push up the statistics.
And even more than that...I am seeing how old assumptions I've made don't hold up the way I've always thought they did.
edit: tbh, it's usually a pragmatic belief. It's easier to convince upper-middle class black people that what you want to do is good for black people in general (because their culture largely overlaps yours and they share your values), and wealthy black people and average black people look the same in pictures.
edit2: I hate to come back to this, but just look up Ray Nagin and his response to the hurricane that ultimately washed all of the black people out of New Orleans for an idea of the character of a lot black leadership in the south, and its total disconnection from any working class awareness. Just looked him up now to see what happened to him since and was not surprised.
Skin color is a poor proxy for diversity of thought or experience. We could instead just treat people as individuals and not draw broad conclusions on skin color.
Even more so in that scenario, I'd think.
If you've eliminated all the other variables, race would be the only differentiator of experience in that grouping.
(Of course, the reality of the non-hypothetical world is that people of different races tend to also have different schools, economic conditions, etc.)
I don't think that's the case at all. Again, skin color is a poor signifier for experience, and while it's good to acknowledge that person's life is impacted by their race, thinking that race is the only differentiator is silly.
Individuals are determined by more than their level of melatonin.
I suspect people of color would tend to disagree. It's likely a black person will have experiences not shared by your average white person, just like Americans may have experiences unique to them, or men, or disabled people, or people with any other characteristic that distinguishes them from others.
> thinking that race is the only differentiator is silly
No one said only.
> Individuals are determined by more than their level of melatonin.
Sure, but your hypothetical was "what if those things were gone?"
Regardless of that, it actually isn't clear that a more diverse leadership team brings better understanding. They may bring a diversity of understanding that is important to consider--it's not "better", in the sense that without their participation others would not see the potential downside.
Police state activities don't adversely impact just those in minority populations.