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Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

Yes, things like "Asians are good at math" is racist, even if it's a positive stereotype.

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.

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So I do not really understand this. (To me having racial categories is racist already, but this seems to be fine/non racist in the US). So would a statement like 'Asians perform significantly higher (by so and so amounts of standard deviation) on Math tests than Caucasians' a racist stereotype while still beiing a fact?

It's not racist to explain why the majority of your quants are Asian. It is racist to hire a quant because they're Asian. In politics, people tend to do the latter.

Good question.

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.

So then you are saying the statement 'Asians are good at math' is not the short version of 'we observed that asians are better at math then other races' but the short version of 'Asians are inherently better at math' and therefor racist?

The generic "Asians are good at math", in this context, is probably extended as "We observed that certain groups of Asians are good at math, therefore, all Asians are good at math."

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.

The US writ-large tried the 'color blindness' approach for a long time. The general effect was that shit kept rolling downhill, but that those in power were not expected to discuss or do anything to improve the situation: the heavily racist outcomes of the war on drugs, racially disparate education funding+outcomes, etc etc etc were off-limits for 'polite' conversation. The current thinking is that you have to acknowledge race to fight systemic racism.

i also think there is a general concern that 'acknowledging race' is what led to racist outcomes being systematized in the first place. the current thinking also seems to struggle to concretely articulate what it's goals actually are, is success defined as proportional representation across interests and industries? is it 'majority minority' in leadership roles? will these mandates be adjusted as outcomes and demographics predictably shift? and maybe most concerning, are all problems considered on equal merits or is there antipathy and an underlying belief in deserved suffering as atonement for intergenerational guilt?

> Yes, things like "Asians are good at math" is racist, even if it's a positive stereotype.

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?

> 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?

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.

Don't we use statistics exactly like that in, say, sports to prove one team has a better offense or defense than another?

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.

Sports might be useful. Do you see the difference between,

"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.

Thank you for this...your outstanding example has finally cleared the air for me with this issue.

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.

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