Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jariel | Hacker News Reader

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That's not quite the right example though.

CRT definitions of 'White Supremacy' are not about 'people acting deliberately' to support it.

CRT laments that 'regular people' doing 'regular things' act unconsciously to support oppressive systems, hence 'White Supremacy'.

Making a film about 'something' and hiring those people you know to make it, who by virtue of your social network might be 'mostly white' - would be an example of 'White Supremacy'.

Ergo - in their view, unless you are actively fighting to dismantle the concept of whiteness - you're supporting 'White Supremacy'.

I believe there is a kernel of truth in systematic, even unconsciously biased systems, however, I don't remotely agree with many of the assertions. Unfortunately, to disagree with their assertions makes you a 'bad person' in their view.

Have a read [1]. A thesis of 'self examination' i.e. a fairly progressive individual addressing their own 'white supremacy' due to their lack of active assertion of issues of equity etc..

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2019/06/25/disman...

The problem lies in the assumption that we live in a society which is systemically racist.

The people not dismantling the system are not white supremacists, they just don't believe we have systemic racism.

I'm definitely not a white supremacist (I'm not even white) and I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.

Sure, I met a bunch of racist individuals, but that doesn't prove systemic racism.

> I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.

https://news.stanford.edu/press-releases/2020/05/05/veil-dar...

"The largest-ever study of alleged racial profiling during traffic stops has found that blacks, who are pulled over more frequently than whites by day, are much less likely to be stopped after sunset, when “a veil of darkness” masks their race."

> Creating that database enabled the team to find the statistical evidence that a “veil of darkness” partially immunized blacks against traffic stops. That term and idea has been around since 2006 when it was used in a study that compared the race of 8,000 drivers in Oakland, California, who were stopped at any time of day or night over a six month period. But the findings from that study were inconclusive because the sample was too small to prove a link between the darkness of the sky and the race of the stopped drivers.

> The Stanford team decided to repeat the analysis using the much larger dataset that they had gathered. First, they narrowed the range of variables they had to analyze by choosing a specific time of day – around 7 p.m. – when the probable causes for a stop were more or less constant. Next, they took advantage of the fact that, in the months before and after daylight saving time each year, the sky gets a little darker or lighter, day by day. Because they had such a massive database, the researchers were able to find 113,000 traffic stops, from all of the locations in their database, that occurred on those days, before or after clocks sprang forward or fell back, when the sky was growing darker or lighter at around 7 p.m. local time.

> This dataset provided a statistically valid sample with two important variables – the race of the driver being stopped, and the darkness of the sky at around 7 p.m. The analysis left no doubt that the darker it got, the less likely it became that a black driver would be stopped. The reverse was true when the sky was lighter.

Aggregating everything and taking an average doesn't prove 'everything is racist', it just proves some portion of people are. It's not traffic stops, 'the police', or 'the system' that is racist, it's individual cops making the decision to pull over one person and not another. If this were an example of systemic racism, there would be a systemic fix, but there isn't. The only way to fix this would be to wipe out or even out the biases of the individual officers. Police departments in the bay area are very ethnically diverse: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/do-bay-area-police-dep...

The claim they were contesting was that the poster couldn't find "a single example of systematic racism". Countering that doesn't require that every single person isn't racist, just that racism exists and has a measurable impact.

Then what does the word 'systemic' even mean?

There's a pretty good definition on Wikipedia.

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

> Institutional racism was defined by Sir William Macpherson in the UK's Lawrence report (1999) as: "The collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour that amount to discrimination through prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people."

If you define any amount of discrimination as a failure to provide an appropriate professional service, then, mathematically, any amount of racism will become 'systemic' or 'institutional' so long as there is an uneven population distribution:

Let's say there are 3 groups. One group is 60% of the population, another is 30%, and the last is 10%. If all three groups have the exact same predisposition to favoring members over outsiders, the 60% group will experience prejudice from 40% of the population. The 10% population will experience it from 90% of the population. The 10% group will experience >10X the incidence of prejudice unless group favoritism is <= 0, which is literally impossible.

If that's what you mean when you say systemic/institutional, it feels like a completely useless thought to me. I, and I think many other people, hear 'systemic', and think 'coming from processes, rules, or procedures defined as part of a system', not from the people operating it. To make a better analogy, when I hear systemic car problem, I think the engine, transmission, or some other component of the car, not the driver.

We're overrepresented in poverty and crime, so it's reasonable that police officers would be biased against black people.

I definitely get stopped more often than my white friends (albeit it changes based on the country). I've been asked several times by police officers in Europe whether I was an immigrant from North Africa with the implication I was dealing drugs.

A lot of north africans immigrants in the country where I was actually deal drugs and I look like I'm from North Africa, so it makes sense for police officers to question me more.

This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.

I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.

> This is not systemic racism, this is recognising patterns, this is an explicit bias.

An explicit bias, held by agents of the state, affecting their behavior towards the citizenry with no regard to individual innocence. Congrats, you've demonstrated systemic racism.

> I can't find a single law discriminating on people's skin color: that's why I think there is no systemic racism.

Kristallnacht wasn't legally authorized, either, but it'd be an odd claim that it didn't reflect systemic anti-Jewish bias in Nazi Germany.

> I can't find a single instance of systemic racism.

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

systemic: > relating to a system, especially as opposed to a particular part.

How many racist people are needed before it's not a particular part"?

I think the context for this conversation is 'now'.

I think based on other discussions in the thread, that just pulling out definitions will not be so helpful, so I just want to directly inquire, what sort of problem (since there is obviously a problem with this) do you think causes things like the "war on terror" and "war on drugs"? Do you think that these sorts of political actions would be acceptable to the voting public if they only affected white people?

Both problems are caused by having a corruptible, warmongering, spying and controlling government.

I don't want the government to intervene between me and a drug dealer to prevent me from buying what I want.

I don't want the government to spend billions of taxpayers money (and incurring debt - and devaluing my money) killing dudes in the middle east. There were definitely economical and geopolitical reasons to do the war on terror, but that's not something I wanted. 9/11 was merely the reason to attack a oil rich country.

I don't think there is anything racist with any of these wars.

Black people are disproportionally poorer and that's why they're overrepresented in drug related crimes and jail convictions. This happened mainly because stable families were destroyed in the 70s thanks to welfare policies. I'm not the best at explaining this kind of stuff, listen to Thomas Sowell for more.

I'm against prosecution for any drug related crime - but if drugs were legal, I'm sure a portion of poor people would move to whatever shady business they can do as long as they can survive and conviction rate wouldn't change much. Maybe street scams, maybe stealing, maybe begging.

Sure, go ahead and push for an end on the war on drugs, but you have to solve poverty and stable families as well if you want to see meaningful outcomes.

I largely agree- especially yes, we do have to fix poverty itself if we want to fix the disturbing racial skew in our justice system. However, when I think about the wars on drugs and terror, I think that they are heavily supported by xenophobia and racism. I don't think incredibly highly of the voting public in general, but it strikes me that there might be a much greater voter pushback against our foreign interventions if they were occurring in predominantly white countries, and prominently affecting white people.

I think similarly of the war on drugs. Sure, we absolutely need to fix the precursors to addiction and the things that keep it entrenched, in order to keep black people from being victimized by addiction and imprisonment at such a high rate, but isn't the fact that this obviously unjust, bastardized, and warped form of health policy is at all acceptable to many voters, partially because a lot of white voters don't see it as affecting their communities (even though it definitely does, trust me).

You can say the same thing about the basic conditions of poverty- if a huge chunk of the population did not identify the injustices faced by those who are impoverished as "black people problems", and if the other enormous chunk of americans didn't identify them as "white trash and black people problems", maybe our policies about for-profit schools, food stamps, and HUD, would look a little more promising.

I'll lay my cards on the table, I believe that most structural exploitation occurs on an economic basis, for economic reasons. I think economic class is the primary stratification that supports most of our unjust political structures. However, it is also clear to me that, at an ideological level, these unjust measures hide themselves behind racial boundaries and political borders, so they can remain palatable to those who might have the power to change them. In other words, racism wasn't a motive, but it is a hell of a shield.

You're clearly not looking very hard. As a super simple example, look at the countless studies that have shown that signifiers that point towards you being black on a resume (your name, school, etc.) have a measurable effect on getting interviews. That's textbook systematic racism.

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