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Comment by johan12345 | Hacker News Reader

Just a question from a non-american. Why is it so important to keep track on which "race" people belong to in America?

If you follow American media then you will realise that there is a strong trend towards fighting systemic racism and fighting systemic discrimination of LGBTQ. As a German it is unbelievable to watch to what extent they are doing this. It seems it got to an extent where there is a forced ideology where anybody remotely identifying as somewhat liberal feels forced to follow. From what I can see on the internet, any discussion about these topics is almost immediately hijacked by ideological views and thus an objective discussion prevented.

You hit the nail on the head. I used to identify as liberal and also voted as such. The woke culture is so annoying, it has pushed me to the right side of the political aisle.

Could you explain how a culture pushed you opposite side of the political spectrum?

Beware confirmation bias. esrauch just posted a peer comment that is totally reasonable, not flamebait, and quite objective. Did you notice that just as you would the one commenter out of thousands who happens to be the "loudest in the room"?

Engage with the constructive conversationalists who can show you another perspective. The more you look for them, the more you see.

Assuming that's a genuine question, the idea is that otherwise we still have a systemic problem where (for example) the overt racism which denied opportunities to black Americans historically is still having ongoing impact because whether your parents went to college has a huge impact on whether you do (and if you succeed).

The idea is that we want a society where there's no racial disadvantage, and if you just ignore race entirely that's accepting the ongoing disadvantages that still measurably exist due to the overt racism that was 1-2 generations ago.

Specific implementions are obviously extremely complex and lead to bad outcomes like the article here, but it seems like sound logic that "doing nothing" is not optimal for getting to an equal society within a couple more generations.

Battling systemic racism with more systemic racism. I guess as someone who doesn't have systemic racism as normal part of my life I am not qualified to describe just how fucking moronic that sounds. However I can say that the students that are actively disadvantaged against now probably deserve it as much as the students that where disadvantaged 20 to 50 years ago. Get everyone involved a racist of the year award for keeping the tradition alive and well.

see my answer at eejjjj82 below

From the article:

"IMPROVE CHANCES OF ADMISSION, FINANCIAL AID BENEFITS"

Quotas and approval criteria are tied to race.

In 2020, the UN encouraged France to use race statistics, after 75 years of ban, to increase chances for the non-whites [1].

So, it is not specific to the USA. If I were all opponents to the West, I would fund the hell out of those movements because they destabilize the Occident.

[1] https://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/l-onu-exhorte-la-fr...

France wont give a shit, and that's good. Here in Europe we do policies based on your income/outcome and not about the levels of melathonin in your skin.

Also, to which ethnics do I belong? Because I am Basque, and after crossing the Bidasoa river I'm getting into the French Basque Country and magically I am not Hispanic even if the differences between "they" and us are nil, the same with Catalonians with most Southern French people. Or the Aragonese.

And most people from Galicia and Asturias would pass as Irish or half-Brit in a breeze.

Oh, and btw, here people is tightly bound to the culture you did grow up with, so you can be a Senegalese speaking better Basque with no "Subsaharian" accent at all, better even than some random Castillian guy who decided to live near a Basque town.

France literally has a minister of equality, and works tirelessly to help “some communities” without putting a name on it.

So colleges can avoid being “cancelled” for supposedly not being diverse enough, rather than accepting the best students

Certainly diffuses responsibility from the institution to the applicant.

because our national culture indexes people's worth based on race in very structural ways. america's hegemony is based on the entire concept of 'western superiority', and that the core way to boost QOL is to create a subservient class that actually wants to be used.

From the outside it seems frustrating that instead of addressing the underlying issue—indexing individual’s worth based on race (or other unalienable characteristics)—the solution is to keep applying the same logic, just assigning different weights to the output.

For example, financial aid should not depend on race, but on actual financial situation. If it happens to be generally worse for certain minorities, you’ve achieved your goal—and without using racial discrimination. Judging by one’s appearance seems like the lazy way out.

How would you propose to level the entrenched inequities if not by reversing the previously unequal distribution of scarce resources?

If we talk about inequities, why not use economic factors? Get the money from equity holders. Probably from BlackRock in this case, not from WhiteRock.

Because race was an explicit and continues to be an implicit factor in separating the haves from the have-nots.

>Probably from BlackRock in this case, not from WhiteRock.

That's cultural appropriation.

Don’t you think this being a factor is exactly what should and could be addressed? (That is what my comment was about.)

If have-nots who are black miss out on financial aid (or something else) because they are black, then giving financial aid based on have/have-not status without considering the race sounds like the safest, most sustainable, and (importantly) most respectable way of going about it.

Explicitly avoiding favoring based on race strikes me as the surest way to eliminate the disparity (that which accumulated from decades of exactly such favoring), while attracting least pushback from across the political aisle.

I can’t imagine any reason for not doing this except for short-term optics, minority votes, etc.

No? The point is that poverty and financial weakness in the black community is a direct result of racist attacks on black economic activity, often carried out or backed by the government, and now practically self-sustaining by nature of the force and length of application. You right an off-balance body with equal and opposite force to the direction of momentum.

By “no”, do you mean you’re in favor of maintaining the status quo where race “continues to be an implicit factor”?

I fail to see how using financial weakness as discriminating factor would not address financial weakness in the black community.

Because I've had this conversation in bad faith far too often, I would like for you to paraphrase what you think my argument has been up to this point, so that I may ascertain your ability or willingness to understand it.

Your argument—and I am paraphrasing it in a way that highlights what I fail to understand, as an outsider—seems to be that using race as discriminating factor in order to resolve disparities caused by using race as discriminating factor in the past is better than eliminating the use of race as discriminating factor altogether, and addressing those disparities in an unbiased way (e.g., dispense aid based on wealth, not race).

Okay, and humor me: why might I have come to that conclusion? Note that I've actually already explained why, so there's no reason for you to "fail to understand." All you have to do is bring yourself to actually write it out, in your own words.

> That's cultural appropriation.

No. What culture is allegedly appropriated here? Random insinuations don't make a good argument.

It was a joke.

It's not just America. In South Africa as well, right now. Almost every form and application asks for race on some level. One of the big reasons is because they've got a big push atm to suppress over-representation of minority groups in terms of company ownership and employment. One of the top groups that they are targeting are the native White minority.

Edit. Added link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad-Based_Black_Economic_Emp...

So that you can prove that your institutions and systems are not discriminating.

How do you know that all members of a given minority aren't being pressured to quit if you don't ever look at the numbers?

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_action

So in order to eliminate unlawful discrimination people constantly need to communicate their ethnic background when applying for a job and employers keep track on that stuff? Are they also required to hire from each ethic minority, not the person with the best merits? Why not just skip the ethnic bookkeeping and make the workplace attractive to everyone instead? (same goes for universities)

It's not like the problem is that Harvard is "unattractive" to minorities.

The thing is that if someone goes to Harvard, their children are more likely to succeed. It's effectively an inheritable benefit; it's just not actually just that "people X did Y they deserve Z"; but what do you want to set up for people who will be born 5 or 10 years from today; do you want it to be the case that you can statistically predict the success of one of those future-children will just be less, and the reason why can be directly tracked back to historical overt racism?

Obviously tons of people are uncomfortable with affirmative action (which isn't as severe as your reductive description makes it); if you have literally any other way to reduce the measurable racial-based disadvantages that exist in our society there's a ton of people who would be very eager to hear it.

How do you justify racism against asians, who are the most affected group by these discriminatory policies, when they are often poor and somehow quickly rise with good scores?

Obviously, it's not historical overt racism holding black people behind asian people, it's genetics. The real overt, disgusting racism is "affirmative action".

I really hope you miswrote what you meant or are just a troll, because saying black people are genetically inferior is overt racism right now from you.

No it isn't. Groups of people obviously have different genes. For example, some East Africans are far better at sprinting. Does admitting that make me racist against non-east africans? Do you believe African-Americans dominate basketball due to racism against non African-Americans?

Racism is about treating people like racial caricatures instead of individuals. Which is what you're doing.

Because without that aspect of a major political platform, there aren’t enough people who would vote them in. It’s strung along in order to maintain power.

So that the bureaucrats know who to discriminate against.

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