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Comment by lordnacho | Hacker News Reader

From the outside (Europe) you have to ask yourself why the US even recognizes such a thing as race. To start with, it's hard to define precisely. It also seems to be at odds with the idea of individual responsibility, and individual identity. Just let young people, who have not yet formed their identities, apply. And judge them by individual criteria, not what groups they happen to be part of.

There's also a very superficial idea of diversity presented. Is your university really going to be diverse from simply having people with different skin color? Having varying skin tones does not tell you for instance whether all the institution's students are wealthy or poor. Or if they grew up in the same place. Or have the same attitudes, which I suppose is the real diversity that you want to have.

As for lying about it, you can't really be surprised. If there's no checking, and people think ticking one box puts them at an advantage, why wouldn't they? Surely many of them have a similar attitude to race as what I'm writing, and why would you set yourself backward unjustly?

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Yep.. a white person from washington, white person from italy and white person from belarus are more diverse than black, latino, asian and white persons from chicago.

But it's $current_year, and race suddenly matters.

It is currentYear and overt racism is fine now as long as the discrimination is directed at white folks (or Asians in an academic context).

> But it's $current_year, and race suddenly matters.

What is with the terrible discussion happening on this thread? There are black people alive in the US today who in their lifetime could not use the same bathroom or schools as white people. In what world did race not “matter” until now?

Yes... there was segregation... then things started to normalize, and race didn't matter anymore (atleast not as much). Instead of going further, and making race irrelevant in everything, things turned around, and we gained back new segregation, with PoC only places and events, even graduations ( https://hsdm.harvard.edu/event/harvard-black-and-latinx-grad... ) and "white people need not apply" at taxpayer paid jobs ( https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1452228/bbc-job-advert-ban... ).

It started to matter less and less and some people were convinced we should strongly hit the brakes on that because they believed they know better and non-falsifiable unconscious bias is the reason people won't intermix. There is just as much scientific rigor behind such statements as there is behind horoscopes, but it still became public policy and has a huge negative effect because it disunites people.

Look at some objective measurements segmented by race, such as earnings or life expectancy, and revisit whether you think race has "suddenly" mattered

As a fellow European, I globally agree with you on this matter. However I think some of your assertions are weakening your post.

First things first

> why the US even recognises such a thing as race. To start with, it’s hard to define precisely.

Well this argument is pretty disturbing… besides the tiny and very neat island of abstract and platonic constructs every concepts about the real world are fuzzy. If someone followed your idea completely he could not use such concepts as “green” or “blue”, or even more relevantly, such an argument could also be applied to the concept of “species”.

> is your university really going to be diverse from simply having people with different skin color

I also find this assertion… strange to say the least. The clusters known as “races” cover phenotypical differences that are far wider than just “a different skin tone”. A black albino has a white skin, however no one will ever call him white. I am pretty sure that you could yourself instantly tell apart a black albino from a white just using unconsciously the craniofacial differences. It has also been argued that some of those biological differences could lead to behavioural differences and so give rise to another “default” mental representation of the world. So, even if two students come from the same cultural background, one could argue that their ethno-racial differences help to bring different points of views.

Even if I agree with you on the argument of fairness, the previous points are not at all effective counter-arguments against racial quotas.

> I am pretty sure that you could yourself instantly tell apart a black albinos from a white just using the craniofacial differences.

You can. This is called anthropometry. Many measurements are highly correlated with race. Widely used in all sorts of situations. For example, in legal medicine it helps to identify bodies.

> Well this argument is pretty disturbing… besides the tiny and very neat island of abstract and platonic constructs every concepts about the real world are fuzzy. If someone followed your idea completely he could not use such concepts as “green” or “blue”, or even more relevantly, such an argument can also be applied to the concept of “species”.

What's so disturbing about that? Species are also on a continuum. I think there's a popsci piece about certain lizards in California that inhabit a horseshoe shaped habitat. If your abstraction is wrong, change your abstraction.

> I also find this assertion… strange to say the least.

Historically people have had horrible things happen to them due to what race they were classified in. Now let's use those classifications to create a diverse campus, thus ensuring the continuation of the racial classification system?

If you want a bunch of people who think differently, and you're a university, there should be a more direct way to do this than using some classifier that's both biased and has negative historical connotations. Here's a couple of ways: interview the students to assess their thinking. You're a university right? The kind of place where thinking people go to practice thinking. Number two is a lottery. You want a representative sample? There you go.

> ...some of those biological differences could lead to behavioural differences...

If I want basketball players, should I recruit in the Netherlands, where people are really tall, or should I just recruit people who are good at basketball?

Not every real world concept is fuzzy. Some things are measurable and thus objective within a defined margin of error. For instance: annual income, height, weight, age, chemicals in the blood etc. I'm not saying we should use X or Y for admissions, simply that using non-objective criteria invariably leads to problems like what is described in the article.

I do not agree with your perspective on “objective” measures. I will take age as an example. Like every other points of your list it is a fuzzy concept. However it looks rigorous and well defined because:

1 the scale of numbers we usually use is sufficiently large to smooth away the fuzziness at the origin.

2 Age is usually artificially quantised in years. This seems transparent because a year is in itself a very precise measure of time but a lot of information is lost in this quantisation.

3. In its administrative form it seems well-defined because it actually is a platonic construct. The fact that it is measured since someone is birthed and not for example since its inception is totally arbitrary in regards to a lot of uses it’s made for. If someone was born after seven months instead of nine months, he will arbitrale counted as older.

The biological differences are tiny and insignificant for human populations if compared to clusters based on environmental differences. An urban born white student has more in common in behavior with an urban born black student than it has with a rural born white student. If we go past borders or land masses, you can have just a few miles difference and have two individuals with complete different culture, values and language.

Beyond that, if you know nothing of an individual and wanted to determine their culture, values and health, the highest predictor would be neither where they live or race. It would be social economic status. Nothing beats clusters of high social economic status in determining behavior and outcomes. It is for example why crime research generally ignore race now days in favor of social economic status, with race seen as less scientific. Universities does the opposite which is a bit ironic.

>The biological differences are tiny and insignificant for human populations if compared to clusters based on environmental differences.

You meant “the biologically induced behaviour differences” didn’t you? Because otherwise in general it’s trivially false. It’s the reason why actually blacks in the USA suffered during decades from being prescribed drugs whose safety were nearly exclusively tested on white males.

In medicine there is many examples where genetics and environment create a difference for people. A person can have a multiple higher risk of diabetes just because they were born by parents with thrifty metabolism, caused by them or their parents eating a non-western diet.

This doesn't mean there are significant biologically different from any other human. As a species, we, humans, have a natural wide range of adeptness to the environment. Some of that can carry with people for centuries or even longer.

If we compared to what is common for all humans those differences are tiny and rather insignificant. Compared to social economic status, race differences are much smaller and tiny. If a scientist did a study comparing medical outcomes of a drug, selecting top 1% wealthy whites and compare to bottom 1% poor black, the results would not say much about how effective that drugs is based on race.

It isn't that race just started mattering, it is that it has always mattered in the US - pitting "races" against each other was a primary means of control of the colonies, and slavery was a massive part of that. That intense racism built up institutions and systems that have race at their core.

You can't just say, "well, race doesn't matter anymore" and expect things to suddenly change. You need to change the systems, and to change the systems you have to recognize that race was used in the creation of them, and so you need to use the lens of race to understand how they are discriminatory so you can fix them.

But you are pitting races against each other if you prefer one in hiring. You would also need to define a goal to justify discrimination, where I don't believe a feasible reason can exist. So technically, you are the racist if you support such policies.

You need discrimination to end discrimination. If you and I are in a race, and I'm 100 laps ahead because I've been cheating and your pit crew gives you worse tires than me, you can't just fix the tires and pretend the race is fair.

There needs to be an adjustment, but only a temporary adjustment, to make things fair again. That's the whole point.

You can't just say, "ok, race doesn't matter anymore" and expect things to just be fine. The discriminatory systems will not fix themselves.

> You need discrimination to end discrimination

That is a false or at least unproved statement.

> only a temporary adjustment, to make things fair again

On the shoulders of innocents because they are associated by skin color to a group. We have to disagree here, I believe this is a completely wrong approach. It has been implemented a long while now and it is actually surprising it didn't have a larger net negative effect. So to what degree is it temporary? To me this is overlooking some of the most basic principles that lead to racism.

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

Interesting read, but it is pretty much deprecated by modern ethical considerations. But that is basically the proposal here. Laws for equal and unequal people.

On average, black kids in America get treated worse by our schools, their parents have a harder time getting loans, including mortgages, are far less likely to have attended university themselves, are more likely to be harassed, abused by the police, are more likely to be arrested, more liklely to get prison sentences for the same crimes, etc. It's not a level playing field, at all. Over generations, these differences add up like interest on a mortgage.

all of that should reflect in economic indicators of parents and their say marital status/history etc... - you shouldn't need an imprecise proxy like race to level the playing field.

Race isn't a proxy, Marital status is. Race(ism) is the root problem. Even the kids of middle class and wealthy blacks suffer the same abuse by the white system.

> Racism is the root problem.

Is this a falsifiable hypothesis, or is it akin to Russel's teapot? In order to be meaningful, a statement must be falsifiable: What experiment could convince you that racism is not a root cause?

I ask because it seems like whenever there is a racially polarized disparity in outcomes it is blamed on racism, no matter the polarity of the disparity, no matter whether race is really needed as part of the mechanism that creates the racial disparity.

For example, gentrification in the United States is often attributed to systemic racism. However, despite only having one significant race, Korea and Japan also exhibit cycles of gentrification which harm the economic underclasses, completely independent of a "white system". So, have you looked at all the other potential root causes and ruled them out?

The system you're describing treats Sasha and Malia Obama as disadvantaged, while handicapping Hmong people because they're Asian. How can we assert that race is anything but a proxy when the system you're defending screws things up this badly? Race homogenizes unique individuals into vague, ill-fitting, predefined groups, and ultimately hammers many square pegs into round holes uncaring of the damage it causes.

'All current performance gaps show "racism," if you just redefine racism to mean "current performance gaps."' -Wilfred Reilly

> It also seems to be at odds with the idea of individual responsibility […]

That's a nice myth but social and economic status are related to race and the game is rigged against some. You can throw terms like "individual responsibility" around all you want and maybe you even start believing that some people just deserve to be in the place they are in… truth is, however, some never had enough chances that individual responsibility would've made a difference.

True but I put it there because Americans seem fond of it, not because I think the playing field is level.

> And judge them by individual criteria, not what groups they happen to be part of.

That sounds good on paper but in reality some groups of people have been left behind because of systematic racism. So you give special benefits to individuals from that group then that person becomes a role model for others in his/her group and can help them.

I think the perspective that a role model has to be from your ethnicity or needs to look like you is not correct. Especially for young kids.

Not from the US but I believe the current disadvantages are still felt because the civil rights movement wasn't that long ago. Such inequality takes decades to vanish, IF policies actually do address inequality at all. Currently most countries face an increase in inequality.

You can fight fire with fire, but I don't think this applies to racism for numerous other reasons. Such policies even underline an alleged difference between black and white people.

> I think the perspective that a role model has to be from your ethnicity or needs to look like you is not correct

What makes you say that?

If I look up to someone because I like the music, art or their general achievements, I don't care much how they look like or more specifically that they are similar to me. On the contrary, it may be advantageous to see people your are on the line with that are completely different to you. Good lesson on how looks can be deceiving.

> If I look up to someone

Exactly and some others are different they look up to people who are the same race or speak the same language etc.

> have been left behind because of systematic racism

Is it proven that it’s “systemic racism” that’s holding some people behind?

What do you think is holding some people behind?

As far as I'm aware, there are 3 main categories of explanations.

1) Systemic racism. I'd like to see an example of systemic racism that's holding anybody behind in current year so we can work on it. But to me, the fact that at least some non-trivial percentage of white students reportedly lied about their race for an advantage in life (among Senators who have done the same) is very telling about what systemic advantages actually exist.

2) Cultural deterioration. I think certain aspects of musical and sports culture may play a role, but I don't know if I want to come across as a cranky old man here.

3) Biological differences & IQ. If a scientist as renowned as James Watson isn't allowed to broach this discussion without being immediately unpersoned, who am I to think double-plus ungood thoughts?

I'm not sure what's the best explanation within the acceptable boundaries of public discourse.

> I'd like to see an example of systemic racism that's holding anybody behind in current year so we can work on it.

Let say there is Group A who have worked for free for Group B for generations. Group A also does not get home loans for generations Group A does not get business loans for generations. More members of Group A are also put in jail compared to Group B.

Group B does not face those same issues, which group do you think will turn out better, which group will have more money and resources, will it be Group A or Group B?

For points 2 and 3, do you think Group A and Group started at an equal level to make that comparison or do you think one of those groups was held behind due to the issues which I mentioned above?

The story you've provided is not an example of unequal rights in current year, which was the question asked, and is the only thing we can fix unless a time machine is invented.

As far as your general comment goes, I get your point and I agree that it's a reasonable argument for some time period as an explanation of inequality, but at some point I'd argue that it doesn't hold up and ceases to explain reality. If in 25 years or 50 years or even 100+ more years, if there's still highly unequal economic outcomes, is the only answer still going to be an unequal start? At what point does this argument no longer hold up?

I'd say that the current income levels of different ethnic groups puts a big fly in your argument.

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

* For one thing, why are certain groups in the lead despite facing many similar significant problems in their history?

* For another thing, why are we assuming that a Harrison Bergeron level of equality of outcomes is possible or even desirable among distinct human groups?

As far as "More members of Group A are also put in jail compared to Group B" is concerned, I'm not 100% sure of which group you're referring to here, but I'd recommend that you look into FBI crime statistics for a deeper dive into why this may occur. There's 10,000 ways to analyze the reason for complex stats. Is is possible that some groups commit more crimes than others? Is it possible that police spend more time policing certain areas not to punish certain groups, but to try and protect them as best as possible, and therefore there's other explanations for why unequal criminal justice system outcomes happens other than "racism".

PS: As an overall comment on your perspective, I'm very distrustful of what I call "God of the Gaps" style arguments. According to Wikipedia, this is a theological perspective in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. For example, many years ago when scholars were debating some idea like how the universe emerged or what causes lightning, they defaulted to "god" or "the gods" did it when there was a gap in knowledge. In current_year, rather than god, we substitute various "isms" and "ists" as the only acceptable answer when the answer to certain questions either aren't known or can't be discussed for some reason. I don't find this style of answer to be intellectually honest or satisfying at all.

> The story you've provided is not an example of unequal rights in current year,

The facts I provided are an example of unequal rights in current year, are you claiming that people from Group A are not being discriminated by the police or killed by them now?

> At what point does this argument no longer hold up?

When Group A is treated equally as Group B.

> of different ethnic groups puts a big fly in your argument.

Try to understand the argument first, did those ethnic groups face the same issues as Group A? Is there some kind of filter which the other ethnic groups have to go through before they can come to the US? Look up US immigration laws.

Not sure I understood your rant about god of the gaps.

> The facts I provided are an example of unequal rights in current year,

Please point to one law or government policy in the US in CURRENT_YEAR that systemically discriminates against a specific group, so people are aware of it, so we can fix it.

> are you claiming that people from Group A are not being discriminated by the police

Examples of discrimination and racism exist, of course, and will probably always exist as long as all humans are not complete genetic clones of each other. But racism is different than systemic racism.

> or killed by them now?

There's many examples of good and bad policing applied against all racial groups (the torture and execution of Daniel Shaver might be the worst example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OflGwyWcft8), but I'd argue that the perception of how policing works doesn't meet reality.

A small example: https://nypost.com/2021/02/27/cases-of-police-brutality-agai...

> Participants across the political spectrum in the nationally representative survey were asked how many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019. The results were revealing. Overall, nearly half of surveyed liberals (44 percent) estimated roughly between 1,000 and 10,000 unarmed black men were killed whereas 20 percent of conservatives estimated the same.

> Most notably, the majority of respondents in each political category believed that police killed unarmed black men at an exponentially higher rate than in reality. Over 80 percent of liberals guessed at least 100 unarmed black men were killed compared to 66 percent of moderates and 54 percent of conservatives. But, according to a close database compiled by Mapping Police Violence, the actual number of black men killed by the police in 2019 is 27.

> The second question the survey asked was: “In 2019, what percentage of people killed by police were Black?” While the survey states that the actual percentage is around 25 percent, the average survey respondent guessed 50 percent (58 percent for liberals and 41 percent for conservatives). The disconnect between perception and reality couldn’t be starker.

Any police murder is horrific, but the perception of the scale of the issue is IMO radically wrong.

> When Group A is treated equally as Group B.

If your criteria for being treated equality is equality of outcome and not equality of opportunity, then there's probably never going to be any success in this regard unless we force ourselves to live a Harrison Bergeron existence.

> Try to understand the argument first, did those ethnic groups face the same issues as Group A? Is there some kind of filter which the other ethnic groups have to go through before they can come to the US? Look up US immigration laws.

It doesn't matter what color somebody is, every group walked through a mile of shit in their history to get to the US and prosper: including being victims of slavery, genocides, facing discrimination, and other big issues. Some groups had it worse than others, of course, and we all recognize that.

Yet any group can prosper today, as shown by Asians doing the best out of any group in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_U...

> Not sure I understood your rant about god of the gaps.

In the past, the default answer to many questions was "god did it".

In the present, the default answer to many questions is "racism did it".

When you look for it, you'll notice it.

> But racism is different than systemic racism.

Not giving loans and putting them in jail and killing one group of people is systemic racism. Not sure why I have to keep repeating it, its as if you dont want to accept that you are wrong so you keep on deflecting it.

> Please point to one law or government policy in the US in CURRENT_YEAR that systemically discriminates against a specific group, so people are aware of it, so we can fix it.

LOL it does not work like that. These are unwritten rules and polices, you dont notice it if you are white.

> Some groups had it worse than others, of course, and we all recognize that.

looks like you are not recognising it if you are comparing slavery and lynching to "other" problems face by everyone else.

Our fundamental disagreement seems to be that you believe in equality of outcome and I believe in equality of opportunity.

If there's examples of certain groups not getting loans when they should qualify, of people being put in jail when they don't commit crimes, or one group of people being targeted for execution by the police, that sounds horrific and wrong so please point it out with data.

I've nicely requested repeatedly for you to please provide one example of a law or government policy that systemically discriminates against a specific group of people so we can fix it. I haven't seen a valid response.

As a closing message, I really don't want to get into a suffering competition here: but other group's history is also filled with being victims of literal genocides, mass kidnappings and slavery, starvation and squalor and the most horrific living and working conditions, the most savage wars in human history, etc.

You keep on asking for examples of law but you just refuse to acknowledge that there are some things which are not written in a rulebook anymore but they are still followed by racists.

Our fundamental disagreement is that you believe in survival of the fittest, you believe that fittest group should freely abuse and torture another group and the children of fittest group should enjoy the fruits of that crime. You just keep dancing around it instead of saying it directly.

As a closing message, I am part of that group which you consider successful in the US and the fact is the issues which you mention are still not comparable slavery and lynching and other horrible things which the group you support have done.

> so please point it out with data.

Do I have to teach you how to use Google?

You can start doing your homework with this one

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/25/emmett-till-...

"Please point to one law or government policy in the US in CURRENT_YEAR that systemically discriminates against a specific group, so people are aware of it, so we can fix it."

Sentencing disparity between powdered cocaine (whose usage skews towards white people) and crack cocaine.

Sorry, I missed seeing this comment and wanted to respond because you at least tried to offer something concrete.

For the sake of clarification, is there any "apples-to-apples" statistical comparison available to prove some kind of bias? By that, I mean not comparing all powdered cocaine users and all crack cocaine users (comparing groups like that is bad statistics IMO), but comparing sentences among all white/black powdered cocaine users, or comparing sentences among all white/black crack cocaine users?

For instance, would a black businessman working for Goldman Sachs caught with 1 kilo of powdered cocaine get the same kind of sentence as a white equivalent? Or would a white crack cocaine user get the same kind of sentence as the black equivalent? To me, that's the question that's a bit more revealing and interesting.

PS: For the record, personally I don't believe that there ought to be any sentencing disparities. The War on Drugs is an abject failure for anything other than growing a destructive government intrusion into peoples' lives and the criminal penalty for possession of any drug should be precisely 0.

I see a lot of similarities to the discussion we have in most (?) European countries about the share of women in leading positions. We as well have programs that prefer women over men when applying to key positions to counter steer inequality. Not to say that this practice isn't a hot topic here, but something very similar exists in EU as well. So I can in fact understand why they 'recognize such a thing as race' (same as we recognize such a thing as sex).

> Or have the same attitudes, which I suppose is the real diversity that you want to have.

I'm not sure if you're kidding or not, but this one bit is completely untrue. I have yet to see one American institution that welcomes people with different attitudes. The required attitude is pretty clearly defined and even having a discussion about it is not welcome.

"From the outside (Europe) you have to ask yourself why the US even recognizes such a thing as race."

From the inside, too. But even our Supreme Court refused to do the right and Constitutional thing when it came to race admissions criteria, the cowards.

>And judge them by individual criteria, not what groups they happen to be part of.

I suspect one of the results of that is a given race who outside this selection process are disadvantaged will be accepted at a low rate.

Yes. And that matters if you believe in race as a diversity criterion, and an important thing to keep similar to the rest of society.

You will also find that the representation of Manchester United fans vs Liverpool or Chelsea fans will not be representative of the general population. For instance somehow my friends from the subcontinent seem to all be Liverpool fans.

But what is important is that people who want to do something are not discouraged on the basis of things that don't matter directly. For instance I studied engineering, and there were maybe a couple dozen women out of 150. What matters is not that half of people are women, but that whatever women want to come are allowed to do so, and not told that they can't because they're women. Do we want a society where we cut down the number of male engineering students to match the number of women? Or where we allow women into the course who didn't pass the same standard?

I think this ratio-matching or whatever you want to call it is poisonous. It actually creates a less diverse society when you try to distribute everyone proportionally to their characteristics, rather than letting them try whatever they feel like.

>Do we want a society where we cut down the number of male engineering students to match the number of women? Or where we allow women into the course who didn't pass the same standard?

This is precisely what they want.

"We" who? I'm pretty sure it's not what I want...

I can't speak for the universities or such. I have no plans for solving this issue with a magic wand.

But people think race is real, they treat people of different races differently, people of those races think of themselves as that race, or gender, or etc. That's a real measurable thing.

I think the social issues of a given race struggling largely as a whole is also real and have real effects on everyone, I don't oppose efforts to address it.

I don't fully understand your last line but admittedly I'm personally less concerned with "diverse" as I am addressing social groups that have cycles of poverty and other issues.

It's true that race correlates with various social issues. But why not address the social issues as such, rather than as race issues?

After all the problems were created by accepting a racial system in the first place. Write it into law and we ensure that future generations will be thinking about race all the time, thus perpetuating the problem.

I'm not sure what you mean by social issues exactly. I suspect the policies we're talking about are part of what they think they're addressing.

Race is one of the foundations of the American experiment, we refer to it as the ‘original sin’ (slavery). We never did anything about it until the Civil War, and then again with Civil Rights. It still lingered, as black/white were bisected in society. Then further subdivisions amongst other races. It’s part of our dilemma, we’ve been circling this problem since the beginning of the country.

America in general really struggles with the impulse to gate-keep opportunity. It’s true, America has the most opportunities in the world, but the natural human impulse to gate-keep kicks in. It can happen with race (‘we don’t want too many of ______ in our neighborhoods), it can happen with immigration (‘we don’t want too many _______ in this country), it can happen with class (‘Not everyone deserves what we deserve’), and so on.

My fear is the solution is still drenched in the same gate-keeping. The solution is not to gate-keep back the other way (‘they excluded us, so let’s now exclude them’). Same problem.

The investment portfolio rebalancing strategy doesn’t sit well with me. Life is not a weighted ETF where you can just go ‘divert the 50% of funds from commodities into a new distribution of 10/10/10/10/10 of crypto, gold, treasuries, etc).

Americans have a virtualization problem. Most Americans see that their country is diverse on TV and the Internet, but in their day to day, they really don’t intermix. Even if we do intermix, it’s still generally virtualized in such a way you only see them, like on TV or on the Internet. It’s even worse in non-major cities. It’s easy for most Americans to fool themselves into thinking they are open-minded, but it’s a whole different thing being comfortable watching another race on YouTube, than sharing a neighborhood with them.

I’ve mixed two different views here, apologies, but it’s a convoluted problem in America. It should be out of our minds by now, yet it isn’t. It’s so bad (or has been so bad) that we are literally setting race/gender quotas at this point, truly sad state of affairs.

————-

Edit:

I just want to add a small anecdote on how disconnected the discussion about this is. Usually we try to offer a chance to people who come from underprivileged backgrounds. This discussion usually falls on deaf ears because many Americans cannot fathom what it was like to go to an inner-city public school. They can’t imagine (no experience) what it’s like to sit next to classmates in the 12th grade who read at a 4th grade reading level (but are on track to graduate high school, already accepted to a college - have fun reading Nabakov and Dostoyevsky). If you can’t imagine that, then of course the discussion is a non-starter and will sound completely unfair. I’ve sat in those classrooms and all I could think was ‘holy shit you are gonna need all the help you can get’.

So, when I say the ‘portfolio rebalancing’ strategy doesn’t make sense, I mean it. It might make us feel better, make us feel fairer, but many people are not ready to just be thrown into these buckets of equity. The true solution requires work, not just quota-filling.

It’s just a country full of a bunch of entry-level inexperienced citizens. Neither side has exposure to the other side. We lack general wisdom.

> From the outside (Europe) you have to ask yourself why the US even recognizes such a thing as race.

I work for a public K-12. We're required to ask students to identify their ethnicity at enrollment. If a student refuses to identify a race, we're required to enter something. The direction we've gotten is, "look at the student and guess".

That sounds ridiculous, until you remember that real people identify minorities 100% by looking at them and guessing. In a very real sense, you are the race you appear to be to a bigot when it comes to discrimination.

However, we're also not allowed to question a reported ethnicity. That's because even if you look white, if you have black ancestors you're still likely to have worse outcomes simply because your ancestors endured racial discrimination.

Now, the only reason we collect ethnicity is so that it can be used for reports to USED's Office of Civil Rights. It's used to document that the educational outcomes for students are as equal or equitable as possible. It's used to show that there is as little racial discrimination built into the structure of public education as possible. That is the sole purpose we use it for. We report it to state and federal agencies, and they use it for basically the same. They use it to identify where racial discrimination is taking place.

The reason we do that is because racism and racial discrimination is alive and well. Bear in mind, too, that there are public school districts in essentially every state in the US under desegregation orders right now. It's not just a problem of individual racism, but structural and institutional racism as well. It extends the whole gamut from petty teasing in grade school to genocide. It appears to impact everything from academic achievement to job earnings to healthcare outcomes to life expectancy to risk of being a victim of a crime to likelihood of home ownership to incarceration rates. It is a deep and clearly systemic issue, and if you think it doesn't exist in your nation it's because you're not actually looking.

If you weren't paying attention over the past several years the far right has a lot of followers, and it's not just in the United States. Britain's brexit and Europe's response to the Syrian refugee crisis are also examples of ongoing racial discrimination. This is a global problem with real, measurable, ongoing effects. Right now as we speak people are being killed simply because they belong to a different race or culture.

Why does the US care about race? Because bigots do, and minority xenophobia is one of the foremost causes of violence, civil war, and state-sponsored violence against their own citizenry in the world today. It's the metric that the enemy uses. Why wouldn't you want to pay attention to it? Frankly, I think it's shocking that Europe ignores such a blatant and informative metric. You look like you've got your head in the sand.

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