Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wbsss4412 | Hacker News Reader

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Culture is socially determined in the sense that culture is simply the collective actions and decisions that a group of people make.

Reading the intent behind that statement, though, that Nigerians have succeeded in America despite any hinderances they may have faced due to wider societies treatment of black people, that would be somewhat outside of the framework of what I am talking about.

The construction here is, do Black Americans have worse outcomes, on average, because of themselves, or because of societies treatment of them. Culture would fall into the bucket of “they are the reason for their own problems”.

Obviously Nigerians do well on average, but they are also a small fraction of the population. Pointing to Nigerians and saying that race isn’t a contributing factor is making an argument after having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument, how do Nigerians compare to the top cohort of white Americans based on ethnicity or whatever? Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?

> do Black Americans have worse outcomes […]

Black Americans do not have worse outcomes.

Specifically, given the distribution of individuals in the group "Black Americans" across all socially relevant dimensions—including culture—individual Black Americans have identical* outcomes to similarly-situated individuals of every other group in America including Whites, Asians, etc.

As you would expect in a country with equal opportunity for all, both legally and culturally.

*Black Americans actually do better than expected because there's an enormous cultural push to promote Black Americans whenever possible—college admissions, management, etc. not to mention Black Americans being so over-represented in media that most Americans think the country is around 40% Black whereas the actual number is ~13%, i.e. they're off by a factor of 3.

Rewriting "culture" as "they are the reason for their own problems” seems rather uncharitable, and unhelpful to the discussion. Why are you doing that, given that it's not adding any clarity?

> having found the statistical outlier that proves your argument

Well, why are they a statistical outlier? If you ask Nigerians, they'll tend to credit their culture. Do you have a different explanation?

> Is it possible that Nigerians would actually be doing better were there not racial barriers?

I suppose it's more possible that they should be doing much worse than they are, because of the racial barriers.

> Rewriting "culture" as "they are the reason for their own problems” seems rather uncharitable, and unhelpful to the discussion. Why are you doing that, given that it's not adding any clarity?

I was under the impression that it did add clarity, so I find your question odd.

What would be the charitable interpretation of the statement “socioeconomic disparities between black Americans and white Americans are due to their respective cultures”?

I mean, there's nothing "problematic" about having a different culture, with different values. There's also nothing surprising about the fact that different cultures and values produce people vastly differently suited to social and economic success. I don't see any issue with these facts in combination, nor do I need to reach for "marginalization" or racism to explain any of this.

No one ever suggested that it was problematic that people have different cultures, or even that it’s bad to acknowledge that black culture is different from white culture, quite the contrary.

What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities, rather than things that are specific to POC, such a culture or genetics, especially given the clear and obvious precedent that is firmly established within this country.

What is a reach, is your reaction to this suggestion.

The research substantiates this thesis though. As cited variously in grandparent threads, domestic environment and culture are the main predictive factors of academic and economic outcomes. Poor kids who study do much better than rich kids who don't.

We no longer deny people opportunities based on their race. If your SAT score is high, you'll be admitted anywhere you want. If you study hard, your score will be high. The reach is constructing the SAT, or any other similar test, as racist because the scores are not evenly distributed by race.

> What’s problematic is the degree to which people can’t even entertain the idea that racism is the primary driver of these disparities

The reason why many people cannot accept this is because many other groups experienced problems from racism as well, but they were eventually able to overcome these barriers. Moreover, the system has already changed to be more accommodating, maybe even putting most of their focus and resources on the bottom 20% of students at the expense of everyone else. Yet, we still have people stating that it’s still unfair.

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