Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

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In the United States coming from a position of "maybe there is or isn't an effect from racism" is simply naive. A quick glance at history will show you that many differences in both outcomes AND culture have deep-seated intentionally racist historical sources (in different ways for different races).

How do you fight intentional racism, with a healthy dose of residual lasting generational effects from past racism, with passivity?

It's like creating a game with rules, but having no penalty for breaking them for the first half of the game, and then saying it's just the fault of the loser if someone cheats to beat them.

Or saying "I can't tell for sure if it's below freezing, my thermometer has an error bar of +/- ten degrees" and ignoring a bunch of freezing water around you.

Perhaps by not telling the alleged perpetrators they are taking advantage of "power structures" provided by racism. If the US is ~60% white, then simply by the numbers there are more disenfranchised white people than any other race. Are these people also taking advantage of said "power structures"?

If the movement to fight this spectre of "institutional" racism would focus less on applying their rules to everyone, and more on applying their rules to actual perpetrators, it would garner more support from the people it needs. To use your analogy if you're sitting in your neighbors pool and he says it's not freezing, but there's freezing water, perhaps don't blame all of his neighbors.

I'm not trying to say that there hasn't been a history of racism nor even that it isn't prevalent today. I just want to understand how we accurately measure the actual effects of it so that we can understand how much effort to put into solving it or measuring if it is getting better over time. And some of the most used measures I find as evidence seem to be about the distribution of races in various jobs which on its own doesn't necessarily seem like a reliable metric to me.

Others pointed out some studies which showed potential biases in hiring and that seems like a great potential proxy to understand the current level of racism in hiring.

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