Hacker News Reader

Comment by p0pcult | Hacker News Reader

> I am still considered privileged and white. When you have no circle, no network, no money, when no one in your family went to college, everything is more difficult.

Now imagine being a Black person with no circle, no network, no money, no one in your family having gone to college. Everything identical for your skin color. Statistically, the hypothetical black person is likely to have worse outcomes than the hypothetical equivalent white person. This is what white privilege is.

It is possible that you benefitted from white privilege, despite all of the hardships you faced.

You can pretend all day that white privilege doesn't exist, but that's just not what is observed.

View on HN

<< You can pretend all day that white privilege doesn't exist, but that's just not what is observed.

Here is an alternate way of looking at this. An immigrant from Kenya comes to US with nothing and little to no support system and succeeds despite things stacked against him. A local black person that should have turf advantage can't compete with an immigrant, who is actually hungry to get ahead.

What do you want me to do? Cripple the immigrant so that the local black person can have a leg up?

Are you sure is about white privilege? Are you sure it is not about something more systemic?

We can pretend. We can even have a real conversation.

But white privilege is an actual social construct ( ie. made up bs ).

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-bus-drivers-white-customers-fr...

You can pretend all you want that white people dont receive preferential treatment, but neither research nor the historical record show evidence for that belief.

Allow me to rephrase, because this whole thing is getting silly.

Everyone is different. Everyone is treated differently. It is only because we have society that we managed to have some level of enforced playing field going.

There is no need to pretend. You can succeed while having deck stacked against you. Naturally, you can also play the victim card.

I honestly do not care. I am done with this conversation. Cuz you know. White privilege and all.

There's no need to get defensive!

>You can succeed while having deck stacked against you.

I agree! It's also less likely when the deck is stacked against you. If only there were a phrase that conveyed the idea that some people have a bunch of factors out of their control, i dunno say a deck of cards, were like shuffled or maybe stacked in a seemingly random way that broke against them. Of course, theres no cliche like rhat, because that kind of thing doesn't happen. Ever. Not once in science or history.

I think what you may find in many of these discussions is that people understand privilege may exist across many domains, but that it's an error to think those privileges can be distilled down to just a single domain. We can do better to acknowledge all these different domains, but it's not like there's a single "privilege index" to rank people.

> it's an error to think those privileges can be distilled down to just a single domain

Youre right, we are all hugely multifaceted individuals. It is hard and maybe even weird to try to isolate the notion of privilege down to a single domain, but often, this is what science is trying to do: control all but one variable and try to observe and measure an effect.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yes, science does that to measure the effect of one variable. This isn’t to be confused with assuming the entire global effect is caused by one variable.

We can, for example, try to measure the effect of one carcinogen to cancer risk. We can’t say all cancer is attributable to one carcinogen.

To relate it to the topic at hand, you would have to measure to total variation of privilege attributable to race as compared to other factors like nationality, socioeconomic status, hell even height, weight, and physical attractiveness. In other words, it’s an incredibly complex model that shouldn’t be reduced to a single variable to estimate effectively.

we can say, ceteris paribus, p(successful outcome|white) > p(successful outcome|nonwhite). That's what I am claiming. It also is possible to say that p(successful outcome|nonwhite) > 0. In fact, both of these things can be true simultaneously.

Right, but aren't we after the joint probability if we're really talking about equity? I.e., we can't make strong claims about an outcome unless we factor in the joint probability across all dimensions.

So, to extend your example, we can't necessarily say p(successful outcome|white)*p(successful outcome|poor) > p(successful outcome|nonwhite)*p(successful outcome|wealthy) until we measure those other socioeconomic conditions. It gets more complicated when we consider they may not all be independent of one another.

And that's just one extra variable. As you say, most agree we are multifaceted individuals. Adding dimensions like p(successful outcome|disability) or p(successful outcome|female) further complicates this as do all the other variables of a social species. So we can't really make strong statements about outcomes of a system very well unless we measure across the entire system of variables. I think that's what people are poking at. We may be able to make conclusions about individual variables but that doesn't always translate to an accurate model of the system at large. It's interesting and perhaps useful, but certainly incomplete. It only works under a "ceteris paribus" assumption, which is to say: "it only works in contrived circumstances that don't reflect reality."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com