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Comment by UnoriginalGuy | Hacker News Reader

Let's accept that rational; but that does leave one question: when does this end? If we have no way to measure the damage then how do we measure the resolution of the damage? Do we continue this for 5, 10, 50, 100, 500 years? Or do we simply never end it?

Do we try to "correct" it so there are literally no poor people of a particular ethnicity? How realistic is that?

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How about until there no longer is any significant racism that systematically disadvantages black people?

Instead we have a system that systematically disadvantages non black people. Just stop discriminating. Either way. No reason to have one or the other have an advantage.

We just had a black man elected to his second term as president, so I think that's a pretty good sign we aren't that racist. This wouldn't have happened a few decades ago.

Even as a white person I notice anti-black racism quite frequently, and am not sure I'd believe that "we aren't that racist", although granted it's certainly better than 20 years ago. I've since moved away from Georgia, but I was often shocked at how much worse my black friends there were treated than I am, in a whole range of circumstances, ranging from employment, to interactions with police, to interactions with shop owners. Afaict, there is still quite strong and systematic racism in many parts of American society (worse in parts of the south than elsewhere, but not exclusively located there).

I grew up in Georgia, about an hour south of Atlanta, and this describes my experience as well.

> Instead we have a system that systematically disadvantages non black people.

This is patently false. If you're white, you're at a huge advantage from birth. It's trivial to find data supporting this.

I'm not saying in general, I'm talking specifically about AA. With affirmative action and applying to something like grad school, a minority that is "qualified" can and will get a spot over a non-minority, that is "slightly more qualified."

In general, averaging across all of America, I'm certain it's an advantage to be white. I'm also certain it's an advantage to grow up to rich parents. I'm also certain it's an advantage to grow up in a good school district. It's also and advantage to grow up in a 2 parent household. It's an advantage to not grow up in the ghetto, white or black.

Life isn't fair, but at the end of the day at some point you have to be accountable for your decisions and all you can do is your best. Picking a winner based on skin color is not the right answer. We should always be picking the absolutely most qualified person for everything. That is something that clearly doesn't happen enough.

Yes, but the absolutely most qualified person for a whole bunch of things is disproportionately often white and male. And even if we as a society wake up tomorrow magically not racist or sexist at all, that will be the case for the foreseeable future simply because white men have disproportionate amounts of money and connections.

Hiring through AA is _intentionally_ suboptimal. The whole point is to give members of disadvantaged communities access to opportunities they are less qualified for in the hope that they, and by extensions their communities, will over time become _less_ _disadvantaged_.

There are more important things in this universe than efficiency.

Instead we discriminate against the poor white guy from the ghetto growing up with a single mom? Brilliant. That guy had none of the supposed white male advantages. Hire/accept people based on their merits. If you want to take into account overcoming adversity that's fine with me. But picking someone based on the color of their skin, be it white, black, or other, is wrong, and it's racist.

Let's argue based on aggregate statistics instead of individual situations. I don't see why otherwise rational/scientific people feel the need to debase themselves by talking about edge-case individual examples when it comes to things like this.

Individual situations are important in this case. It is as much about fairness for the white guy/girl with poor parents who is being discriminated against by his or her government as it is about the African American who is being discriminated against by employers, schools etc.

This is obviously a tough issue, but edge cases are important. There is too much noise in the statistics.

I don't think poor, white people are an edge case. As of 2007, 9.9% of the white, non-hispanic population lived in poverty (compared to 27.6% of black people and 26.6% of hispanics). The numbers are lower, but they are far from edge cases. The source of adversity in the human experience is not solely rooted in race.

Just curious, but what do you get if you multiply those percentages by the size of those groups?

~24 mil white ~11 mil black ~14 mil hispanic

Imagine that. All kinds of people leaving in poverty and having disadvantaged lives.

African Americans constitute 15% of America.

White Americans constitute 74% of America.

Thus African Americans are more than twice as likely to live under the poverty line. Those are not I odds I would like to gamble with had I been born black.

You won a lottery when you were born.

Merely being born American made us winners in that lottery, if you get down to it.

Is anyone really against the idea that all 49 million need help?

You mean being born a first world country. But there are other first world countries that have better average quality of life than the US.

There will always be some people who have it better than others. I would prefer that we make sure that those who have it the worst comparatively don't have it that bad on an absolute scale.

> But picking someone based on the color of their skin, be it white, black, or other, is wrong

In these circumstances, some of us disagree with you.

> That guy had none of the supposed white male advantages.

Merely looking like those who hold power is, in fact, a huge advantage.

I'm that white guy from the ghetto with a single mom. I'm an executive now, and I'm sure it was easier for me than a black kid from my old neighborhood.

Let me change the subject slightly, people who are tall and good looking have more opportunity and success than those that aren't. No one, even you, are making purely rational decisions based on merit. All of us make decisions that are influenced by things we aren't aware of.

90% of American CEOs are taller than the average American; 30% of CEOs are 6'2" or taller, compared to 4% of the American population. CEOs are taller on average than actors, a job where appearance should matter.

Humans are shallow creatures.

Uhm, that's not how it works.

If you are white the odds are massively stacked in your favor. That doesn't mean you can't lose, but it's less likely. All AA does is fudge the odds a bit in the other direction. No more.

Just stopping to discriminate would do nothing – because that's for the most part not the reason why the odds are stacked against minorities. Structural racism is the reason. Society is constructed in a way that leaves minorities with less opportunities, that decreases their odds. Individuals changing their behavior cannot address that problem.

Note the comment below. People in poverty in America by race ~24 mil white ~11 mil black ~14 mil hispanic I cannot and will not believe that in 2012 we have structural racism in America, the day after a black man named Barack Hussein Obama got elected to his second term as President of the United States. Is their racism? Yes. Is it structural and 100% pervasive? No.

The reason they have less opportunities is a structural problem, but it is not because of racism. Maybe it grew out of that, and it probably did, but at some point when they stopped you have to change yourself. The problem is lack of a family structure. The stats of black single mothers living in poverty vs. other races is unbelievable. We have to get fathers back to change this dynamic. I suspect racism and the things that caused along the way contributed to this, but now it is just that way because it's been that way. If you can turn this around, you can turn around a lot of communities, get rid of a lot of poverty, and provide as many opportunities as anyone could want for the black community.

You are completely ridiculous. It’s pointless even talking to people like you. Bye.

Do you accept that black people are two and a half times more likely to live poverty? From that, wouldn't if follow that a black person is two and a half more times likely to reap some sort of benefit from affirmative action, even if it wasn't based on race? What if affirmative action was based purely on the statistic of being part of a single parent family in poverty?

Do you accept that the median salary if you are black is less that 2/3 of that if you are white?

You comment on the stats of single mothers in poverty, say we need to turn it around, then and pretend it's an easy problem to solve when these communities don't have the money to fund programs at a local level (since they, you know, live in poverty), coupled with a history of racism and neglect at the state level, and you just say "well it's not really a problem because more white people are poor and we should end affirmative action"

Affirmative action seems pretty targeted to me. Sure white people don't really get affirmative action (that's not really true because there's all sorts of advantages you for just being poor), but life's not always exactly fair.

Oh here we go. White man's troubles and all that. The problem with those minorities is they're just lazy and need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps!

Thanks for at least refraining from using the N word.

> Instead we have a system that systematically disadvantages non black people.

Can't tell if I'm getting trolled here...

Nah, you're just on HN.

that's a pretty good sign we aren't that racist

Yes the level of racism is probably going down. However that doesn't mean it's at zero now.

> We just had a black man elected to his second term as president, so I think that's a pretty good sign we aren't that racist.

Sir, I say this with as much respect as I can muster: Absent significant study, it is absolutely not the place of someone who is a member of the racial majority to declare the extent or impact of racism. You simply have no idea what you're talking about.

A mixed race man was, indeed, elected to high office. He was elected over the objections of people who claimed him to be, among other things:

- A Kenyan

- A secret muslim

- A liar inelegible for the presidency under the terms of Section I, Article II of the United States constitution

These claims have been made and repeated for over four years. They are made, in part, because Barack Obama looks different from the men who have previously run the country. They are repeated because that fact scares the absolute shit out of a certain subset of the country.

Racism – far from vanquished – has proven to be a politically expedient tool. (Though, thankfully, one with toxic side effects.)

Have we made progress since the civil war and the civil rights movement? Yeah.

But racism is an ugly, nasty force that persists in both overt and subtle ways. It's not over. And for the people who must still grapple with its effects, it's a big problem.

> Absent significant study, it is absolutely not the place of someone who is a member of the racial majority to declare the extent or impact of racism. You simply have no idea what you're talking about.

The opposite is also true: "Absent significant study, it is absolutely not the place of someone who is a member of the racial minority to declare the extent or impact of racism." Why not say simply it is not the place of someone to declare the extent or impact of racism without study?

Also I believe you are assuming the race of the parent. For all you know they could be a member of a racial minority.

More to the point what is our goal WRT racism? To eliminate associating traits with a person purely based on their race that are not backed up by a correlation? If that's the case affirmative actively works against that goal.

> Also I believe you are assuming the race of the parent. For all you know they could be a member of a racial minority.

You believe incorrectly. I did my homework.

http://geekpolitics.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/derekclar...

But the rest of silliness about white people having it harder than minorities was the giveaway.

> The opposite is also true: "Absent significant study, it is absolutely not the place of someone who is a member of the racial minority to declare the extent or impact of racism." Why not say simply it is not the place of someone to declare the extent or impact of racism without study?

Being a minority can be a graduate level course on the extent and impact of racism. In America, most blacks and hispanics have had ample time to study up, sadly. And if you're from anywhere in the vicinity of the Middle East, god help you.

>> But the rest of silliness about white people having it harder than minorities was the giveaway.

I grew up poor, light skin (white?) part Scottish descent small part Native American Indian. I trained myself to get into the profession I love, buying my own books and writing code in several languages for a dozen years on the side while maintaining a full time job and family, before I started writing code for pay.

No one person in America deserves more than any one else based on the color of their skin.

Right, but you're light skinned. Imagine that, in addition to all the hardships you probably had to overcome, you also had to deal with systemic racism because you had dark skin.

> You believe incorrectly. I did my homework.

My apologizes you did your fact checking.

> Being a minority can be a graduate level course on the extent and impact of racism. In America, most blacks and hispanics have had ample time to study up, sadly. And if you're from anywhere in the vicinity of the Middle East, god help you.

That could all be correct however the person would still lack perspective and sample size. Without studying it on a large scale you could never be sure.

You also ignored my question of what is the goal in the end. My personal end goal is to have no one look at a person and label/judge them based on characteristic without facts to back it up and I think affirmative action takes us away from that.

The opposite is also true: "Absent significant study, it is absolutely not the place of someone who is a member of the racial minority to declare the extent or impact of racism."

People of marginalized groups are often much more familiar with racism and what is and isn't racist than people of privileged groups. It's like talking about sports with a sports fanatic and someone not that into sports. One person is going to know a lot more than the other.

White guy here. I grew up in rural Georgia and got out as fast as I could. I still visit every Xmas. While we've come a long way since Jim Crow, I still hear the n-word all the time. Not just from rednecks, but from educated people who are respected leaders in their community.

I think we're at least another generation away from that word being expunged from common discourse.

There's always going to be significant racism against any demographic that is legally put above or below others.

How do you measure that?

I think it's fair to say that it was a necessary phenomenon to kick-start a perception-shift among all Americans that all kinds of people could be in all kinds of roles. We're probably at the inflection point now: a black president means Americans have now come to see as "normal" the possibility of a person of color in the highest office in the land. Thus it's probably the right time to begin moving toward class-based aid instead of race.

It ends when it is politically expedient to do so. However, apart from demographic data indicating black people are no longer disadvantaged with respect to white people, I don't see what could drive such a change.

Slavery lasted for 400yrs(+).

Slavery when, where, and how? The term is surprisingly broad, when you actually look into details, and can easily span all of remembered human existence.

And still exists today, to a very large extent.

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