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Comment by frogpelt | Hacker News Reader

And I have a problem with calling this racism. Bias != racism

To me, racism is hatred toward a person or persons because of their race, the desire to cause pain or suffering to a group of people because of their race, or actively trying to rid the world of a race of people.

All humans are biased to some degree or another. And we are all biased for different reasons. If I am hiring people, there's a strong likelihood that I am going to be biased about who I hire based on where they grew up, where they went to school, what ethnicity they are, what gender they are, what race they are, simply because I am human.

These do not equate to hatred which I think is what racism is about. Eqaulity is a noble objective in some ways but ridding the world of human bias is not going to happen.

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Googling "define racism" results in:

the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.

It isn't about hatred. A bias towards hiring people of one race (or against hiring people of a race) fits in this, because the only reason to have that bias is that members of that race don't have the right characteristics or abilities.

Example: "Company doesn't hire black people because they wouldn't be a culture fit" assumes all black people have the characteristic: culture mismatch.

Hidden bias is still bias: People with "black" names don't get called, and a commonly cited reason is "that name sounds ignorant" (as if a person chooses their own name). And back it up with "well if they care, they would call themselves something normal, like mike".

Biases about race can exist in a person, but that doesn't mean you have to act on them. It doesn't mean you can't recognize them, evaluate them, and if they make no sense, work to discard them. Having biases may be human, but so is the ability to introspect and to change biases.

Then I'm a racist. Sue me.

That's alright most non-poc people, even those that try not to be, are racist because society pushes you towards it constantly. Instead I'll point you here:

http://racismschool.tumblr.com/

If you need any help, feel free to message me personally via the email in my profile.

Is it racist to identify cultural differences and strengths and make decisions based off those?

For example: I'd much rather hire a Russian programmer than a Chinese programmer simply because I can communicate with the Russian better, we're from similar cultural backgrounds, and I understand where he is from.

Is that racist?

To pretend that differences don't appear in all types of people is ignorant in itself.

Those are two different things. A cultural difference is language. A cultural strength is when some part of a culture is "strong" in the sense of being vibrant or alive or thriving.

The easiest way to determine if something is racist is to ask if you're generalizing about a race of people. If you say "all Chinese people <blank>", it is a racist statement. Most people don't like to hear that, though, because most people make racist statements without realizing it.

Is it racist to hire someone because you prefer people from their ethnic background? Yes, because again, you're making the decision based on race in general instead of the individual person. You may find out the Russian is part of the Russian mob while the Chinese person has high business ethics. You wouldn't hire just white people because you feel uncomfortable dealing with black people, so don't make the same biased decisions about Russian vs Chinese.

Probably. Would you refuse to hire a chinese programmer who speaks fluent russian (or even just really good russian)? (if you say "there's no such thing" that is racist fyi). The cultural differences mean communication difficulties is a bit of a strawman. There are lots of cultural differences your statement ignores: country folk vs city folk within russia probably have differences (they do most places), those born pre and post communism probably have cultural differences, etc.

(Warning - attempts at trying to draw me down a semantic rabbit hole about what culture is are very much distracting from this conversation and will be ignored, and probably should be ignored by others as they are pretty blatantly strawmen).

Pretending differences don't appear amongst different groups of people is ignorant. However using this to justify all groupings is also ignorant. For one thing there are different types of groupings, some valid, some not. Some reflect inherently true things, some statistically probable things, and some that are not inherently true but the result of various other factors combined with an arbitrary and otherwise insignificant grouping. For another, a lot of groupings don't lend themselves to generalizations - for instance in the US in California especially, being ethnically Chinese doesn't imply being an immigrant, or having recently immigrated family, so assuming that a person who is ethnically Chinese speaks Mandarin is a bad assumption based on a bad generalization from a grouping that probably doesn't even matter.

Your definition forces a very limited view to what racism is - so limited that it serves to minimize the harmful effects of racism that are still present in the world, so limited that it serves only to describe the ugliest of individuals in the world, and so limited that it's practically worthless in conversation.

By all means, enlighten me. What is racism then if it's not based on hatred of people because of their race?

Racism is any bias based on race.

If I'm white and I have a bias to think that white people typically can't dance. Does that make me a racist?

Oddly enough, this implies something HN people might find enlightening:

Bayesian inference--you know, the mathematically-correct way to update a model of the world based on information--is inherently racist. (And sexist, and a bunch of other -ists.)

(If people don't get the joke, this is a bit like the statement "science is inherently leftist." That doesn't mean science is wrong; it means you should re-evaluate your opinion (and moral gut-reaction) of exactly what it means to be leftist. Or, in this case, racist or sexist.)

This is a perfect example of what my statistics professor always warned us about: if you base your statistics on a terrible model, you'll end up drawing terrible conclusions!

No, this is plain ol' institutionalized racism.

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