How the Asians Became White
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The whole privilege debate has always bothered me a bit. I don't doubt that having a particular ethnic background helps in certain situations, but "privilege" suggests a certain binary-ness that doesn't accurately capture all the nuances of race and ethnicity in America.
For instance, there's a large amount of variation among different Asian groups. There is a world of difference between the socioeconomic status of the Hmong community in Michigan and the Taiwanese community in the Bay Area. Or even between the Chinese immigrants who came in the 1800s and the latter wave of immigration in the last few decades. And while it may be fair say that, all else equal, being to a particular ethnic group grants certain advantages relative to belonging to other groups, that advantage isn't uniform. For example, being Chinese or Indian is probably a net plus if you want to be a software engineer in the valley; it's probably a net minus if you want to be an actor in Hollywood.
That said, I don't think the answer is to be color-blind. Race and ethnicity clearly matter in America -- it's just not as simple as privileged / not-privileged or majority / minority.
It's going to get a lot worse. We're in the early stages of a huge revival in populism, and a lot of it is targeting the rich.
If you look at, for example, blacks in the U.S., two things stand out rather starkly: Poverty and incarceration rates. On average, kids in wealthy, stable, two-parent families do better than kids in poor single-parent households. Poverty and incarceration rates for blacks in the U.S. are significantly higher than for whites or asians. To compound matters, schools/teachers in poor areas are often of poorer quality than schools in rich areas.
The U.S. has the highest per capita incarceration rate in the world. The for-profit prison system and complicit judges/politicians have created this sad state of affairs. This needs to change. One way to accomplish this might be for state and federal governments to take control of the prison system. More public funding needs to be directed towards schools and youth programs in poor areas. More money needs to be focused on easing poverty. Give these kids back their parents, reduce the desperation of extreme poverty their families experience, and give them quality education. Do all this, and we won't still be talking about race-based hiring practices a generation from now.
In general, children are an investment in the future and the U.S. has not been investing in all children equally.
Edit: Note that I am Canadian. Disproportionate incarceration, poverty, and inferior schooling are all problems faced by (many) first nations communities up here, only with the added difficulty that acting to change any of these is guaranteed to turn into a political fecal-storm. The feds recently tried to improve the education system, but it basically blew up in their faces and undermined the AFN (assembly of first nations) in the process.
What exactly does this mean? The government didn't create all those single parent households. I mean, who exactly are you blaming here?
Thats an interesting assertion. Do you have any data to back that up? ... because I'd posit that these cultural "problems" that you mention
a. pale in comparison to the cumulative effect of Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of explicit racist housing policy from the federal government
b. are probably a side effect of a.
http://dallasmorningviewsblog.dallasnews.com/files/2013/06/m...
I'd argue that slavery, racism and institutionalized discrimination, which led to packing blacks into housing ghettos or poorer neighborhoods in addition to heavy policing because of all that is the cause of what you're seeing and not the other way around.
Additionally, as you can see the rates of out of wedlock births has exploded all around (white rates went from 2% to 30%, notably white society has collapsed from this astounding increase) which means that it is probably also pretty accepted by society which makes it more likely to happen.
The data doesn't support that slavery, racism, housing discrimination were causes. When those terrible things were in full effect, the out of wedlock birth rate was flat and relatively low. Lower than the white out of wedlock birthrate is today. If you look at the large uptick in the late 60's and 70's, it points more to the drug war,the rise of the welfare state, and cultural acceptance as major factors.
In practice, the war on drugs simply drove our market for drugs into the ghetto, robbed them of the ability to regulate that market without violence & warlordism, and then harassed the inhabitants endlessly in a manner largely indistinguishable from earlier policies of racial persecution. Stop and frisk that.
A black male born in 1991 has a 29% chance of spending time in prison at some point in his life.
Nearly one in three African American males aged 20–29 are under some form of criminal justice supervision whether imprisoned, jailed, on parole or probation. One out of nine African American men will be incarcerated between the ages of 20 and 34.
On an average day in 1996, more black male high school dropouts aged 20–35 were in custody than in paid employment; by 1999, over one-fifth of black non-college men in their early 30’s had prison records.
How would the prospects for college and middle-class employment look like if no one you grew up knowing had parents who were in a position to help pay for college?
...
This is not something that is out of our control to fix, if we decide to. Affirmative action, a social taboo on overt racism and institutional legal equality - all three had a modest impact on the progress of de facto racial integration & equality (measured in, let's say... educational attainment, & household net worth). But the drug war, in urban areas that were still largely segregated, had a negative impact that swamped all of these, and generated giant gaping tumors in 'black culture', as you put it, that we're going to be dealing with for generations.
The fact that we've largely dismantled due process for the impoverished to help pay for all this, that our use of leaded gasoline in the 20th century & ensuing soil contamination actually significantly compromised neurological functioning in urban populations (across races), that we assiduously attack welfare programs under the banner of suppressing an inferior 'culture of dependence', and the policy of warehousing the poor in housing projects - these things are not inconsequential.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incarceration_in_the_United_Sta...
While I'm not saying this is wrong, given there is a privatized system I've always thought; If the prison is private they should pay the prisons an absolute minimum fee for running costs and large bonuses based on re-offence rates. Something like if a prisoner has held a job and not re-offended in the 3 years post release they get a significant bonus.
At the moment it there is an incentive to keep them criminals so you'll see them back for even longer stays. And given past behaviour in this industry I imagine this thinking is in action at some penitentiaries.
(Data was leaked from the college board in 1995. I'm not aware of more current data - anyone else? Specifically, I'm looking for a data set which slices some sort of outcome score by (race, income) pairs.)
http://theunsilencedscience.blogspot.in/2013/10/black-suits-...
I'm not sure what you mean by "easing poverty" or "desperation...their families experience". Could you explicitly list what good/services poor children lack which cause them to underperform?
This is true but heres something to consider, my feeling is that Asian Americans are what I consider newer immigrants to America. My understanding is that they actually started to come here in large numbers after 1965 when the Immigration and Nationality Act Amendments eliminated racial/nationality-based discrimination in immigration quotas.
Why is this important?
I think that you'll find that if you compare the SAT scores of Asian Americans to recent black immigrants to the United States (Nigerians, Ghanaians and jamaicans for example), you might find that their scores are much closer than your initial comparison.
The reason for that is what I call the immigrant effect ... explained by this quote from a David Brooks NY Times article
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/what-drives...
"Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students"
Perhaps immigrant status is the driving force behind the Asian/Black and Asian/White gaps. But then what causes the Asian/Mexican gap? Also, if you have data showing Nigerian/Ghanaian/Jamaican immigrants do as well as Asians, or the original source for Amy Chua's data, I'd love to see it.
I wish I had more data for you, but how could it not be? Better incomes means better homes, in better neighorhoods, betters schools and access to the kind of environments suitable for realizing full educational potential of a child. With the notable exception of blacks who as noted in the American Life episode 'house rules'
"The average African-American household making $75,000 a year or more, that family lives in a poorer neighborhood than the average white family making less than $40,000 a year. That is, a black family making twice as much money as a white family probably still lives in a poorer neighborhood. That's according to a study from Brown University."
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/t...
which means that the access to better education of what I said above, probably doesn't apply to the same degree for blacks as it does for others.
> Also, if you have data showing Nigerian/Ghanaian/Jamaican immigrants do as well as Asians, or the original source for Amy Chua's data, I'd love to see it.
I wish I did, but I don't. I took an African American Studies class years ago with a source, but I didn't save it :\
> But then what causes the Asian/Mexican gap?
That I'm not sure of. Definitely plan to do a bit more reading around that
You suggest one possible way it could be true - black families with money choose not to spend it on things that you believe improve outcomes, and asians spend their money on these things even more. This seems unlikely since the curve relating black outcomes to black income is upward sloping just like all the other curves.
Another possibility: "better homes, better neighborhoods, better schools" don't actually improve outcomes. Some hidden factor X might be causing both higher income, better homes, better schools, and better outcomes.
Then you missed my point entirely. The point of the quote and the podcast (you really should listen to it) is that black people with money were unable to move into nicer neighborhoods, because of persistent racism.
Asians carry the "model minority" tag and as such have fewer problems moving into nicer neighborhoods because people aren't intimidated by them or worry that they'll be difficult to control.
> Some hidden factor X might be causing both higher income, better homes, better schools, and better outcomes.
Yeah. A lack of racism directed against said groups :)
I disagree that this is a red herring. Children of wealthy parents perform better academically, plain and simple, across all races, gender, immigrant status or not. (This is true everywhere in the world.) The fact that first-gen immigrant children might perform better due is simply due to a sampling bias.
http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2011/12/15-school-...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-gr...
http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/109074/chapters/How-P...
Also, as trustfundbaby said earlier in the thread: "Group success in America often tends to dissipate after two generations. Thus while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students"
I don't doubt that there is a significant Asian culture effect, but in this case it seems that the "immigrant effect" plays a big, if not greater role.
There is an enormous amount of public funding going to these very things right now and it doesn't seem to have changed anything. The stereotypical black family (missing father, poor single mother) is not the result of a lack of action on the part of government. The government did not cause parents to abandon their children. It is the result of the changing message of mass media, celebrity icons, and social trends-from one that rewards integrity, and hard work to one that glorifies violence, 'thug' culture, and insubordination.
It's not lack of action...our crazy drug policies are a direct contributor to this situation, and it's by design.
> I think it would be equally appalling for it to fire, stop hiring, or hire fewer whites as well.
You think it would be? How have we got to the point where racism has to be rhetorically hedged in?
In the UK, not only is it illegal to hire on the basis of race, but it's also deeply taboo. I like to think that a UK company would not have the racial data on their employees to compile such statistics.
I hear a lot about "white males" from supposed leftists, and frankly it disgusts me. There is a large amount of casual racism that oozes from the American left under the guise of "equality".
France has that law, not the UK. And the safest (legally) kind of bias is definitely the bias that is undocumented.
Any company could theoretically ask for its employees origins, though it would then have to be very careful not to give any hint that it might take any kind of discriminatory action from this data. It's hard to think of a reason that would make this data useful to a company anyway. But private statistics institutes do collect it. Also, the government does have data regarding foreign citizenship and place of birth of immigrants, because that's not racial data.
I don't think alextgordon was talking about law. I think he was saying that UK companies (just as French companies) would simply not care about collecting this data.
Anyway... I realise the historical and cultural context is very different between UK/France and the US/Canada, but I think our approach of race is widely better. For an anecdotal data point, my wife is Canadian, and Asian. When we lived in Montreal every encounter with random people seemed to be an occasion for them to ask her "where she comes from", with a slight frown when they heard "Montreal" as an answer. People would talk to her in English, and to me in French. It felt strange to me and a bit weary for her. We live in France now, and where she comes from is a topic that never comes up, the last time it happened was with Flemish tourists. My parents didn't ask either at the time, they just assumed she was from Canada and most importantly that it was none of their business. I like this attitude.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/201...
It's worth considering that a workforce might be 90% "white male" because 90% of the time, the environment we live in nurtures "white males" to fit there better, not because intrinsically, 90% of the time "white males" are just better at it.
That's not to say I disagree with the first part. Google isn't going to make people that don't fit in the job suddenly magical at it; however, I think it's important to recognize racial disparity as a problem that --will not fix itself if left alone--, instead of calling disgusting those who might consider an equalizing force somewhere in society to be important.
These numbers clearly aren't so disparate because "no reason at all" or because "whites are just better," so why do you think they are? And also, how can we even have a discussion or make changes without paying specific attention to race?
On a personal level, many of my (white) relatives were racially purged.
That is why I find the term "white male" to be wholly disgusting.
I can't speak for America's problems, only to say that if racism is your weapon to fight racism, then all you will achieve is to ensure its continuing existence.
By contrast, in the US you had people systematically excluded from exercising the vote within the last 50 years, which is comparatively recent. I think the politicization of race has resulted in a great many misconceptions all across the political spectrum, but that doesn't mean you can just pay it some lip service and call the problem solved.
I can find you equally obnoxious casual racism from the right, or you could just read the comments on American newspaper articles. I read a story this morning about some tourists visiting Chicago's Willis Tower who were frightened by superficial-but-not-obviously-so cracks in the building's observation deck, which is famous for having a glass floor. More than half the comments on the article consisted of suggestions that the tourists in question being Latinos from California, the cracks must have been caused by weapons in their pockets. WTF.
"Crypto"??
If you come to Chicago, you should do the Sears Tower thing; it's not disappointing. I find the building disconcerting. On the upper floors, when there's a lot of wind, you can feel the building sway.
If you want to see uncryptic racism, you can go to the top of the Sears Tower and look west or south.
I wonder how much it'd shock Eugene if someone pointed it out to him that, in American racial discourse, Irish and Italian folk were once considered "not white." Even Germans were once considered not-white: as recently as WW1, much of the anti-German propaganda up-played the idea that they were somehow more Asiatic than good Anglo-Saxons and Frenchmen.
Before a strong sense of minority ethnicities was forged in the mid-20th century, whiteness was the word applied to the demographic categories that had made it; if they hadn't, they simply wouldn't be considered white. Now we feel it's pretty ridiculous to say that Asians are white, and for good reason. But it's silly for Volokh to pretend that whiteness-as-pale-skin is anything but a pretty recent innovation; in a way, pulling Asians (at least, the successful subgroups, the Chinese and Japanese, and to a lesser extent Koreans) into whiteness is the conservative, traditional approach, and his idea that there's a real "whiteness" that people either do or don't fall into is the kind of ethnic studies navel gazing he'd usually vociferously denounce.
Why would that shock him? That's perfectly in line with his claim.
Whiteness in American racial discourse has never mapped to this idea, as it has at various points excluded most European groups. And many groups that would have been considered Caucasian in the 19th century Americans would never naturally consider white, even today--Arabs and Indians, for instance.
As with the experience of the American Irish, Italians, Jews, and many other groups, the Asian experience shows that racial divisions and hostilities can subside over time.
But regarding that piece, I found the following passage problematic:
And it’s evidence of the essential fairness of the American capitalist system, which has rewarded this hard work even though many people, including many government officials, tried to penalize it.
I submit that the phenomenon in question describes the essential unfairness of the American system, capitalist or otherwise. If people can be "rewarded" for their "hard work" in spite of their race only when that racial identity is subsumed by whiteness, it only reinforces the existing power structure. Or, the author might argue, it was this success and recognition that led to the change in racial perception. Either way, it's not what I call fair.
The title of his article is "How the Asians became white" which as Eugene pointed out in the comments, is an allusion to "How the Irish Became White," by Noel Ignatiev.
So it wouldn't shock him at all, that's his point.
I'm annoyed that he seemingly doesn't get that for centuries white always meant "an ethnic group that has made it." Despite his allusion to the title of a work showing exactly that, he obviously didn't pick up on the point.
The title of his piece is almost certainly a reference to "How the Irish Became White" [1], so presumably not so much. I'm with you on the broader point, though, that the hand-wringing about who is and isn't white is silly, and that if it serves as shorthand for racially privileged people, that's pretty much fine.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Irish-Became-White-Routledge-Classics/....
How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet have this level of scrutiny on the racial makeup of a company that is clearly not actively discriminating based on race? I don't mean to be hyperbolic, but this isn't far off from having political overseers at production facilities in the former Soviet Union.
1. There's no way to tell whether they are or aren't just from exposing this data.
2. Racism/Sexism is discussed a lot in American culture, but I fail to see how "ignoring" actual data (which Google is proactively choosing to share) would somehow fix these issues.
You don't and you shouldn't start addressing these issues with numbers.
Who said that? Of course you can identify problems without having any number. That's called qualitative understanding.
In science, we call out qualitative reasoning as being biased and unscientific.
Ha! I'm a scientist by training, and your claim makes me smile. Most of Science starts by qualitative reasoning and observation. It's because you notice phenomena that you emit hypotheses as to why they occur, and then you design experiments to generate data and verify your hypothesis (i.e. whether your qualitative understanding is correct or not).
First, collecting data must be made to answer a question. The current way of asking ethnicity based on unvalidated criteria (basically what you identify yourself as) does not mean anything. It's rubbish as data, because there are almost no "pure" individuals in the US anymore, people have been mixed for generations.
The way the current data is used is to reach a political agenda to say that we are in a state of inequality between races and sexes and that the government has to step in to fix things, hence you need the government to spend money and resources on this, etc... It's NOT a scientific study at work, it's data used for political purposes.
Plus, it's not unbiased either because it's not in an observational state. Individuals and companies are aware of these ratios in these companies and know that they are expected to do something about it. That's not science at work, it's social pressure at work.
It's not rubbish. You can't simultaneously discuss statistics about black incarceration or female underrepresentation in tech while also denying that such classifications even exist in the first place. The lines blur sometimes, but pretending there are no lines denies reality.
> that the government has to step in to fix things
You're putting the cart before the horse. This is a private company's data, not any specific recommendation for government action.
>Plus, it's not unbiased either because it's not in an observational state. Individuals and companies are aware of these ratios in these companies and know that they are expected to do something about it. That's not science at work, it's social pressure at work.
First, some companies just plain don't care and don't feel any social pressure because their insulated from any real feedback or criticism. Second, any social science work includes some degree of bias because we're not all robots. Saying no possible conclusions can be drawn from demographic data is unscientific and akin to global warming denial.
The federal government (and potentially individual States too) has been active for years to enforce quota in various domains to reduce "discrimination". Of course companies feel the pressure to do something about it, because if they don't, they may be targeted next in terms of Employment Laws.
> Second, any social science work includes some degree of bias because we're not all robots. Saying no possible conclusions can be drawn from demographic data is unscientific and akin to global warming denial.
A proper social study should always lead to further studies unless you are crystal clear on how to read the data out. Because "we are not robots", the explanations are not always simple and it's not JUST because there's racism or discrimination that there are differences in who gets what job. It's just like if you were saying that there's racism against white people among construction workers, because most of them are not white. This would be missing the entire point because you'd be focused on the numbers instead of trying to understand why it is so and what are the incentives in place.
So yeah, most "demography data based conclusions" are rubbish because they do not focus on explaining the individuals behaviors and what's in it for each of them. And yeah, global warming is actually very similar: data is sparse, grossly extrapolated, and used as a political agenda and a source of new taxes. Global Warming may be happening, but certainly not as fast as Al Gore wanted us to believe, and whether CO2 is the real culprit is another matter for discussion. But that's a whole other topic not relevant to the point discussed here.
The problem is in these sorts of cases the numbers are generally useless. Even if we eliminated 100% of all racial discrimination from society, fewer African Americans would attend college because fewer of their parents can afford to send them, and those type of consequences would carry down for generations completely regardless of continuing racism.
So you say you want to stick with the numbers anyway and try to account for income level. OK boss, that will reduce your confidence interval by a good bit but we can do it. The trouble is poverty is not the only issue. The fertility rates are different. African Americans on average have more children than whites and Asians according to the most recent census (2.1 vs. 1.8), so for the same parental income level the money is split between more children, as is parental time and attention. African Americans are also significantly more likely to grow up in single parent families. That one's 65% for African Americans vs. 23% white and 16% Asian. Ouch. So we have to account for that stuff too. And those all interact. If you have three children being raised by one parent making $30,000/year as compared with two children being raised by two parents each making $50,000/year, expecting to get anything resembling the same results is bonkers.
It's also why hard science majors make fun of them.
> Throwing your hands up and saying "too many numbers! no conclusions could ever be possibly found!" would be completely unacceptable in any other discipline.
That's because just about any other discipline is capable of conducting a controlled experiment. The problem with statistics in social sciences is that you don't control anything. You can't just order families of a particular race to stop having more or less children than other races so that you can get a good control group, so you have no control group. You only have data from something you hope is a reasonable approximation of a control group, without even any good way to tell when it isn't.
Hard science recognizes social science work when solid data is used and the methodology is well understood and effective. You're generalizing.
> That's because just about any other discipline is capable of conducting a controlled experiment
> You can't just order families of a particular race to stop having more or less children than other races so that you can get a good control group, so you have no control group.
You look at families of a race that had less children and compare them to families of the same race with more children. That would be a data experiment controlled for race. Read Freakonomics if you want to understand data experiments better.
That's exactly how you expound the problem and get the wrong answer. How do you know that the factors causing parents to have more or less children are the same between races, or that those factors don't directly impact parenting ability? Suppose the predominant factor in low income Asian Americans having three or more children is a calculated decision that the couple's extended family has enough resources to responsibly raise that number of children (i.e. rich uncle), but the predominant factor in low income African Americans having three or more children is accidental pregnancy.
At first you had to take into account income level, but to do that you have to factor out fertility rate, and to factor that out you have to account for the different causes behind the differing fertility rate. If we then discover that the predominant cause of accidental pregnancy in African Americans is religious opposition to birth control or abortion, don't we have to then account for the causes and consequences of a higher degree of faith in religion?
Nobody has the resources to go all the way down the rabbit hole. But everywhere you look there is some factor that would change the outcome by 50% in one direction or the other if you take it into account. Which means you can make the numbers say whatever you want just by looking in the places you can expect to find support for the result you like.
Statistical controls are real controls, and are frequently used not only in social sciences, but in so-called "hard" sciences for large, complex, or distant systems that can't be conveniently be set up in a laboratory. Laboratory-style control is one particularly convenient mechanism for isolating particular independent variables, but its not a defining requirement of empirical science.
Precisely. The issue with numbers is that people will focus on numbers and make the conclusions that "as long as it's not 50/50, it means there is some RACISM at work somewhere" without understanding the underlying causes.
It's ALWAYS the same issue with numbers and statistics: used in the wrong context, you can manipulate them to say what you want to say, instead of using numbers to explain the truth.
That's pseudo science at best.
Races are BS, period. So these questionnaire make the BS go on and on.
Given the history of legal and social discrimination in the US, the impetus is on the people claiming we live in a post-racial society to back that fact up.
Say look at customers in a store and notice there is inequality, more people of a certain race visit it. What does it mean? Should something be done about it? Then, there is like you said, prisons. There is something disturbing going on, and something has to be done there, more urgently, than say figure out why there is racial misrepresentation at that one mall or store.
Ok two extremes. What about Google? There is racial inequality at Google. What does it mean? Should something be done about it? Should Google hire based on racial profiles. Minority X gets Y slots based on some weighted criteria. Will that solve anything? Will it make things worse. Should anything be done at all at Google? Is that a big priority. Should we be looking at prisons instead...
Is there anything in the data (I haven't looked too much in dept) about the application pool. Because it seems to me, b) kind of sidesteps deeper issues and kind of says (figuratively) "Minorities just don't know to apply to Google. If that is the sentiment I am not sure I agree with it.
(Unless of course Google and just then turn around and implement racial quota hiring decision and then in effect we back to that. As "just apply, we'll make sure you get in").
I have seen companies do that. One company I worked for hired a minority into upper management. Her skill set, experience and competence was not up to par. Compared to the rest of the managers. The belief was that she was there as a token "minority" person. Not necessarily disagreeing with that. Maybe those kind of steps are needed. But just saying companies do that.
Now on a) I know Google does some good work. They have good programs for Women in tech. But not familiar too much with their program geared for racial minorities. Can you point me to some?
Again, the presumption about a a post-racial society requires evidence. That evidence may be that ethnic identity issues explain discrepancies, but it can't be an argument because we live in a post racial society , data to the contrary should be ignored.
Culturally, we all need to understand that we need to admire people who do these things. It will encourage us to seek partners (even in our own cohort) that are good at these things and have children which are even better. Obama gave fantastic advice to all African american men (to all men, really): marry someone smarter than you.
Everyone needs to follow that advice. We no longer have evolution looking out for us, and this is how we avoid idiocracy.
It is my sincere belief that African-Americans or Latinos if they were left alone would do much better.
Consider an alternative: those non-white races who predominantly arrived here as a result of passing modern immigration requirements, often having secondary education and a drive to succeed, tend to be more successful.
I technically agree with your statement, though. If we had never pushed out the people who were here before us, and never enslaved blacks, both populations would probably be doing much better.
The immigration system of the old days wasn't meritocratic; it was simply exploitative.
And really, so is the immigration system today, except that it exploits largely by keeping the threat of deportation hanging over the immigrant's head (including, yes, under the H1-B program for white-collar workers).
in the days of Ellis Island and had just enough education to work as bakers and butchers
So in other words, for the time in which they lived, they were pretty skilled.
The immigration system of the old days wasn't meritocratic; it was simply exploitative
That's irrelevant to the parent comments claim that societal meddling has left some population groups behind. It's also irrelevant to my point distinguishing between people who were already here and pushed out, or forcibly brought here, compared to population groups primarily composed of modern, legal immigrants.
However, it doesn't matter. Coming here in "the days of Ellis Island" required a tremendous amount of dedication and daring, and the places they were coming from were likely even worse off. It was self-selecting for driven people.
"How can we be a supposedly post-racial society and yet ..."
We simply are not a post-racial society, not by a long way. The way to get there is not to pretend that we are and hope it all goes away. Google's data is just more information that can be used in the discussion. It is not particularly surprising, though. I think that their publication of it is more significant that the data itself, in this case.
Where did you get the impression that we are?
Sigh...
South Asia is pretty colorful (at least compared to Han-dominated East Asia). I do think they have "South Asian" as an option on many query forms now.
http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/questionnaires/2014/...
On the other hand, white people are white people. They're always at the center of controversy and just about everything else, as is usual for a majority.
That might be technically true, but I'm pretty sure a majority of all ethnic groups spend most of their time engaged in things other than civil rights activism.
Nor would I suggest that Asian civil rights activism is somehow less active than that of other ethnic groups. There's a pretty rich history of Asian-American civil rights activism dating back to the 1860s (e.g. Yick Wo v. Hopkins was a landmark civil rights case decided in the 1886) and dealing with issues ranging from internment in the 1940s (look up Fred Korematsu), hate crimes (look up Vincent Chin), and general xenophobia (the whole debacle around Wen Ho Lee). If Asian Americans seem less prevalent than, e.g., African Americans, I'd suggest it has more to do with making up a smaller portion of the population than any cultural distinction.
So what are asians doing wrong ? Well, simple : they're too peaceful a people. They use trade, negotiations, ... not violence in the streets, violent change of government.
It doesn't make sense to support them if you want a revolution.
I care about this issue deeply. I'm a baby boomer, which is another way of saying that I'm a good bit older than most people who post on Hacker News. I distinctly remember the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated--the most memorable day of early childhood for many people in my generation--and I remember the "long hot summer" and other events of the 1960s civil rights movement.
One early memory I have is of a second grade classmate (I still remember his name, which alas is just common enough that it is hard to Google him up) who moved back to Minnesota with his northern "white" parents after spending his early years in Alabama. He told me frightening stories about Ku Klux Klan violence to black people (the polite term in those days was "Negroes"), including killing babies, and I was very upset to hear about that kind of terrorism happening in the United States. He made me aware of a society in which people didn't all treat one another with decency and human compassion, unlike the only kind of society I was initially aware of from growing up where I did. So I followed subsequent news about the civil rights movement, including the activities of Martin Luther King, Jr. up to his assassination, with great interest.
It happens that I had a fifth-grade teacher, a typically pale, tall, and blonde Norwegian-American, who was a civil rights activist and who spent her summers in the south as a freedom rider. She used to tell our class about how she had to modify her car (by removing the dome light and adding a locking gas cap) so that Klan snipers couldn't shoot her as she opened her car door at night or put foreign substances into her gas tank. She has been a civil rights activist all her life, and when I Googled her a few years ago and regained acquaintance with her, I was not at all surprised to find that she is a member of the civil rights commission of the town where I grew up.
One day in fifth grade we had a guest speaker in our class, a young man who was then studying at St. Olaf College through the A Better Chance (ABC) affirmative action program. (To me, the term "affirmative action" still means active recruitment of underrepresented minority students, as it did in those days, and I have always thought that such programs are a very good idea, as some people have family connections to selective colleges, but many other people don't.) During that school year (1968-1969), there was a current controversy in the United States about whether the term "Negro" or "Afro-American" or "black" was most polite. So a girl in my class asked our visitor, "What do you want to be called, 'black' or 'Afro-American'?" His answer was, "I'd rather be called Henry." Henry's answer to my classmate's innocent question really got me thinking. Why not treat all of my neighbors as individuals, one at a time?
And anyway I've seen this issue go wrong for people in other countries. Also in my childhood, in the other state I lived in growing up, I had a classmate in the early 1970s who would get on the school bus each day wearing a button that said "Serb Power." I thought that was very strange, because I knew my history well enough to know that Serbia hadn't been an independent country since Yugoslavia was formed after World War I. And, anyway, he was living in the United States and had been born here, so why was he so concerned about Serb power? We all found out during the early 1990s how crazy many people in Yugoslavia were about former historical grievances, which made that country disintegrate and killed many innocent people born long after the grievances should have been forgotten.
Most reporting to the federal government about "race" and "ethnicity" is based on the U.S. Census bureau definitions for ethnicity and race categories, which in turn are based on regulations from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which were announced on 30 October 1997
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/fedreg_1997standards
to take effect no later than 1 January 2003 for data collection by all federal agencies. You can look up the detailed category definitions on the website of the United States Bureau of the Census. As the Census Bureau itself notes,
"U.S. federal government agencies must adhere to standards issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in October 1997, which specify that race and Hispanic origin (also known as ethnicity) are two separate and distinct concepts. These standards generally reflect a social definition of race and ethnicity recognized in this country and they do not conform to any biological, anthropological, or genetic criteria. The standards include five minimum categories for data on race: "American Indian or Alaska Native," "Asian," "Black or African American," "Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander," and "White." There are two minimum categories for data on ethnicity: "Hispanic or Latino" and "Not Hispanic or Latino." The concept of race reflects self-identification by people according to the race or races with which they most closely identify. Persons who report themselves as Hispanic can be of any race and are identified as such in our data tables."
https://ask.census.gov/faq.php?id=5000&faqId=191
It's politics all the way down. I'd be happy to see the United States move in the direction of treating individuals like individuals, equal before the law and all deserving full legal protection of civil rights, period.
I read somewhere Asian women is most desired by men of other races while Asian men is least desired by women of other races. Read that somewhere...
No, Asian is not white.
Instead, the interesting thing in the data is the large amount of overrepresentation of Asian people. There's nothing wrong with that, but perhaps the sense that overrepresentation is a sign of wrongness that is the cause of people being afraid to mention it or focus on it.
Overall, the group most overrepresented in tech (judging from google's numbers and others) are Asian men. Yet, because the overall political narrative is focused elsewhere, that will remain un-remarked upon.
If people could change their physical appearance as easily and as cheaply as their clothes, this problem would disappear overnight. If everyone could choose their gender, race, height, etc, there would be no point in discriminating based on those traits. To quote Dr. Seuss, people could change their appearance...
> until neither the Plain nor the Star-Bellies knew
> whether this one was that one... or that one was this one
> or which one was what one... or what one was who.
(Minus being scammed by Mr. McBean.)
Sadly, that sort of technology won't be around for centuries, if ever. But I think we can get most of the way there with present-day tech. More and more jobs allow remote work, and on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. With the right blinding in the hiring process, we could make discrimination impossible. Even if the job isn't remote, the hiring evaluation could be done without meeting in person. Once a person is shown to be intelligent, mindful, productive, kind, etc... it's very hard to maintain a prejudice against any trait they may have been born with.
This wouldn't solve the problem of a bias in applicants, but it would eliminate any implicit or unconscious discrimination.
I've been suggesting for a while someone build a blind hiring website. I'm imagining you'd have a service to help cleanse gender, race, age, etc. information from the application materials. Even if you have phone or in-person late-stage interviews, this could radically change the makeup of the candidate pool at the final step.
I agree that meeting might never be necessary. I know an academic department that doesn't meet faculty candidates because they find the application materials are a better predictor of the kind of academic success they're looking for. I'm inclined to think this is true more often, but I have no data.
Elementary School Math competitions are almost completely SE Asian and South Asian. Maybe 2% Caucasian. Girls/boys are about 50/50 across Asians. Fewer Caucasian girls than boys but small sample size.
Just random observations.
i.e. minorities get a boost of score in university entry test; they are also not bound by one-child policy.
The races in the east have mostly inter-married and integrated with Han culture, though there are still some tensions (the largest Zhuang minority has been very rebellious up until the 20th century).
I'm more inclined to believe that there are high number of Asians simply because there are more Asians in the world, period.
That's basically an idea to brutally "reflect the demographics of the country". And that's actually racist.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Constitutional_Amendmen...
"White" as a racial definition only exists to allow opposition to the "colored" races (for things like slavery, colonialization,etc).
The more we mix the harder is to make this classifications.
Also, immigrants who come from far a way are usually better off. So may be they should not be considered a minority in the traditional sense.
What!? There were plenty of Chinese and Vietnamese (+ Hmong and so on) who came over during the Vietnam and Chinese-Vietnam wars as refuges who, like most displaced peoples, had (and still have) many social and economic problems; e.g. gang violence that you normally wouldn't associate with upper class Asians.
[1] http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/o...
I don't think anyone is saying that white men are a "problem". There's so much defensiveness in these counter-articles coming out as though this is some specific attack on white males. I don't think Google was trying to shame itself over its own white male percentages, it was just exposing its own racial breakdown data instead of previously keeping it a secret.
http://money.cnn.com/2014/05/29/technology/google-white-male... ("Google: Overwhelmingly white and male")
> I don't think Google was trying to shame itself over its own white male percentages
I'm not sure what other conclusion you can draw when Google says "we're not where we want to be" and the giant pie chart slices are 70% male, 61% white. They were apologizing and acting contrite about _something_, don't you think? The implicit message is "we did a bad thing hiring too many white males."
It absolutely is an attack -- not by Google directly, but by our culture which strives to make whites feel ashamed about who they are. I don't blame Google, they're looking out for their best interests. They don't want to get slammed for having too many white dudes in their ranks.
By interpreting this purely as an attack on white males ONLY you're ignoring the "attack" perceived by minorities who see things like 1% black tech employment rates and see mainly systemic bias. It has the appearance of avoiding the issue experienced by minorities.
Come on, man! He's not doing that! He was responding to this claim you made just two posts above:
> I don't think anyone is saying that white men are a "problem". There's so much defensiveness in these counter-articles coming out as though this is some specific attack on white males.
Despite Asian people being overrepresented and White people being underrepresented—in fact, despite Asian men being the most overrepresented of the demographics listed by Google (honestly: congrats!)—CNN and other media go for the fashionable target: White men.
It's interesting: When Asian people succeed, White people admire their hard work and determination. When White people succeed, White people feel shame and guilt.
I think that's an exaggeration. When's the last time whites felt shame about Buffett's or Gate's success?
The problem for minorities or women is that it seems like every time race or gender is brought up in tech, the majority comes out in droves to steer the conversation into a discussion of white male hardship while also completely avoiding or the dismissing the original issues brought up about minorities and women in the workforce.
Why is it that we can categorize people by age, sex, disability, income, etc., but when it comes to race, race is all of a sudden some sort of taboo, something "we need to finally move on from" in a supposed post-racial society? Sure all these categorizations of people are "human," regardless of race or income or any sort of background -- but their experiences and situations growing up are not all the same, and that's the key point.
That statistical correlations exist with race across the spectrum in so many vital facets of American life means that it's a meaningful idea. To deny the existence of race as it affects people's everyday experience and situations denies that race is a factor that actually matters. And that's a problem, because it does matter. And it's more than just data, as meaningful as data is. You can simply ask a minority about their personal experiences growing up in America to learn about some of the things a minority may go through.
Also consider that there is an inherent bias here in HN since it's reasonable to say that most of us come from privileged backgrounds, regardless of race. Always consider the background of any minority who dismisses race as an issue. They only speak to their personal experience and it may not be indicative of the mounds of minorities who organize and find common ground in their situations and experiences.
And I'm not here to argue necessarily over what "race" means, its definition or its construction and meaning over time, because that's not the issue I'm trying to bring up. It's clear to anyone with common sense that this construction of "race" that we perceive still matters, and it has always mattered for centuries in countless civilizations and societies, though how it plays out may not be universal.
I understand that it's not easy. If we could ignore race completely somehow, in theory, perhaps we really could whisk away many of the problems that it brings. In some sense, race is unique from other categorizations of people because of how fluid its definition is, how subjective race really is. Yet, it amazes me how with something as complex an issue as poverty or economic growth, we can take great measures to study it and analyze its history and come up with all sorts of policies to tackle its many dimensions... but when it comes to race or racism, we think we can solve the issue by dismissing it. "Let's just forget about race, it will go away!" Does that simple diagnosis really make sense for one of our oldest social ills?
Many of us don't want big brother meddling with affairs they need not stick their noses in, but even if you hate the government, I think we could all agree that if the government were to disappear tomorrow, the world would collapse. I say this again to point to the complexity of race issues, that you simply just can't throw the idea away and expect the issues to fix themselves. At the very least, it's something that deserves to be treated with seriousness, whose intricacies need to be appreciated to be understood. The ability to simply ignore an issue or approach it shallowly because it may not affect you is what real privilege is, not the petty term that it is unfortunately so often thrown towards white males or whichever privileged group is in question.
One last word, which truly applies to issues beyond race: If you feel uncomfortable talking about race in this post-racial world you envision, then I'm sorry but it's not about your personal feelings towards race, when there are people out there facing real problems that deal with race. And it's great if you "personally don't see race," but unfortunately that's not the experience of many others, or the people born into a situation that is a product of systematic racism.
I encourage you to step away from those personal feelings and your worldview and to instead consider the lives of others, at least for a moment.
Then it goes on and on about women. If 30% overall and 17% technical are women, compared to 2% and 1% for black, it sounds like women have it relatively good.
Many of my CS classes had more black guys than women of any color. Yet there is almost no discussion of this. It's Jesse Jackson who prompted that this data be released.
While this is about Google, they've been the most open and forthright about it in releasing the data. The situation is widespread through the Valley.
I hear happy horseshit about Watsi and other nonsense in the Valley. Begin at the source - with the LPs of VC's exploiting mostly young talent in the various startups - startups where 1% of the hired technical workers are black, if that.