America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium.
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
Your comment about white people that didn't have anyone to do with slavery doesn't seem entirely correct. I'm one of those people (great grandparents were German or Scottish immigrants). But my mom's house is in a neighborhood where black people were explicitly prohibited from buying houses (it was on the deed at the time). And, loans from the government were red lined. Isn't that government collusion that benefitted only me and harmed black people? It didn't help Latinos or Japanese immigrants in the twenties. I'm not sure if that counts as having nothing to do with slavery. That impact seems directly correlated to slavery, although the dragnet could have impacted recent African immigrants in the 1920s.
Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
Say you inherit your mom’s house which is worth more as a result of historical redlining, and your wife inherit’s her mom’s house and it’s worth less. So there is some persistent economic disparity as a result of past actions. But both houses probably are worth more than my wife’s grandmother’s house, which is a modular house in rural Oregon. And my dad’s family house is a tin roof building in a third world village that didn’t have electricity last time I was there in the late 1980s.
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
Economic value of a house is just a single factor between the two. Redlining has a host of other issues that are often unspoken about or ignored. That rural house in Oregon most likely is in a better environment. Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted. Because of lack regulation or companies just paying low cost fines and making criminal acts just part of business their model. This increase the cost of insurance and medical expenses for those that live in redline districts.
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
> Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted.
They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution. Go look at the actual maps https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ and see for yourself. Typically, the redlined neighborhoods are conveniently located close to downtown.
> Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
In the context of redlining, observe that agricultural employment was already at around 20% when redlining started, and 5% when it ended, and also the redlined neighborhood were the ones with best commutes and job availability. This is still true, by the way: the ghetto parts of the American cities almost universally are centrally located, close to jobs and facilities, and they are well served by transportation infrastructure (in fact, this is one of the activists biggest complaints: that they're too close to freeways).
Thank you for corroborating my claim with evidence. I said:
> They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution.
The study found:
> Across all included cities, redlined D-graded neighborhoods had 12.2 ± 27.2 wells km−2, nearly twice the density in neighborhoods graded A (6.8 ± 8.9 wells km−2).
So, just like I said, "more often", but that's still only less than twice as often as the most desirable neighborhoods. This is hardly a noticeable difference to residents.
> Redline districts are often near oil refiners and other highly polluted.
Significance:
Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts. "The presence of wells in historically redlined neighborhoods remains relevant, as many of these redlined neighborhoods have persistent social inequities and the presence of wells, both active and post-production, can contribute to ongoing pollution."
* Meant to say,"Redline districts are often near oil refiners and highly polluted."
> Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Yes, 2x is clearly "disproportionate", but it's a far cry from being obviously significant. If you assume that pollution is not significant in best neighborhoods, then it's not greatly significant in worst, because twice something insignificant is still hardly significant. Replace oil wells with something else that's clearly harmful: murders. Imagine the worst neighborhoods had twice as many murders as the best ones. This would actually be improvement over the status quo: worst neighborhoods are far more dangerous than just 2x!
> Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts.
It does no such thing. It says that wells can contribute to ongoing pollution. That does not mean that it does, and it does not even quantify the contribution of wells to pollution, nor does it even show that the worst districts are significantly more polluted in the first place.
The point of this study is to corroborate the narrative of redlined district being significantly more polluted than the "best" districts, and that this is why residents of these districts and their descendants have worse outcomes today. It shows something that's not very interesting on its own (just twice the number of oil wells). However, it's clearly successful in building narrative, given that it convinced you that it provides evidence for it.
There's a clear reason for these ideas being popular but it's something you have to work out yourself because everyone who writes about it is too deeply politically motivated to address it objectively.
As to teaching history, the question is how you do it. Growing up in Virginia, I learned about slavery as a cautionary tale: we treated people in the past differently, and that was bad, and we strive to treat everyone the same now. That’s good history.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
You can see the difference between one immediate family and another in the DNA. DNA differences range from distinctions between individuals to distinctions between species. How do you decide where it makes sense to draw a middle line and say "ethnic group"?
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
> I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
Germany is an ethnostate, so why is that surprising? The country’s name is literally “land of the people” in the language of a group of tribes of people who happened to have fair skin. Our languages’ names for Germany are derived from the names of specific tribes.
It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.
My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.
> As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white,
Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.
If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
The easy fix is to stop assuming and start talking to people in German - it’s really easy to do.
If they don’t understand the language you will notice immediately.
A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
You know it's the same everywhere? It's hopeless to wish for all of humanity to change their common intuitions and independently reproduced heuristics.
I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.
There's a white Korean member of the National Assembly[0], whose existence I find fascinating. I have no doubt that he would also get spoken to in English on the streets, if the speaker does not know who he is. And even more funnily, supposedly his Korean has a thick Jeolla accent!
Also, born and grew up in Korea to missionaries, only to be deported to the US by the Japanese when they took over Korea. Then moved back later in life.
I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position.
Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.
I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.
It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.
But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.
> I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position
The reverse is also true: it can be corrosive for the people on the other side of that equation. Of course the 3rd generation "foreign" descendant had no choice on where to be born, but you can imagine that for the generation of the "natives" that took in the immigrants, it might have felt strange to see among their community people that looked different, spoke a different language, and had different cultural customs. It's hard not to think that this was corrosive to the social fabric, especially for the people who didn't feel that they had agreed to that particular change in the social contract.
> your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country
Some immigrant groups don't integrate very well, even after generations. Naturally, it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem; do the immigrants not integrate because the natives reject them, or do the natives reject them because the immigrants don't integrate?
As an immigrant myself, I believe the onus is on the immigrant to integrate, and to raise one's children to be even further integrated. Again, it sucks for those who had no choice but to be born in a country as the descendants of immigrants, who nevertheless get judged as an immigrant unwilling to integrate; but that's not a problem particular to immigration. It always sucks to be judged not as an individual but as a member of a group.
We should all strive to judge people by who they are and not what group they belong to, which I suppose was your overall message; but I just want to point out that everything is a two-way street.
Even if that number would hold up - Why?
It’s still more dignified for all involved.
Not every human interaction needs to be made as efficient as possible.
Clearly as evidenced by your irritation, most people don’t work the way you think they should? At least by default. If they’re German.
Honestly, being part German, I’m surprised there isn’t a law about this already! Though I guess there was an attempt that ended badly not that long ago…
Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.
I for one am sad that Germany once again seems to head toward embracing some death-cult ideology that in the past did unimaginable damage to the people it was supposed to serve.
It makes me feel that all the progress we made in the past 80 years is built on sand and we can slide back anytime in a highly fragmented, tribalistic and cruel society.
>> Yes there is something deeply wrong in German society - as evidenced by the recent stellar rise of a popular racist and facist party and the more and more common casual racism that is just accepted by the majority of the population.
I guess you mean the party which led by a women in a relationship with another women from Sri Lanka. You should probably start looking for other insults, racist and fascist are getting kind of boring.
I will never understand why Weidel hates herself so much - how can you be lesbian and head of a party that opposes same-sex marriage and wants to take away your rights?
The party is internally divided but a strong portion of it openly endorses facist “heroes” - for example calling the SS “all good people”. They try to hide it and purge their extremist members but it’s not working. Höcke and Gauland are very obviously racists as are many other less prominent members of the party.
>"Germany for the Germans".
>referring to Germans of Turkish origin as "fatherless vermin" and "camel drivers", who should go back to their "mud huts" and "multiple wives".
Yea those are definitely not racist or facist statements /s
Edit: even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
>> I will never understand why Weidel hates herself so much - how can you be lesbian and head of a party that opposes same-sex marriage and wants to take away your rights?
Maybe what you think you know is wrong?
>> even the other far right European parties don’t want to associate with the afd, I wonder why
Maybe because they don't consider AFD as far right enough?
It’s honestly like an odds calculation in those environment. The odds of someone who looks different that is local is incredibly low so they default to assuming said individual is a tourist.
It might be the case in certain Asian countries but in Germany the odds are definitely not incredibly low - something around 40% of the population don’t look like what most people think of when speaking of Germans.
So, Germany previously had Prussia, Bavaria and the rest. They were separate kingdoms, but all ethnically German.
There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?
Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.
Thank you. I wouldn't exactly call France a tiny state. Are there any others that I should specifically be looking at? The Europeans pride themselves as being quote unquote civilized people, did they not have uniform ethnicities within their borders before the founding of their states? If not, then what did define those borders?
Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?
It did somewhat calm down once the Republic’s formed, but even today there are large conflicts with ‘Normal’ French society and the large scale ghettos from (typically Muslim) immigrants and refugees in France.
Killing is not the only way to ethnically homogenize a population. Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
The nation state of Turkey's establishment out of the ethnically diverse Ottoman Empire deployed all of the above.
> Other instruments are suppression of ethnic identity, deportation and encouragement of emigration.
Thank you. Again, though, the histories of the European states don't mention efforts at suppression of ethnic identities, deportation, nor encouragement of emigration - at least not up until the 1930s.
If there are good sources to read about this occurring I would love to read them. Otherwise the insinuations are baseless.
Notably, it was exceptionally common for Religion to overlap almost exactly with Ethnicity (for various reasons), so the fighting between different Sects was often a common proxy for fights between different Ethnic groups too.
Also, since different Ethnic groups tended to ‘own’ different countries, each time there was an invasion, one would either make ground, or get repelled ‘back where you came from’, which also tended to align ethnic groups by borders. Those efforts didn’t generally merit note. If ‘your side’ lost, even if you’d lived there for a couple of generations, of course you’d lose your land and need to flee ‘home’.
Paris is one somewhat notable exception though.
Language is also an interesting proxy for this. Spanish vs French vs German vs English, etc.
still, there was always the ‘European’ Spaniards, vs the Moorish Spaniards, eh? Splits within splits.
France is not, and has never been, ethnically homogeneous (I'm French).
It was always a mix of different peoples - Celtic, then Romans when they invaded, then various Germanic peoples (including the Franks that gave the country it's name)... even the standardization of the French language is fairly modern. We had Occitan and Provincal and Breton spoken, it's only in the past ~200 years or so that industrialization has given a "uniform" culture.
In some countries yes, others not. Nobody got killed to make Nordic countries ”ethnostates”. It’s just that not that many people wanted to live so far north.
In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
That’s gotta be among the most revisionist takes I’ve ever seen. The nordic countries subjected hundreds of thousands of individuals from mostly lower class backgrounds to mandatory sterilizations over a period of decades in order to secure the population distribution they have now.
People pattern match. Gender, skin color, height, hair color are intuitively and naturally the easiest things people can pattern match on. Not a whole lot of Asians or black folks in pictures like these [https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1c/West_and...], just like you won’t see a whole lot of local folks who are white in China or India.
Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900. It is natural to assume that people are white.
As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.
When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
> Germany is too small to be a so called melting pot immigration country like the U.S. around 1900.
Why? Are we talking population or space?
On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.
If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.
Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.
So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
It’s not a “choice” Europe has made. That’s what they are. Most European countries, as a matter of history, are ethnic tribes with flags, similar to Japan or Bangladesh or Israel.
Everything is a choice. There are differences in immigration, work visa, citizenship, social security, etc laws that perpetuate these choices. But these laws are downstream of the local culture desiring this.
Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
Space and wages of course. In Germany you are a bank slave for your entire live if you want to buy a house. Meanwhile rich people from all over the world buy up prime real estate.
Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.
This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.
Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.
What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.
I use ethnostate more as a statement of fact than as derogatory. Often though I do it to needle lefty euros who like to tell Americans how much more racist we we are than them.
I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.
Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.
Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.
European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.
Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
> The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
Yes, I've lived in Brazil for almost a year, and lived in Japan for two years, and was more or less fluent in both the languages of those countries. I've traveled to almost every country in Europe and South America.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
Ah, I see your point now. I agree there isn't a way to do this easily. And I see what you are saying about the impact of separating into groups to achieve the goal of reparations.
Tying it back together, though, this is why I'm disappointed that there is so much backlash about DEI programs. I know first hand from my time at a Fortune 50 company that the lack of black people employed there was partially due to the fact that they had never recruited at any historical black college ever. When they hired a Chief Diversity Officer, we did (I went there). And there were good candidates.
I successfully recommended for hire the first black employee at the satellite office for that company. That (candidates being pushed that don't look like the current workforce) just simply doesn't happen when it is all white guys. We generally find other people that look like we do to recommend and hire, especially when we aren't aware of it. I'm sure Asian men suffer from the same myopia as I do. It doesn't stop unless I really think about my default behaviors.
That feels like the right way to do reparations. That's the best way, IMHO, to build generational wealth.
But, it's falling apart because angry white men like me are complaining that they are cut out of opportunities. I can understand, as a 51 year old white male I've seen how hard it is to find work the last few years. It's brutal. But I've always gotten most of my jobs through my personal network of other mostly white men that worked in tech. If you don't have that network because you aren't in a group heavily represented in tech, then your chances are slim even if it truly is a meritocracy.
But as you note, you used race to discriminate, and someone who otherwise would have been qualified who wasn’t black (apparently), lost not due to some skill gap or the like, but apparently purely due to the color of their skin. At least that is how I read it.
At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.
Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?
Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)
Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?
Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?
Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?
I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.
But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.
The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?
And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.
The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.
In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.
Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.
If you interview 10 people for one job opening, you have to pick one of them. If 5 of them pass the technical interview you start filtering them on other non-technical things. "Would I like to hang out with this person", "were they funny", "do they have similar hobbies to me?", "did they go to the same school as me?"
Whoever you pick, for whatever reason, didn't take an opportunity from the other 4 qualified people.
Heck, my wife would have a pile of resumes to go through and she only read them until she found 5 people she wanted to call. If you were "the next" person in the pile it was just bad luck that you didn't get called. The people in the pile before you didn't take your opportunity.
Interviewing is hard. People don't have a "technical skill" stat that you can sort by and just take the best one. People interviewing people is a terrible way to decided if someone will be a good fit, but it's the only way we have.
Often you end up with a bunch of people that you feel are equally qualified and you just have to pick one. If you use "dei" to pick rather than "this person was in the same fraternity as me" that's just a different side of the same coin. The difference is that before DEI programs, the people that passed the "post technical" part of the interview were the people that were most similar to the interviewers (that's human nature) and the interviewers were mostly white guys.
Rather than taking away opportunities, DEI takes away the ability for white people to "always win ties"
Those situations you are describing are discrimination. At least by the meaning of ‘a choice based off criteria’. The vast majority of them are legally just fine, but as you note produce a specific, rather predictable outcome yes?
Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same
with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.
Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.
But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?
Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.
Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.
DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.
In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?
For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.
A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.
Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?
Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.
Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?
Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.
> for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population
But there are also personal preferences, and some groups have different average preferences than other groups. Look at rich countries, women often prefer non-STEM jobs if they have the choice, while poor countries can have more equality because women will pursue traditionally male jobs lacking other good options.
> Because how do you propose doing reparations without causing the exact problem I’m describing?
If you are a white or Asian boy who likes computers, and have been playing with code ever since you were little, you get rejected at college admission with a higher score than a black kid. Why has anything to do with skin color, programming doesn't get any easier if you are white. Math problems are just as hard no matter how rich are your parents. If you achieve some level of understanding, it should not be wiped away by skin color, especially to redress a wrong that was made generations ago and not your fault.
Humans are tribal.
As much as I wish it weren’t the case often, I don’t think just pretending we’re all one big family will work.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
The answer is to stop paying lip service to the idea that an ethnicity is like a big family - an idea almost nobody in the US believes, so this will not be that hard - and start saying what we all know to be true: that we're all individuals whose behavior and loyalties are determined by our character and values, not the circumstances of our birth, our skin tones, or which side of a pointless conflict our ancestors fled here to escape.
In most cases, it’s not so much that they’re a family, but rather a group of folks with somewhat aligned interests that can fight together for those interests.
The ‘black community’, ‘Irish community’, ‘catholic community’. And those do often work - frankly, it’s often the only thing that works when that community does have some specific interest.
It’s for lobbying and other pressure tactics, yes?
Ethnic groups don't actually have collective interests. Individuals have specific examples of universal interests. Sometimes individuals are lead to believe that they have collective interests, but that's usually because they're being made to do something against all of their individual interests. Let me offer a few examples.
Civil rights is a specific example of a universal interest: equality before the law. The rise of the Nazi party is an example of people forsaking their own interests for a facade of collective interest that covered over the personal interest of a few leaders - Nazi Germany was extraordinarily corrupt, and of course ruined the lives of and killed most of the people who it claimed to exist for the interest of.
It is interesting that you bring up "Catholic interests," because the Church is naturally opposed to concepts like "Irish interests." The Church doesn't want its members to divide themselves along ethnic or other lines because that would detract from their Catholicism. It is no accident that the Nazis - the most famous example of an "ethnic interest group" - had to destroy or subsume every other kind of organization to exist.
Irish New Yorkers in 1933 didn't want Irish rights, Irish houses and Irish jobs, they wanted rights, houses and jobs. That's what I mean by individual examples of universal interests. Nobody went around saying, "I'll only work for an Irishman," or "I'll only live in a building built by an Irish mason."
LA has always had a lot of gang warfare, which divides itself along ethnic lines because that's the underbelly of human nature. Gang warfare is a great example of everybody doing things that are very bad for themselves and others because of a perceived division with little basis in fact. If there's enough gang warfare I guess you could see racially segregated unions, like in the deep south, but that is again against worker's interests just like how segregated churches oppose God.
It is very difficult to find even a selfish motive for segregation unless you are an actual slaveowner or apartheid government official.
Irish New Yorkers were being heavily discriminated against, to the point that worrying about rights, houses, and jobs was a particularly serious and somewhat unique problem for Irish folks (individuals!) there at that time. It’s not like someone fresh off the boat is going to be able to pass as anything else.
There were also prevalent crime issues and ethnic gangs at the time. And many people (Irish in particular) DID go around saying those things you assert no one ever said.
For people who ‘looked Irish’ it was absolutely in their interest to align with these groups to some extent, or they’d be discriminated against and not have useful power to fight against it, and not have a group of people aligned with them that would provide housing, jobs, etc. to them.
In fact, near as I can tell, the only reason the Irish stopped being discriminated against so heavily is because of the political machines and gangs that punished groups for discriminating against them this way.
I can see that we have different interpretations of what acts were central to the progress of civil rights, and which were ancillary or even effects.
I don't think, for example, the "mafia" was a major contributor to equal rights for Italian immigrants. One obvious piece of evidence is that today, the mafia has been weakened thanks to the efforts of the police, but Italians haven't become persecuted as a result.
Membership in the Italian Mafia has turned out to be bad on net for the good of the people the families claim to represent. I think some people can get rich doing it but it is not a beneficial or admirable lifestyle.
If you want another example, where were all the Jewish gangs? I'm not aware of a single one. Some famous gangsters were Jewish (at least if you count the movies, I don't know about real life), and I don't think the cause of equal rights has suffered as a result. You have to read this with a smile even though the topic is very serious because the ideas involved would be at home on Saturday Night Live.
One final example is what could be the most hated organizations in America: the white nationalist gangs that only exist in prison. They are all in jail, and equal rights for people of European descent hasn't suffered at all. I'm surprised I ever participated in a conversation where I had a reason to write this, but white nationalists have no positive goals, not even for anybody.
The advancement of the universal recognition of equal rights for all is a much better explanation because unlike the rise of gangs, it hasn't been reversed.
As to your second point, not all Nash equilibria are beneficial. Gang formation is a lot like a Keynesian beauty contest in that appealing to the basest parts of our nature is the safest bet, and I think we can agree that this has nothing to do with anything good.
People do not need to "band together to survive" in that sense. Those gangs were mainly shaking down businesses in their own neighborhoods anyway, and everybody is a lot better off now that they're history.
So now you’re trying to say we should just go back to 1930’s New York (and prisons!) and tell them they should just stop forming those ethnic gangs because clearly they don’t actually need to do that, and they’d be better off without them?
Hey, you’re welcome to if you want. Time travel may be hard, but I’m sure someone would let you into your local Folsom equivalent if you asked.
That is a rather weird shifting of the goal posts, and completely ignores that there is such a thing as collective interests if a collective is being specifically targeted, or has special interests correct?
Yes, collectives don't have special interests. Individuals have specific instances of universal interests, like security or freedom. "Black people" doesn't have a separate existence from a black person. By guarding the principle of equality before the law, you are not getting involved in anybody's business but yours.
It isn't right to view something like equality before the law as a matter of somebody else's self-interest, or to justify a ruthless pursuit of self-interest by recasting it as service of an imagined collective interest.
I honestly don’t understand the point you are trying to make. Does it have a practical point?
If a bunch of, say Catholics, get together to make a community group and lobby for something they want - how is that not that groups ‘special interests’ in every practical way?
In 100% of cases, that group will either be lobbying for a universal value in a less effective way than if they were defined by the cause, or advocating for the interests of a few of the members of the larger group against the interests or views of other members.
Anyone who doesn't find that self-evident, I challenge to think of a single political opinion that is universal to members of any religious sect or ethnicity that is not universal to all human beings.
Those are all the same right, the right to practice your religion without being expelled from normal society. Nobody has different rights from anybody else, we just exercise them in different ways.
Literally these are different rights for different groups of people. Based on the dictionary and legal definitions of ‘right’. I’m again not sure what you think you’re saying, but it doesn’t seem to agree with reality.
We don't label people with a mark at birth delineating the prayer and rest times they have a right to. Anybody has the right to convert to any religion and observe it. You have as much a right to pray towards Mecca as you do to observe the Sabbath or attend Mass when it is held.
Of course you think that. You(r family) would monetarily benefit from it. Not to mention you’d get to double dip and enjoy the perks of the neighborhood as well as get your free money. Completely bonkers that you were able to type that without seeing the blatant hypocrisy.
> America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery
You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression.
So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US).
I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
"DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity)"
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
> What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
Interviewing for orchestras behind a screen, so the judges can't see the age/gender/race. That's a good way to go about equality.
<< White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
The word "justice" being the keyword (now, for some people) for DEI indicates it is precisely about punishment. At least to those who frame it in terms of "justice". I see that word and I know it is a buzzword for angry people. In the 90s when I was first persuaded as to the necessities of policies that instantiate reverse racial discrimination (i.e. affirmative action) talk was more about equality and unity, and increasing efficiency of the system. Blacks were (still are) not utilized to their full potential, so aa offered a common good inthe form of a more productive, better functioning society. I don't encounter those arguments as much niw as arguments about "justice" or the impossible to define "equity" (not the same as the phrase "equality of outcome" which was a very concrete and useful construct for thinking about racism). Historical context is everything.
What do you do when both A and B score a 95 and there is only one job?
That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"
affirmative action as implemented requires percentage targets (based on statistical models of the overall population) based on race/gender/etc.
If you don’t get enough candidates, or the candidates you do get don’t happen to exactly align quality wise on whatever other criteria you are using, of the right race, gender, etc. what do you think actually happens?
NOTE: I have been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that what happens is not what you assert. I have also been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that I should say what you are asserting if anyone asks.
>You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing. We are all harmed when we are amongst racist assholes refusing to coexist with others based on skin color.
> This idea that white-passing people benefit from BIPOCs being discriminated against is not convincing
Did you sleepwalk through literally every American history class you had growing up?
It boggles the mind that you can write "discrimination against people doesn't help the people who aren't discriminated against."
That is the point of discrimination: to benefit those who aren't discriminated against. That's why it was created, that's why it persists, and that's why people who benefit from the discrimination oppose its cessation. Look elsewhere in this discussion: the people who historically benefit from that oppression are saying its abatement is oppression directed back at themselves.
The beneficiaries of discrimination are usually split among class lines. So you have economically poor white folks who are indeed harmed by racial discrimination—though not nearly as harmed as the discriminated groups them selves—and rich white folks who are the only ones making money off of it.
The harm is often second factor such as the abundance of cheap (or free) labor yields less bargaining power and you end up working for less than you otherwise would have (but also the psychological harm of living in an unfair society). But next to the harm caused to those who are indeed discriminated against, the harm is rather minute.
My issue is the metrics constantly parroted to show inequality wouldn't (shouldn't) stand muster to an Econ 101 student.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
How about the English? I'm a second-generation 'white' American citizen. My grandfather was a Canadian citizen from London, Ontario who migrated to the USA in the mid 1920s as a boy. The English, largely due to the influence of Wilberforce, passed the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, which outlawed slavery in the British Empire and predated the American Civil War.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.