" racism.

This is a real thing. There has to be a good way to explain this...

5/6/2014 4:25:32 PM

This:


http://www.policymic.com/articles/88731/wharton-study-shows-the-shocking-result-when-women-and-minorities-email-their-professors

Quite sad and reprehensible...

If this is how the cream of the crop (people with phds and ideally neutral and race-blind) are, imagine how employees and management of companies and gov agencies deal with minorities and women.

[Edited on May 6, 2014 at 5:03 PM. Reason : systemic racism AND SEXISM]

5/6/2014 4:42:09 PM

OP, it's because they want to feel better about themselves.

5/6/2014 5:30:52 PM

^^ Having a PhD doesn't make you enlightened. You're the same asshole, you just have a fancy piece of paper with your name on it.

5/6/2014 5:33:28 PM

^^^ ouch, that's brutal, especially against research that just came out suggesting Asians do better just because they work harder (ie not a genetic thing like many people feel). So the Asians work harder, but the lazier white male still gets more exposure, even in academia.

[Edited on May 6, 2014 at 7:31 PM. Reason : ]

5/6/2014 7:31:07 PM

I'm not surprised

I've long decided that the next time I look for a job, I'm going to be using my anglicized middle name (Philip) instead of my chinese-sounding name.

It comes down to the thinking that you'd (probably) mesh better and have less barriers with your new understudy/employee/etc

[Edited on May 6, 2014 at 9:20 PM. Reason : ]

5/6/2014 9:17:42 PM

How come?

5/6/2014 9:20:34 PM

i think there is definitely institutionalized racism, but that study is seriously flawed. it's really just what people a professor doesn't know at all would respond to.

professors get lots of emails from prospective grad students. and MANY of those are from East Asia. Hell i got them sometimes and I wasn't even a professor. Not answering emails from foreign sounding strangers (especially asian ones) isn't necessarily a comment on institutionalized racism.

now if it were actual students from this prof's classes (or even university) that'd be an entirely different thing.

5/6/2014 10:03:33 PM

Quote :

"http://www.policymic.com/articles/88731/wharton-study-shows-the-shocking-result-when-women-and-minorities-email-their-professors"

So if the only thing different about the email was the name, how do the professors know who is a white male?

"Brad Anderson" couldn't be a black guy?

[Edited on May 6, 2014 at 10:49 PM. Reason : ]

5/6/2014 10:49:05 PM

^ racism doesn't normally make sense, but that's kind of the point. Just being perceived white helps you get your foot in the door.

Quote :

"professors get lots of emails from prospective grad students. and MANY of those are from East Asia. Hell i got them sometimes and I wasn't even a professor. Not answering emails from foreign sounding strangers (especially asian ones) isn't necessarily a comment on institutionalized racism."

It's exactly a comment on institutionalized racism, because the content of the emails are identical. And the point isn't to cast the professors as bad people, this isn't a personal flaw, that's what makes this "systemic" or "institutional". This is distinct from personal racism, which i'd argue really isn't a major problem in America anymore.


[Edited on May 7, 2014 at 1:06 AM. Reason : ]

5/7/2014 1:02:00 AM

To be fair to the professors, when mentoring someone you want to be able to connect with that person. You tend to connect with people of your own background and gender better. Sure there was probably some racism and sexism involved but isn't using stereotypical names kind of racist, as the researchers did?

5/7/2014 1:48:24 AM

^ yeah, that's correct. But that's the definition of systemic racism. Systemic racism isn't a personal problem, this isn't to criticize professors.

It's for people to realize that supporting "diversity", programs that seek to recruit more women and minorities into those positions, is to help restore fairness. A woman might have a subconscious, understandable, tendency to respond to other women, a minority might want to reach out to someone who has been through some of the battles they have. Without actively promoting diversity, you have this situation where the groups that have attained these positions of power, without trying to be racist, will result in a system to promotes like-minded individuals to more easily rise up, making it unfair for others.

[Edited on May 7, 2014 at 1:59 AM. Reason : ]

5/7/2014 1:57:03 AM

Yeah, that's a really shitty study that proves nothing about race and everything about a name. I've met plenty of Black, Asian, Indian and Latino people with regular names like James Smith or Dan Jones. Sounds like they'd all get responded to at the same rate as the studie's "white male" population.

Furthermore, a response rate to an email inquiry is a horrible way to judge racism, and ignores a potential mountain of external factors that could influence results.

This study was conducted in April 2010. Maybe by that point, the professors had already filled their programs with minority students and were looking to add some white males for you know.. ~diversity~.

5/7/2014 7:06:16 AM

Quote :

"I've met plenty of Black, Asian, Indian and Latino people with regular names like James Smith or Dan Jones."

lol you're part of the problem dude

5/7/2014 8:18:50 AM

"How Come"

5/7/2014 8:36:07 AM

I think "systemic racism" is a cop out to be lazy and implement programs that "help restore fairness" with zero effort on addressing actual discrimination by actual people.

It's "privilege" all over again.

5/7/2014 8:36:42 AM

^
What is the solution then? "Fairness programs" are racist in and of themselves, but how else do you level the playing field?

5/7/2014 8:50:57 AM

Investigate actual instances of discrimination. Make hiring/college/banking whatever as transparent as it needs to be to make this happen. Require that rejections are justified and provided to the rejected possibly. Have the discriminated against get off their ass and litigate instead of just vaguely complain about the system.

Painting all white people or all men as discriminatory just fuels outrage, though I'm starting to think that's the point, thereby "proving" systemic racism in never ending loop.

[Edited on May 7, 2014 at 9:24 AM. Reason : .]

5/7/2014 9:23:02 AM

Quote :

"lol you're part of the problem dude"

no, i'm pointing out it's a shit study

5/7/2014 9:28:51 AM

By saying that a name like "John" is a regular name, then you also at the same time mean that Tavarus, or Jiangeng, are not regular names. The fact that the latter names are not construed by you as regular means that you are part of systemic racism. You'll subconsciously hate on them for it.

5/7/2014 9:35:51 AM

Quote :

"Painting all white people or all men as discriminatory just fuels outrage, though I'm starting to think that's the point, thereby "proving" systemic racism in never ending loop."

that's not what the study implied at all. it only said white men, as a group, discriminate against minorities, as a group. which is apparently true. not that every white man is racist.

the more people you convince that there is a problem, the easier it is to solve the problem.

5/7/2014 9:54:59 AM

What is it about the whiteness or the maleness of the "group" that makes them discriminate?

Because if it isn't the whiteness or the maleness, why identify the group as white men?

5/7/2014 10:00:56 AM

You want to argue the semantics of what I meant by Regular Name? How about addressing the fact that a name is not an indicator of race.

You rush to label anyone who disagrees with you a racist yet completely ignore that any person regardless of race named "Brad Anderson" or "Steven Smith" was more likely to get a response from the professors sampled. Where did I get those two names? Those were the exact same names the researchers used in their study.

The only thing this study proved was that males with traditional Anglo-Saxon names were more likely to get a response. If anything, this study is more damning to gender inequality than to race.

5/7/2014 10:02:46 AM

:face palm:

5/7/2014 10:12:06 AM

Quote :

"What is it about the whiteness or the maleness of the "group" that makes them discriminate? Because if it isn't the whiteness or the maleness, why identify the group as white men?"

everyone discriminates. white men are singled out because of their social standing. their actions have the greatest effect on socioeconomics. it would have been interesting if they included females and other races

Quote :

"You want to argue the semantics of what I meant by Regular Name? How about addressing the fact that a name is not an indicator of race."

of course there are asians named Jim Smith, but how many white dudes do you know that are named Zhang Wei? the point is to put an image in their head.

and i don't think you're racist

5/7/2014 10:19:58 AM

And I'm not, nor do actually believe the study is wrong, I'm just playing devil's advocate. It's easy to get worked up over a piece of research like this, but it's really not that great of an indicator of systemic or institutionalized racism and and it's findings are somewhat inconclusive.

5/7/2014 10:32:34 AM

Quote :

"I think "systemic racism" is a cop out to be lazy and implement programs that "help restore fairness" with zero effort on addressing actual discrimination by actual people. It's "privilege" all over again. "

You don't understand what systemic and institutional racism is. Your approach would result in more "false positives" for white people.

A system can be discriminatory without a specific individual in it being racist. In this type of scenario, you can't "address actual discrimination by actual people".

In this professor example, you'd want to scrutinize the emailing habits of professors in real time, which is wrong and onerous. The correct solution is to encourage women and minorities to seek those positions and to educate the leaders on their own biases.

5/7/2014 12:32:37 PM

Quote :

"professors get lots of emails from prospective grad students. and MANY of those are from East Asia. Hell i got them sometimes and I wasn't even a professor. Not answering emails from foreign sounding strangers (especially asian ones) isn't necessarily a comment on institutionalized racism."

This is reality. Many of the people you hear from don't have visa status to start out with. Of course you can secure this for summer research work in most cases. No doubt, this would increase their chances of getting into a full program. I completely see what they're going for, and the requests are genuine. The problem is that we just don't have enough "opportunity" to go around.

This is legal and it's nationalism based. We flagrantly admit to denying people access to our institutions and jobs because they were born in the wrong place. Their treatment is a result of the actions of people geographically close to them. If you called this nationalist racism, nation-based racism, or something like that you wouldn't be wrong.

This is privilege too. Not only is it "systematic", it's fully institutionalized. You don't need a study, just read what the damn law says in clear English.

The study has a valid point. We can look at it and say "yeah, that's unfair". But
a) even the SJW themselves don't have a way to combat it and
b) how is this worse than the people overtly underprivileged?

Regarding (b), it's not worse. Okay... so we've identified something that's unfair, unintentional, we don't have anything to do about it, and this kind of discrimination is legally sanctioned in other cases where we also don't plan to do anything.

The "life isn't fair" mantra is bull. I'll admit that. It would be more accurate to say that we can't have nice things in a broken world. When 1/3rd of the world remains inhumanely poor, you're not going to get equality anywhere. That poor population is extremely race-skewed.

So I think the problem is solvable. Absolutely. But not until we solve the bigger problem.

5/7/2014 12:39:33 PM

Quote :

"What is the solution then? "Fairness programs" are racist in and of themselves, but how else do you level the playing field?"

Implement systems that remove all personally identifying information from the process. No name, no place of birth, no race, no schools. Just an identifying number and a list of the verified and credentialed accomplishments of the individual.

5/7/2014 1:16:42 PM

^ good idea, but doesn't work in the legal system, or more casual communications channels. Wouldn't work too for a woman who was the president of her WISE chapter, the black kid who lead his BSB, the gay who was part of the GSA. A lil ironic your solution itself is demonstrative of privelege don't you think? See any correlation between that and government?

5/7/2014 1:20:48 PM

Quote :

"Implement systems that remove all personally identifying information from the process. No name, no place of birth, no race, no schools. Just an identifying number and a list of the verified and credentialed accomplishments of the individual."

If you do this, then we'd have to throw out affirmative action.

5/7/2014 1:31:58 PM

um, i'm pretty sure that's what he's saying

5/7/2014 2:20:35 PM

Quote :

"You don't understand what systemic and institutional racism is. Your approach would result in more "false positives" for white people. "

So? If the paper trail was definitive the accused could prove they weren't being racist.

Quote :

" A system can be discriminatory without a specific individual in it being racist. In this type of scenario, you can't "address actual discrimination by actual people". In this professor example, you'd want to scrutinize the emailing habits of professors in real time, which is wrong and onerous. The correct solution is to encourage women and minorities to seek those positions and to educate the leaders on their own biases. "

That's not what I'm suggesting at all. All I'm saying is those professors must give a reasonable excuse for rejecting someone that doesn't involve protected classes. It doesn't even have to be longer than a couple sentences. If anything, implementing this would in effect work on their biases since they'll be forced to actually read the applications/resumes past the name to find an excuse.

5/7/2014 2:33:47 PM

Quote :

"All I'm saying is those professors must give a reasonable excuse for rejecting someone"

You mean they must give a reason for every email they don't reply to?

Oh man. That'll go over well...

5/7/2014 2:50:58 PM

I'm obviously talking about formal requests. Blind e-mails can be rejected for whatever reason, IMO.

5/7/2014 2:55:40 PM

Quote :

"good idea, but doesn't work in the legal system, or more casual communications channels. Wouldn't work too for a woman who was the president of her WISE chapter, the black kid who lead his BSB, the gay who was part of the GSA. A lil ironic your solution itself is demonstrative of privelege don't you think? See any correlation between that and government?"

Why wouldn't it work in the legal system? In this day and age of technology, there's no reason in the world why the defendant should have to appear in person before either the judge or the jury. They should be a number and a scrambled voice on a scrambled video screen. Heck you could even do the same thing for public defenders, they never have to meet their client in person. The catholic church solved this centuries ago with a wall and a screen, surely our modern society can do even better with our technology.

As to your various leaders of student groups, simply replace the line item with "President of Student Group, Local Chapter".

As to casual communication, if you start passing personal information along, that's on you. No reason you couldn't sign off all of your emails with a PGP signature or some other non - personal handle. Like they say, on the internet, no one knows you're a dog.

5/7/2014 4:38:24 PM

"We can solve this problem, if we end all human to human interaction."

5/7/2014 5:27:59 PM

Quote :

"This is legal and it's nationalism based. We flagrantly admit to denying people access to our institutions and jobs because they were born in the wrong place. Their treatment is a result of the actions of people geographically close to them. If you called this nationalist racism, nation-based racism, or something like that you wouldn't be wrong. "

I mean maybe this makes me a nationalist, but isn't this a good thing? I think we should somewhat discriminate based upon where people live in education.

I'd rather Chang Wong from San Francisco get in than Brad Anderson from the UK.

5/7/2014 5:57:08 PM

Quote :

"http://www.policymic.com/articles/88731/wharton-study-shows-the-shocking-result-when-women-and-minorities-email-their-professors"

a short quote from the paper:

All emails from prospective students sent to faculty were identical except for two
components. First, the race (Caucasian, Black, Hispanic, Indian, Chinese) and gender signaled
by the name of the sender was randomly assigned (see Table 1 for details about the names used
                                                            

--------------------------------
Insert Table 1 about here
--------------------------------

Second, half of the emails indicated that the student would be on campus that very day,
while the other half indicated that the student would be on campus one week in the future (next
Monday).4

5/7/2014 8:25:54 PM

Quote :

"We can solve this problem, if we end all human to human interaction."

Well, yes. If you want to solve a problem inherent in all human beings, you need to remove the human element. People are inherently and subconsciously influenced by their own experiences and internal biases. We can, with social change and conditioning, correct the conscious biases and reduce or eliminate them. But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about ingrained preferences for the familiar and for things like us. The only way to eliminate these is to take them out of the equation entirely. The only way to do that is to separate the person making the decisions from the person the decisions will affect.

5/7/2014 9:02:46 PM

It's not a problem inherent in all humans, only white men!

I mean, do you even READ Tumblr?!?!

5/7/2014 9:26:54 PM

^^ I actually think its a really interesting idea, especially for places like the courtroom, where we expect no bias but have some evidence of it occurring. I just get cynical about the trend away from face to face interaction sometimes (as I type this lol).

[Edited on May 7, 2014 at 9:32 PM. Reason : Arro]

5/7/2014 9:31:51 PM

Quote :

"Why wouldn't it work in the legal system? In this day and age of technology, there's no reason in the world why the defendant should have to appear in person before either the judge or the jury. They should be a number and a scrambled voice on a scrambled video screen. Heck you could even do the same thing for public defenders, they never have to meet their client in person. The catholic church solved this centuries ago with a wall and a screen, surely our modern society can do even better with our technology. "

A world where we use technology to this level is far off, I would be in favor of more tech used throughout government.

^^ lol, no one's blaming white males ITT.

5/7/2014 10:49:37 PM

^ Yeah I know, it was a joke

5/7/2014 11:22:19 PM

I think part of the problem is that people overlook the word systemic and get defensive about the word racism. Acknowledging systemic racism doesn't mean you're culpable or that you have overtly racist tendencies/bias.

5/8/2014 8:59:41 AM

That's just nonsense to me.

How does a group of people become racist without the individual members of that group being racist? Where does the group's racism spring forth from exactly?

Why is everyone hostile to the idea of punishing (or preventing as in 1337 b4k4's awesome idea) racist actions instead of trying to modify biases?

5/8/2014 9:25:22 AM

^^ Calling someone racist is like calling them a Nazi. It's a very very strong pejorative. People would rather be called a mother fucker than a racist.

Racism is based in a belief. I don't think you can be racist if you don't have a belief that at least resembles a concept of race superiority.

But the people in the study likely don't hold such a belief. A professor doesn't respond as often to races other than his own. Does that reflect a belief that person holds? Really?

Subconscious racism is a misnomer as far as I can tell. If it's subconscious, it's not a belief, and it's not racism.

"Secretly racist" is a different concept. In that case, the person believes in race superiority but has learned to keep their mouth shut. They mentally (consciously) admit it to themselves.

By all means, let's bicker about how much of the study's results are due to subconscious racism vs. secret racism. But these are very educated people. I don't think secret racism is negligible, but I don't think it accounts for most of the correlation.

5/8/2014 9:50:36 AM

^^Because individuals within the systems are racist but not all individuals within the system are. Blacks are disproportionately subjected to stop and frisk, but that does not mean that all cops are racist. Some cops are racist; the inordinate numbers are systemically racist.

^I, too, question the validity of this study, but I think bias can definitely be something about which one isn't aware. Not realizing -- or being unconscious of -- your bias doesn't mean it isn't actually bias. I think systemic racism benefit from both: the actively, overtly racist and the unconsciously biased.

5/8/2014 9:59:31 AM

Quote :

"^^Because individuals within the systems are racist but not all individuals within the system are. Blacks are disproportionately subjected to stop and frisk, but that does not mean that all cops are racist. Some cops are racist; the inordinate numbers are systemically racist. "

So would it be fair to say that black people are systemically criminals? Or that women are systemically adulterers?

Therein lies my problem with this bullshit.

5/8/2014 10:04:57 AM

Which relates back to my original point, systemic racism describes the system not the group. To describe those groups as criminals and adulterers is inaccurate. However, you could look at the system and say:

Blacks are over-represented in our prisons. Why is that? There are lots of factors in the system that could lead to that result.

- Crimes are more often committed by the poor/uneducated, which describes many members of the black community.
- Blacks are convicted more than whites and tend to be sentenced to stiffer penalties
- Blacks are stopped and search more often than whites
- Blacks are frequently stereotyped as criminals/thugs, which perpetuates an idea of "Blacks = criminals" whether or not it's statistically true

Are there black criminals? Yup. Are all blacks criminals? Nope. Is there a systemic problem related to blacks and the justice system? I think so.

5/8/2014 10:20:57 AM