This would be huge news if not for the election...

But we all know that this policy couldn't last forever, is there a good reason now is not the time for it to go away?

Problems still exist with race equality, but is there a reason to believe that SES-based AA couldn't serve these interests well enough?

I think it was Roberts who was concerned that a class of privileged blacks could gain benefit over poor whites because of the policies. It would have been unheard of to even talk about a class of "privileged blacks" when the policies were first created, and even a decade or so ago, but I feel like it's a viable concept now.

10/21/2012 5:08:52 PM

This seems relevant here:



The numbers are old, but it's the first one I found. Everything is the same now, with just different scales for income and SAT score. The trend is consistent.

Whites and Asians below the poverty line score better on the SAT than the wealthiest blacks and Hispanics.

Going by SES alone is no substitute for race. It will highly favor whites and Asians, as not only do these groups far outperform Hispanics and blacks within every SES, but even the lowest-income whites and Asians outperform the highest SES minorities.

Nobody likes to talk about that graph, but even liberals know that it is true. They know that SES cannot do the job that race-based AA can. That's why they're going to fight tooth and nail for it.

10/21/2012 5:28:53 PM

interesting... but why?

10/21/2012 6:06:50 PM

Overbearing Asian parents.

Whites making up the vast majority of nerds.

In other words, cultural differences.

10/21/2012 6:11:38 PM

10/21/2012 6:12:26 PM

Income level is just a single dimension of discrimination. Even in classrooms of mixed race with roughly equal incomes, teachers tend to tutor white children more diligently, have lower expectations of black children from the start, and even tend to discipline students differently for the same offenses based on race. Add to that the expectations, prejudice, and self-perception students gain from media and the national culture as a whole. It has a real effect on the self-esteem of a child when every person who looks like him on television is either a drug addict or a pimp, for instance.

[Edited on October 21, 2012 at 8:04 PM. Reason : .]

10/21/2012 8:01:21 PM

GD, those are shit SAT scores

10/21/2012 8:16:19 PM

There should be affirmative action for white people for prison.

10/21/2012 10:05:24 PM

That's called "keeping the cops from being racist bastards."

10/21/2012 11:58:23 PM

Pretty hilarious to see blatant racism in the second post...that says a lot about where we stand as a country I guess.

10/22/2012 12:39:57 AM

^ SAT scores are racist. Its why white people score so high on them.

10/22/2012 6:12:10 AM

Is it racist? SAT scores do track race even when you account for socioeconomic status, and there are a number of possible reasons for it.

Replacing race-based affirmative action with SES-based affirmative action seems like a good thing to do. But we should all be clear that, if race is removed from the equation, black enrollment at competitive colleges will decline. In order to be included, more black middle/upper income students will have to become the ultracompetitive nerds that y0willy0 is talking about in spite of the stuff that Str8Foolish is talking about.

Quote :

"moron: I think it was Roberts who was concerned that a class of privileged blacks could gain benefit over poor whites because of the policies."

It's not just an advantage over poor whites but poor blacks as well.

10/22/2012 7:01:52 AM

^That post is meant for moron, not oneshot, by the way.

Also, I don't necessarily agree with TULIPlovr's tone.

It's weird to meet someone who is smarter/wittier/more knowledgable/disciplined than you and then find out they barely broke a 1000 on the SAT. And people who don't do really well obviously don't talk about it very often...so it's not something we really have to confront as a reality of the test.

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 9:28 AM. Reason : ]

10/22/2012 9:28:19 AM

how does someone score below 700? I mean, if you told me such a person would have no decent career prospects, I'd say "no shit".

I would rate my K-12 education at an efficacy of about 0.5%, that was about the fraction of the time that I was gaining meaningful knowledge, and I'm not even on the chart (although I'm sure no one else posting here would be either).

What kind of school did you go to for 13 years in order to score that low? Do they even bother attempting to teach?

10/22/2012 9:33:31 AM

Check out this (slightly old) article:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/28/at_the_elite_colleges___dim_white_kids/?page=2

At the elite colleges - dim white kids

Quote :

"Researchers with access to closely guarded college admissions data have found that, on the whole, about 15 percent of freshmen enrolled at America's highly selective colleges are white teens who failed to meet their institutions' minimum admissions standards. Five years ago, two researchers working for the Educational Testing Service, Anthony Carnevale and Stephen Rose, took the academic profiles of students admitted into 146 colleges in the top two tiers of Barron's college guide and matched them up against the institutions' advertised requirements in terms of high school grade point average, SAT or ACT scores, letters of recommendation, and records of involvement in extracurricular activities. White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race."

Maybe the reason (some) white people are so hostile to accepting the existence white privilege is the branding...

perhaps we could instead call it "Reverse Affirmative Action" ?

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 10:23 AM. Reason : .]

10/22/2012 10:19:19 AM

Quote :

"White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race"

Oh look! A factoid not corrected for the total population of the different groups.

Are there black and hispanic students who don't get a "break" but are still admitted with less than the minimum requirements?

This statistical argument has the flexibility of a yoga instructor.

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 10:24 AM. Reason : ]

10/22/2012 10:24:51 AM

WHITE KIDS? GETTING PRIVILEGE? SURELY THIS IS SOME STATISTICAL TRICKERY!!! I STILL KNOW I GOT BUMPED FROM RUTGERS BECAUSE OF SOME AFFIRMATIVE ACTION PORCHMONKEY!!!

10/22/2012 10:27:58 AM

Seriously man, the point of posting this was to point out that anybody bitching about AA taking the spots of qualified white kids are off-target.

Quote :

"A larger share, however, are students who gained admission through their ties to people the institution wanted to keep happy, with alumni, donors, faculty members, administrators, and politicians topping the list."

This is called "privilege" and it disproportionately lands on white people because of historical and generational factors. Not all "white privilege" comes from people being racist and prejudicial, it often comes from systems that appear race-neutral on the face but benefit whites disproportionately de facto. Much like poll taxes and literacy tests in the post-Civil War south that were designed to repel blacks without using the word "negro" anywhere in the written law.

This is why many "race neutral" policies simply have the effect of perpetuating the current un-level playing field, rather than producing a level one. It's like finding out mid-way through a Monopoly game that the banker's been cheating and has snuck an extra $20,000 into his account, but saying "Okay, let's finish the game but no more cheating from now on!" The end result is not a fair game.

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 10:40 AM. Reason : .]

10/22/2012 10:32:17 AM

I've read the argument from Tim Wise. I understand white privilege as well as my prejudices will ever allow.

The concept of white privilege has some empirical success. The argument that minorities have a worse starting place is well established. We're solid on that point. I still find it notably unhelpful. I'll even put aside the discussion as to whether it's helpful to the debate. People like Tim Wise think that if we understand our situation then things will magically improve, although it might actually be the reverse, with these self-images perpetuating. If I'm a privileged child, then why should I feel insecure about my next bad grade? I'm privileged motherfuckas.

Ok, I'm sorry to tangent into that level of recursion of the arguments. I'm supposed to be arguing about white privilege purely on its factual basis. Again, it can explain some things. The problem is what it doesn't explain.

If the white privilege we know it is true, and I understand economics correctly (up for dispute), then the differential between black and white people would have decreased over time. The minorities would have started out shitty, then would still be in a much shittier place, but it wouldn't be getting worse. As far as I understand the evidence, it's getting worse.

So we must abandon something from this world view. Maybe my understanding of economics wrong? That would be an extremely unfortunate conclusion - that inequalities only grow over time as a matter of natural evolution. Do you believe that?

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 11:19 AM. Reason : ]

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 11:19 AM. Reason : ]

10/22/2012 11:17:56 AM

^^ Can we just call it "privilege" instead of "white privilege" then?

Maybe we can callit "Historically white privilege" kind of like "Historically black universities"

10/22/2012 11:31:41 AM

^^ it's only been getting worse since about 2002-ish timeframe, from my recollection.

It's anyone's guess as to what happened then that caused things to shift.

10/22/2012 1:57:19 PM

Quote :

"The minorities would have started out shitty, then would still be in a much shittier place, but it wouldn't be getting worse. As far as I understand the evidence, it's getting worse."

Part of that has to do with the fact that we just suffered a major crisis that erased decades worth of gains, but not necessarily permanently:



The gaps close when the economy's doing well, when there are plenty of jobs to go around, but open again when things get bad. When the gap is closing, black unemployment improves more gradually than white, when it's widening, it pre-empts. This, to me at least, communicates that blacks are the last to be hired and the first to be fired. That's racism expressing itself in the structure of people's priorities, it reemerges when people become more concerned or cautious, as a way of mitigating the (perceived) risk of hiring a minority.

Still, during each successive period of gap closing, the gap closes just a bit more tightly, that's progress, and that's why simply looking at a snapshot of today and a snapshot of so many years ago during a boom is deceptive, it misses this dynamic.

Compare 2010 in that graph, for instance, to 1983. White unemployment is the same at both times, but the corresponding black unemployment is lower in 2010. The gap still grows in bad times and shrinks in good times, but in both good AND bad times, the gaps are smaller than they were in the past. So you can see in that graph that these relative gaps are indeed decreasing with time, and any time it widens it's always occurring in tandem with unemployment across the board.

So, the racism is still there, reasserting itself during crises, but overall it is nonetheless weakening year by year and crisis by crisis. So no, it is not getting worse, that's an illusion created by comparing a snapshot of a racist nation in crisis with a racist nation not in crisis. If you compare crisis-to-crisis or boom-to-boom, the improvement is obvious.

edit: Bear in mind also that this "first to be fired, last to be hired" effect occurs in other areas too, such as the availability of credit, education budgets, etc...

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 2:13 PM. Reason : .]

10/22/2012 1:58:34 PM

That is very compelling. One of the best posts I've seen in TSB.

10/22/2012 2:16:28 PM

I agree with the post overall but I have to take issue with labeling America a "racist nation"

Not that it isn't true, but it implies that there are nations that are not racist, which is not the case.

10/22/2012 2:27:24 PM

Quote :

"White students who failed to make the grade on all counts were nearly twice as prevalent on such campuses as black and Hispanic students who received an admissions break based on their ethnicity or race.""

You keep using these numbers....I don't think they mean what you think they mean.

Basic statistics: This means a black or hispanic applicant is more likely to receive an admissions break than a white applicant.

Twice as many whites got breaks, but if there are more than twice as many white people who applied, then your citation works against you. At elite universities, I'm willing to bank on white applicants more than doubling the number of black applicants.

[Edited on October 22, 2012 at 3:05 PM. Reason : a]

10/22/2012 3:03:55 PM

Racial inequality is not the same as racism. Racism may fuel racial inequality and often does, but it's only part of the picture, and it also happens to be the most difficult part to address because it involves modifying peoples' individual prejudices. An admirable goal, but not something easily augmented. It's just like the gender wage gap is way more complex than "we got two new hires - start the man at 20 an hour and the woman at 18".

10/22/2012 3:52:39 PM

No Native Americans so far ITT !

10/22/2012 3:57:35 PM

Ignoring Asians itt.

10/22/2012 8:37:15 PM

Asians are at least in the line graphs.

10/22/2012 8:38:04 PM

IIRC Native Americans are so few that they can't be reliably sampled for the surveys, and Asians were once like that too.

10/22/2012 8:41:48 PM

So few because they were nearly exterminated.

Which is somehow not as bad as what happened to Blacks.

Got it.

I'll just go back to pretending to be White now.

10/22/2012 8:47:08 PM

I thought anyone who made it through elementary school knew why there are so few Native Americans, so I didn't need to explain it

10/22/2012 8:55:43 PM

Quote :

"So few because they were nearly exterminated."

....by disease. And no, not the disease introduced as an act of war.

Warfare is down on the list, and warfare specifically against Europeans even farther down.

Your elementary school textbooks were wrong.

10/22/2012 9:13:54 PM

but still exterminated, regardless of the cause

10/22/2012 11:56:01 PM

If the cause is unimportant, why did you italicize why?

10/23/2012 6:18:45 AM

Disease reduced native populations by more than 90% during the last hundred or so years before settlers even showed up.

Then settlers reduced them by another 90% during the next hundred years.

[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 9:17 AM. Reason : .]

10/23/2012 9:07:49 AM

Quote :

" Twice as many whites got breaks, but if there are more than twice as many white people who applied, then your citation works against you. At elite universities, I'm willing to bank on white applicants more than doubling the number of black applicants. "

Let me quote myself again

Quote :

"Seriously man, the point of posting this was to point out that anybody bitching about AA taking the spots of qualified white kids are off-target. "

Take a few moments off from defending the proud white race from slanders such as "They aren't actually inherently superior" and try to understand that, yes, you are more likely to get bumped from college admissions by Willard Romney III than by DeMarkus Williams.

edit: Also:

Quote :

"Ignoring Asians itt."

Ah yes, Asians. Some people love to bring up Asians as though they stand counter to the "white privilege myth" because they out-earn whites. This is actually a statistical illusion created by the fact that Asians live primarily in major cities like NYC and L.A./Sacramento/San Francisco, and Houston, where the cost of living is much, much higher than the national average, and have extremely low populations in rural or suburban areas compared to other minorities.

As a result, their median income appears very high when compared to whites overall. If however, you compare urban asians to urban whites, the racial gap reasserts itself with whites on top again. That is to say, much of the high earnings figures for Asians compared to whites reflects moreso the gap between urban and rural populations. The gap is even larger if you control for education attainment and profession. That is, for the same job and same qualifications, whites still out-earn Asian Americans.

Another factor is this: Asian immigrants, as a rule, have to possess a certain level of accomplishment to even make it to the US. Being across the Pacific, it's not as easy as floating over on a raft or wading across the Rio Grande. To get a visa, get on a boat, and establish yourself in a US city requires, on average, greater familial wealth from the get-go, especially when you're coming with all of your family and don't already have relatives who can help you get on your feet. Compare to immigrants from Central and South America, who come here most often on foot and impoverished; or to blacks, who were economically suppressed for hundreds of years, and to some extent still today. In fact, for similar reasons, immigrant blacks tend to fair better economically than native ones.

That is to say, given the average conditions of their immigration, it'd be strange if asians didn't outperform other minorities who either enter the country on foot to flee poverty or have been a captive underclass for generations. Nonetheless, they still get paid less than whites when you control for level of education, profession, and local cost-of-living.


Here's bit of info on the subtleties of stats on Asian Americans:

http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3203265/Waters_ImmigrationEthnic.pdf?sequence=1


[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 9:40 AM. Reason : .]

10/23/2012 9:12:31 AM

Quote :

"This is actually a statistical illusion created by the fact that Asians live primarily in major cities like NYC and L.A./Sacramento/San Francisco, and Houston, where the cost of living is much, much higher than the national average, and have extremely low populations in rural or suburban areas compared to other minorities. "

Like how men earn more than women in large part because they select higher paying professions. So, correct for profession and the differences goes from 72% to 80-some % and correct for profession and qualifications and you're up to 90% these days.

But that includes old people. The world was racist in the 60s. No one argues otherwise, and people influenced by those dirty decades of our parents are still in the workforce. Compare people in their 20s and the difference is gone.

Now this doesn't change the fact that men earn more than women. But it's not something to target with policy, aside from how we treat children in math and science classes. Likewise, it's not anyone's problem that Asians live in urban areas. That's their decision and life situation.

Plus, how fair of a comparison is first generation immigrants to their counterparts in other racial groups?

Let's be clear on this point - non-citizens are OVERTLY discriminated against. Want to work at a national lab? Count your lucky stars if you get a job without having citizenship first. Security clearance? Forget it. You can dispute the ethics of these practices, but it's the current law.

There is a statistically meaningful number of freshly minted Asian citizens. Just look at the population number. We should have never held the expectation that they'd be on par with the rest of us when they didn't do K-12 education in this nation. Why on Earth would you maintain otherwise? These newcomers are included in the statistics, and they should be expected to drag them down.

I admit, it's probably nigh impossible to make a fair comparison between Asians and their counterparts of other races. With the margins as small as they are, I would classify this is virtually unknowable. It follows that it's folly to predicate a policy on a perceived difference. The default position should be to look at, and treat, all groups equally.

Quote :

"Here's bit of info on the subtleties of stats on Asian Americans: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3203265/Waters_ImmigrationEthnic.pdf?sequence=1"

Don't you think that 1995 is a little old for this discussion? This paper has tables with 1990 data. How old were you in 1990? Our collective life experience has virtually no bearing on this data.

10/23/2012 10:15:26 AM

Hoping this doesn't turn into one of those 16-quote/replies-per-post situations but here goes...

Quote :

"Like how men earn more than women in large part because they select higher paying professions. So, correct for profession and the differences goes from 72% to 80-some % and correct for profession and qualifications and you're up to 90% these days."

What you're describing is a gap (Women to Men) that closes the more closely you look at the details. This is opposite for Asians vs Whites. If you look at the most simply statistics, a national average, then it appears Asians outearn Whites. If you correct for local cost of living, however, it reverses, and whites out-earn asians. If you continue to correct for education and profession, the gap grows.

Quote :

"Likewise, it's not anyone's problem that Asians live in urban areas. That's their decision and life situation."

When you correct for the urbanity, they still earn less than their counterparts. If they chose to all move to the country, they'd probably earn less than their counterparts there as well. Two people, same job, same education, same city: Asian guy earns less. It's only when you average in all the Appalachian hillbillies and Midwest trailer park denizens that suddenly lower-income Asians in San Francisco look rich.

The point of my post was that the "model minority' stereotype is based on fallacious interpretation of national statistics, and that false stereotype means that Asian communities who need assistance don't get it because of a false perception that they're ahead of whites. That is a problem, because not only does the disparity with whites go unnoticed, there's a false perception that the disparity is reversed!

Also, this misperception is ammunition for people trying to dispel the notion of white privilege, people who take the discourse of race in this country backwards and into denialism.

Quote :

"There is a statistically meaningful number of freshly minted Asian citizens. Just look at the population number. We should have never held the expectation that they'd be on par with the rest of us when they didn't do K-12 education in this nation. Why on Earth would you maintain otherwise? These newcomers are included in the statistics, and they should be expected to drag them down."

Newcomers are included in statistics for hispanics as well. My point was that the same goes for hispanics, for instance, who don't get K-12 here, but there's a reason to expect Asians, as an immigrant group, do better than immigrant populations from Central and South America. Namely, the financial conditions for travel from Asia to America are more demanding, illegal travel is far more unlikely, and so the mere path of immigration from Asia to America acts as a preliminary class-sieve.

Quote :

"It follows that it's folly to predicate a policy on a perceived difference. The default position should be to look at, and treat, all groups equally."

That is the default position, but willful blindness to disparity means the "default position" reduces to "perpetuate the current disparities."

Quote :

"Don't you think that 1995 is a little old for this discussion? This paper has tables with 1990 data. How old were you in 1990? Our collective life experience has virtually no bearing on this data."

The "Asian Americans are a model minority" talking point began in the 90's, and as a point of rhetoric has simply carried over from year to year since. Even if the data's not up to date, it shows that, from the very start, that rhetoric of the model minority Asian-American was misleading and hid an actual disparity.


[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 10:47 AM. Reason : .]

10/23/2012 10:40:53 AM

One more thing: Non-citizens quite often are positively discriminated in favor of compared to native populations, particularly with minorities. However, this is more relevant to Black and Hispanic populations than Asian ones. This piece is a great read.

http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_04_29_a_black.htm

The article, as a whole, is about the experience of being a foreign-born black dealing with American blacks and American conceptions of "blackness", but here's the part that pertains to positive discrimination for immigrants:

Quote :

"In 1994, Philip Kasinitz, a sociologist at Manhattan's Hunter College, and Jan Rosenberg, who teaches at Long Island University, conducted a study of the Red Hook area of Brooklyn, a neighborhood of around thirteen or fourteen thousand which lies between the waterfront and the Gowanus Expressway. Red Hook has a large public-housing project at its center, and around the project, in the streets that line the waterfront, are several hundred thriving blue-collar businesses--warehouses, shipping companies, small manufacturers, and contractors. The object of the study was to resolve what Kasinitz and Rosenberg saw as the paradox of Red Hook: despite Red Hook's seemingly fortuitous conjunction of unskilled labor and blue-collar jobs, very few of the Puerto Ricans and African-Americans from the neighborhood ever found work in the bustling economy of their own back yard. After dozens of interviews with local employers, the two researchers uncovered a persistent pattern of what they call positive discrimination. It was not that the employers did not like blacks and Hispanics. It was that they had developed an elaborate mechanism for distinguishing between those they felt were "good" blacks and those they felt were "bad" blacks, between those they judged to be "good" Hispanics and those they considered "bad" Hispanics. "Good" meant that you came from outside the neighborhood, because employers identified locals with the crime and dissipation they saw on the streets around them. "Good" also meant that you were an immigrant, because employers felt that being an immigrant implied a loyalty and a willingness to work and learn not found among the native-born. In Red Hook, the good Hispanics are Mexican and South American, not Puerto Rican. And the good blacks are West Indian. The Harvard sociologist Mary C. Waters conducted a similar study, in 1993, which looked at a food-service company in Manhattan where West Indian workers have steadily displaced African-Americans in the past few years. The transcripts of her interviews with the company managers make fascinating reading, providing an intimate view of the perceptions that govern the urban workplace. Listen to one forty-year-old white male manager on the subject of West Indians: They tend more to shy away from doing all of the illegal things because they have such strict rules down in their countries and jails. And they're nothing like here. So like, they're like really paranoid to do something wrong. They seem to be very, very self-conscious of it. No matter what they have to do, if they have to try and work three jobs, they do. They won't go into drugs or anything like that. Or listen to this, from a fifty-three-year-old white female manager: I work closely with this one girl who's from Trinidad. And she told me when she first came here to live with her sister and cousin, she had two children. And she said I'm here four years and we've reached our goals. And what was your goal? For her two children to each have their own bedroom. Now she has a three bedroom apartment and she said that's one of the goals she was shooting for. . . . If that was an American, they would say, I reached my goal. I bought a Cadillac."

Elsewhere in the article

Quote :

"The implication of West Indian success is that racism does not really exist at all--at least, not in the form that we have assumed it does. The implication is that the key factor in understanding racial prejudice is not the behavior and attitudes of whites but the behavior and attitudes of blacks--not white discrimination but black culture. It implies that when the conservatives in Congress say the responsibility for ending urban poverty lies not with collective action but with the poor themselves they are right."

Spoiler: Rest of the article works to disprove that implication, or at least show that the issue has far greater depth.

[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 11:07 AM. Reason : .]

10/23/2012 11:04:49 AM

Quote :

"My point was that the same goes for hispanics, for instance, who don't get K-12 here, but there's a reason to expect Asians, as an immigrant group, do better than immigrant populations from Central and South America. Namely, the financial conditions for travel from Asia to America are more demanding, illegal travel is far more unlikely, and so the mere path of immigration from Asia to America acts as a preliminary class-sieve."

I was arguing the newcomers point to offer an alternative explanation for the white-Asian discrepancy other than discrimination.

Yes, it would follow that the same thing applies to Latinos, who have had about the same population grow rate (although slightly different composition from birth rates vs immigration, I'm sure it won't matter too much).

But now this is immensely confusing. We have ogles of mechanisms.
- urbanity
- class-sieve
- newcomer bias
- honest-to-god discrimination

Now, these are all in addition to the typical corrections for educational attainment and industry. It should also be said that we've obviously not listed all the factors. We might not have even listed the most important factor determining the relative income between groups. It could be something completely and totally unknown to us. It could even be balancing against yet another factor that we don't know about, pushing it in the other direction!

Discrimination could make a huge difference, or it could make almost no difference. Employers could be discriminating in favor of Asians in places, balancing out other employers discriminating against them. I generally agree with the proposition that Asians are probably on net harmed by discrimination... but so what? I'm not even saying that I am sure they are harmed by discrimination, it's just more likely than not, and even that is only for the average.

I'm not arguing that we're truly post-racial, I'm just questioning how much that final bullet point really matters for this idea of helping "communities who need assistance". I fail to believe that even the best social scientist in the world could have a prayer's chance at clearly defining what this community is, what assistance is, or what constitutes need.

More than likely, you're going to hurt them by trying to help.

[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 11:20 AM. Reason : ]

10/23/2012 11:18:25 AM

You're boringly reasonable to disagree with. Bring back the guy who got banned for his "Black people" version of the cop brutality thread



edit: pack_bryan!

[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 12:39 PM. Reason : .]

10/23/2012 12:36:48 PM

Quote :

"More than likely, you're going to hurt them by trying to help. "

I wouldn't say "more than likely" but I see what you're trying to say.

But you also have to realize that a reduction in privilege doesn't equate to discrimination, which is where many of the people who ask "why isn't there a WET" err i their thinking.

10/23/2012 2:25:12 PM

Str8Foolish

Quote :

"Income level is just a single dimension of discrimination. Even in classrooms of mixed race with roughly equal incomes, teachers tend to tutor white children more diligently, have lower expectations of black children from the start, and even tend to discipline students differently for the same offenses based on race."

You realize this is not due to race but due to the child's behavior, right? Black students, for whatever reason (parenting, youth culture, etc) are typically less behaved/polite than white students. Same goes for poor vs rich students.

Treating kids differently because of their behavior is not discrimination.

Quote :

"So we must abandon something from this world view. Maybe my understanding of economics wrong? That would be an extremely unfortunate conclusion - that inequalities only grow over time as a matter of natural evolution. Do you believe that? "

I feel that two things are preventing the races from achieving academic and occupational parity:
1. Difference between the races when it comes to behavior at school and academic discipline.
2. The inherent human preference to associate with others who think and behave similarly.

#1 is a result, I feel, of popular culture (eff the establishment) and differences in parenting quality.

#2 will never change. Human beings have an innate preference for associating with others who think and behave similarly. This will always result in discrimination, no matter who is at the top of the social hierarchy. Even if the preference is so incredibly small that (and this is what I think we are approaching today) it only affects decisions where the options were otherwise 100% the same, (e.g. anglo HR analyst selects Sarah Smith, CRNA of 14 years over Rahjeshri Lakhera, CRNA of 14 years) the aggregate of that tiny impulse within a large population will still amount to perceiveable, measurable discrimination.

10/23/2012 2:57:46 PM

Quote :

"But you also have to realize that a reduction in privilege doesn't equate to discrimination"

...I'm lost. Has anyone proposed any means of reducing, eliminating, or otherwise addressing white privilege?

The arguments make it almost an intractable problem. You want to keep students from getting preference at schools their parents went to?
a. schools already are not supposed to do this
b. no matter what you do, the money is tied to the kid's attendance, money talks
c. do we really have say over private schools?

There is also an intractable conundrum - parents looking after their kids. There's nothing wrong with that, but there is a huge difference in the life of someone born to educated vs uneducated parents.


IMHO, the race problem will become a non-issue when the entire world reaches something close to economic equality. Labor is so disposable that marginalizing groups domestically is possible. The BRICs, Mexico, and so many others offer a constant downward pressure on the value of what our poorest have to offer. Considering our starting place, "race" problems will always exist as long as this economic pressure is present.

10/23/2012 3:22:25 PM

Quote :

"You realize this is not due to race but due to the child's behavior, right? Black students, for whatever reason (parenting, youth culture, etc) are typically less behaved/polite than white students. Same goes for poor vs rich students."

If you'll read what you quoted again, you'll see you missed my last clause.

Here's one study that included both subjective (defiance) and objective (smoking in the bathroom, for instance) offenses, and found that in both cases black students received harsher punishments than whites accused of the same offenses.

http://www.indiana.edu/~safeschl/cod.pdf

10/23/2012 3:40:56 PM

Quote :

"Add to that the expectations, prejudice, and self-perception students gain from media and the national culture as a whole. It has a real effect on the self-esteem of a child when every person who looks like him on television is either a drug addict or a pimp, for instance. "

You mean that clause? I don't think what you're saying is relevant to the last 10 years. Hollywood goes out of its way to cast white people as pimps and drug addicts. Teachers undergo ongoing sensitivity training through their license renewal process and frequent "Professional Development Days".

In regards to the link you posted, I don't feel a study from over 10 years ago is relevant to the current state of affairs. Also, I would have to confirm that repeat offenders were isolated form the objective portion of the study. However, I don't personally have doubts about the validity of the results. I feel that racial awareness was vastly different in 2000, and popular culture vastly more "gangsta".

10/23/2012 4:35:48 PM

The last clause in the statement you quoted. The part where I said "for the same behavior" before you went on to claim the differences were due to different behavior.

Quote :

"In regards to the link you posted, I don't feel a study from over 10 years ago is relevant to the current state of affairs."

Right, because the past is totally irrelevant to the present. But sure, I'll humor you with two more recent ones:

Beginning around page 19: http://digitalcommons.pcom.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1192&context=psychology_dissertations

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2678799/

Quote :

"Hollywood goes out of its way to cast white people as pimps and drug addicts. "

Do you have any non-anecdotal evidence of this? As in, statistical or sociological research? Or is this just your personal, common sense, gut feeling (worthless)?

Quote :

"Also, I would have to confirm that repeat offenders were isolated form the objective portion of the study."

There will always be one more thing you'd add to the methodology. Why don't you post some evidence for your assertions so I can poke holes in it?

Quote :

" However, I don't personally have doubts about the validity of the results. I feel that racial awareness was vastly different in 2000, and popular culture vastly more "gangsta"."

How would "a popular culture more vastly gangsta" lead to black students being punished more harshly for the same offenses as white students?


Also, can you find any statistical evidence that black students misbehave more frequently than whites, controlling for income? Note: This is not the same thing as finding evidence that they're punished more often.

[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 5:02 PM. Reason : .]

10/23/2012 5:01:47 PM

Quote :

"Also, can you find any statistical evidence that black students misbehave more frequently than whites, controlling for income?"

Nice trap. You will always have an out because no one can know that 'true' misbehavior rate anywhere, only what is reported and/or disciplined. You'll say there is bias in what gets reported or actually has consequences depending on race, so you'll get to throw out any data that anyone presents to you. You have already concluded that any data-gathering method is tainted by white racism. It's a nice game, being impossible to prove wrong.

So, why don't you go to a poor, mostly black school. Then go to an equally poor, mostly white school. Then get back to us.

Look back at the first graph I posted. You're suggesting that a school filled with people who average 875 on the SAT would have the same discipline problem as one that gets 675 on the SAT, on average. And that's just nonsense.

Besides, that would put you in an uncomfortable spot of having to answer why classroom order and behavior and income are all equal, but there is a 200 point SAT difference.


[Edited on October 23, 2012 at 5:35 PM. Reason : a]

10/23/2012 5:22:03 PM

I imagine a Dr. Seuss book, "Oh the statistical corrections we can make"

I actually tried to read this:

Quote :

"http://www.indiana.edu/~safeschl/cod.pdf"

And believe-you-me it was hopeless. Maybe I didn't get to the part where they found black kids are punished more for the same offense, but if they wanted me to get to that point, maybe they should have made a summary that was less than 3 pages long.

Everything I did read was along similar lines of what TULIPlovr is saying. That you can't trust A statistic, you can't trust B statistic. Again, maybe they figured out a way to tease out the bias but not as far as I can read. It's obvious that they wanted to get to that point from the title alone.

It's a valid point though - I would fully expect black kids to cause more problems in school. We all agree that they're in worse environments as white kids. If white kids were in the that environment, they would act up more. I recognize that we would prefer a method where we control for kids who got referred, then look at the difference in punishment.

What I got from the paper is that this either can't be done with the data out there, or it turns up a null result.

10/24/2012 8:22:18 AM