The key point of the article appears at the end of the second paragraph, and pretty much explains everything that follows:
>...I simply can’t discern features of the field itself that have been put in place to perpetuate inequities.
If you don't understand how systemic inequity can persist without overt bigotry, then any kind of affirmative action is going to seem counterproductive to you. But bias is self-reinforcing; once it happens for any significant amount of time, it persists even among people with no conscious bias. If you don't actually see a minority doing a job, it becomes slightly more difficult to imagine them doing that job, and that small difference, aggregated across millions of people, adds up to a significant ongoing effect. Add in the economic consequences, and you have a further reinforcement. It's like a traffic jam that persists long after the accident that caused it is cleared. And of course, that assumes that there is no longer any conscious bigotry and clearly there is: there are still organized groups in the US publicly advocating white supremacy, for instance.
Your response imposes a specific view of "systemic equity", one that not everyone buys into, and one that has not been empirically verified. Furthermore, the author has consistently blogged about his support for affirmative action, so I'm not sure your rhetoric makes any sense.
The notion of bias being self-enforcing is questionable as well. Unconscious bias here seems like a catch-all for any kind of perceived injustices. For all you know, the effects of unconscious bias could have been reasonably mitigated by education, personality, and sound policies. I'm not stating that biases don't exist, or that they are inconsequential. My point is that using unconscious bias as a catch-all is not intellectually honest as it gives unearned merit to claims made without evidence. The way forward is more empirical work, not more rhetoric.
> The notion of bias being self-enforcing is questionable as well.
It seems obvious, to me at least, that people don't pursue careers in areas where no one looks like them, therefore creating a self fulfilling prophecy.
> one that has not been empirically verified
Historically women were excluded from many scientific fields. The effect of female role models has been studied (a lot [1][2]) and there's no denying the real world impact representation (or lack of it) can have.
Except affirmative action is not the solution either because now you’ve put less meritorious people where they shouldn’t be (I apologize for the phrasing, but I think it’s important not to sugar coat this) as representatives of their disenfranchised group. As far as I can tell, in every environment I’ve been in, this often only serves to reaffirm and even intensify the bias. And the beneficiaries of affirmative action are furthermore made to feel like human asterisks, even if they’re talented and entirely deserving of an opportunity.
> Except affirmative action is not the solution either because now you’ve put less meritorious people where they shouldn’t be...
There is a risk of this, true. But that same risk exists if you stick with the status quo, as better-qualified minorities are overlooked in favor of less qualified majority candidates. Certainly that happened in the past as well, when biases were enshrined in law.
There is no “silver bullet”. Tweaking one parameter and expecting a systemic problem to resolve is unrealistic (i dont care if you dont buy into it..consider the alternatve and read some history)
What's funny that women are already a majority of STEMM undergraduates (in addition to being a majority of undergraduates overall).
Which leads to organizations contorting themselves to define STEMM in some way that excludes all the female dominated majors: biology, nursing, psychology, social science...
They can't admit that women are already winning at education, so they have to keep drilling down to find sub-sub groups where they're a minority.
I think that some of what's at play is that, with an undergraduate degree, engineering and tech are the only STEM majors that give a good chance of actually working in STEM. So you even a majority of STEM degrees may not lead to a majority of STEM workers.
For what it's worth, I also don't think that most people would consider psychology or social science to be STEM and this is the first time I've heard of STEMM to include "medicine". So that may factor in as well.
Could you expand on how this article is poorly written?
I think the poor responses on hacker news is much more likely a consequence of hyper-partisan politics, rather than the quality of the submission. Topics that touches on race always seem to elicit dogmatic responses from across the spectrum.
What stood out to me was "I can't say woke I say progressive because if I said woke X would freak out". I can't say exactly why, but that immidiately tipped me off to the fact that the article wasn't in the best frame.
Also, I skimmed the thing looking for substance, points being made about actions being taken, and it appeared to all be about ethics and ideals.
It would be disastrous in any field. When you replace metric with arbitrary quotas then you're maximizing the odds for a suboptimal outcome.
People conflate social and individual trends with structural restrictions. The best we can do is ensure that the opportunities are not restricted so you have equality of opportunity. The equity crowd seems to restrict opportunities and pretend they can guarantee equality of outcome and still have a free and vital society.
There are no fed scholarships or special funding for stem students. You get the same for degrees that have no market. Many of these people could not do much with stem in school because of their living situation/school being poorly operated.
If we want stem, we have to pay for it. The fed does not do this. They won't even fund student programs. All of that money goes into luxurious bio/chem labs used for overwhelmingly useless research. It turns out that none of this is about student education, it's for furthering the careers of "researchers".
Colleges are looking for a more diverse faculty but cant keep them as they leave frustrated with the same old system that kept them out before. You cant just fix one piece and expect everything to resolve. Education is a stubborn profession and discrimination is a hard problem.
The contemporary popular definition of structural racism is merely a synonym of racism, so it really doesn't matter either way. The original definition is of no use to contemporary woke types because it concerns how power structures and institutions promote racist ends regardless of whether the individuals themselves behave in racist ways. Contemporary woke types are only interested in moralizing and individualizing, so they have abused this terminology to a point that its contemporary definition has no resemblance to the original.
Structural racism is a vague idea that's used as a boogeyman to support race essentialist policies. As far as I know, no evidence has been provided for "structural racism" in the sciences yet, it's simply assumed to be true. That's not to say that there aren't any racists in this field. But if you can't properly define "structural racism" and provide any reliable evidence for it, you can perpetually push this narrative and shift your goal posts as you please. This comes at the expense of true inquiry and progress.
I'm not sure if the implementation of such equity based policies imply a real demand for it from constituents. In fact, a recent poll showed that the majority of americans wouldn't want race as a factor in university admissions[0]. On the other hand, such policies are supported by the humanities and social sciences, premised on questionable foundations[1].
No, its not, though like any term that enters wide use there is lots of sloppy use (and like most terms that are important in politically-charged debates, a substantial portion of that sloppy use is deliberate and designed to undermine the concept.)
> to support race essentialist policies.
It is usually used, in the context of policy advocacy (it is used extensively outside that context, with the same meaning) in advocating policies which are contingent on current material conditions (which may be directly race-blind or race-conscious), rather than race-essentialist. (In fact, to describe the policies as race-essentialist is to impute the present difference in material conditions that structural racism attributes to socio-legal structures as instead being an inherent product of race, which is itself race-essentialist and, given the nature of the material difference, racist in the individual rather than structural sense.)
Please provide a definition for the term. From reading the positions on various advocates of this term, the use is indeed sloppy and often asserted without evidence.
I do not understand your second paragraph, could you elaborately more concisely please?
The totality of mutually reinforcing systems of housing, education, employment, earnings, benefits, credit, media, health care, and criminal justice which reinforce racially/ethnically [0] discriminatory beliefs, values, and distribution of resources. [1]
> I do not understand your second paragraph, could you elaborately more concisely please?
“Race essentialism” is the belief that races are clearly genetically distinct groups with fundamental and essentially immutable differences in capacities between groups that are more significant than the differences within groups, such that (among other things) differences in outcomes under fair treatment between races are immutable. “Structural racism” is typically part of the argument for policies that address current unequal conditions that are reinforced by existing structures, particularly by removing those structures.
It is, in a way, the polar opposite of race essentialism, and the strong reaction against it by active racists is because it both provides an alternative explanation to race essentialism as to why outcomes in a system without overt, direct discrimination, particularly one which had such discrimination in the past, could systematically and persistently differ by race that does not rely on race essentialism and a direction as to how to correct that.
[0] consistent with the more general use of “racism” to describe discrimination and bigotry by either what is conventionally described as “race” or “ethnicity”, the distinction of which is artificial and itself, in origin, a product of race essentialist ideologies.
[1] This definition is a slight rephrasing (to serve more as a definition than a description) from Bailey ZD, Krieger N, Agénor M, et al. “Structural racism and health inequities in the USA: evidence and interventions.” Lancet. 2017;389(10077):1453–1463.
The original definition of structural racism is very basic and undeniable. Racial profiling by police departments is an obvious example. They profile by race because it work, not because the police themselves are racist. And it works for historical and material reasons. It is not causal but correlational. Nonetheless, it works so the institution does it. As a result, the structure of the police department is racist.
That said, this original definition has been completely ignored and void by the woke types and the terminology now has no coherent meaning at all.
> The original definition of structural racism is very basic and undeniable. Racial profiling by police departments is an obvious example. They profile by race because it work, not because the police themselves are racist.
On the one hand, if that description were accurate, that would be institutional racism, which is not “the original definition of structural racism”, structural racism is about the interaction between elements of society and between racism at all three (institutional, personally mediated, and internalized) [0] levels.
On the other hand, the description is not accurate, and racial profiling as a phenomenon is actually a very good place to talk about structural racism, because what is superficially boring institutional racism (and, to be clear, it is institutional racism on top of whatever else it is) is, when you look into the arguments for it even a little, colored rather extraordinarily by personally mediated racism (the kind of active racism that is thought of when the term is used without qualifiers), including racist priors leading to treating statistics drawn from the output of criminal justice processes involving all three kinds of racism (including racial profiling itself) as being race-blind. It’s literally “people of X race are more likely to be identified as perpetrators of crime under status quo systems, so in seeking to identify perpetrators of crime, we should focus on people of race X.”
[0] “institutional racism” and the three-fold distinction between institutional, personally mediated, and internalized racism is originally from Jones CP. “Levels of racism: a theoretic framework and a gardener’s tale”. Am J Public Health. 2000;90(8):1212–1215.
I don't care whether or not the example also qualifies as "institutional racism" or how many obscure academic texts you cite.
The institution is only one small part of the power structures that enforce the resulting behavior. In Frankfurt School critical theory, the largest structures in this case would be capitalism and the capitalist state (monopoly on violence). Of course, the state dictates the priorities of its institutions.
You effectively asserted in your original post that "structural racism" is real. Wouldn't it make more sense for you to make a case for it then? The burden of proof is on you.
Black Americans are twice as likely as white Americans to be unemployed, and earn on average only 60 cents for every dollar earned by white Americans. Black Americans are also more likely to be incarcerated, and are subject to racial profiling by law enforcement. These disparities are not the result of individual actions, but are instead the result of systemic factors such as redlining, employment discrimination, and the criminal justice system.
Edit:
As of 2019, black adults were 5.5 times more likely to be incarcerated than white adults. There were 2,221,400 black adults in the U.S. incarcerated, compared to 1,254,800 white adults.
Correlation does not mean causation. How do you quantify that individual actions aren't substantial for the outcomes of black americans today? Furthermore, can you quantify the effects of your latter claims?
> According to Hamilton (2019:11), 63 percent of first-generation Nigerian immigrants to the United States are college educated, which is significantly higher than in the U.S. population (Tran et al. 2018). This selectivity is further evident because “in Nigeria, however, only 7 percent of the population had earned a bachelor’s degree” (Hamilton 2019:11), as is also emphasized in Tran et al.’s (2018) discussion of “hyper-selectivity” (p. 188).
These immigrants are usually already somewhat wealthy and educated before they step foot in the US.
GP said "show me that structural racism is imaginary"
Parent said "African immigrants do very well"
I provided data that shows that the claim "African immigrants do very well" suffers from selection bias. It cannot be used as evidence that structural racism does not exist. I am not supporting any claim other than the fact that parent's argument is flawed.
The debate about race and racism is a constantly moving goal post. CNN said that pointing out the police officers who murdered Tyre Nichols are all black is a form or racism.
Actually, Africans immigrants doing well in the US would be evidence that there is structural racism. It could be said they're doing well because they bypassed it.
Replying to those below:
Yeah, being poor in America is rough, and it perpetuates. I grew up poor, and totally get it. It's just not an either-or problem. For many black Americans, they're hit by both.
Is argument that because some African children do well we should ignore the overall stats?
Is that "structural racism" or just "being poor sucks"? There's a difference between the two, because the former implies that it's due to the color of their skin, whereas the latter implies it's due to their socioeconomic status.
I know you would be editing to elaborate, but I think you are going dangerously deep into the territory of unfalsifiable theories. African immigrants and their children both do pretty well actually
The immigration system actively filters for those who would do well (both as an overt goal of the poicy criteria and because of filtering effects of the required effort and opportunities for failure even outside of selection criteria); the existence of that structural bias does not disprove the existence of other structural biases.
I think it would mean that the bias isn’t based on race (so having an intervention based solely on race wouldn’t correct the problem) but on based on prejudice on historical race or being subject to discrimination. So perhaps it’s not discrimination due to race that causes harm as long-term generational discrimination based on race.
It may seem insignificant in that it’s not racism now that’s the problem, but racism then. But, again, if the goal is to increase equity in STEMM then we want to properly design interventions.
I’m not arguing that structural racism doesn’t exist. I’m arguing that saying there is structural racism against Black people is not generalizable to all Black people as there are some people with black skin from Africa that don’t have the measurable disparity as other people with black skin.
If anything, I think there should be more precise interventions to reduce structural racism.
Knowing nothing about you, I'm guessing if you examined yourself honestly, the only way your views have changed in recent years is to become more extreme.
As a 30+ year rap fan, I’d wager that the vast majority of published rap music does not center around these things. You might consider quitting mass media which shoves this type of rap into every production. Or you could dive into hip-hop to discover deeper messages that absolutely touches on these subjects in a way that is educational and instructive about how drugs, misogyny, policing, etc. are hurting communities. You definitely will never hear that on the radio, save a few exceptional artists who can create and distribute whatever they please.
Even the rappers who do project this lifestyle —whether to be authentic or to mimic what’s profitable— are cutting back out of fear of catching RICO charges.
Ahh yes, obviously bad lyrics in rap music is to blame for all of America's racial issues and not the weird history with the fact that we literally had ethic slavery and a civil war to end it a few hundred years ago
>...I simply can’t discern features of the field itself that have been put in place to perpetuate inequities.
If you don't understand how systemic inequity can persist without overt bigotry, then any kind of affirmative action is going to seem counterproductive to you. But bias is self-reinforcing; once it happens for any significant amount of time, it persists even among people with no conscious bias. If you don't actually see a minority doing a job, it becomes slightly more difficult to imagine them doing that job, and that small difference, aggregated across millions of people, adds up to a significant ongoing effect. Add in the economic consequences, and you have a further reinforcement. It's like a traffic jam that persists long after the accident that caused it is cleared. And of course, that assumes that there is no longer any conscious bigotry and clearly there is: there are still organized groups in the US publicly advocating white supremacy, for instance.