White privilege poll.

[Trausti]

Yes, of course white privilege exists. In and of itself, privilege isn't a bad thing. So let's figure out a way to extend those privileges so they are available to other people as the normal standard.

Treat everyone as individuals and not obsess about group membership?

That's like telling short people to just be taller.

On second thought it's not like that. It's like telling people we're all the same. We're not.

Well, we are not equal in ability - correct. But we should be equal in law. Generations have fought for that. How sad that now so many would throw it away.

 

[Bomb#20]

Toni is talking in the first instance about past generations, in particular the early to mid-20th C. It's well documented and accepted that blacks routinely faced numerous barriers during that time. To the point that only a denialist could ask 'how do you know'?

OK, I really must have mangled my point.

I don't need to be convinced. I am asking "how do you know" because the story Toni told just assumed that the listener already understood the effects of racism. It was basically "I'm wealthier than my parents, but I wouldn't have done this well if I was black, because racism".

To bigfield: Nope, you didn't mangle your point; it was your readers who blew it.

To ruby sparks: When I asked you "How do you know", it was not in reference to the assertion that blacks routinely faced numerous barriers during that time. So if you intended to label me a "denialist", feel free to argue for that opinion by addressing my actual post instead of a taken-out-of-context sentence fragment. Conversely, if you didn't mean me, well, is anybody asking "How do you know that blacks routinely faced numerous barriers during that time?"?

 

[DrZoidberg]

I don't think you can understand white privilege without incorporating the study of socioeconomic class. Absent class issues, the "white race" and "black race" would never have been invented to begin with. It is and always was a cynical idea, meant to divide the working poor against each one another and stave off rebellion against the aristocracy. The true power brokers have enough education to know that biology doesn't really work the way folk taxonomies of race would have you believe (and it shows, when you look at how they treat impoverished whites) but when you have a considerable economic stake in the perpetuation of a bad idea, it's not hard to convince yourself of it.

Yeah, without a cup of Marx the white privilige conversation is stupid IMHO.

The real discussion isn't whether white privilige exists or not, but what, if anything we should do about it. In this thread these two things are conflated.

People, in this thread, who deny white privilige I just don't think understand what the words mean. I've had many chats with conservatives on forums who have seriously claimed that rich people have equal opportunities to poor people. Nobody thinks that. At least nobody who understands what is meant by a life opportunity.

Personally I don't think white privilige is a race thing. I think it's a class thing. I think we're best off ignoring race and instead focusing on how to flatten the income distribution. I'm not saying racism isn't a problem. But if we flatten the income distribution I think that would be the best method with which to mitigate the racial conflicts.

 

[Emily Lake]

Yes, of course white privilege exists. In and of itself, privilege isn't a bad thing. So let's figure out a way to extend those privileges so they are available to other people as the normal standard.

Treat everyone as individuals and not obsess about group membership?

That's the end goal, sure. But for a while at least, I think we need to recognize and acknowledge that there's a lot of subconscious and underlying discrepancies that need to be addressed.

For example, one white privilege that I think most people (not all) can acknowledge is that on average, black people get stopped for minor traffic violations more frequently as a percent of population that white people do. And once they've been stopped... white people are more likely to be let off with a warning, whereas black people are more likely to get a ticket. For the most part, that's not a written rule... it's the effect of subconscious social bias. There's a deeply ingrained, underlying perception of white people as having made honest mistakes, or being appropriately apologetic, or being overall good people with good intentions so that they deserve the benefit of the doubt. There's also, similarly deeply ingrained, the perception that black people are more likely to be violent, more likely to be criminals, and more likely to be up to no good. It's pernicious, because it's not an assumption that every single black person is a bad guy and every single white person is a good guy. It's a subconscious stacking of the the perceived probabilities. The result ends up being that white people in traffic stops more often get the benefit of the doubt where black people more often don't.

I don't think that a reasonable solution is "don't give black people traffic tickets" or anything so blatant. But at the same time, :treat everyone the same" doesn't work as well as we might like either, because of those subconscious likelihood calculations. I wish I had an easy solution, but I don't. Mostly, I think it takes awareness that the bias exists, and a willingness to constantly question our assumptions and our initial reactions. I think that media portrayals, especially in TV and film, can also help. The more black people in general are treated by art as normal and not noteworthy, the more they're just "people who happen to be black" rather than "black people", the more likely we are to see a shift in those implicit patterns. It's likely to take a generation though, because children are much more susceptible to that kind of subconscious pattern-forming than adults are. The patterns they absorbed as children tend to become fixed as adults.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I've already given multiple examples. You're the one in denial.

How on earth could race, in the USA, disappear as a factor, Loren? How could that happen? There'd have to be no racism, and no effects of racism, in the USA.

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

 

[Testy Calibrate]

I don't think you can understand white privilege without incorporating the study of socioeconomic class. Absent class issues, the "white race" and "black race" would never have been invented to begin with. It is and always was a cynical idea, meant to divide the working poor against each one another and stave off rebellion against the aristocracy. The true power brokers have enough education to know that biology doesn't really work the way folk taxonomies of race would have you believe (and it shows, when you look at how they treat impoverished whites) but when you have a considerable economic stake in the perpetuation of a bad idea, it's not hard to convince yourself of it.

Yeah, without a cup of Marx the white privilige conversation is stupid IMHO.

The real discussion isn't whether white privilige exists or not, but what, if anything we should do about it. In this thread these two things are conflated.

People, in this thread, who deny white privilige I just don't think understand what the words mean. I've had many chats with conservatives on forums who have seriously claimed that rich people have equal opportunities to poor people. Nobody thinks that. At least nobody who understands what is meant by a life opportunity.

Personally I don't think white privilige is a race thing. I think it's a class thing. I think we're best off ignoring race and instead focusing on how to flatten the income distribution. I'm not saying racism isn't a problem. But if we flatten the income distribution I think that would be the best method with which to mitigate the racial conflicts.

I agree with this generally, but racism (which is clearly alive and well in America- witness trump and his followers) has some elements that make class systems more rigid than just income. Opportunity needs to accompany income distribution. If you are hassled by the cops frequently, if you get a criminal record, if you don't have basic education, the opportunities will never be equal.

The criminal justice system is broken or maybe working exactly as intended. Either way, it is the main source of opportunity loss in our society.

Every billionaire is a policy failure

 

[Testy Calibrate]

I've already given multiple examples. You're the one in denial.

How on earth could race, in the USA, disappear as a factor, Loren? How could that happen? There'd have to be no racism, and no effects of racism, in the USA.

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

excellent argument for a single payer system.

 

[ruby sparks]

I've already given multiple examples. You're the one in denial.

How on earth could race, in the USA, disappear as a factor, Loren? How could that happen? There'd have to be no racism, and no effects of racism, in the USA.

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

That's a particularly easy example, and most of the reports do not attribute currently active racism all that much. Which I think is fair enough. But your problem is that your claim is not limited to such easy examples. Your contention that race factors disappear when other things are properly accounted for is arsewipe.

I mean, you actually said recently that to the extent that there's an issue for blacks, it's attitudes passed down from parents. An out and out racist could hardly say anything as blatant if they were trying to be as racist as possible. In my opinion your attitudes, in addition to being wrong, are a complete disgrace to the forum.

 

[Emily Lake]

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

Umm... no, even when socioeconomic and hospital performance factors are considered, there remains a difference in treatment. About a year ago, I don't recall exactly when, a subsidiary of United got sued because they built a predictive algorithm for use in triage and prioritizing patients, identifying those who need the most intervention and the most attention. The algorithm produced biased results, because the data going into it was biased.

At the end of the day, even controlling for everything else, black people (especially men) are assumed to be healthier, tougher, and more resistant to pain than white people are. As a result, they get less treatment for the same severity of illnesses.

On a similar note, women also get less treatment, although the driving mechanism is different. Women are generally assumed to overstate and exaggerate their symptoms... and there's a tendency for doctors (even if those doctors happen to be women) to discount women's complaints.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

This theme keeps coming up over and over. African Americans are concentrated in cities because of racism. You can't then blame things that happen to the demographic on the coincidence of them being concentrated in cities. You've ignored a root cause analysis in favor of a superficial cry for apologetics, if so.

 

[ruby sparks]

The idea that race has disappeared as a factor in the USA is nothing less than a deluded fantasy.

 

[Worldtraveller]

I've already given multiple examples. You're the one in denial.

How on earth could race, in the USA, disappear as a factor, Loren? How could that happen? There'd have to be no racism, and no effects of racism, in the USA.

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

This is actually a good example for the other thread, about systemic racism.

It's also a classic example (which LP demonstrates many times on a daily basis here) of the the psychological effects of compartmentalization. If you look at every single incident in complete isolation, you never get racism, guns, or whatever it is one is trying to pretend doesn't exist as a factor! Not sure how one would be able to sleep at night, but it seems to work for lots of bootlicker types.

 

[Bronzeage]

White privilege can proven to exist by purely empirical observation. How else could so many stupid white people be found in positions of power and influence? What are the alternative explanations?

Unfortunately, there are really stupid people of all races in positions of power and influence.

Are you arguing for the existence of stupidity privilege?

 

[skepticalbip]

White privilege can proven to exist by purely empirical observation. How else could so many stupid white people be found in positions of power and influence? What are the alternative explanations?

Unfortunately, there are really stupid people of all races in positions of power and influence.

Are you arguing for the existence of stupidity privilege?

Have you ever listened to any of our congress critters (a pretty powerful and privileged position)? My congressional representative before I moved to a different district argued on the house floor that he feared that too many marines being sent to Guam may make the little island capsize and sink.

Apparently there is such a thing as stupidity privilege.

 

[Emily Lake]

Hmm. Are you sure he wasn't trying to be funny? That sounds like a joke I would try to make. I'm not very good at being funny.

 

[skepticalbip]

Hmm. Are you sure he wasn't trying to be funny? That sounds like a joke I would try to make. I'm not very good at being funny.

It does sound like a joke but I have talked with him a couple times at his headquarters in his home district. The man is not mentally capable of making a joke. Wit requires a bit more awareness.

Personal opinion is that his handlers put him up for office because he was easy to control.

 

[Emily Lake]

Hmm. Are you sure he wasn't trying to be funny? That sounds like a joke I would try to make. I'm not very good at being funny.

It does sound like a joke but I have talked with him a couple times at his headquarters in his home district. The man is not mentally capable of making a joke.

Oh... that's a bit sad.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

Umm... no, even when socioeconomic and hospital performance factors are considered, there remains a difference in treatment. About a year ago, I don't recall exactly when, a subsidiary of United got sued because they built a predictive algorithm for use in triage and prioritizing patients, identifying those who need the most intervention and the most attention. The algorithm produced biased results, because the data going into it was biased.

At the end of the day, even controlling for everything else, black people (especially men) are assumed to be healthier, tougher, and more resistant to pain than white people are. As a result, they get less treatment for the same severity of illnesses.

On a similar note, women also get less treatment, although the driving mechanism is different. Women are generally assumed to overstate and exaggerate their symptoms... and there's a tendency for doctors (even if those doctors happen to be women) to discount women's complaints.

But was that racism, or the computer regurgitating the pattern it saw based on the overloaded hospitals? Neural network approaches are well known for reproducing flaws in the input data.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This theme keeps coming up over and over. African Americans are concentrated in cities because of racism. You can't then blame things that happen to the demographic on the coincidence of them being concentrated in cities. You've ignored a root cause analysis in favor of a superficial cry for apologetics, if so.

The problem is the root causes are in the past. Unless you have a time machine you can't fix past discrimination. Antidiscrimination efforts can only fix current discrimination, they have no hope of fixing legacy effects from past discrimination. The original cause doesn't matter, what matters is how it's being perpetuated now. That's the only thing we can change.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

For example, the supposed inferior medical treatment of blacks. Nope, it's the facilities, not race. You're not going to get as good care at an underfunded and overworked facility, the supposed racism is because those facilities are more likely to be in the inner cities (a lot of uninsured patients and a lot who have medicaid.)

This is actually a good example for the other thread, about systemic racism.

It's also a classic example (which LP demonstrates many times on a daily basis here) of the the psychological effects of compartmentalization. If you look at every single incident in complete isolation, you never get racism, guns, or whatever it is one is trying to pretend doesn't exist as a factor! Not sure how one would be able to sleep at night, but it seems to work for lots of bootlicker types.

The point is you can't fix this by focusing on better medical treatment for blacks as that's not the problem in the first place. (That is, unless you're a KKKer. They would love that because of the backlash it provokes.)