Multi-Billionaire Oprah Whines About Sexism & Income Inequality At DNC

[Toni]

By giving people previously excluded because of their race, gender or country of origin from the pool of applicants access to educational and career opportunities they would not have had prior to affirmative action.

You're talking about giving people today extra access to make up for the fact that their grandparents didn't have access.

You'd be naive to believe that persons of color, women and LGBTQA+ persons today do not suffer from discrimination based on their skin color, gender and sexual orientation. Certainly plenty of people who are or who resemble (to some people) people who are Hispanic or Middle Easterners can face discrimination, as can those who are or who are perceived to be Jewish or Palestinian/Muslim/Arab. Depending on where you live, Native Americans can face significant discrimination. Asians face discrimination.

The question is how much. Saying they face "discrimination" is not an adequate justification for affirmative action! Same as "pain" isn't a justification for morphine.

Because I'm white and many of my friends and acquaintances are academics or academic adjacent, it's pretty easy for me to think that at least in my little world, there is no more discrimination but unfortunately, that is absolutely untrue. I believe it was in this thread where I described a dear friend who is Asian and who has spoken English since early childhood, attended university and grad school in the US and who taught in academia for decades routinely had students complain to admin. that they had trouble understanding her excellent English (as in: barely any accent at all).

Sure it really was race? You're close to her, you're used to understanding her. I barely hear my wife's accent--but when put to an objective test she has a lot of trouble with Alexa.

For the most part, admin backed her up but if you think that does not take a toll, then you are quite mistaken. The same with her husband, and a lot of faculty I know personally. I've watched newly hired black administrators not last more than one academic year, quite recently. Racism, sexism and discrimination are alive and well.

And someone not lasting a year is proof it's discrimination???

Complaining that anyone who is female or a person of color was an AA --or more recently, a DEI hire is actually a form of bigotry and discrimination.

Someone who simply assumes they are a DEI hire is a bigot. But someone who considers them suspect until proven competent is simply responding to the fact that there are DEI hires.

It would be lovely if it were all in the past but it's not.

It's impossible for it to be all in the past so long as we continue to enforce discrimination in the form of affirmative action.

It may well be the case that it is time to sunset Affirmative Action laws. I don't know the answer. But I do know that discrimination happens every single day in my small community--in a mostly blue state.

1) You're taking a guilty-without-evidence approach, assuming that anything that could be interpreted as discrimination. But you're not considering that there might be other factors.

2) Affirmative Action inherently causes discrimination and thus it causes backlash. Thus the problem can never be solved so long as the laws exist. Especially when you fail to consider things like a criminal record excluding people from a lot of things. The population from which one can draw doesn't match up with the racial distribution in many cases.

I have no problem with going after actual discrimination. But statistical discrepancies are never more than a reason to take a quick look. A quick look that doesn't require mounting a defense so it doesn't impose an undue cost on a business.

I’m absolutely certain of my friend’s English skills and accent as I mentioned, she spoke English along with her maybe language from childhood, attended university and graduate school at very his universities in the US abd taught at American universities for over 30 years, as well as being active and in leadership positions in a number of organizations, was a faculty advisor for university organizations, founded an educational foundation in our community and has friends literally from all over the world, with English being the common language. I am aware that there are those Americans who, upon seeing someone who is not Caucasian, imm sisterly have a problem with their accent—no matter where anyone was born and raised. Any accent that she has is very slight and only would be a problem for someone who wanted it to be a problem.

I’ve worked for/with people from all over the world, from every continent except Antarctica and have friends and neighbors from all over as well. Yes, I’m accustomed to accents —and I definitely know people with much heavier accents, including from Australia.

How much discrimination and racism must one suffer to be entitled to relief?

Asking on behalf of butt hurt white men who cannot cope with seeing people who are t white and/or male compete for on equal footing and win and succeed at jobs they thought were by rights theirs.

Here’s sometii go by you may get: Trump has more than once mentioned immigrants taking black jobs. He may be re-elected POTUS because that’s just how common that sort of racist crap that is.

 

[Bomb#20]

... The fundamental problem is that teachers can't magically impart the same amount of knowledge to every student. Teach to the fast ones and the slow ones get left behind. Teach to the slow ones and the fast ones don't learn as much as they could. It's simply impossible to teach to all of them at the maximum rate they can learn. You minimize such loss by matching students as well as possible.

If teachers always taught to the material they are expected to teach inferior students wouldn't be a problem for the others--but such a teacher would leave them behind.

That is a fundamental misrepresentation of how primary school teaching works...

Just because you don't like the reality doesn't mean it doesn't happen. What magic would you invoke to avoid this?

You know we have actual teachers here, right?

You know some of the posters here actually spent years personally experiencing what happens in grade school in spite of not being teachers, right?

Eight-year olds have a mostly but extremely accurate but very myopic understanding of what happens in a classroom and why.

True; but eight-year-olds don't have a professional stake in teachers getting to be seen as having superpowers. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

You know some of the posters here actually spent years personally experiencing what happensed in grade school a very long time ago in spite of not being teachers, right?

FTFY.

You know schools have changed somewhat since the middle of the last century, right?

What exactly did schools change between then and now, that gave teachers the ability to teach in a quantum state of thirty-odd superposed momentums?

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

By giving people previously excluded because of their race, gender or country of origin from the pool of applicants access to educational and career opportunities they would not have had prior to affirmative action.

You're talking about giving people today extra access to make up for the fact that their grandparents didn't have access.

Grandparents, didn't have access?

Let's swap grandparents for countless generations, didn't have access to were restricted from having access to property / education / civil rights via the law and violence, and we'll need to add were segregated in such a way to create a permanent underclass that required extensive intervention (of some form that was noted as being necessary as early as the 1950s) to prevent a permanent caste like system from taking hold.

But that was a remarkable job of minimizing the systemic and intentional racism that existed in the United States for hundreds of years. Sure, I suppose we could have gone the female suffrage route which took 100 years, but why in the heck would we do that if there were better options available. .

 

[Politesse]

True; but eight-year-olds don't have a professional stake in teachers getting to be seen as having superpowers. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Good classroom management is a skill that anyone can cultivate with a modicum of time, training, and effort. Not a "superpower". And our system of standards and assrssments is designed to make classroom exchanges more efficient and effective, not less.

 

[Toni]

True; but eight-year-olds don't have a professional stake in teachers getting to be seen as having superpowers. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Good classroom management is a skill that anyone can cultivate with a modicum of time, training, and effort. Not a "superpower". And our system of standards and assrssments is designed to make classroom exchanges more efficient and effective, not less.

I don’t quite agree about the anyone part. Or at least not do it well and with any concern for the students and what they learn. I’ve seen some very badly run classrooms. It could be that the teacher just wasn’t trying to be good, I suppose.

OTOH, I will never forget chatting with my kid’s first grade teacher during recess( only time we were both free) and the kids were all over the playground, in playground equipment t, playing games, kicking balls, etc. and without any bell or whistle she simply raised her hand in the air and every single one of this kids immediately stopped what they were doing and turned an orderly line to go inside: end of recess. I gasped and says she needed to teach me that and she laughter and says her own kids didn’t do it at home, this was just a teacher thing. O way you can convince me that is not some kind of magical teacher super power, no doubt hard won by a lot of effort and consistency. It may have pertained only to her classes at school but it was a superpower.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You know schools have changed somewhat since the middle of the last century, right?

What exactly did schools change between then and now, that gave teachers the ability to teach in a quantum state of thirty-odd superposed momentums?

It's simple:

1) There is a good answer.

If you're liberal:
2) The side with the power is at fault.

If you're conservative:
2) The side with the power is right.

 

[Politesse]

True; but eight-year-olds don't have a professional stake in teachers getting to be seen as having superpowers. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Good classroom management is a skill that anyone can cultivate with a modicum of time, training, and effort. Not a "superpower". And our system of standards and assrssments is designed to make classroom exchanges more efficient and effective, not less.

I don’t quite agree about the anyone part. Or at least not do it well and with any concern for the students and what they learn. I’ve seen some very badly run classrooms. It could be that the teacher just wasn’t trying to be good, I suppose.

OTOH, I will never forget chatting with my kid’s first grade teacher during recess( only time we were both free) and the kids were all over the playground, in playground equipment t, playing games, kicking balls, etc. and without any bell or whistle she simply raised her hand in the air and every single one of this kids immediately stopped what they were doing and turned an orderly line to go inside: end of recess. I gasped and says she needed to teach me that and she laughter and says her own kids didn’t do it at home, this was just a teacher thing. O way you can convince me that is not some kind of magical teacher super power, no doubt hard won by a lot of effort and consistency. It may have pertained only to her classes at school but it was a superpower.

Can, not will. But more importantly, fundamental and innats differences between the capabilities of the students are not the reason why classrooms differ in success and retention, nor was the provided description of how primary educators do their work in any way accurate.

 

[Emily Lake]

Not sure what you mean. I gave an example of someone who was being racially discriminated at her workplace for no good reason.

In your example, she was subjected to racism, but she wasn't discriminated against.

In this context, discrimination implies legal or policy-based backing for disparate treatment on the basis of race or ethnicity. And given that the university took the teacher's side, then she was not subject to discrimination. Her students treated her in a fashion that could be described as racist, sure. Racism implies that people are treated differently in interpersonal ways.

Both can happen at the same time, but they're not the same things.

Ferinstance... an interviewer might treat a male applicant poorly, be rude to them, and discount their skills when applying for a job - which would be a demonstration of sexism. And the company might have a policy of only hiring female humans for the posted position - which would be discrimination on the basis of sex. And those two things could occur simultaneously.

If the posted position happens to be for a stripper in a club that caters to a heterosexual audience, such discrimination might even be reasonable and appropriate.

 

[Emily Lake]

By giving people previously excluded because of their race, gender or country of origin from the pool of applicants access to educational and career opportunities they would not have had prior to affirmative action.

You're talking about giving people today extra access to make up for the fact that their grandparents didn't have access.

Grandparents, didn't have access?

Let's swap grandparents for countless generations, didn't have access to were restricted from having access to property / education / civil rights via the law and violence, and we'll need to add were segregated in such a way to create a permanent underclass that required extensive intervention (of some form that was noted as being necessary as early as the 1950s) to prevent a permanent caste like system from taking hold.

But that was a remarkable job of minimizing the systemic and intentional racism that existed in the United States for hundreds of years. Sure, I suppose we could have gone the female suffrage route which took 100 years, but why in the heck would we do that if there were better options available. .

Did you genuinely think that when I said "grandparents", I meant only grandparents, and was somehow implying that the generations prior to those grandparents did have access? Because that's a really, really, really strange way to interpret what should have been a pretty straightforward post.

 

[Toni]

Not sure what you mean. I gave an example of someone who was being racially discriminated at her workplace for no good reason.

In your example, she was subjected to racism, but she wasn't discriminated against.

In this context, discrimination implies legal or policy-based backing for disparate treatment on the basis of race or ethnicity. And given that the university took the teacher's side, then she was not subject to discrimination. Her students treated her in a fashion that could be described as racist, sure. Racism implies that people are treated differently in interpersonal ways.

Both can happen at the same time, but they're not the same things.

Ferinstance... an interviewer might treat a male applicant poorly, be rude to them, and discount their skills when applying for a job - which would be a demonstration of sexism. And the company might have a policy of only hiring female humans for the posted position - which would be discrimination on the basis of sex. And those two things could occur simultaneously.

If the posted position happens to be for a stripper in a club that caters to a heterosexual audience, such discrimination might even be reasonable and appropriate.

True, but it does not take much imagination to understand the toll this took on my friend or to imagine if there had been a different t dean, she would have had a much harder time. Professors, even tenured professors do get denied promotion, have their schedules changed in ways that can make their job harder, lose out on opportunities, etc. because of student complaints.

Of course it could have been much more difficult for her and for her spouse. They faced a lot of issues that their white, US fellow professors such as my husband, do not face. I confess to being extremely ignorant about these issues until fairly recently when we were talk into about a related situation, at least with respect to these friends because it is just so hard for me to imagine anyone having an issue with such delightful, hard working, community minded people. White person privilege.

 

[Bomb#20]

"When I was living in L.A. for two years, and because in L.A. no one’s heard of a British accent — although God knows why, there are Brits all over the place there — I just got tired of repeating everything in an English accent when I went into a store. So I would wake up sometimes and just be an American with my American accent, and it felt like the most natural thing."

- Damian Lewis​

Apparently what Lewis' experience shows is that stores in Los Angeles are peopled by bigots who just pretend not to understand excellent English with barely any accent at all because they're racist against upper-class Eton-educated ginger Londoners.

As an alternative to disability-shaming people because they find difficult that which we find easy, we could always try systematically teaching a skill some of us have been able to acquire just through long practice.

Accent-independent adaptation to foreign accented speech

Foreign-accented speech can be difficult to understand but listeners can adapt to novel talkers and accents with appropriate experience. Previous studies have d

pubs.aip.org

"In summary, the results of the current study demonstrate that accent-independent adaptation to foreign-accented speech is possible after exposure to multiple talkers with different foreign accents. We show that listeners are able to generalize to novel talkers from a novel language background as well as from a language background included in training. We suggest that this generalization is a result of exposure to systematic variation during training."​

 

[Bomb#20]

True; but eight-year-olds don't have a professional stake in teachers getting to be seen as having superpowers. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Good classroom management is a skill that anyone can cultivate with a modicum of time, training, and effort. Not a "superpower". And our system of standards and assrssments is designed to make classroom exchanges more efficient and effective, not less.

When I was in public school, some classes streamed students and some didn't; I recall the streamed classes going faster. I spent a couple years at a private school with an entrance exam; it moved faster than public school. In non-streamed public school classes it was perfectly normal for the majority of the students to spend part of a period aimlessly mind-wandering while the teacher had one of the students who couldn't yet read at grade-level try to read a passage aloud from whatever book we were nominally studying; it's not obvious what the rest of us were learning during all those impromptu reading lessons. If you want us to put more weight on a "Teacher knows best" argument from authority than on what reason and experience tell us, it's going to take a more complete explanation than "Good classroom management".