I don't think any serous white privilege theorist would deny that black privilege exists as well.
Absolutely they would, just as they would expend a lot of effort denying female privilege. They might be aware that there is such a thing but its generally seen as too great of a rhetorical risk to admit it.
Well any counter arguments would be getting me into 'No true scotsman' fallacies here so I'll drop it.
The conceptual problem with framing things in terms of white privilege is not that there isn't white privilege, there is, it is that we restructure everything to be specifically white privilege even when it is inconsistent or makes little sense. For example: Men being seen as strong is considered male privilege in terms of gender divide but black people being seen as strong is considered white privilege in terms of racial divide.
Critical race theory has provided us with extremely useful ways to think about and discuss race but because of its oppositional origins the community that built up around it is often narrowly focused.
This is a good example of why framing it such a way is a problem.
First, that we should eradicate all privileges that are race-based.
This is not a position typical of the American Right. Since that's more the realm of conservatism, the typical conservative position seems to be to assume as much as possible that there are no unearned privileges, so whatever the current situation is must be just. There's a key temporal component. You'll probably get a certain subset of libertarians to agree with it, though, as long as you can convince them it's the government's fault.
But egalitarianism (such as you outlined) is great so damn the left-right axis altogether on this one.
Well, I think this formulation is very much before Brown v. Board of Education. Since then, I'd say mainstream conservatism has leaned far left enough to acknowledge that societal factors do weigh in on what a group's substantive rights are. The current debate still seems to revolve around equality under the law versus equality of outcome, but this presumption of equality I think is pretty well rebutted even in conservative dialogue.
Because where I see Republicans coming down on the issue in National debates is that they want equal privileges for all regardless of race, but they want to avoid implementing policies that classify based on race. They also want to avoid making laws accountable for social outcomes rather than individuals, as much as possible. And they certainly never make any insensitive comments that attempt to ignore race data.
Of course, the pre-1960's conservative view of the constitution still exists, and it's definitely on the rightmost end of the spectrum. I just wouldn't attribute it to the US Republican party to the same degree as I would attribute Ignatiev's views to American Democrats. One, the degree of acceptance shown to a Harvard lecturer is enormously greater than the degree shown to the KKK, or really any other race related sub-constituency. And two, possibly related to the first, Republicans seem to want to distance themselves from their radical constituents while Democrats seem to be in constant search of new radical elements. Neither side is turning down donations, but one suppresses radical messages from the public while the other looks for opportunities to voice the radical element.
The other camp though says that we should eradicate white privilege, specifically.
To the extent that it's framed in a sort of class-struggle dialectic, then it's more Leftist, yeah. The best formulation I can think of is one that makes a distinction between "white" as commonly thought of as a skin color or "race," and "whiteness" as a categorical concept that underpins the Euro-American conception of race, and how it's really a reskinning (ha!) of the usual "Us"/"Them" dichotomy (Good stuff for "us", none for "them"). That way it helps to contextualize things in a solidly Euro-American framework, so that you don't have idiots saying things like "people of color can't be racist" when talking about places that aren't in America or Europe... the theory simply doesn't apply there.
But even then it's a specific example of a broader issue, the tendency of humans to wish that they and their friends could rule everyone else, and be unquestioned. And if there's one thing we're good at, it's rationalizing things. Why do I deserve to rule? Uh... because of Reasons! Whiteness! Masculinity! Religion! And totally not because my grandfather conquered your tribe, because any old schmuck with a warband could do that..
This is pretty interesting also. The way a lot of people argue against race privilege it's definitely more of a social construct than a genetic reality. There's a history behind how we understand race, and that factors into it.
It's just that there's a rift then between how race is perceived versus how it's measured. If one side is using surveys that ask people to self-identify their race, then there will be self-selection bias, and a great amount of it since people very often have ancestors of multiple races. And ultimately, redressing statistical outcomes at the bottom line becomes a poor fit to redress a problem that's in play due mainly to perception that's difficult to quantify. I remember reading of challenges happening in education in Brazil due to administrators not knowing how to classify the race of applicants. Ultimately, a lot of people started arguing that the requirement made of applications boards to classify people was actually a stronger cause of classification and bias than what was supposed to be redressed thereby. How race-diverse does a culture have to be before this happens? And is the left'ist formulation of race helping us get there or hindering us?
Unfortunately, I can't change the opinion of every bitter person out there with a chip on their shoulder and make them talk about this empirically, any more than I can stop gun nuts from ruining the perception of guns for the rest of the pro-gun crowd.
You certainly can't be expected to do it all yourself, but do your part. For instance, next time you are involved in one of these discussions and someone on the pro-privilege side offers one of these non-empirical lists (prime example: the Peggy McIntosh list) as evidence of something, call them out on the nonsense.
I do, however, think there is a definite subtle phenomena that I'm hesitant to call 'racist' that is behind the both statistical skew and the not-so-empirical social norm examples. The reason I'm hesitant to call it 'racist' is because racism implies things about the people involved that aren't as true. It's more subtle prejudices that, consciously, the individuals involved don't even realize they're making.
And of course it's fine for you to have this opinion, but you must understand that it is unsupported and unjustified, and you absolutely must not try to promulgate law, policy, or moral guidance that applies to other people based on only on an unsupported and unjustified opinion.
You're losing me here. First of all, do you actually have evidence that opponents are 'run out of town'?
Oh, there are tons of examples. Picking one at random: Danish developmental psychologist Helmuth Nyborg. Drummed out of academia twice by some governmental censorship panel for publishing results relating to racial and gender IQ. Accused of all sorts of trumped-up nonsense (one of the formal charges filed against him read "Various other complaints"), acquitted on almost all grounds, immediately published corrections of all actual mistakes found (which according to other scientists were trivial in nature), and still wound up censured and discredited despite that. Steven Pinker wrote a letter that sums it up nicely. When a scientist publishes results, even and especially wrong or controversial ones, we do science in response; we don't hold witch trials.
If many of the source of opposition to the theory that I've been shown are any indication, they're just as flawed as the poor examples the rest of you have been criticizing.
For instance, attempting to measure differences in racial IQ is a faulty experiment to begin with because the Intelligence Quotient is faulty to begin with. I would much rather see a similar study on how the IQ test skews results based on cultural backgrounds and context. But, even if it were framed in a useful manner, the reality is those studies have already been done. We already know that the IQ test is biased based on background.
I don't think that we have the luxury of guiding science by what you would "much rather see." That doesn't seem like the right way to conduct things. Look, your entire argument here seems to be built up around some kind of dogma, with deviation from it regarded as heresy -- some studies have been done, those are the holy writ, nobody is allowed to do any other studies because the final authority has already been established. Well, nuts to that, says I.
Of course IQ correlates with other background variables. It's not as though any of these studies aim to refute that notion. The question is, does it also correlate with race or sex, can we disambiguate the racial/sex correlations from the other background variables, how significant are the racial/sex correlations ultimately, and what are the causal connections if any? Why is someone not allowed to study these questions? What is so perfect about your studies that makes it so that not only can other studies not be done, but anyone who does other studies must be so inherently evil that it is fitting to drum them out of science altogether?
And to be clear, I'm not here to defend any particular result about IQ. Those results could be totally wrong for all the difference it makes to my actual argument, which is that disagreement in science is to be resolved by examination, rebuttal, and peer-review processes -- not by dragging opponents in front of the Thought Police and heaping censure on them until their back breaks and they quit publishing.
This stance is hyperbole from anyone actually advocating it. It's certainly a social injustice, which some people feel so strongly about they define things in terms of good and evil, rather than as problems to be addressed. You might even say that culturally, as a Christian (or at least religious) nation, we're predisposed to view things in the light of good and evil.
I'm not talking about comic-book Darth Vader evil; by evil I just mean "not good" or "morally errant" or that there is some moral duty incumbent on those who observe this phenomenon. What I'm talking about is that a privilege theorist doesn't just say "average white wealth is greater than average black wealth" and walk away -- he feels that the situation is wrong and that he is obliged to do something about it and he believes everyone else is likewise obliged to do something about it.
This, however, requires an argument that extends beyond mere statistical analysis of racial groups. Now you have to make a moral case for why one race isn't allowed to have higher average wealth.
On the scholarship example, in general, I'm going to have to disagree with you. A lot of people like to harp on this as an example of 'black privilege', which it is, but that doesn't make it inherently a bad thing.
See, you do get it! When the races are reversed, that is. This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's one thing to observe a statistical result, it's another thing to think that result is evil or generates a moral duty.
If decades of black students being slightly more favorable than the equivalent white student ends the social gap to create a more equitable environment, I'd be fine with that. You can't correct a unfair system by suddenly claiming fair rules when one side already has a significant head start.
So you don't care how many real human beings -- and mind you, these people are the ones who are well below the statistical average and lack all of the stuff of privilege -- suffer actual harm as a result of a policy as long as in the end a line on a graph shifts in a way that is appealing to you for some arbitrary reason? And you say you don't belong in the pile with the crazies? Color me skeptical.
This New Bureau of Economic Research paper 'Who goes to college' is actually a really useful paper for this topic. I recommend giving it a read when you have time, because the facts of low-SES individuals going to college are different from most people's presumptions. It's a good read but I don't want to veer off into a tangent on the value of race-based scholarships. http://www.nber.org/papers/w9310.pdf?new_window=1
While racist scholarships are a tangent per se, this general point is not and racist scholarships are a prime example, so I'm going to stick with it. I read the paper you linked, and I'm not sure what we're meant to conclude from it. It seems that by your lights and this paper's conclusions, you should agree with me that racist scholarships aren't helpful, because black college attendance does not appear to have a causal relationship with the generosity of financial aid according to this paper.
"Cute little averaging process"? Are you suggesting that we shouldn't care about a historically disadvantaged group because the advantaged group might have some people who aren't so advantaged?
I'm suggesting that morality doesn't scale in some neat, linear, averaged way up to groups or back down to people. You should care about disadvantaged people as much or more as you care about disadvantaged groups, and you should not be willing to throw disadvantaged people under the bus because they are a member of a group that isn't the flavor of this particular month or because their sacrifice increases some arbitrary metric of yours.
It's like the trolley problem in moral philosophy: studies of that problem show that morally-normal people generally won't push the one fat man onto the train tracks to save five others. Privilege theorists (and I'm sad to say that in this particular respect your assertions fall right in line with those of the crazies) will shove him right over the rail... as long as he's white.
Read the paper I just posted. Your low-SES white individual is still more likely to go to college than his black neighbor. In fact, the only time blacks almost matched whites in the same low SES was in the 80's, according to the research.
If you can find more recent statistics than the 2000s (which is where the study ends), please post them and we can address it. I'm sure the proportion is much higher now than it was in the late 90's.
Read what I've been saying. I send out admission letters to real people who are low-SES and are forced to refuse because I can't offer them aid. These are real human beings that I personally correspond with as a member on an admissions committee, not some theoretical statistical average person that doesn't actually exist in reality.
His "likelihood" of accepting my offer of admission with zero financial aid is essentially nil because his father is a deadbeat rather than a doctor and the prospect of six-figure student loans is not something he can face. Best case for him is he goes to state school at night and misses out on a first rate education that he is more than qualified for. Meanwhile, I send an entirely different letter to a black applicant in the same situation: thanks to some racists who have given racist endowments for racist scholarships that can only go to your race, you're going to get four years of free tuition. As you can imagine, I get a drastically different answer back in those cases.
Now, don't get me wrong. I send out tons of letters with zero aid packages to white kids of white doctors and their answer is "OK, daddy will pay for it." I get way more of those back from white applicants than I do from black applicants. I don't contest the data. What I do contest is that one has the right to mistreat individuals in order to get the data to come out in a way that is more pleasing to one. I don't see why this inner city white kid has to suffer because of all the white kids with rich fathers. He's not connected to them in any way. He bears no fault and there's no objective fact of the matter that underwrites this choice. It makes no sense. It's morally monstrous.
Remember, you're talking to me, not the raving bloggers. I don't believe 'good' or 'evil' factors into this at all. What I'm saying is that, as the majority population in a diverse country, we have a definition of normalcy that tends to exclude non-whites.
And you think there's something wrong with this, yes? That we ought refrain from it. That we are obliged to stop. That it is evil. Actually, there are some cases of this where I would agree with you. When someone creates a different standard of treatment based on an inborn trait (e.g. prohibition of gay marriage) that is evil. But the fact that the Wal-Mart greeter hasn't memorized the traditional greeting of every Native American tribe just isn't.
A good example of that is the allowable hair style choices for black students at institutions with a dress code, where only in the last decade or so have started opening up to more hair styles for natural black hair.
Was it an evil policy? Absolutely not. But it is short-sighted and a little ignorant in such a multi-cultural environment in the United States. It essentially says, 'your natural hair isn't good enough', or at least that is how it's perceived.
Why is it evil (again, in the non-cartoon sense) to tell someone their hairstyle isn't good enough, but not evil to tell someone their way of dressing isn't good enough? (Or do you object to all dress codes in their entirety?)
(It appears you cross-quoted Blinking Spirit with my name in the rest of the post.)
Read what I've been saying. I send out admission letters to real people who are low-SES and are forced to refuse because I can't offer them aid. These are real human beings that I personally correspond with as a member on an admissions committee, not some theoretical statistical average person that doesn't actually exist in reality.
His "likelihood" of accepting my offer of admission with zero financial aid is essentially nil because his father is a deadbeat rather than a doctor and the prospect of six-figure student loans is not something he can face. Best case for him is he goes to state school at night and misses out on a first rate education that he is more than qualified for. Meanwhile, I send an entirely different letter to a black applicant in the same situation: thanks to some racists who have given racist endowments for racist scholarships that can only go to your race, you're going to get four years of free tuition. As you can imagine, I get a drastically different answer back in those cases.
Now, don't get me wrong. I send out tons of letters with zero aid packages to white kids of white doctors and their answer is "OK, daddy will pay for it." I get way more of those back from white applicants than I do from black applicants. I don't contest the data. What I do contest is that one has the right to mistreat individuals in order to get the data to come out in a way that is more pleasing to one. I don't see why this inner city white kid has to suffer because of all the white kids with rich fathers. He's not connected to them in any way. He bears no fault and there's no objective fact of the matter that underwrites this choice. It makes no sense. It's morally monstrous.
Well...now I have to ask. Can you specifically point to a case of a low-SES white guy being denied financial aid, while an obviously less qualified low-SES black guy got significantly more? Such a scenario would indeed be monstrous, as you proclaim. However, if we're talking about a comparison between two students who are pretty close in qualifications...then shouldn't it have been a tossup in the first place? And that being said, if there was a substantial chance the exact same outcome would've occurred even without the race factor, then why are we blaming this individual's rejection solely on the existence of a race-based scholarship?
The logic behind these scholarships is that in said comparisons that are theoretically supposed to be coin-flips, the coin will often be weighted in favor of the straight-white-male (SWMs) applicant due to the subconscious biases of the person making the selection. I seem to remember seeing studies/research that supported the existence of such biases. Humans tend to naturally favor people who they feel are more like themselves; because the majority of people making these decisions are SWMs, other SWMs will be favored. scholarship for a certain minority weights the coin back towards the minority in question, ideally balancing out this bias.
Is it perfect? Almost certainly not. But the alternative, which is to let known race biases run wild in the other direction, seems equally bad.
Is it perfect? Almost certainly not. But the alternative, which is to let known race biases run wild in the other direction, seems equally bad.
Even if these were the only two possibilities, I would say it's worse to consciously embrace a race-based policy than otherwise.
And these are not the only two possibilities. There is always the literal coin flip, which should be better than both if what you say is true, shouldn't it?
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Well...now I have to ask. Can you specifically point to a case of a low-SES white guy being denied financial aid, while an obviously less qualified low-SES black guy got significantly more?
Privacy and data-blindness obviously prevent me from giving specific examples, so the best I can tell you is that such cases do exist. No two people are ever in the exact same situation, but I'd say there are at least 50 applicants a year (of many racial backgrounds) that fall into this "heartbreaking" socioeconomic grouping: family income < 120% of poverty, broken or single-income home, middle-of-the-road test scores and grades, but shows strong self-motivation and work ethic (has a job to support his family, etc.)
Of course you don't have to take my word for it if you don't want to, but there it is, there's nothing more I can offer.
However, if we're talking about a comparison between two students who are pretty close in qualifications...then shouldn't it have been a tossup in the first place?
Yes! They each should have gotten half of the available money, because their financial needs and socioeconomic background are too close the same to make a useful distinction.
And that being said, if there was a substantial chance the exact same outcome would've occurred even without the race factor, then why are we blaming this individual's rejection solely on the existence of a race-based scholarship?
There is zero chance this would have occurred without the race factor. Even the gender studies nutcases on the panel agree (in the phase of the process before we are allowed to look at the races of the candidates!) that the money should be allocated more evenly between the needy. The problem is that the money is earmarked by race or gender.
The logic behind these scholarships is that in said comparisons that are theoretically supposed to be coin-flips, the coin will often be weighted in favor of the straight-white-male (SWMs) applicant due to the subconscious biases of the person making the selection.
We have double-blind and data-blind processes to reduce or prevent this. For instance, it would be impossible for me to know, when handing out aid, whether the person I'm handing out aid to is the same as a person I bubbled to the top in the merit-based phase. Also, a lot of the distribution is done according to need-based formulas with little room for discretion. (Except, of course, for the earmarked racist money.)
I seem to remember seeing studies/research that supported the existence of such biases. Humans tend to naturally favor people who they feel are more like themselves; because the majority of people making these decisions are SWMs, other SWMs will be favored. scholarship for a certain minority weights the coin back towards the minority in question, ideally balancing out this bias.
There is no question that biases exist. But there are ways of reducing or eliminating bias, such as double-blind and data-blind processes, which don't involve screwing over innocent people.
Yes! They each should have gotten half of the available money, because their financial needs and socioeconomic background are too close the same to make a useful distinction.
Wouldn't that just mean both of them don't have enough money?
Wouldn't that just mean both of them don't have enough money?
That is one possible negative consequence, yes. However, I can say that refusals at the offer level of half-tuition are much, much rarer than refusals of zero aid offers, so I don't think this outcome is especially likely.
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Wouldn't that just mean both of them don't have enough money?
That is one possible negative consequence, yes. However, I can say that refusals at the offer level of half-tuition are much, much rarer than refusals of zero aid offers, so I don't think this outcome is especially likely.
Even if that would be the outcome of splitting the money evenly, it's not like there's no way around it. Like I said, a literal coin flip would do the job.
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And of course it's fine for you to have this opinion, but you must understand that it is unsupported and unjustified, and you absolutely must not try to promulgate law, policy, or moral guidance that applies to other people based on only on an unsupported and unjustified opinion.
But what law, policy or moral guidance are you referring to? There are plenty of categories where proven statistical slants towards one race or another justify intervention.
I don't think that we have the luxury of guiding science by what you would "much rather see." That doesn't seem like the right way to conduct things. Look, your entire argument here seems to be built up around some kind of dogma, with deviation from it regarded as heresy -- some studies have been done, those are the holy writ, nobody is allowed to do any other studies because the final authority has already been established. Well, nuts to that, says I.
This goes for the next several paragraphs of your statement there. You've been using a lot of hyperbole here to support your points. Don't make assumptions about my opinions because of what you think I mean or how I don't believe a few anecdotal examples constitutes a significant trend in science. I'm not against new studies. However, since I work in Public Health, I'm very much against bad or sloppy studies that will have severe public backlash. Racial differences in IQ screams at me as one of those, my example of 'what I would rather see' is how I would want the research framed. We've dealt with a lot of those and so I'm a bit biased when I hear about socially sensitive studies with erroneous information that get published.
See, you do get it! When the races are reversed, that is. This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's one thing to observe a statistical result, it's another thing to think that result is evil or generates a moral duty.
But... where in my arguments have I discussed a moral duty? I've already discussed I'm largely dropping the 'white privilege' theory as the descriptor for my argument, largely because of misconceptions of what I believe because there are so many people out there with chips on their shoulder using the same terminology.
So you don't care how many real human beings -- and mind you, these people are the ones who are well below the statistical average and lack all of the stuff of privilege -- suffer actual harm as a result of a policy as long as in the end a line on a graph shifts in a way that is appealing to you for some arbitrary reason? And you say you don't belong in the pile with the crazies? Color me skeptical.
You've yet to produce any individual human being who suffers actual harm directly because of being denied funding that went to a less qualified black student instead just because they are black.
I'm suggesting that morality doesn't scale in some neat, linear, averaged way up to groups or back down to people. You should care about disadvantaged people as much or more as you care about disadvantaged groups, and you should not be willing to throw disadvantaged people under the bus because they are a member of a group that isn't the flavor of this particular month or because their sacrifice increases some arbitrary metric of yours.
But this implies that the additional funding specifically for minorities is directly taking out of the pockets of non-minorities.
Arbitrary metric? If black disadvantaged students go to college at much lower rates than whites, despite being in the same SES, and someone wants to correct that, it's arbitrary?
Look, when there are severe demographic skews based on a social grouping, in this case racial, it's sometimes necessary to give additional support to that social group to at least bring them within a more proportional representative sampling. If gays suffer disproportionately from aids, no one would argue that it's unfair to all the straights with aids. Sometimes you have give advantages to social groups and target programs to correct a social problem. This is done all the time in public health because there are always clear differences in certain metrics between racial categories, even when adjusting for SES compared to those outside that racial category.
Read what I've been saying. I send out admission letters to real people who are low-SES and are forced to refuse because I can't offer them aid. These are real human beings that I personally correspond with as a member on an admissions committee, not some theoretical statistical average person that doesn't actually exist in reality.
Could it possibly be you feel this way because your sample group is horrible skewed in your anecdotal example? Of your applicants, how many are white and how many are black. I would imagine that you're going to be denying a lot more disadvantaged white students than disadvantaged black students, since you probably have a much, much larger number of white students applying. On sheer volume, you're always going to be denying more white students than black students financial aid, with or without the endowments.
His "likelihood" of accepting my offer of admission with zero financial aid is essentially nil because his father is a deadbeat rather than a doctor and the prospect of six-figure student loans is not something he can face. Best case for him is he goes to state school at night and misses out on a first rate education that he is more than qualified for. Meanwhile, I send an entirely different letter to a black applicant in the same situation: thanks to some racists who have given racist endowments for racist scholarships that can only go to your race, you're going to get four years of free tuition. As you can imagine, I get a drastically different answer back in those cases.
Nail on the head. So this funding wouldn't exist without the 'racist' endowment, meaning the white students never would have gotten this exact funding anyway. So how, exactly, is a white student suffering because the black student is now going to college with money that only given because people want to see more black students succeed and become proportional to the white students.
You may think what you're advocating is a 'fair' system, but it's not. Even with the 'racist' endowment, the average white poor student is still more likely to go to college than the average poor black student. I'm really not sure you understand what that means, because clearly there is a fundamental social problem preventing black students from going to college at rates equal to their white counterparts. Even with the 'racist' endowments, those numbers only barely come close to matching their poor white counterparts. These endowments are not the same thing as taking from the white students. What this money is doing is breaking through fundamental societal barriers for black students that are disproportionately keeping them out of school.
And you think there's something wrong with this, yes? That we ought refrain from it. That we are obliged to stop. That it is evil. Actually, there are some cases of this where I would agree with you. When someone creates a different standard of treatment based on an inborn trait (e.g. prohibition of gay marriage) that is evil.
I really wouldn't frame this in terms of good or evil. Things can be right and wrong without being good or evil. I'd refer to it more as a societal illness than an evil.
But the fact that the Wal-Mart greeter hasn't memorized the traditional greeting of every Native American tribe just isn't.
Is there a real life example you are drawing this from? I don't get it.
Why is it evil (again, in the non-cartoon sense) to tell someone their hairstyle isn't good enough, but not evil to tell someone their way of dressing isn't good enough? (Or do you object to all dress codes in their entirety?)
It's wrong because it forced black students to either shave their heads or use straightening products to mimic white hair. Black hair doesn't naturally mimic white hair, it requires time, treatment and processing to get it that way.
I don't care about dress codes in general, I have a problem with dress codes that discriminate. If all children have to wear the same thing, fine, but the hairstyle thing is the equivalent of making everyone wear either a small, medium or large version of the uniform. XL people better suck in their gut! That's all I mean. It's not a great injustice but it's pretty ignorant.
(It appears you cross-quoted Blinking Spirit with my name in the rest of the post.)
My bad, I'll fix it.
Edit: Minorities and disadvantaged groups often don't respond to 'general' help. You have to specifically target them, because culturally they believe that the 'general help' isn't for them. Specifically targeting that minority groups address this issue. Does it have to be done through exclusively black scholarships? No. But I imagine it helps cutting through that cultural barrier.
Edit: Minorities and disadvantaged groups often don't respond to 'general' help. You have to specifically target them, because culturally they believe that the 'general help' isn't for them. Specifically targeting that minority groups address this issue. Does it have to be done through exclusively black scholarships? No. But I imagine it helps cutting through that cultural barrier.
So minorities need to be fluffed and treated as special in order to accept help? What a joke. Cut it all off and see how quick their "cultural barriers" drop.
In the end their lack of belief in general help doesn't and shouldn't matter. Last I checked there's no biological differences that make it so they need targeted outreach of any kind.
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STRANGER: Indeed?
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STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Edit: Minorities and disadvantaged groups often don't respond to 'general' help. You have to specifically target them, because culturally they believe that the 'general help' isn't for them. Specifically targeting that minority groups address this issue. Does it have to be done through exclusively black scholarships? No. But I imagine it helps cutting through that cultural barrier.
So minorities need to be fluffed and treated as special in order to accept help? What a joke. Cut it all off and see how quick their "cultural barriers" drop.
In the end their lack of belief in general help doesn't and shouldn't matter. Last I checked there's no biological differences that make it so they need targeted outreach of any kind.
Cultural differences are jsut as strong and important as biological differences. I mean, I'm one of the most anti affirmative action people here, but even I will admit that there are strong cultural differences that exist, and cause different approaches to be necessary.
Edit: Minorities and disadvantaged groups often don't respond to 'general' help. You have to specifically target them, because culturally they believe that the 'general help' isn't for them. Specifically targeting that minority groups address this issue. Does it have to be done through exclusively black scholarships? No. But I imagine it helps cutting through that cultural barrier.
So minorities need to be fluffed and treated as special in order to accept help? What a joke. Cut it all off and see how quick their "cultural barriers" drop.
In the end their lack of belief in general help doesn't and shouldn't matter. Last I checked there's no biological differences that make it so they need targeted outreach of any kind.
Nature is only half of what makes a person, if that. If you were actually correct about your opinion here, blacks would have caught up to whites in all categories the moment Jim Crow laws were ended. Assuming that black communities are just white communities with black skin is simply false, black communities have formed their own distinct cultures with different sentiments from their white counterparts over time. If you want to reach the black community, you need to address them.
Edit: Minorities and disadvantaged groups often don't respond to 'general' help. You have to specifically target them, because culturally they believe that the 'general help' isn't for them. Specifically targeting that minority groups address this issue. Does it have to be done through exclusively black scholarships? No. But I imagine it helps cutting through that cultural barrier.
So minorities need to be fluffed and treated as special in order to accept help? What a joke. Cut it all off and see how quick their "cultural barriers" drop.
In the end their lack of belief in general help doesn't and shouldn't matter. Last I checked there's no biological differences that make it so they need targeted outreach of any kind.
Nature is only half of what makes a person, if that. If you were actually correct about your opinion here, blacks would have caught up to whites in all categories the moment Jim Crow laws were ended. Assuming that black communities are just white communities with black skin is simply false, black communities have formed their own distinct cultures with different sentiments from their white counterparts over time. If you want to reach the black community, you need to address them.
The goal of ending slavery wasn't to "catchup" Blacks to Whites, it was to grant equal rights and protections to them. Gauging the success of Blacks or any race on how much they've caught up to Whites or what level of status they have on any category is wrong. Ending slavery wasn't to put Blacks on the same economic status as Whites it was allow them to pursue their own successes and destiny within the country.
Ultimately all races are responsible for their own success and attempts to legislate that success deprive any culture of the pride, knowledge and history that goes with that success. That they have different sentiments on specific things doesn't matter because the efforts should be solely towards the universal rights that apply to everyone, leaving each race to carve out its success with those differing sentiments on their own terms, accountable to both the law and their own community and ultimately providing for a stronger nation as a whole.
Any race that needs propping up by the actions or existence of another to that other races' detriment isn't strong on its own terms, this is one of the biggest lessons of slavery. Outreach programs, quotas and admission policies are examples of this propping up. Babies, the sick and injured need coddling, not races.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
The goal of ending slavery wasn't to "catchup" Blacks to Whites, it was to grant equal rights and protections to them. Gauging the success of Blacks or any race on how much they've caught up to Whites or what level of status they have on any category is wrong. Ending slavery wasn't to put Blacks on the same economic status as Whites it was allow them to pursue their own successes and destiny within the country.
Ultimately all races are responsible for their own success and attempts to legislate that success deprive any culture of the pride, knowledge and history that goes with that success. That they have different sentiments on specific things doesn't matter because the efforts should be solely towards the universal rights that apply to everyone, leaving each race to carve out its success with those differing sentiments on their own terms, accountable to both the law and their own community and ultimately providing for a stronger nation as a whole.
Any race that needs propping up by the actions or existence of another to that other races' detriment isn't strong on its own terms, this is one of the biggest lessons of slavery. Outreach programs, quotas and admission policies are examples of this propping up. Babies, the sick and injured need coddling, not races.
We can't, as a country, institutionally marginalize a group for centuries and then shout 'ollie ollie oxen free' and wipe our hands of it. Making the rules fair when the game has been rigged for centuries does not suddenly make the game fair.
Our nation is stronger by reaching down and helping up those in need, not by looking down and snidely commenting on how the rest of us 'made it on our own'.
I'm not saying these programs have to go on forever (in fact that would be an injustice by itself, they should end when there is reasonable proportionality between the social groups), but you can't correct a social injustice by hoping it will get better. You can, and should, target outreach to be most effective in the communities you're trying to reach.
Edit: I took out some language that was potentially inflammatory that I didn't intend to be.
Ah, the ol' bootstraps argument. The freedom to pursue your own destiny because everything is suddenly fair, and because context doesn't matter to an individual's ability for success. We should just let black babies die at higher rates than white babies, because obviously black people aren't working hard enough to keep them alive, right?
We can't, as a country, institutionally marginalize a group for centuries and then shout 'ollie ollie oxen free' and wipe our hands of it. Making the rules fair when the game has been rigged for centuries does not suddenly make the game fair.
It's a silly kind of argument. Our nation is stronger by reaching down and helping up those in need, not by looking down and snidely commenting on how the rest of us 'made it on our own'.
I'm not saying these programs have to go on forever (in fact that would be an injustice by itself, they should end when there is reasonable proportionality between the social groups), but you can't correct a social injustice by hoping it will get better. You can, and should, target outreach to be most effective in the communities you're trying to reach.
Ah the old "non Whites can't succeed and survive without outreach programs and social justice argument. See, I can do it too.
Black people in general should be concerned with the death rates of their babies, as should anyone else who wishes to contribute their own time and money to addressing it. The VS. Whites thing is junk, so is the idea of playing winners and losers with taxpayer funds for such but of course we start getting into the limits on size and scope of the government there. Each race should be concerned about increasing its own survival period, not in comparing itself to other races and somehow using that as a social justice tool to facilitate outreach involving others money.
The fact that you think what I said was looking down on other races shows how you don't have a ****ing clue what I was saying. You can't acknowledge the abolition of slavery as good and then acknowledge that racial outreach programs are too. Both are playing the game of winners and losers and in the case of outreach programs its being done with taxpayer money which by its very nature is supposed to be colorblind and beneficial to all, not greatly beneficial to some while intangibly if at all beneficial to others.
I never said that I was just hoping it would get better. I was saying that the entire point of America is success and initiative on your terms and efforts. When slavery was abolished the door was opened and the groundwork laid for the pursuit of success. When the whole separate but equal thing fell by the wayside that really completed the foundation on which Blacks and other races could pursue success in individual and race specific ways without there being anything to stop them except themselves. Social justice is an antique, outdated and totally false premise that is only put to use now because it's a good career for people who see victimization as profitable.
Just saw your edit, woe is me for starting this post and then walking away for 20 minutes then coming back to finish it. I'm not trying to be inflammatory either, I just can't accept the idea that outreach should exist except amongst the races themselves, and any outsiders who wish to engage in it for their own reasons. Outreach as a political tool or method of addressing problems goes too far.
Private Mod Note
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CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
When slavery was abolished the door was opened and the groundwork laid for the pursuit of success.
If you have something to say, actually say it. Picking one sentence out of what I said and doing stupid emotes says nothing. You don't have to worry about me reporting you though, I don't do that.
Thanks for your non comment, it was appreciated.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
The fact that you think what I said was looking down on other races shows how you don't have a ****ing clue what I was saying. You can't acknowledge the abolition of slavery as good and then acknowledge that racial outreach programs are too. Both are playing the game of winners and losers and in the case of outreach programs its being done with taxpayer money which by its very nature is supposed to be colorblind and beneficial to all, not greatly beneficial to some while intangibly if at all beneficial to others.
First of all, I apologize for that imagery. I didn't mean 'looking down' in the figurative sense of snubbing people, but instead that allegory was meant to mean framing the rules from a position of security.
Secondly, I think you're misunderstanding how the outreach I'm talking about works. They aren't just arbitrarily picking people, but instead identifying weaknesses and shoring them up. What I'm suggesting is boarding up the windows and doors against a zombie attack. What you're suggesting is boarding up the walls, windows and doors, which isn't as effective.
What taxpayer dollars should be are effective. I think we can both agree on that. If the overall population's health metrics are down because a single social group is doing poorly, wouldn't you agree it's more effective to target that social group rather than the entire population?
When slavery was abolished the door was opened and the groundwork laid for the pursuit of success.
This is what I disagree with. When slavery was abolished the door was opened, but the groundwork wasn't laid. In fact, it was prevent from being laid in most places in the country for another hundred years, until it became actually illegal to discriminate.
The kind of outreach I'm talking about is that groundwork. It's not an attempt to perpetually prop up social groups - it's an attempt to rectify problems.
When the whole separate but equal thing fell by the wayside that really completed the foundation on which Blacks and other races could pursue success in individual and race specific ways without there being anything to stop them except themselves. Social justice is an antique, outdated and totally false premise that is only put to use now because it's a good career for people who see victimization as profitable.
While there are certainly people who see victimization as a profitable means of getting their way, I think the biggest fallacy is that social justice is an antique. In many ways, like 'feminism', it's a victim of it's own success. Such great strides were made in such a short period of time that we've gotten tired of hearing about it.
Overt discrimination may no longer be socially acceptable, but outcomes are still incredibly disproportionate. And it hurts everyone when entire communities of people lag behind the rest, the ripple effect can't be denied.
It's already happening, the so-called 'racist' scholarships are the result of the black community helping others who were in their situation along. It's a good thing, because the first and second generations are already helping their own communities advance themselves.
Just saw your edit, woe is me for starting this post and then walking away for 20 minutes then coming back to finish it. I'm not trying to be inflammatory either,
Yeah I saw you viewing when I finished the edit and said 'well, crap'. Sometimes I forget to filter the stupid or aggressive things out of a post, and I can be really bad about knee jerk reactions before I get more clinical.
I just can't accept the idea that outreach should exist except amongst the races themselves, and any outsiders who wish to engage in it for their own reasons. Outreach as a political tool or method of addressing problems goes too far.
You know, it's funny, because a lot of people with your general position are mad about racially distinct communities advancing themselves, too, so I'm glad you aren't.
My reasons for targeted outreach is simply to be effective, and to do the most improvement with the funding available. The net gain for targeting vulnerable communities is much higher than trying to blanket everyone. What I don't think many people realize is that allowing communities to lag behind, regardless of who or what that community is, brings us all down.
Take communities rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina. Even in the 'rebuilt' communities, the middle and upper class and infrastructure recovered faster than the low SES individuals who lived there, so we're seeing communities where the gap between the poor and everyone else has widened to a silly extent. And that hurts the everyone long term, because communities aren't resilient when large groups of the population can barely get by. The same basic principle applies to our society, too.
Words, blah blah stuff said, snow globes and kaleidoscopes
The weaknesses that you're saying are recognized aren't the perogative of the government to engage in addressing. This is the place of private initiatives and local communities organizing their efforts and resources, and why a robust federal government isn't well suited to addressing the needs of communities because a blanket approach is more prone to miss important details to specific areas, be less accountable and the tailored approach plays the game of winners and losers. It argues for stronger state and local governments which are not only more immediately accountable to the local citizens but also is front and center in both interacting with citizens and planning solutions suitable to the situation. If there's going to be tax dollars spent it should be the people of specific communities spending their own taxes on their own problems and solutions.
That's why I'm not against things like the NAACP, but am against federal agencies and tax money spent on outreach. Private organizations are fine and are good for coordinating, compiling and marshalling to deal with concerns and problems regardless of where in the country things are happening. I'm not against these at all and have no problem with every race having them, they should be looking to survive and address their own concerns with their own efforts and resources. It leaves the door open to others of other races who wish to contribute to them for whatever reason they choose but most importantly makes each distinct people responsible for its own well being which translates into more personal responsibility, pride, history and growth of character/identity.
What I'm suggesting isn't boarding everything up, what I'm suggesting is what has happened since the dawn of time: Take care of your own first and then if circumstance and discretion allow for it take care of others. Each race acting in this accord with no attempts at detrimental action towards others creates stronger community amongst themselves and makes it possible for critical thinking and appraisal to find the time and resources to donate outside the community if so desired.
Yes tax dollars should be effective, in this context they'd be mostly confined to the state and local levels so that they could be so. The federal government should be the assistant to state and local governments, not the ringleader. If outreach happens at all it should come from local communities first, then state level last and never from the federal government.
I'm not a fan of all inclusive health metrics or any of that type of thing. Obviously a specific group that is bottoming out or something of the like needs to take actions but the actions should come from within, from their own leadership and their own outreach. I think of the Tao no. 17 in that regard:
When the Master governs, the people
are hardly aware that he exists.
Next best is a leader who is loved.
Next, one who is feared.
The worst is one who is despised.
If you don't trust the people,
you make them untrustworthy.
The Master doesn't talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, "Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!"
Especially the quote of the people at the end. I believe in strong history, strong national identity, strong racial and cultural backgrounds and I think you only achieve this when you have people committed to their own people first and as a extension of that their nation and then others as a secondary commitment. Under the principle of existing to the benefit of your own without being a detriment to others of course. Take away that principle and you have many examples of abuses throughout history.
I don't see income disparity as a problem to rectify as a national initiative, nor health disparity. Equal opportunity is what the goal was, not outcome. It is sad to know there's people without as much as others but the only place where that happens is when everyone has little to nothing. It can't ever come to pass that everyone has everything they want or need. The peaks and valleys will always exist and its a pipedream to believe otherwise.
In the past people just accepted that their down position wasn't going to change unless they changed it themselves and if they stuck together with their families and local communities. Now they look to people who live hundreds of miles away and ask them to organize a plan to fix their problems so they can keep on watching tv, doing whatever it is they do and not take active roles in the problems they deal with. The contrast of this and the results of it can't be overstated and it's helped create the explosion in the power of politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats beyond anything the world has ever seen. It's not healthy nor acceptable to a free society in any way.
The "fact" that people are "behind" is still an Us vs. Them consideration which needn't be engaged in. Us first, then them is more acceptable.
I'm all for racially distinct communities, I'm a big traditionalist in many ways and that is one of the biggest examples of sustaining and passing on traditions and identity. National integration while a fine effort can't ever be so pervasive that it mutes away ethnic qualities and racially distinct communities are huge in safeguarding this.
Your last bit about Katrina is probably my outlier. Natural disasters deserve to be addressed as a whole by everyone but I think that is also something that finds itself outside the crux of the majority of our back and forth.
None of what I have said here includes or implies any hostility towards other races. When I say that efforts should be beneficial towards your own without being detrimental to others I mean it. There's always paths to take which provide for this.
Private Mod Note
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CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Why should I not protect the advantage I've obtained? Seems to me if I have this advantage, I can only suffer if I support policies that seek to mitigate it.
But what law, policy or moral guidance are you referring to? There are plenty of categories where proven statistical slants towards one race or another justify intervention.
Statistics alone are morally neutral; no statistic justifies anything without a concurrent moral argument. In order to justify some attempt to change a statistic, you need the statistics, plus a piece of moral logic that says that your attempt to dork around with the statistics is justified, plus a piece of means-end logic that shows your proposed intervention will have the effect that is underwritten by the moral logic.
This goes for the next several paragraphs of your statement there. You've been using a lot of hyperbole here to support your points. Don't make assumptions about my opinions because of what you think I mean or how I don't believe a few anecdotal examples constitutes a significant trend in science.
I won't pretend that I'm not guilty of a few rhetorical stunts here and there, especially in these debates, which I've had thousands of times and by this point are so boring for me that I have to throw a few jabs in just so that I can manage to keep my eyes open.
But if my crime is hyperbole, yours is being cagey and deceptive about your actual position. Look how this conversation started out: it was just about crunching the numbers for you. Well, that was fine and dandy. But with each successive exchange you are pulling new cards out of your sleeve and putting them on the table. (I don't think the surprises are over, either. If we start talking about morality, well, let's just say postmodern leftists have certain tendencies in that direction and leave it at that.)
I don't want to put you on a position you don't hold. But so far it has turned out that most of the positions I'm arguing against, even the ones you deny in the moment, you later go on to affirm!
To wit:
I'm not against new studies. However, since I work in Public Health, I'm very much against bad or sloppy studies that will have severe public backlash. Racial differences in IQ screams at me as one of those, my example of 'what I would rather see' is how I would want the research framed. We've dealt with a lot of those and so I'm a bit biased when I hear about socially sensitive studies with erroneous information that get published.
And of course your bias -- that you yourself acknowledge! -- can't be the guiding force behind science! We have to lift science free of our biases. What you (or I or anyone else) would rather see is irrelevant. And you don't know whether or not the information is erroneous until after it's been published. And the way of dealing with erroneous information is by way of rebuttal. And the argument you made two posts ago that particular pieces of data are erroneous relies on you treating another piece of data as unquestionable -- conveniently (and circularly) enough, the very piece of data that would be called into question by the new data.
All of this is you affirming, at least to some degree, the very position I've been arguing against. So have the decency to be straight with me. My cards are all on the table here.
But... where in my arguments have I discussed a moral duty?
You haven't discussed it, and that's part of the problem. You've treated it as obvious or implicit, and you've made many statements relying on it (e.g. "There are plenty of categories where proven statistical slants towards one race or another justify intervention"), but you haven't discussed it.
You've yet to produce any individual human being who suffers actual harm directly because of being denied funding that went to a less qualified black student instead just because they are black.
But this implies that the additional funding specifically for minorities is directly taking out of the pockets of non-minorities.
Do one or more welfare recipients suffer harm when welfare funding is reduced so that the upper class can get a 1% tax break? After all, we're not taking money out of their pockets, are we? Just giving them less than they would have gotten. No harm 'tall there, no sir.
Arbitrary metric? If black disadvantaged students go to college at much lower rates than whites, despite being in the same SES, and someone wants to correct that, it's arbitrary?
Yes, until you make it non-arbitrary by providing moral reasoning. The (true) fact that left-handed men earn on average 5% more than righties doesn't seem to spur any social justice crusade, nor should it. Because, in addition to all of the other fallacies we've been talking about, it's arbitrary.
Look, when there are severe demographic skews based on a social grouping, in this case racial, it's sometimes necessary to give additional support to that social group to at least bring them within a more proportional representative sampling.
What makes it necessary to do this? You're making a moral claim!
If gays suffer disproportionately from aids, no one would argue that it's unfair to all the straights with aids.
If gays suffer disproportionately from AIDS and as a result, there is constructed an infrastructure of gay-only AIDS clinics that turns straight men away at the door, denying them access to AIDS-fighting resources then you had better damn well believe that I'll be arguing it's unfair. Anyone who wouldn't find that unfair is bound to be, how shall we say, a morally interesting human being.
Sometimes you have give advantages to social groups and target programs to correct a social problem. This is done all the time in public health because there are always clear differences in certain metrics between racial categories, even when adjusting for SES compared to those outside that racial category.
And at least here in the US, public health, you'll notice, is not all that it might be. Don't assume that because it happens to be the case that you do something, it's the right or best thing to do.
Could it possibly be you feel this way because your sample group is horrible skewed in your anecdotal example?
There is no doubt that my sample is skewed. Attempting to draw a general statistical inference from that is going to be hopeless, which is why it's a good thing I'm not trying to do that.
Look, I feel like you're just not listening to me. I am certainly dealing with a statistically unique corner of the universe -- but so is everyone else! You've never met an average white person in your life. Such a person does not exist. Everyone deviates from statistical norms in significant ways. Us weirdos out here on the fringe are still human beings! You can't mistreat us because we don't fall into the middle of the curve! You can't sacrifice us for the sake of your numbers! You can't toss virgins into volcanoes in an attempt to stop them from erupting, even if pushing virgins into volcanoes actually helped! You can't push the fat man onto the train track! It's wrong!
Nail on the head. So this funding wouldn't exist without the 'racist' endowment, meaning the white students never would have gotten this exact funding anyway. So how, exactly, is a white student suffering because the black student is now going to college with money that only given because people want to see more black students succeed and become proportional to the white students.
How does a welfare recipient suffer when his welfare check is reduced so that more money can be devoted to Social Security?
You may think what you're advocating is a 'fair' system, but it's not.
Oh, for the love of...
Fairness is a moral concept, and since you haven't articulated -- in fact, have outright denied that you are taking -- a moral stance here, you simply have no basis for saying which things are or aren't fair. This is a bare assertion.
As the party in this debate whose cards are actually on the table instead of up his sleeve, let me outline my own modest proposal for the moral logic that is at play here. If you agree that:
1) The vicious cycle of poverty -- where people get stuck in low socioeconomic bands because all of their productive time is devoted to maintaining their status quo rather than advancing it -- is a moral evil; humankind is better off the more opportunities people have to lift themselves out of this.
2) For a person in this situation, receiving a first-rate education can help mitigate this phenomenon and lift them out of the cycle.
Therefore, 3) We help humanity the most and do the most moral good (that college financial aid possibly can) when we allocate our resources so as to give the highest number of first-rate educations to the highest number of the neediest people.
-- then the rest of the reasoning is purely mechanical. The best allocation of the money is to each low-income student according to need, not race, in such a way that as many needy students as possible can have sufficient of their needs met. Any deviation from that distribution is morally inferior.
Even with the 'racist' endowment, the average white poor student is still more likely to go to college than the average poor black student.
There is.No such ****ing person.In the universe.As the average poor white and/or black student.
I'm really not sure you understand what that means, because clearly there is a fundamental social problem preventing black students from going to college at rates equal to their white counterparts. Even with the 'racist' endowments, those numbers only barely come close to matching their poor white counterparts.
And one could attempt to figure out the reason that the black attendance percentage is lower. Then one could use moral logic to decide whether or not that reason is actually a problem -- and if it is, address it in a morally sound fashion without throwing virgins into the volcano to please Pele.
As for the actual social science behind this, the most interesting thing I found in that paper you linked was the section on Pell grants, which suggests that whatever this social problem is, it actually isn't the generosity of aid! The racist scholarships aren't helping! Finance isn't the driving factor in the decision making of black college applicants. (Says the paper, anyway. I'm actually very skeptical of that particular conclusion. I've always seen higher acceptance rates at higher aid levels, and there's a very plausible causal reason for that.)
These endowments are not the same thing as taking from the white students. What this money is doing is breaking through fundamental societal barriers for black students that are disproportionately keeping them out of school.
Even if racist scholarships weren't totally morally unacceptable for other reasons, they are apparently not actually doing what you think they are. So sayeth your own resource!
Is there a real life example you are drawing this from? I don't get it.
No, it's a snarky allusion toward what I'll call normalcy, borrowing Blinking Spirit's phrase. When you walk into Wal-Mart, the greeter will say "Hello, welcome to Wal-Mart, how are you today?" But that's Anglo-normalcy, isn't it? If you're Japanese, he should say "Konichi-wa." If you're Hawaiian, he should say "Aloha kakahiaka." If you're a member of the Catawba tribe, he should say "Tanake tineyedo." In fact he should probably have an array of costumes at the ready, as well as familiarity with a wide array of sign languages as well as body language and dances. But he doesn't, and so the cycle of white male heterosexual ooppression just goes on and on.
Why should I not protect the advantage I've obtained? Seems to me if I have this advantage, I can only suffer if I support policies that seek to mitigate it.
A valid question. I think it would depend on what your end goals are. If you are looking to carve out the most for yourself, and **** the rest of humanity, then sure, it makes sense for you to maintain the status quo. However, I would say that it is for the good of humanity that we assure that everyone has equal opportunity. If we chuck 10% of our population under the bus, that's 10% of our potential Einsteins, da Vincis, etc that we're throwing out. So I should think it would be in our interest that we make it possible for EVERYONE, no matter the circumstances of their birth, be given a path through which they can rise to the very top should they have the proper talent and apply themselves accordingly.
Why should I not protect the advantage I've obtained? Seems to me if I have this advantage, I can only suffer if I support policies that seek to mitigate it.
A valid question. I think it would depend on what your end goals are. If you are looking to carve out the most for yourself, and **** the rest of humanity, then sure, it makes sense for you to maintain the status quo. .
So it's okay if I get ****ed?
However, I would say that it is for the good of humanity that we assure that everyone has equal opportunity.
But I'm getting ****ed by no fault of my own.
If we chuck 10% of our population under the bus, that's 10% of our potential Einsteins, da Vincis, etc that we're throwing out.
But I'm getting thrown under the bus....what about me and my peers? I do not live a life of bliss with this purported advantage I have.
So I should think it would be in our interest that we make it possible for EVERYONE, no matter the circumstances of their birth, be given a path through which they can rise to the very top should they have the proper talent and apply themselves accordingly.
Losing an advantage over other certain people does not always mean you're getting shafted. Conversely, bringing a disadvantaged person up to your level of opportunity isn't necessarily going to affect you, since this isn't a 100% zero-sum matter. Just because someone is gaining something, doesn't mean another person must "lose".
But I'm getting thrown under the bus....what about me and my peers? I do not live a life of bliss with this purported advantage I have.
I assume you're referring to your SES. In which case, you're part of the population that we need to stop chucking under the bus. Remember, there are multiple kinds of "Privilege".
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Well any counter arguments would be getting me into 'No true scotsman' fallacies here so I'll drop it.
This is a good example of why framing it such a way is a problem.
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Well, I think this formulation is very much before Brown v. Board of Education. Since then, I'd say mainstream conservatism has leaned far left enough to acknowledge that societal factors do weigh in on what a group's substantive rights are. The current debate still seems to revolve around equality under the law versus equality of outcome, but this presumption of equality I think is pretty well rebutted even in conservative dialogue.
Because where I see Republicans coming down on the issue in National debates is that they want equal privileges for all regardless of race, but they want to avoid implementing policies that classify based on race. They also want to avoid making laws accountable for social outcomes rather than individuals, as much as possible. And they certainly never make any insensitive comments that attempt to ignore race data.
Of course, the pre-1960's conservative view of the constitution still exists, and it's definitely on the rightmost end of the spectrum. I just wouldn't attribute it to the US Republican party to the same degree as I would attribute Ignatiev's views to American Democrats. One, the degree of acceptance shown to a Harvard lecturer is enormously greater than the degree shown to the KKK, or really any other race related sub-constituency. And two, possibly related to the first, Republicans seem to want to distance themselves from their radical constituents while Democrats seem to be in constant search of new radical elements. Neither side is turning down donations, but one suppresses radical messages from the public while the other looks for opportunities to voice the radical element.
This is pretty interesting also. The way a lot of people argue against race privilege it's definitely more of a social construct than a genetic reality. There's a history behind how we understand race, and that factors into it.
It's just that there's a rift then between how race is perceived versus how it's measured. If one side is using surveys that ask people to self-identify their race, then there will be self-selection bias, and a great amount of it since people very often have ancestors of multiple races. And ultimately, redressing statistical outcomes at the bottom line becomes a poor fit to redress a problem that's in play due mainly to perception that's difficult to quantify. I remember reading of challenges happening in education in Brazil due to administrators not knowing how to classify the race of applicants. Ultimately, a lot of people started arguing that the requirement made of applications boards to classify people was actually a stronger cause of classification and bias than what was supposed to be redressed thereby. How race-diverse does a culture have to be before this happens? And is the left'ist formulation of race helping us get there or hindering us?
You certainly can't be expected to do it all yourself, but do your part. For instance, next time you are involved in one of these discussions and someone on the pro-privilege side offers one of these non-empirical lists (prime example: the Peggy McIntosh list) as evidence of something, call them out on the nonsense.
And of course it's fine for you to have this opinion, but you must understand that it is unsupported and unjustified, and you absolutely must not try to promulgate law, policy, or moral guidance that applies to other people based on only on an unsupported and unjustified opinion.
Oh, there are tons of examples. Picking one at random: Danish developmental psychologist Helmuth Nyborg. Drummed out of academia twice by some governmental censorship panel for publishing results relating to racial and gender IQ. Accused of all sorts of trumped-up nonsense (one of the formal charges filed against him read "Various other complaints"), acquitted on almost all grounds, immediately published corrections of all actual mistakes found (which according to other scientists were trivial in nature), and still wound up censured and discredited despite that. Steven Pinker wrote a letter that sums it up nicely. When a scientist publishes results, even and especially wrong or controversial ones, we do science in response; we don't hold witch trials.
I don't think that we have the luxury of guiding science by what you would "much rather see." That doesn't seem like the right way to conduct things. Look, your entire argument here seems to be built up around some kind of dogma, with deviation from it regarded as heresy -- some studies have been done, those are the holy writ, nobody is allowed to do any other studies because the final authority has already been established. Well, nuts to that, says I.
Of course IQ correlates with other background variables. It's not as though any of these studies aim to refute that notion. The question is, does it also correlate with race or sex, can we disambiguate the racial/sex correlations from the other background variables, how significant are the racial/sex correlations ultimately, and what are the causal connections if any? Why is someone not allowed to study these questions? What is so perfect about your studies that makes it so that not only can other studies not be done, but anyone who does other studies must be so inherently evil that it is fitting to drum them out of science altogether?
And to be clear, I'm not here to defend any particular result about IQ. Those results could be totally wrong for all the difference it makes to my actual argument, which is that disagreement in science is to be resolved by examination, rebuttal, and peer-review processes -- not by dragging opponents in front of the Thought Police and heaping censure on them until their back breaks and they quit publishing.
I'm not talking about comic-book Darth Vader evil; by evil I just mean "not good" or "morally errant" or that there is some moral duty incumbent on those who observe this phenomenon. What I'm talking about is that a privilege theorist doesn't just say "average white wealth is greater than average black wealth" and walk away -- he feels that the situation is wrong and that he is obliged to do something about it and he believes everyone else is likewise obliged to do something about it.
This, however, requires an argument that extends beyond mere statistical analysis of racial groups. Now you have to make a moral case for why one race isn't allowed to have higher average wealth.
See, you do get it! When the races are reversed, that is. This is exactly what I'm talking about. It's one thing to observe a statistical result, it's another thing to think that result is evil or generates a moral duty.
So you don't care how many real human beings -- and mind you, these people are the ones who are well below the statistical average and lack all of the stuff of privilege -- suffer actual harm as a result of a policy as long as in the end a line on a graph shifts in a way that is appealing to you for some arbitrary reason? And you say you don't belong in the pile with the crazies? Color me skeptical.
While racist scholarships are a tangent per se, this general point is not and racist scholarships are a prime example, so I'm going to stick with it. I read the paper you linked, and I'm not sure what we're meant to conclude from it. It seems that by your lights and this paper's conclusions, you should agree with me that racist scholarships aren't helpful, because black college attendance does not appear to have a causal relationship with the generosity of financial aid according to this paper.
I'm suggesting that morality doesn't scale in some neat, linear, averaged way up to groups or back down to people. You should care about disadvantaged people as much or more as you care about disadvantaged groups, and you should not be willing to throw disadvantaged people under the bus because they are a member of a group that isn't the flavor of this particular month or because their sacrifice increases some arbitrary metric of yours.
It's like the trolley problem in moral philosophy: studies of that problem show that morally-normal people generally won't push the one fat man onto the train tracks to save five others. Privilege theorists (and I'm sad to say that in this particular respect your assertions fall right in line with those of the crazies) will shove him right over the rail... as long as he's white.
Read what I've been saying. I send out admission letters to real people who are low-SES and are forced to refuse because I can't offer them aid. These are real human beings that I personally correspond with as a member on an admissions committee, not some theoretical statistical average person that doesn't actually exist in reality.
His "likelihood" of accepting my offer of admission with zero financial aid is essentially nil because his father is a deadbeat rather than a doctor and the prospect of six-figure student loans is not something he can face. Best case for him is he goes to state school at night and misses out on a first rate education that he is more than qualified for. Meanwhile, I send an entirely different letter to a black applicant in the same situation: thanks to some racists who have given racist endowments for racist scholarships that can only go to your race, you're going to get four years of free tuition. As you can imagine, I get a drastically different answer back in those cases.
Now, don't get me wrong. I send out tons of letters with zero aid packages to white kids of white doctors and their answer is "OK, daddy will pay for it." I get way more of those back from white applicants than I do from black applicants. I don't contest the data. What I do contest is that one has the right to mistreat individuals in order to get the data to come out in a way that is more pleasing to one. I don't see why this inner city white kid has to suffer because of all the white kids with rich fathers. He's not connected to them in any way. He bears no fault and there's no objective fact of the matter that underwrites this choice. It makes no sense. It's morally monstrous.
And you think there's something wrong with this, yes? That we ought refrain from it. That we are obliged to stop. That it is evil. Actually, there are some cases of this where I would agree with you. When someone creates a different standard of treatment based on an inborn trait (e.g. prohibition of gay marriage) that is evil. But the fact that the Wal-Mart greeter hasn't memorized the traditional greeting of every Native American tribe just isn't.
Why is it evil (again, in the non-cartoon sense) to tell someone their hairstyle isn't good enough, but not evil to tell someone their way of dressing isn't good enough? (Or do you object to all dress codes in their entirety?)
(It appears you cross-quoted Blinking Spirit with my name in the rest of the post.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Well...now I have to ask. Can you specifically point to a case of a low-SES white guy being denied financial aid, while an obviously less qualified low-SES black guy got significantly more? Such a scenario would indeed be monstrous, as you proclaim. However, if we're talking about a comparison between two students who are pretty close in qualifications...then shouldn't it have been a tossup in the first place? And that being said, if there was a substantial chance the exact same outcome would've occurred even without the race factor, then why are we blaming this individual's rejection solely on the existence of a race-based scholarship?
The logic behind these scholarships is that in said comparisons that are theoretically supposed to be coin-flips, the coin will often be weighted in favor of the straight-white-male (SWMs) applicant due to the subconscious biases of the person making the selection. I seem to remember seeing studies/research that supported the existence of such biases. Humans tend to naturally favor people who they feel are more like themselves; because the majority of people making these decisions are SWMs, other SWMs will be favored. scholarship for a certain minority weights the coin back towards the minority in question, ideally balancing out this bias.
Is it perfect? Almost certainly not. But the alternative, which is to let known race biases run wild in the other direction, seems equally bad.
Even if these were the only two possibilities, I would say it's worse to consciously embrace a race-based policy than otherwise.
And these are not the only two possibilities. There is always the literal coin flip, which should be better than both if what you say is true, shouldn't it?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Privacy and data-blindness obviously prevent me from giving specific examples, so the best I can tell you is that such cases do exist. No two people are ever in the exact same situation, but I'd say there are at least 50 applicants a year (of many racial backgrounds) that fall into this "heartbreaking" socioeconomic grouping: family income < 120% of poverty, broken or single-income home, middle-of-the-road test scores and grades, but shows strong self-motivation and work ethic (has a job to support his family, etc.)
Of course you don't have to take my word for it if you don't want to, but there it is, there's nothing more I can offer.
Yes! They each should have gotten half of the available money, because their financial needs and socioeconomic background are too close the same to make a useful distinction.
There is zero chance this would have occurred without the race factor. Even the gender studies nutcases on the panel agree (in the phase of the process before we are allowed to look at the races of the candidates!) that the money should be allocated more evenly between the needy. The problem is that the money is earmarked by race or gender.
We have double-blind and data-blind processes to reduce or prevent this. For instance, it would be impossible for me to know, when handing out aid, whether the person I'm handing out aid to is the same as a person I bubbled to the top in the merit-based phase. Also, a lot of the distribution is done according to need-based formulas with little room for discretion. (Except, of course, for the earmarked racist money.)
There is no question that biases exist. But there are ways of reducing or eliminating bias, such as double-blind and data-blind processes, which don't involve screwing over innocent people.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Wouldn't that just mean both of them don't have enough money?
That is one possible negative consequence, yes. However, I can say that refusals at the offer level of half-tuition are much, much rarer than refusals of zero aid offers, so I don't think this outcome is especially likely.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Even if that would be the outcome of splitting the money evenly, it's not like there's no way around it. Like I said, a literal coin flip would do the job.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
But what law, policy or moral guidance are you referring to? There are plenty of categories where proven statistical slants towards one race or another justify intervention.
This goes for the next several paragraphs of your statement there. You've been using a lot of hyperbole here to support your points. Don't make assumptions about my opinions because of what you think I mean or how I don't believe a few anecdotal examples constitutes a significant trend in science. I'm not against new studies. However, since I work in Public Health, I'm very much against bad or sloppy studies that will have severe public backlash. Racial differences in IQ screams at me as one of those, my example of 'what I would rather see' is how I would want the research framed. We've dealt with a lot of those and so I'm a bit biased when I hear about socially sensitive studies with erroneous information that get published.
But... where in my arguments have I discussed a moral duty? I've already discussed I'm largely dropping the 'white privilege' theory as the descriptor for my argument, largely because of misconceptions of what I believe because there are so many people out there with chips on their shoulder using the same terminology.
You've yet to produce any individual human being who suffers actual harm directly because of being denied funding that went to a less qualified black student instead just because they are black.
But this implies that the additional funding specifically for minorities is directly taking out of the pockets of non-minorities.
Arbitrary metric? If black disadvantaged students go to college at much lower rates than whites, despite being in the same SES, and someone wants to correct that, it's arbitrary?
Look, when there are severe demographic skews based on a social grouping, in this case racial, it's sometimes necessary to give additional support to that social group to at least bring them within a more proportional representative sampling. If gays suffer disproportionately from aids, no one would argue that it's unfair to all the straights with aids. Sometimes you have give advantages to social groups and target programs to correct a social problem. This is done all the time in public health because there are always clear differences in certain metrics between racial categories, even when adjusting for SES compared to those outside that racial category.
Could it possibly be you feel this way because your sample group is horrible skewed in your anecdotal example? Of your applicants, how many are white and how many are black. I would imagine that you're going to be denying a lot more disadvantaged white students than disadvantaged black students, since you probably have a much, much larger number of white students applying. On sheer volume, you're always going to be denying more white students than black students financial aid, with or without the endowments.
Nail on the head. So this funding wouldn't exist without the 'racist' endowment, meaning the white students never would have gotten this exact funding anyway. So how, exactly, is a white student suffering because the black student is now going to college with money that only given because people want to see more black students succeed and become proportional to the white students.
You may think what you're advocating is a 'fair' system, but it's not. Even with the 'racist' endowment, the average white poor student is still more likely to go to college than the average poor black student. I'm really not sure you understand what that means, because clearly there is a fundamental social problem preventing black students from going to college at rates equal to their white counterparts. Even with the 'racist' endowments, those numbers only barely come close to matching their poor white counterparts. These endowments are not the same thing as taking from the white students. What this money is doing is breaking through fundamental societal barriers for black students that are disproportionately keeping them out of school.
I really wouldn't frame this in terms of good or evil. Things can be right and wrong without being good or evil. I'd refer to it more as a societal illness than an evil.
Is there a real life example you are drawing this from? I don't get it.
It's wrong because it forced black students to either shave their heads or use straightening products to mimic white hair. Black hair doesn't naturally mimic white hair, it requires time, treatment and processing to get it that way.
I don't care about dress codes in general, I have a problem with dress codes that discriminate. If all children have to wear the same thing, fine, but the hairstyle thing is the equivalent of making everyone wear either a small, medium or large version of the uniform. XL people better suck in their gut! That's all I mean. It's not a great injustice but it's pretty ignorant.
My bad, I'll fix it.
Edit: Minorities and disadvantaged groups often don't respond to 'general' help. You have to specifically target them, because culturally they believe that the 'general help' isn't for them. Specifically targeting that minority groups address this issue. Does it have to be done through exclusively black scholarships? No. But I imagine it helps cutting through that cultural barrier.
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So minorities need to be fluffed and treated as special in order to accept help? What a joke. Cut it all off and see how quick their "cultural barriers" drop.
In the end their lack of belief in general help doesn't and shouldn't matter. Last I checked there's no biological differences that make it so they need targeted outreach of any kind.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Cultural differences are jsut as strong and important as biological differences. I mean, I'm one of the most anti affirmative action people here, but even I will admit that there are strong cultural differences that exist, and cause different approaches to be necessary.
Nature is only half of what makes a person, if that. If you were actually correct about your opinion here, blacks would have caught up to whites in all categories the moment Jim Crow laws were ended. Assuming that black communities are just white communities with black skin is simply false, black communities have formed their own distinct cultures with different sentiments from their white counterparts over time. If you want to reach the black community, you need to address them.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
The goal of ending slavery wasn't to "catchup" Blacks to Whites, it was to grant equal rights and protections to them. Gauging the success of Blacks or any race on how much they've caught up to Whites or what level of status they have on any category is wrong. Ending slavery wasn't to put Blacks on the same economic status as Whites it was allow them to pursue their own successes and destiny within the country.
Ultimately all races are responsible for their own success and attempts to legislate that success deprive any culture of the pride, knowledge and history that goes with that success. That they have different sentiments on specific things doesn't matter because the efforts should be solely towards the universal rights that apply to everyone, leaving each race to carve out its success with those differing sentiments on their own terms, accountable to both the law and their own community and ultimately providing for a stronger nation as a whole.
Any race that needs propping up by the actions or existence of another to that other races' detriment isn't strong on its own terms, this is one of the biggest lessons of slavery. Outreach programs, quotas and admission policies are examples of this propping up. Babies, the sick and injured need coddling, not races.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
We can't, as a country, institutionally marginalize a group for centuries and then shout 'ollie ollie oxen free' and wipe our hands of it. Making the rules fair when the game has been rigged for centuries does not suddenly make the game fair.
Our nation is stronger by reaching down and helping up those in need, not by looking down and snidely commenting on how the rest of us 'made it on our own'.
I'm not saying these programs have to go on forever (in fact that would be an injustice by itself, they should end when there is reasonable proportionality between the social groups), but you can't correct a social injustice by hoping it will get better. You can, and should, target outreach to be most effective in the communities you're trying to reach.
Edit: I took out some language that was potentially inflammatory that I didn't intend to be.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
Ah the old "non Whites can't succeed and survive without outreach programs and social justice argument. See, I can do it too.
Black people in general should be concerned with the death rates of their babies, as should anyone else who wishes to contribute their own time and money to addressing it. The VS. Whites thing is junk, so is the idea of playing winners and losers with taxpayer funds for such but of course we start getting into the limits on size and scope of the government there. Each race should be concerned about increasing its own survival period, not in comparing itself to other races and somehow using that as a social justice tool to facilitate outreach involving others money.
The fact that you think what I said was looking down on other races shows how you don't have a ****ing clue what I was saying. You can't acknowledge the abolition of slavery as good and then acknowledge that racial outreach programs are too. Both are playing the game of winners and losers and in the case of outreach programs its being done with taxpayer money which by its very nature is supposed to be colorblind and beneficial to all, not greatly beneficial to some while intangibly if at all beneficial to others.
I never said that I was just hoping it would get better. I was saying that the entire point of America is success and initiative on your terms and efforts. When slavery was abolished the door was opened and the groundwork laid for the pursuit of success. When the whole separate but equal thing fell by the wayside that really completed the foundation on which Blacks and other races could pursue success in individual and race specific ways without there being anything to stop them except themselves. Social justice is an antique, outdated and totally false premise that is only put to use now because it's a good career for people who see victimization as profitable.
Just saw your edit, woe is me for starting this post and then walking away for 20 minutes then coming back to finish it. I'm not trying to be inflammatory either, I just can't accept the idea that outreach should exist except amongst the races themselves, and any outsiders who wish to engage in it for their own reasons. Outreach as a political tool or method of addressing problems goes too far.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Spam warning. - Blinking Spirit
If you have something to say, actually say it. Picking one sentence out of what I said and doing stupid emotes says nothing. You don't have to worry about me reporting you though, I don't do that.
Thanks for your non comment, it was appreciated.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
First of all, I apologize for that imagery. I didn't mean 'looking down' in the figurative sense of snubbing people, but instead that allegory was meant to mean framing the rules from a position of security.
Secondly, I think you're misunderstanding how the outreach I'm talking about works. They aren't just arbitrarily picking people, but instead identifying weaknesses and shoring them up. What I'm suggesting is boarding up the windows and doors against a zombie attack. What you're suggesting is boarding up the walls, windows and doors, which isn't as effective.
What taxpayer dollars should be are effective. I think we can both agree on that. If the overall population's health metrics are down because a single social group is doing poorly, wouldn't you agree it's more effective to target that social group rather than the entire population?
This is what I disagree with. When slavery was abolished the door was opened, but the groundwork wasn't laid. In fact, it was prevent from being laid in most places in the country for another hundred years, until it became actually illegal to discriminate.
The kind of outreach I'm talking about is that groundwork. It's not an attempt to perpetually prop up social groups - it's an attempt to rectify problems.
While there are certainly people who see victimization as a profitable means of getting their way, I think the biggest fallacy is that social justice is an antique. In many ways, like 'feminism', it's a victim of it's own success. Such great strides were made in such a short period of time that we've gotten tired of hearing about it.
Overt discrimination may no longer be socially acceptable, but outcomes are still incredibly disproportionate. And it hurts everyone when entire communities of people lag behind the rest, the ripple effect can't be denied.
It's already happening, the so-called 'racist' scholarships are the result of the black community helping others who were in their situation along. It's a good thing, because the first and second generations are already helping their own communities advance themselves.
Yeah I saw you viewing when I finished the edit and said 'well, crap'. Sometimes I forget to filter the stupid or aggressive things out of a post, and I can be really bad about knee jerk reactions before I get more clinical.
You know, it's funny, because a lot of people with your general position are mad about racially distinct communities advancing themselves, too, so I'm glad you aren't.
My reasons for targeted outreach is simply to be effective, and to do the most improvement with the funding available. The net gain for targeting vulnerable communities is much higher than trying to blanket everyone. What I don't think many people realize is that allowing communities to lag behind, regardless of who or what that community is, brings us all down.
Take communities rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina. Even in the 'rebuilt' communities, the middle and upper class and infrastructure recovered faster than the low SES individuals who lived there, so we're seeing communities where the gap between the poor and everyone else has widened to a silly extent. And that hurts the everyone long term, because communities aren't resilient when large groups of the population can barely get by. The same basic principle applies to our society, too.
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[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
The weaknesses that you're saying are recognized aren't the perogative of the government to engage in addressing. This is the place of private initiatives and local communities organizing their efforts and resources, and why a robust federal government isn't well suited to addressing the needs of communities because a blanket approach is more prone to miss important details to specific areas, be less accountable and the tailored approach plays the game of winners and losers. It argues for stronger state and local governments which are not only more immediately accountable to the local citizens but also is front and center in both interacting with citizens and planning solutions suitable to the situation. If there's going to be tax dollars spent it should be the people of specific communities spending their own taxes on their own problems and solutions.
That's why I'm not against things like the NAACP, but am against federal agencies and tax money spent on outreach. Private organizations are fine and are good for coordinating, compiling and marshalling to deal with concerns and problems regardless of where in the country things are happening. I'm not against these at all and have no problem with every race having them, they should be looking to survive and address their own concerns with their own efforts and resources. It leaves the door open to others of other races who wish to contribute to them for whatever reason they choose but most importantly makes each distinct people responsible for its own well being which translates into more personal responsibility, pride, history and growth of character/identity.
What I'm suggesting isn't boarding everything up, what I'm suggesting is what has happened since the dawn of time: Take care of your own first and then if circumstance and discretion allow for it take care of others. Each race acting in this accord with no attempts at detrimental action towards others creates stronger community amongst themselves and makes it possible for critical thinking and appraisal to find the time and resources to donate outside the community if so desired.
Yes tax dollars should be effective, in this context they'd be mostly confined to the state and local levels so that they could be so. The federal government should be the assistant to state and local governments, not the ringleader. If outreach happens at all it should come from local communities first, then state level last and never from the federal government.
I'm not a fan of all inclusive health metrics or any of that type of thing. Obviously a specific group that is bottoming out or something of the like needs to take actions but the actions should come from within, from their own leadership and their own outreach. I think of the Tao no. 17 in that regard:
Especially the quote of the people at the end. I believe in strong history, strong national identity, strong racial and cultural backgrounds and I think you only achieve this when you have people committed to their own people first and as a extension of that their nation and then others as a secondary commitment. Under the principle of existing to the benefit of your own without being a detriment to others of course. Take away that principle and you have many examples of abuses throughout history.
I don't see income disparity as a problem to rectify as a national initiative, nor health disparity. Equal opportunity is what the goal was, not outcome. It is sad to know there's people without as much as others but the only place where that happens is when everyone has little to nothing. It can't ever come to pass that everyone has everything they want or need. The peaks and valleys will always exist and its a pipedream to believe otherwise.
In the past people just accepted that their down position wasn't going to change unless they changed it themselves and if they stuck together with their families and local communities. Now they look to people who live hundreds of miles away and ask them to organize a plan to fix their problems so they can keep on watching tv, doing whatever it is they do and not take active roles in the problems they deal with. The contrast of this and the results of it can't be overstated and it's helped create the explosion in the power of politicians, lawyers and bureaucrats beyond anything the world has ever seen. It's not healthy nor acceptable to a free society in any way.
The "fact" that people are "behind" is still an Us vs. Them consideration which needn't be engaged in. Us first, then them is more acceptable.
I'm all for racially distinct communities, I'm a big traditionalist in many ways and that is one of the biggest examples of sustaining and passing on traditions and identity. National integration while a fine effort can't ever be so pervasive that it mutes away ethnic qualities and racially distinct communities are huge in safeguarding this.
Your last bit about Katrina is probably my outlier. Natural disasters deserve to be addressed as a whole by everyone but I think that is also something that finds itself outside the crux of the majority of our back and forth.
None of what I have said here includes or implies any hostility towards other races. When I say that efforts should be beneficial towards your own without being detrimental to others I mean it. There's always paths to take which provide for this.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Why should I not protect the advantage I've obtained? Seems to me if I have this advantage, I can only suffer if I support policies that seek to mitigate it.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
Statistics alone are morally neutral; no statistic justifies anything without a concurrent moral argument. In order to justify some attempt to change a statistic, you need the statistics, plus a piece of moral logic that says that your attempt to dork around with the statistics is justified, plus a piece of means-end logic that shows your proposed intervention will have the effect that is underwritten by the moral logic.
I won't pretend that I'm not guilty of a few rhetorical stunts here and there, especially in these debates, which I've had thousands of times and by this point are so boring for me that I have to throw a few jabs in just so that I can manage to keep my eyes open.
But if my crime is hyperbole, yours is being cagey and deceptive about your actual position. Look how this conversation started out: it was just about crunching the numbers for you. Well, that was fine and dandy. But with each successive exchange you are pulling new cards out of your sleeve and putting them on the table. (I don't think the surprises are over, either. If we start talking about morality, well, let's just say postmodern leftists have certain tendencies in that direction and leave it at that.)
I don't want to put you on a position you don't hold. But so far it has turned out that most of the positions I'm arguing against, even the ones you deny in the moment, you later go on to affirm!
To wit:
And of course your bias -- that you yourself acknowledge! -- can't be the guiding force behind science! We have to lift science free of our biases. What you (or I or anyone else) would rather see is irrelevant. And you don't know whether or not the information is erroneous until after it's been published. And the way of dealing with erroneous information is by way of rebuttal. And the argument you made two posts ago that particular pieces of data are erroneous relies on you treating another piece of data as unquestionable -- conveniently (and circularly) enough, the very piece of data that would be called into question by the new data.
All of this is you affirming, at least to some degree, the very position I've been arguing against. So have the decency to be straight with me. My cards are all on the table here.
You haven't discussed it, and that's part of the problem. You've treated it as obvious or implicit, and you've made many statements relying on it (e.g. "There are plenty of categories where proven statistical slants towards one race or another justify intervention"), but you haven't discussed it.
Do one or more welfare recipients suffer harm when welfare funding is reduced so that the upper class can get a 1% tax break? After all, we're not taking money out of their pockets, are we? Just giving them less than they would have gotten. No harm 'tall there, no sir.
Yes, until you make it non-arbitrary by providing moral reasoning. The (true) fact that left-handed men earn on average 5% more than righties doesn't seem to spur any social justice crusade, nor should it. Because, in addition to all of the other fallacies we've been talking about, it's arbitrary.
What makes it necessary to do this? You're making a moral claim!
If gays suffer disproportionately from AIDS and as a result, there is constructed an infrastructure of gay-only AIDS clinics that turns straight men away at the door, denying them access to AIDS-fighting resources then you had better damn well believe that I'll be arguing it's unfair. Anyone who wouldn't find that unfair is bound to be, how shall we say, a morally interesting human being.
And at least here in the US, public health, you'll notice, is not all that it might be. Don't assume that because it happens to be the case that you do something, it's the right or best thing to do.
There is no doubt that my sample is skewed. Attempting to draw a general statistical inference from that is going to be hopeless, which is why it's a good thing I'm not trying to do that.
Look, I feel like you're just not listening to me. I am certainly dealing with a statistically unique corner of the universe -- but so is everyone else! You've never met an average white person in your life. Such a person does not exist. Everyone deviates from statistical norms in significant ways. Us weirdos out here on the fringe are still human beings! You can't mistreat us because we don't fall into the middle of the curve! You can't sacrifice us for the sake of your numbers! You can't toss virgins into volcanoes in an attempt to stop them from erupting, even if pushing virgins into volcanoes actually helped! You can't push the fat man onto the train track! It's wrong!
How does a welfare recipient suffer when his welfare check is reduced so that more money can be devoted to Social Security?
Oh, for the love of...
Fairness is a moral concept, and since you haven't articulated -- in fact, have outright denied that you are taking -- a moral stance here, you simply have no basis for saying which things are or aren't fair. This is a bare assertion.
As the party in this debate whose cards are actually on the table instead of up his sleeve, let me outline my own modest proposal for the moral logic that is at play here. If you agree that:
1) The vicious cycle of poverty -- where people get stuck in low socioeconomic bands because all of their productive time is devoted to maintaining their status quo rather than advancing it -- is a moral evil; humankind is better off the more opportunities people have to lift themselves out of this.
2) For a person in this situation, receiving a first-rate education can help mitigate this phenomenon and lift them out of the cycle.
Therefore, 3) We help humanity the most and do the most moral good (that college financial aid possibly can) when we allocate our resources so as to give the highest number of first-rate educations to the highest number of the neediest people.
-- then the rest of the reasoning is purely mechanical. The best allocation of the money is to each low-income student according to need, not race, in such a way that as many needy students as possible can have sufficient of their needs met. Any deviation from that distribution is morally inferior.
There is. No such ****ing person. In the universe. As the average poor white and/or black student.
And one could attempt to figure out the reason that the black attendance percentage is lower. Then one could use moral logic to decide whether or not that reason is actually a problem -- and if it is, address it in a morally sound fashion without throwing virgins into the volcano to please Pele.
As for the actual social science behind this, the most interesting thing I found in that paper you linked was the section on Pell grants, which suggests that whatever this social problem is, it actually isn't the generosity of aid! The racist scholarships aren't helping! Finance isn't the driving factor in the decision making of black college applicants. (Says the paper, anyway. I'm actually very skeptical of that particular conclusion. I've always seen higher acceptance rates at higher aid levels, and there's a very plausible causal reason for that.)
Even if racist scholarships weren't totally morally unacceptable for other reasons, they are apparently not actually doing what you think they are. So sayeth your own resource!
No, it's a snarky allusion toward what I'll call normalcy, borrowing Blinking Spirit's phrase. When you walk into Wal-Mart, the greeter will say "Hello, welcome to Wal-Mart, how are you today?" But that's Anglo-normalcy, isn't it? If you're Japanese, he should say "Konichi-wa." If you're Hawaiian, he should say "Aloha kakahiaka." If you're a member of the Catawba tribe, he should say "Tanake tineyedo." In fact he should probably have an array of costumes at the ready, as well as familiarity with a wide array of sign languages as well as body language and dances. But he doesn't, and so the cycle of white male heterosexual ooppression just goes on and on.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
A valid question. I think it would depend on what your end goals are. If you are looking to carve out the most for yourself, and **** the rest of humanity, then sure, it makes sense for you to maintain the status quo. However, I would say that it is for the good of humanity that we assure that everyone has equal opportunity. If we chuck 10% of our population under the bus, that's 10% of our potential Einsteins, da Vincis, etc that we're throwing out. So I should think it would be in our interest that we make it possible for EVERYONE, no matter the circumstances of their birth, be given a path through which they can rise to the very top should they have the proper talent and apply themselves accordingly.
So it's okay if I get ****ed?
But I'm getting ****ed by no fault of my own.
But I'm getting thrown under the bus....what about me and my peers? I do not live a life of bliss with this purported advantage I have.
But I'd be getting screwed. I'm not at the top.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
I assume you're referring to your SES. In which case, you're part of the population that we need to stop chucking under the bus. Remember, there are multiple kinds of "Privilege".