Just out of curiosity, how many people in this thread do you think are actually white or non-white..
Why does this matter? Are white peoples opinions any less relevant?
And I don't mean you are non-white because you're an 8th Cherokee. If you could pass the eyeball test at a Klan rally for the sake of this question, consider yourself white. I'm guessing 90% or more of the participants are white.
So what?
Don't ****ing trivialize the absolute **** I had to put up with by god damned saying that (1)"everything's okay", and (2) "we all have an equal shot now" or "(3)Someone else's great, great grandpa did it. Not my fault".
1. Cite
2. Cite
3. So it is all white people fault you were discriminated against?
As a black person there's nothing more infuriating perhaps than hearing how (1)"it's all okay now," and (2) "well, the people who caused this are dead, (3) so totes not our fault, boy".
1. Cite.
2. Nothing infuriates me more than people blaming me for things other people did for no other reason than the color of my skin while at the same time using an (3) appeal to emotion with embellishments.
I prefer the ones who will just call me a ****** to my face. At least they're open and clear with where they stand, and don't try to hide behind semantics, smoke, and mirrors.
ummm
I'm not even saying you're racist if you feel that way. I'm just saying you're a **** human being and I hope you get whatever cancer you fear the most and die from it stinking of chemo and urine. **** you.
I find it ironic you judge people by the color of their skin and wish them death based on them rejecting the idea of them being held accountable for things other people did or do.....have some courage and call out the people who you think are doing this and have a civil discussion with them.....
do you stop to consider everything that slavery brought with it? We're you alive when Jim Crow laws were present? How about the unequal sentencing laws for the drug trade? The repercussions of slavery are alive and well today, so yes, you, in today's world are responsible for your ancestors. People are still being oppressed because of them that aren't you, so you are benefitting. If you're not responsible and you aren't benefitting, you don't get to tell me if/when it's all ok.
I'm sorry but you don't get to blame me without knowing me. If you do not like being judged by the color of your skin, stop doing it to other people. Not a person here has said its okay...
Gimme my red card and my timeout now. I think I earned it.
I honestly wish you'd try and establish a dialogue instead of coming in this thread and making thinly veiled assertions of racism and blatant appeals to emotion. You essentially blame me and others, who you do not know for things that we had nothing to do with and mesh all of us white people together all because of the color of our skin.
It's unfortunate you were hurt by racism.....but you lose a lot of credibility with what you've posted thus far. I do not think you will get a card because you did not direct it at any individual and were only expressing your opinion. With that said, I do believe your embellishment of what was said and outright claims that people should be held accountable for stuff other people did on the basis of skin color really hurts your argument. It's awfully hypocritical to appeal to your own instances of discrimination and then discriminate against others....I do not think its trivializing racism when I speak out against blatant discrimination, irrelevant of the skin color involved. I do not think people's credibility or accountability are judged by their skin color...please stop doing that.
Race should not matter when it comes helping poor kids or people.
I'll answer this in a second, when I get to Blinking Spirit. But ultimately, yes, it does matter, and I'll explain why. I've skipped over a lot of the discussion that we've gone back and forth at nauseam and just try to go about arguing my central point.
So you are proponent of racial profiling? I make no judgement on this because I see a benefit of sorts in the medical community however there is contradiction in the anti-racist argument. Not saying you are anti-racist....but a cop stops a black kid, its racist, a doctor stops one...its not?
If you mean stopping someone for the sole reason that they are black, no, because there is no statistical reason why any individual black person on the street is more likely to commit a crime than any other person walking down the street. Black people aren't disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime, they're just more likely to be arrested and convicted.
The difference, with medicine, is that there is evidence that certain population groups are more or less likely to experience different health problems at different proportions. The funny thing is, it isn't because they're genetically any different, it's all cultural. The black population is at higher risk for diabetes and heart disease because they're more likely to be living in a food desert, not because they're predisposed to it.
And that encompasess significantly more cultural difference than the complexion of someones skin. Skin color is such an insignificant part of culture and it amazes me many people think is the most important or least the one they talk about the most.
I'm not sure you understand what I mean. People divide themselves by color, and it just so happens that in this case the cultural divide is along predominantly racial lines. There is a so-called 'black culture' that has developed largely due to the historical discrimination their community experienced, discrimination that occurred for no other reason than they were black.
Say we've got a town with 150 white kids and 50 black kids. Because historically the town swimming pool was whites-only, blacks are three times more likely not to know how to swim than whites. So if one white kid in five can't swim, three black kids in five can't swim. This means we have sixty non-swimmers, thirty of each race. Now say it costs $100 to teach a kid to swim, and we've got $4000. Now, we could spend this money to correct the racial imbalance, spending $1500 on white kids and $2500 on black kids, leaving 15 white non-swimmers and 5 black non-swimmers or a uniform one-in-ten non-swimming rate. But if we do this, then a given white non-swimmer only has a 50% chance of learning whereas a given black non-swimmer has an 83% chance. And it's certainly not the white kids' fault that segregation was a thing long before they were born, nor are they rendered any less deserving because most other kids who look like them already know how to swim. It does not matter to any of the kids in this pool of non-swimmers how they got there or what the statistics for the greater population are. What matters is that every one of these sixty kids is at the same risk of drowning. So every one of these sixty kids deserves the same shot at learning how to swim.
So, this is a good example but it leaves some critical pieces out.
This model assumes that both sides are at equal risk for drowning, when statistically speaking that simply isn't true. The black kids are in far more danger of drowning (probably from having so many fewer people knowing how to swim). To put this in a microcosm of the complexities of the differences in culture, the white children will be using the community pool they and their family have always used while black children continuing to use the river their parents and ancestors always used because they couldn't use the pool. Sure, many people's behavior would change and they would use the pool once things changed, but many other black kids would still be swimming in the river while that isn't even a consideration for the white kids or their parents, while for generations it was the only option for black children.
By being 'fair' about the funding disbursement, you're making assumptions about a level playing field that doesn't exist. 'Fair' treatment is only fair when the playing field is level.
In the even funding distribution model, we had 30 white kids who didn't know how to swim, and 30 black kids who didn't know how to swim. If we apply the funding equally to everyone, we teach 20 white and 20 black kids to swim. That brings us to 1 in 15 white kids not knowing how to swim and 1 in 5 black kids not knowing how to swim.
Now, what if we targeted the funding? Using BS' model, we targeted funding based on the imbalance, and we end up with 5 black kids who don't know how to swim and 15 white kids who don't know how to swim, bringing us to 1 in 10 of all children not knowing how to swim.
In both scenarios, we're left with 20 kids who don't know how to swim. Those 20 kids are always going to be left out, regardless of how we spend the money.
By making the ability to swim normal for the black children in the community for that single generation, you're improving the likelihood of future generations not being disproportionately affected when funding is fair. In the future of the targeted scenario, we can apply funding equally and get more or less equal results across all populations.
In the future of the 'fair' scenario, continued 'fair' funding only serves to continue the imbalance. The problem with this argument is that it ultimately favors white people, or the dominant group, no matter how you slice it. In this scenario, as a parent, you're three times more likely to have your child die simply for being black, and no matter how many years go or how much things improve overall, your child is still three times more likely to die.
Do you notice you have to manipulate every stat you comes across to fit your argument? i.e. "if it included this and that and excluded this and taht it would say this" while making claims of cherry picking.
Manipulate in what sense? (Also that post you quoted had me demonstrating that my original "unmanipulated" claim was of debatable relevance.)
I like to be sure that the numbers we use represent what we intend for them to represent. Neither the arbitrary interval of "5-14" nor the interval of "0-19" tell us much about how helpful a swimming program might be. We ought to exclude children unlikely to be taught to swim and we probably should include people who are still legally children. It happens that the rate of drowning for young children is very high in white communities, which is the main reason that the "0-19" interval in the body of the report is so close but the "5-14" interval in the abstract is so wide.
If you'd prefer a person who just tosses around numbers devoid of context or consideration you can go find anthropologist or an economist. I was trained to care both about accuracy and relevance.
It feels to me like you're implicitly valuing the lives of white kids over black kids. Why is it a tragedy to turn away a white kid but not to turn away a black kid?
This is a pernicious strawman. Where have I written anything that even approaches "It's okay to turn away a black kid based on the color of their skin"? It is a tragedy to turn away any kid, so every kid should have an equal opportunity to receive the necessary resources. If you can't teach every kid to swim, fill the slots in the swim class with a lottery or other evenhanded distribution system.
So its just rhetorical emphasis on white kids, then? Fair enough.
This strikes me as a bit contradictory. If you don't care about the race of the children and you don't care about the characteristics of the population then you shouldn't care about how the program is designed. All you can care about is the number of kids saved and we don't have enough money to help everyone. In this situation the only reason to care if all the money is spent on black kids is that one group gains more than the other, something you've said you don't care about.
That's far from the only reason to care. I don't care that one group gains more than the other, but I care very much that individual kids are being turned away because of the color of their skin. I'm trying to save as many kids as possible without unjustly wronging them or anyone else.
Why is it a problem? Would it be less of a problem if exactly the same number of kids couldn't swim, but the numbers were balanced between the races? It's not the imbalance that's the problem, it's the drowning.
Then why do you have a horse in this race at all? If we saved only white kids or only black kids it shouldn't matter to you so long as we save the right number of them. To me it seems like your position is constantly switching. Sometimes you want to remove race from the equation but sometimes racial fairness is important. Perhaps I'm just not understanding.
If the race of the people who drown is irrelevant then the fairness of the program is also irrelevant. Yes or No? Why or Why Not?
I think I appreciate your position, I just disagree with it. Although all of these kids cannot swim their race is not irrelevant to that. 80% of white kids learn to swim but only 40% of black kids do. That gap is filled with kids who didn't learn as a result of their race. True, in both cases the immediate cause is that nobody taught them but I'd say that the reason that they weren't taught and is tied very strongly to their race.
Again you're forgetting the characteristics of the final population.
Again, I'm not "forgetting", I'm expressly arguing that it doesn't matter. Please, I feel like you're not really paying attention here.
I was responding to your claim that white people would end up with too few swimmers in the population to teach their own kids. This is obviously untrue if you look at the final population.
The white population ends up with 90% swimmers, not 50% swimmers, so there's not going to being an issue of white people losing swimming as a cultural inheritance.
The "cultural inheritance" of white people doesn't matter either. What matters is simply this: Here are some kids. They cannot swim. How do we do right by them?
Cultural inheritance is extremely relevant if you care about teaching the greatest number of children to swim. We're wondering why so many white kids can swim despite the program not being in effect. A possibility is that family members teach them, if more black families teach their kids (when previously they could not) you keep saving kids in years to come.
This is true of a lot of things, actually. Money and public works also get passed down.
If we split our attentions to accept applicants without considering race at all we end up with 100% swimmers in the white population (75% of the 40 kids will be white) and 40% swimmers in the black population (25% of the 40 kids will be black). That sets up a system that guarantees success for one group, a scenario I'd hardly call fair.
What? No. How do you get a swim class with 75% white kids by picking colorblindly from a pool of applicants that is only 50% white? (Also, 25% of 40 is not 40% of 30.)
The model scenario specified a population with 150 white children and 50 black children, of which 40 can be helped. If you accept applicants with no regard for race 75% will be white. If you accept only 20 white children then you can expect to turn away about ten on them on the basis of their skin color.
If you mean stopping someone for the sole reason that they are black, no, because there is no statistical reason why any individual black person on the street is more likely to commit a crime than any other person walking down the street.
Black people aren't disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime, they're just more likely to be arrested and convicted. The difference, with medicine, is that there is evidence that certain population groups are more or less likely to experience different health problems at different proportions. The funny thing is, it isn't because they're genetically any different, it's all cultural. The black population is at higher risk for diabetes and heart disease because they're more likely to be living in a food desert, not because they're predisposed to it.
If it's not busy at work, I'll bring some evidence that poor parts of city have higher crime rates....and I'll bring evidence that blacks are overrepresented in poor parts of cities. With that said, the way you phrased how you target minorities it had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with access.....and the bottom line is you do racially profile the same as cops.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, black Americans commit more murders than white Americans. Of all the murders committed between 1976 and 2005, 52.2% were committed by African Americans, and 45.8% were committed by whites. The remaining 2% were committed by other races.
Even if we accept that half of all murderers are wrongly convicted, blacks still commit murders at a higher rate.....their socioeconomic status has more to do with it than skin color but that does not change the fact that blacks commit murder at higher rate than whites when discussing in context of the percentage of the population. .
Black people are disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime because they are disproportionately more likely to be poor.
If you mean stopping someone for the sole reason that they are black, no, because there is no statistical reason why any individual black person on the street is more likely to commit a crime than any other person walking down the street.
Black people aren't disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime, they're just more likely to be arrested and convicted. The difference, with medicine, is that there is evidence that certain population groups are more or less likely to experience different health problems at different proportions. The funny thing is, it isn't because they're genetically any different, it's all cultural. The black population is at higher risk for diabetes and heart disease because they're more likely to be living in a food desert, not because they're predisposed to it.
If it's not busy at work, I'll bring some evidence that poor parts of city have higher crime rates....and I'll bring evidence that blacks are overrepresented in poor parts of cities. With that said, the way you phrased how you target minorities it had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with access.....and the bottom line is you do racially profile the same as cops.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, black Americans commit more murders than white Americans. Of all the murders committed between 1976 and 2005, 52.2% were committed by African Americans, and 45.8% were committed by whites. The remaining 2% were committed by other races.
Even if we accept that half of all murderers are wrongly convicted, blacks still commit murders at a higher rate.....their socioeconomic status has more to do with it than skin color but that does not change the fact that blacks commit murder at higher rate than whites.
Don't waste your time getting the references, you're correct factually and I won't dispute that, but you didn't address the context.
Here's the issue, you're talking about urban environments where blacks are over-represented. In those scenarios it's virtually useless to profile on race because everyone is that race. Especially where the majority of those murders occur, they're primarily black and black and contained to the black community.
When you get out into suburban or rural areas, that over representation disappears and racial profiling becomes useless again.
If police were, say, 'stopping and frisking' in high-crime neighborhoods only, where the chances of a crime happening are higher, that'd be one thing. But racial profiling is used to stop black people despite their location.
If you mean stopping someone for the sole reason that they are black, no, because there is no statistical reason why any individual black person on the street is more likely to commit a crime than any other person walking down the street.
Black people aren't disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime, they're just more likely to be arrested and convicted. The difference, with medicine, is that there is evidence that certain population groups are more or less likely to experience different health problems at different proportions. The funny thing is, it isn't because they're genetically any different, it's all cultural. The black population is at higher risk for diabetes and heart disease because they're more likely to be living in a food desert, not because they're predisposed to it.
If it's not busy at work, I'll bring some evidence that poor parts of city have higher crime rates....and I'll bring evidence that blacks are overrepresented in poor parts of cities. With that said, the way you phrased how you target minorities it had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with access.....and the bottom line is you do racially profile the same as cops.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice statistics, black Americans commit more murders than white Americans. Of all the murders committed between 1976 and 2005, 52.2% were committed by African Americans, and 45.8% were committed by whites. The remaining 2% were committed by other races.
Even if we accept that half of all murderers are wrongly convicted, blacks still commit murders at a higher rate.....their socioeconomic status has more to do with it than skin color but that does not change the fact that blacks commit murder at higher rate than whites.
Don't waste your time getting the references, you're correct factually and I won't dispute that, but you didn't address the context.
Here's the issue, you're talking about urban environments where blacks are over-represented. In those scenarios it's virtually useless to profile on race because everyone is that race. Especially where the majority of those murders occur, they're primarily black and black and contained to the black community.
When you get out into suburban or rural areas, that over representation disappears and racial profiling becomes useless again.
If police were, say, 'stopping and frisking' in high-crime neighborhoods only, where the chances of a crime happening are higher, that'd be one thing. But racial profiling is used to stop black people despite their location.
Where do you think majority of racial profiling occurs?
Where do you think majority of racial profiling occurs?
Wait, how complex do we want to go here? 'Racial Profiling' occurs everywhere. Racial profiling as a policy is very rarely official. Are we talking actual law enforcement only? Transportation security? Rent-A-Cops? Let's pare this down so we are on the same page.
Where do you think majority of racial profiling occurs?
Wait, how complex do we want to go here? 'Racial Profiling' occurs everywhere. Racial profiling as a policy is very rarely official. Are we talking actual law enforcement only? Transportation security? Rent-A-Cops? Let's pare this down so we are on the same page.
Well some people think the higher percentage of cops in a high crime, over represented minority community is racial profiling.
Where do you think majority of racial profiling occurs?
Wait, how complex do we want to go here? 'Racial Profiling' occurs everywhere. Racial profiling as a policy is very rarely official. Are we talking actual law enforcement only? Transportation security? Rent-A-Cops? Let's pare this down so we are on the same page.
Well some people think the higher percentage of cops in a high crime, over represented minority community is racial profiling.
I wouldn't consider additional resources in a high crime neighborhood profiling, although I can see why people consider it that. But that's silly, you don't distribute limited emergency services resources equally if you want to be effective. That's why most EMS companies in this country are so inefficient, they're distributed equally when the distribution of EMS calls are anything but equal.
When I hear 'racial profiling', I think of a black person getting pulled over just because they are black. For instance, a black guy I know was pulled over in rural Texas and the officers went over to his (white) wife and asked if she was being kidnapped.
Where do you think majority of racial profiling occurs?
Wait, how complex do we want to go here? 'Racial Profiling' occurs everywhere. Racial profiling as a policy is very rarely official. Are we talking actual law enforcement only? Transportation security? Rent-A-Cops? Let's pare this down so we are on the same page.
Well some people think the higher percentage of cops in a high crime, over represented minority community is racial profiling.
I wouldn't consider additional resources in a high crime neighborhood profiling, although I can see why people consider it that. But that's silly, you don't distribute limited emergency services resources equally if you want to be effective. That's why most EMS companies in this country are so inefficient, they're distributed equally when the distribution of EMS calls are anything but equal.
When I hear 'racial profiling', I think of a black person getting pulled over just because they are black. For instance, a black guy I know was pulled over in rural Texas and the officers went over to his (white) wife and asked if she was being kidnapped.
that is the overt and obvious answer but you cant define profiling by that one example. For instance, murder. It's a statistically more likely for white person to be murdered by a white person. Same thing for other races....it is racially profiling if cops use race in the determination of suspects. Most cops do not profile due to racist beliefs, they use it because a statistic and expereinces have developed stereotypes on the typical criminal. The same as you do.
You've attempted to redefine racial profiling so it does not include what you are doing in medicine. However, you are profiling.
When I hear 'racial profiling', I think of a black person getting pulled over just because they are black. For instance, a black guy I know was pulled over in rural Texas and the officers went over to his (white) wife and asked if she was being kidnapped.
But that's still what goes on, just with another conceptual leap added on.
The trick is that cops have in their mind a profile of the "suspicious person," who is (by and large) a young black man. That may be based in statistics or it may not, but the problem is that they view young black men as inherently suspicious enough to be worth targeting. They can say "it's not racist, I'm just stopping guys who look suspicious" all they want--still, the reason they look suspicious is because they're black.
Private Mod Note
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Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Sing lustily and with good courage.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
Say we've got a town with 150 white kids and 50 black kids. Because historically the town swimming pool was whites-only, blacks are three times more likely not to know how to swim than whites. So if one white kid in five can't swim, three black kids in five can't swim. This means we have sixty non-swimmers, thirty of each race. Now say it costs $100 to teach a kid to swim, and we've got $4000. Now, we could spend this money to correct the racial imbalance, spending $1500 on white kids and $2500 on black kids, leaving 15 white non-swimmers and 5 black non-swimmers or a uniform one-in-ten non-swimming rate. But if we do this, then a given white non-swimmer only has a 50% chance of learning whereas a given black non-swimmer has an 83% chance. And it's certainly not the white kids' fault that segregation was a thing long before they were born, nor are they rendered any less deserving because most other kids who look like them already know how to swim. It does not matter to any of the kids in this pool of non-swimmers how they got there or what the statistics for the greater population are. What matters is that every one of these sixty kids is at the same risk of drowning. So every one of these sixty kids deserves the same shot at learning how to swim.
You're ignoring prior probabilities for this evaluation with distorts your final model of the population.
Unless black people have a genetic defect that prevents them from swimming the only reason that three times as many white kids as black kids would be swimmers to start with is that they have pre-existing opportunities to learn swim.
So in the initial population:
80% whites learn
40% blacks learn
They we give a 50% chance to use this program for white kids and a 83% chance to use it for black kids.
In the final population:
90% whites learn (the original number plus 50% of those who needed the program)
90% blacks learn (the original number plus 83% of those who needed the program)
If we believe the lives of white and black children are equal then we want them to have similar survival outcomes. This is what the racially targeted program achieves that the race-blind program does not. Moreover we save the same number of children with both programs but the racially targeted one has positive social effect (for free) and will probably reduce the number of black children in later generations who need the program (also for free).
Not to get into too much detail, but this approach is so paternalistic that it strikes me as satire.
First, there is some non-zero chance that a Black kid will learn to swim (or whatever that's a proxy for in this example). That chance may be driven by things that are cultural. So when picking and choosing things to drive the political-cultural dialogue, those lines of conversation that redress the underlying causes for non-intrinsic differences also have a great effect in remedying or not-remedying those differences. And this line of of laying the blame of cultural oppression on modern Whites does anything but redress cultural differences, and to the contrary, exacerbates them. So in the example, teaching Black kids that they need a special program to "learn to swim" through the fact of making one makes it less likely they they learn to swim on their own, or go swimming with White friends. You've just created a self-reinforcing problem.
Second of all, there's some significant debate about whether this program to teach Black children "to swim" would actually succeed in doing so. When there's some kind of cultural difference that we believe isn't fair, jumping to a government solution rather than a cultural one seems inapposite. They might go to the program, pass the program, then return to whatever conditions spawned the problem, forgetting how to swim in the meantime. The question should be why Black kids aren't swimming, answering that question in places where it's possible to be answered, removing any systemic barriers, and then focus the rest of the cultural-political force into reformulating the culture underlying those conditions.
The presumption seems to be that the government succeeds in doing whatever it tries. In reality, the American government is set up to be one of limited powers, enumerated in the constitution. Hundreds of years of social and legal backdrop makes the government best at things that are specifically enumerated, such as the Commerce Clause.
Just out of curiosity, how many people in this thread do you think are actually white or non-white. And I don't mean you are non-white because you're an 8th Cherokee. If you could pass the eyeball test at a Klan rally for the sake of this question, consider yourself white. I'm guessing 90% or more of the participants are white.
I'm going to put this as plain as I can for those that don't get it: I grew up for many years of my life off and on in Wyoming as a black kid/teen/man. Don't ****ing trivialize the absolute **** I had to put up with by god damned saying that "everything's okay", and "we all have an equal shot now" or "Someone else's great, great grandpa did it. Not my fault". As a black person there's nothing more infuriating perhaps than hearing how "it's all okay now," and "well, the people who caused this are dead, so totes not our fault, boy". I prefer the ones who will just call me a ****** to my face. At least they're open and clear with where they stand, and don't try to hide behind semantics, smoke, and mirrors. I'm not even saying you're racist if you feel that way. I'm just saying you're a **** human being and I hope you get whatever cancer you fear the most and die from it stinking of chemo and urine. **** you.
When people say "Well, me and my kids didn't do it, why do we have to deal with/pay for it", do you stop to consider everything that slavery brought with it? We're you alive when Jim Crow laws were present? How about the unequal sentencing laws for the drug trade? The repercussions of slavery are alive and well today, so yes, you, in today's world are responsible for your ancestors. People are still being oppressed because of them that aren't you, so you are benefitting. If you're not responsible and you aren't benefitting, you don't get to tell me if/when it's all ok.
I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences, but you should keep in mind that you can't walk a mile in anyone else's shoes any more than they can walk a mile in yours.
Everyone suffers misfortune. A White person can't say which misfortunes they would have suffered if they had been Black. But a Black person can't say which misfortunes they would NOT have suffered if they'd been White. Neither can know what it's like to have been a member of any other race.
So, take a person who was born into religious fundamentalism, or is a veteran, or some other minority. They will probably suffer directly from these things, simply in the form of opportunity cost on things that the educated and affluent were participating in instead of religion, military, what have you. Maybe they suffer some misfortune. They might feel the need to attribute it to the bad things that have happened to them. But in a lot of cases, there's no real way to know why certain misfortunes happened. They may be the same misfortunes among all disadvantaged groups. But attributing misfortune to being a member of a certain group shouldn't just be an automatic. There are particulars to blame for that disadvantage that are more intrinsic to the situation that resulted. Maybe spending time in a church that tells you not to go to college disadvantages you. Maybe poverty sucks. You can't always control any of this stuff. But seeing things always in terms of class, then automatically attributing it to class prejudice rather than intrinsic disadvantage is mostly a learned behavior.
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
But a Black person can't say which misfortunes they would NOT have suffered if they'd been White.
No, but I'm willing to wager that "getting called ******" is something that doesn't happen to white folks a lot.
Your point about there being economic and educational elements to all of this is well-taken, however, you're still ignoring certain fundamental aspects of the minority experience in this country which we take for granted. It's a little rich to see upper-middle class white guys complaining about getting called "cracker" by a poor black dude when, more likely than not, they'd make that poor black dude jump through a lot more hoops to rent a room or to get a loan than the poor white dude down the street.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Sing lustily and with good courage.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
But a Black person can't say which misfortunes they would NOT have suffered if they'd been White.
No, but I'm willing to wager that "getting called ******" is something that doesn't happen to white folks a lot.
Your point about there being economic and educational elements to all of this is well-taken, however, you're still ignoring certain fundamental aspects of the minority experience in this country which we take for granted. It's a little rich to see upper-middle class white guys complaining about getting called "cracker" by a poor black dude when, more likely than not, they'd make that poor black dude jump through a lot more hoops to rent a room or to get a loan than the poor white dude down the street.
Well, maybe. But I don't automatically accept the value of singling out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types. Black guy and White guy aside, chances are greater than either that the landlord won't rent to a disabled person for fear that they won't get their rant, not to mention fear of having to install a bunch of ramps, what not. That's why Title VIII protects all of them, including the White guy.
And if White guy never shows up to bring a civil suit for not being rented an apartment, it's probably because he's learned that he can't be discriminated against de facto because of his race, and not because he never actually is. There are lots of neighborhoods in Chinatown where you can not get an apartment if you are White.
All considered, learning where and when to play the victim card is a learned behavior, and the process of learning that behavior can cause more harm than the actual discrimination.
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
By far my favorite thing about this philosophy of life is that people who believe in it have armfuls of excuses and rationalizations so they never take accountability for their actions. Looking for a sentence like that one is the perfect way to zero in on people with no sense of perspective.
Well, maybe. But I don't automatically accept the value of singling out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types. Black guy and White guy aside, chances are greater than either that the landlord won't rent to a disabled person for fear that they won't get their rant, not to mention fear of having to install a bunch of ramps, what not. That's why Title VIII protects all of them, including the White guy.
And if White guy never shows up to bring a civil suit for not being rented an apartment, it's probably because he's learned that he can't be discriminated against de facto because of his race, and not because he never actually is. There are lots of neighborhoods in Chinatown where you can not get an apartment if you are White.
All considered, learning where and when to play the victim card is a learned behavior, and the process of learning that behavior can cause more harm than the actual discrimination.
The value in "singling out race-motivated social dysfunction" is that it is both still omnipresent and incredibly pernicious to a huge percentage of the population. Blacks and Latinos in this country constitute something close to 30% of the population; they are disproportionately impoverished, poorly educated, and forced (by both economic and racial circumstances) to live in dangerous and poorly-serviced slums. Do the problems go beyond the fact that people notice they have a different skin color? Sure. But the fact that race is one of the strongest correlating factors for poverty is no coincidence.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Sing lustily and with good courage.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
And this line of of laying the blame of cultural oppression on modern Whites does anything but redress cultural differences, and to the contrary, exacerbates them.
That would totally be an incisive jab at a flawed way of viewing race in America if you were talking to anyone else. But you're not, so it just looks like you've got a checklist or something.
So in the example, teaching Black kids that they need a special program to "learn to swim" through the fact of making one makes it less likely they they learn to swim on their own, or go swimming with White friends. You've just created a self-reinforcing problem.
Almost everyone I know who is able to swim learned from swimming lessons so I'm not sure why you think the concept is terribly paternalistic. I was never a fan of tossing kids over the side of a boat and waiting for them to come up (but maybe that why so many white kids under five drown?).
Second of all, there's some significant debate about whether this program to teach Black children "to swim" would actually succeed in doing so.
The success or failure of the program is irrelevant to the discussion of what should count as "fair" or "equitable" treatment of individuals within a population.
When there's some kind of cultural difference that we believe isn't fair, jumping to a government solution rather than a cultural one seems inapposite.
That's nice but I don't really care about your political posturing. I'm sure it gets you a lot of pats on the back in other forums. Is that where you got that checklist you're apparently still using?
They might go to the program, pass the program, then return to whatever conditions spawned the problem, forgetting how to swim in the meantime.
It is extraordinarily difficult to lose implicit memory. If you'd prefer to talk about a scenario where three in five black children become severely brain damaged we could do that, too. Doesn't really change my position.
The question should be why Black kids aren't swimming, answering that question in places where it's possible to be answered, removing any systemic barriers, and then focus the rest of the cultural-political force into reformulating the culture underlying those conditions.
One possible reason is that no one teaches them because no one in their peer group knows. Increasing the number of swimmers would help address that. Basically we would synergism of reformulation of the buzz-word paradigm and set up a program that teaches swimming.
The presumption seems to be that the government succeeds in doing whatever it tries. In reality, the American government is set up to be one of limited powers, enumerated in the constitution. Hundreds of years of social and legal backdrop makes the government best at things that are specifically enumerated, such as the Commerce Clause.
I spent that whole paragraph waiting for a link to someone selling The Fountainhead on Amazon. I'm glad your so insecure about your political beliefs that you have to insert a pitch completely at random, though, makes me super happy.
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
By far my favorite thing about this philosophy of life is that people who believe in it have armfuls of excuses and rationalizations so they never take accountability for their actions. Looking for a sentence like that one is the perfect way to zero in on people with no sense of perspective.
Tell me what moral impeartive you are using to assert ones acountability for no other reason than their skin color? How is it "rationalizing" or an "excuse" to point out my skin color has nothing to do with the way things are?
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
By far my favorite thing about this philosophy of life is that people who believe in it have armfuls of excuses and rationalizations so they never take accountability for their actions. Looking for a sentence like that one is the perfect way to zero in on people with no sense of perspective.
No one can respond to what you're saying unless you say something. Lots of word salad, no calories. Like chewing celery.
You don't know me, so you don't know any actions I've taken that I'd need to take accountability for.
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
By far my favorite thing about this philosophy of life is that people who believe in it have armfuls of excuses and rationalizations so they never take accountability for their actions. Looking for a sentence like that one is the perfect way to zero in on people with no sense of perspective.
No one can respond to what you're saying unless you say something. Lots of word salad, no calories. Like chewing celery.
You don't know me, so you don't know any actions I've taken that I'd need to take accountability for.
It's obvious he/she feels you have to be acountable for the effects of racism.
Well, maybe. But I don't automatically accept the value of singling out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types. Black guy and White guy aside, chances are greater than either that the landlord won't rent to a disabled person for fear that they won't get their rant, not to mention fear of having to install a bunch of ramps, what not. That's why Title VIII protects all of them, including the White guy.
And if White guy never shows up to bring a civil suit for not being rented an apartment, it's probably because he's learned that he can't be discriminated against de facto because of his race, and not because he never actually is. There are lots of neighborhoods in Chinatown where you can not get an apartment if you are White.
All considered, learning where and when to play the victim card is a learned behavior, and the process of learning that behavior can cause more harm than the actual discrimination.
The value in "singling out race-motivated social dysfunction" is that it is both still omnipresent and incredibly pernicious to a huge percentage of the population. Blacks and Latinos in this country constitute something close to 30% of the population; they are disproportionately impoverished, poorly educated, and forced (by both economic and racial circumstances) to live in dangerous and poorly-serviced slums. Do the problems go beyond the fact that people notice they have a different skin color? Sure. But the fact that race is one of the strongest correlating factors for poverty is no coincidence.
Well, this explains why we would look at race-motivated stuff, but it doesn't establish priority for it such that we would "single out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types".
Personally, I would say anything that we can put our finger on as a source of injustice deserves a good look. But I think that the presumption should be that logical, intrinsic attributes about someone's personal condition should be looked at first, since they seem to be the most rationally related. So, this approach would redress poverty wherever it exists, racial poverty included.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that race correlates to poverty. The US obviously has a not so distant history of racial oppression. But determining the cause doesn't necessarily indicate the solution. You get a cold, and you take antibiotics. It doesn't matter whether you got the cold from going to school or staying at home. Knowledge of what caused is helpful to avoid it in the future, but a remedy along those lines is not automatically the best course.
Well, this explains why we would look at race-motivated stuff, but it doesn't establish priority for it such that we would "single out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types".
Personally, I would say anything that we can put our finger on as a source of injustice deserves a good look. But I think that the presumption should be that logical, intrinsic attributes about someone's personal condition should be looked at first, since they seem to be the most rationally related. So, this approach would redress poverty wherever it exists, racial poverty included.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that race correlates to poverty. The US obviously has a not so distant history of racial oppression. But determining the cause doesn't necessarily indicate the solution. You get a cold, and you take antibiotics. It doesn't matter whether you got the cold from going to school or staying at home. Knowledge of what caused is helpful to avoid it in the future, but a remedy along those lines is not automatically the best course.
Because saying "we shouldn't look at race first," however good your intentions are, usually has the effective result that no real injustice, racial or not, is ever confronted.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Sing lustily and with good courage.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
So, this is a good example but it leaves some critical pieces out.
This model assumes that both sides are at equal risk for drowning, when statistically speaking that simply isn't true. The black kids are in far more danger of drowning (probably from having so many fewer people knowing how to swim). To put this in a microcosm of the complexities of the differences in culture, the white children will be using the community pool they and their family have always used while black children continuing to use the river their parents and ancestors always used because they couldn't use the pool. Sure, many people's behavior would change and they would use the pool once things changed, but many other black kids would still be swimming in the river while that isn't even a consideration for the white kids or their parents, while for generations it was the only option for black children.
Like I discussed with Tiax, this is a deliberately simplified model, intended to strip away complicating variables and get to the heart of the question of what our goals and priorities are. If there is a reason for targeting black children that lies in the complexities but is not found in the simplified model, that's an interesting discovery, isn't it? It eliminates several arguments that are commonly seen here and elsewhere, such as the innate desirability of balanced statistics.
Incidentally, I had actually considered talking the possibility that the drowning risk for blacks was based on other factors besides or beyond the lack of swim education, as a bit of a pedantic foray into how statistics can be tricky. But I decided it wasn't worth it and just stuck with the clean model of drowning being a single-variable function of swimming ability.
In the future of the 'fair' scenario, continued 'fair' funding only serves to continue the imbalance. The problem with this argument is that it ultimately favors white people, or the dominant group, no matter how you slice it. In this scenario, as a parent, you're three times more likely to have your child die simply for being black, and no matter how many years go or how much things improve overall, your child is still three times more likely to die.
First off, while this statement is technically true if things improve to a 100% swimming rate since zero is three times zero, I don't think the spirit of the statement is accurate in this happy event. But that's a nitpick.
The more substantial problem is that the statement is an abuse of the meaning of the statistics. To say that a black child is three times more likely than a white child to drown is an abstraction. It would be a legitimate use of this statistic for an actuary, tasked with estimating a person's likelihood of death but given no information about that person other than their race, to estimate that a black person is more likely to drown than a white person. But this is an empirical probability, not a real probability. It arises only from ignorance of the details. When kids drown, it is not through a random process (Neptune rolling dice, perhaps) which checks their race and gives them worse odds if they're black. Kids drown because they don't know how to swim, because they swim in risky places, because they don't practice boat safety, et cetera. Race is only a proxy for these real risk factors. A black kid and a white kid with the same risk factors have the same chance of drowning - it's just that an actuary assessing black kids at random is more likely to find a kid with the risk factors than an actuary assessing white kids at random. And if this were not the case, if the actuarial numbers for black kids and white kids were identical, that would not alter by one iota the drowning risk for a child with the risk factors, black or white.
So it's not completely accurate to say that as a parent of a black child, your child is three times more likely to drown. You're not the parent of a statistical average, or of a randomly selected child about which nothing else is known. You're the parent of your child, with individual risk factors that you can learn about and exercise some control over; possibly the city government or community center can help you with that. But the help ought to be distributed with equal priority to every kid who displays the same risk factors. Now, in my simplified model, the only risk factor was pure inability to swim. Obviously, reality is more complex. But even in the real world, blackness is not a risk factor in its own right. Neptune is colorblind.
So its just rhetorical emphasis on white kids, then? Fair enough.
Yes, when one's argument is that some people are being wronged, it is common practice to talk about the people who are being wronged. In another scenario where black kids were being wronged (like the swimming pool in this town sixty years ago), I'd be talking about them.
Then why do you have a horse in this race at all? If we saved only white kids or only black kids it shouldn't matter to you so long as we save the right number of them. To me it seems like your position is constantly switching. Sometimes you want to remove race from the equation but sometimes racial fairness is important. Perhaps I'm just not understanding.
If the race of the people who drown is irrelevant then the fairness of the program is also irrelevant. Yes or No? Why or Why Not?
The goal is to treat each individual person fairly, without discrimination based on their race.
I think I appreciate your position, I just disagree with it. Although all of these kids cannot swim their race is not irrelevant to that. 80% of white kids learn to swim but only 40% of black kids do. That gap is filled with kids who didn't learn as a result of their race. True, in both cases the immediate cause is that nobody taught them but I'd say that the reason that they weren't taught and is tied very strongly to their race.
Of course the reason is tied to their race. It does not follow from this that their need is more urgent. There's a reason why every one of these kids didn't learn how to swim. How do we decide that "historical racism" is a more worthy reason than "aquaphobic parents" or "child abuse" or "just grew up in a desert town without a swimming pool" or whatever else? As long as the reason produces the same result of being unable to swim, the child is at the same risk (pace Jay13x's complications). To say that children at the same risk deserve different treatment in order to engineer a more equal-appearing population is both oxymoronic on its face and ominous in its implications.
Again you're forgetting the characteristics of the final population.
Again, I'm not "forgetting", I'm expressly arguing that it doesn't matter. Please, I feel like you're not really paying attention here.
I was responding to your claim that white people would end up with too few swimmers in the population to teach their own kids. This is obviously untrue if you look at the final population.
That is a response to a claim you made up, not any claim I made. The claim I made was that any white person who does not learn how to swim will in turn not be able to teach their kids how to swim, just as any black person who does not learn how to swim will not be able to teach their kids how to swim. This is true regardless of how many whites or blacks do learn how to swim; the domain of the proposition is strictly those who don't. I'm also making the assumption that a black person and a white person can be expected to have the same number of children. (Admittedly I did not state this explicitly the first time around; furthermore, it is not quite true in the real world. But again, we're dealing with a simplified model in order to explore our values as clearly as possible.) So from these premises the logic is straightforward: if you can trade off whites and blacks in the swim class on a one-for-one basis, picking a black kid over a white kid (or, for that matter, a white kid over a black kid) will result in no change to the expected number of future kids who have a non-swimming parent. So, reasoning according to the number of lives saved and valuing each life equally, it is pointless to make such a choice. It only becomes "profitable" in the utilitarian calculus if you value the lives of one family more than the lives of the other. Which you... shouldn't.
Cultural inheritance is extremely relevant if you care about teaching the greatest number of children to swim. We're wondering why so many white kids can swim despite the program not being in effect. A possibility is that family members teach them, if more black families teach their kids (when previously they could not) you keep saving kids in years to come.
Obviously this cultural inheritance isn't perfect, or otherwise every white kid would be able to swim. But some can't; some, in fact, drown. You're focusing on the "many" and forgetting that "many" is not the same as "all". This is troubling reasoning, especially in a conversation about the treatment of minorities.
The model scenario specified a population with 150 white children and 50 black children, of which 40 can be helped.
The model also specified that 120 of those white children and 20 of those black children can already swim. They therefore are in no need of help and are not applicants. (If one did file an application for some reason, we could summarily dismiss it.) The pool of applicants is 30 whites and 30 blacks.
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
By far my favorite thing about this philosophy of life is that people who believe in it have armfuls of excuses and rationalizations so they never take accountability for their actions. Looking for a sentence like that one is the perfect way to zero in on people with no sense of perspective.
Tell me what moral impeartive you are using to assert ones acountability for no other reason than their skin color? How is it "rationalizing" or an "excuse" to point out my skin color has nothing to do with the way things are?
I don't think people need to take "responsibility" for their skin color. I assure you, however, that Justice1337 has never taken responsibility for anything in his life. He uses demands about other people's "accountability" as a way to avoid having to be accountable himself.
Why does this matter? Are white peoples opinions any less relevant?
So what?
1. Cite
2. Cite
3. So it is all white people fault you were discriminated against?
1. Cite.
2. Nothing infuriates me more than people blaming me for things other people did for no other reason than the color of my skin while at the same time using an (3) appeal to emotion with embellishments.
ummm
I find it ironic you judge people by the color of their skin and wish them death based on them rejecting the idea of them being held accountable for things other people did or do.....have some courage and call out the people who you think are doing this and have a civil discussion with them.....
I'm sorry but you don't get to blame me without knowing me. If you do not like being judged by the color of your skin, stop doing it to other people. Not a person here has said its okay...
I honestly wish you'd try and establish a dialogue instead of coming in this thread and making thinly veiled assertions of racism and blatant appeals to emotion. You essentially blame me and others, who you do not know for things that we had nothing to do with and mesh all of us white people together all because of the color of our skin.
It's unfortunate you were hurt by racism.....but you lose a lot of credibility with what you've posted thus far. I do not think you will get a card because you did not direct it at any individual and were only expressing your opinion. With that said, I do believe your embellishment of what was said and outright claims that people should be held accountable for stuff other people did on the basis of skin color really hurts your argument. It's awfully hypocritical to appeal to your own instances of discrimination and then discriminate against others....I do not think its trivializing racism when I speak out against blatant discrimination, irrelevant of the skin color involved. I do not think people's credibility or accountability are judged by their skin color...please stop doing that.
calling liberals loons=not okay
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I'll answer this in a second, when I get to Blinking Spirit. But ultimately, yes, it does matter, and I'll explain why. I've skipped over a lot of the discussion that we've gone back and forth at nauseam and just try to go about arguing my central point.
If you mean stopping someone for the sole reason that they are black, no, because there is no statistical reason why any individual black person on the street is more likely to commit a crime than any other person walking down the street. Black people aren't disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime, they're just more likely to be arrested and convicted.
The difference, with medicine, is that there is evidence that certain population groups are more or less likely to experience different health problems at different proportions. The funny thing is, it isn't because they're genetically any different, it's all cultural. The black population is at higher risk for diabetes and heart disease because they're more likely to be living in a food desert, not because they're predisposed to it.
I'm not sure you understand what I mean. People divide themselves by color, and it just so happens that in this case the cultural divide is along predominantly racial lines. There is a so-called 'black culture' that has developed largely due to the historical discrimination their community experienced, discrimination that occurred for no other reason than they were black.
So, this is a good example but it leaves some critical pieces out.
This model assumes that both sides are at equal risk for drowning, when statistically speaking that simply isn't true. The black kids are in far more danger of drowning (probably from having so many fewer people knowing how to swim). To put this in a microcosm of the complexities of the differences in culture, the white children will be using the community pool they and their family have always used while black children continuing to use the river their parents and ancestors always used because they couldn't use the pool. Sure, many people's behavior would change and they would use the pool once things changed, but many other black kids would still be swimming in the river while that isn't even a consideration for the white kids or their parents, while for generations it was the only option for black children.
By being 'fair' about the funding disbursement, you're making assumptions about a level playing field that doesn't exist. 'Fair' treatment is only fair when the playing field is level.
In the even funding distribution model, we had 30 white kids who didn't know how to swim, and 30 black kids who didn't know how to swim. If we apply the funding equally to everyone, we teach 20 white and 20 black kids to swim. That brings us to 1 in 15 white kids not knowing how to swim and 1 in 5 black kids not knowing how to swim.
Now, what if we targeted the funding? Using BS' model, we targeted funding based on the imbalance, and we end up with 5 black kids who don't know how to swim and 15 white kids who don't know how to swim, bringing us to 1 in 10 of all children not knowing how to swim.
In both scenarios, we're left with 20 kids who don't know how to swim. Those 20 kids are always going to be left out, regardless of how we spend the money.
By making the ability to swim normal for the black children in the community for that single generation, you're improving the likelihood of future generations not being disproportionately affected when funding is fair. In the future of the targeted scenario, we can apply funding equally and get more or less equal results across all populations.
In the future of the 'fair' scenario, continued 'fair' funding only serves to continue the imbalance. The problem with this argument is that it ultimately favors white people, or the dominant group, no matter how you slice it. In this scenario, as a parent, you're three times more likely to have your child die simply for being black, and no matter how many years go or how much things improve overall, your child is still three times more likely to die.
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Manipulate in what sense? (Also that post you quoted had me demonstrating that my original "unmanipulated" claim was of debatable relevance.)
I like to be sure that the numbers we use represent what we intend for them to represent. Neither the arbitrary interval of "5-14" nor the interval of "0-19" tell us much about how helpful a swimming program might be. We ought to exclude children unlikely to be taught to swim and we probably should include people who are still legally children. It happens that the rate of drowning for young children is very high in white communities, which is the main reason that the "0-19" interval in the body of the report is so close but the "5-14" interval in the abstract is so wide.
If you'd prefer a person who just tosses around numbers devoid of context or consideration you can go find anthropologist or an economist. I was trained to care both about accuracy and relevance.
So its just rhetorical emphasis on white kids, then? Fair enough.
Then why do you have a horse in this race at all? If we saved only white kids or only black kids it shouldn't matter to you so long as we save the right number of them. To me it seems like your position is constantly switching. Sometimes you want to remove race from the equation but sometimes racial fairness is important. Perhaps I'm just not understanding.
If the race of the people who drown is irrelevant then the fairness of the program is also irrelevant. Yes or No? Why or Why Not?
I think I appreciate your position, I just disagree with it. Although all of these kids cannot swim their race is not irrelevant to that. 80% of white kids learn to swim but only 40% of black kids do. That gap is filled with kids who didn't learn as a result of their race. True, in both cases the immediate cause is that nobody taught them but I'd say that the reason that they weren't taught and is tied very strongly to their race.
I was responding to your claim that white people would end up with too few swimmers in the population to teach their own kids. This is obviously untrue if you look at the final population.
Cultural inheritance is extremely relevant if you care about teaching the greatest number of children to swim. We're wondering why so many white kids can swim despite the program not being in effect. A possibility is that family members teach them, if more black families teach their kids (when previously they could not) you keep saving kids in years to come.
This is true of a lot of things, actually. Money and public works also get passed down.
The model scenario specified a population with 150 white children and 50 black children, of which 40 can be helped. If you accept applicants with no regard for race 75% will be white. If you accept only 20 white children then you can expect to turn away about ten on them on the basis of their skin color.
If it's not busy at work, I'll bring some evidence that poor parts of city have higher crime rates....and I'll bring evidence that blacks are overrepresented in poor parts of cities. With that said, the way you phrased how you target minorities it had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with access.....and the bottom line is you do racially profile the same as cops.
Even if we accept that half of all murderers are wrongly convicted, blacks still commit murders at a higher rate.....their socioeconomic status has more to do with it than skin color but that does not change the fact that blacks commit murder at higher rate than whites when discussing in context of the percentage of the population. .
Black people are disproportionately more likely than a white person to commit a crime because they are disproportionately more likely to be poor.
calling liberals loons=not okay
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Don't waste your time getting the references, you're correct factually and I won't dispute that, but you didn't address the context.
Here's the issue, you're talking about urban environments where blacks are over-represented. In those scenarios it's virtually useless to profile on race because everyone is that race. Especially where the majority of those murders occur, they're primarily black and black and contained to the black community.
When you get out into suburban or rural areas, that over representation disappears and racial profiling becomes useless again.
If police were, say, 'stopping and frisking' in high-crime neighborhoods only, where the chances of a crime happening are higher, that'd be one thing. But racial profiling is used to stop black people despite their location.
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Where do you think majority of racial profiling occurs?
calling liberals loons=not okay
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Wait, how complex do we want to go here? 'Racial Profiling' occurs everywhere. Racial profiling as a policy is very rarely official. Are we talking actual law enforcement only? Transportation security? Rent-A-Cops? Let's pare this down so we are on the same page.
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Well some people think the higher percentage of cops in a high crime, over represented minority community is racial profiling.
calling liberals loons=not okay
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I wouldn't consider additional resources in a high crime neighborhood profiling, although I can see why people consider it that. But that's silly, you don't distribute limited emergency services resources equally if you want to be effective. That's why most EMS companies in this country are so inefficient, they're distributed equally when the distribution of EMS calls are anything but equal.
When I hear 'racial profiling', I think of a black person getting pulled over just because they are black. For instance, a black guy I know was pulled over in rural Texas and the officers went over to his (white) wife and asked if she was being kidnapped.
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that is the overt and obvious answer but you cant define profiling by that one example. For instance, murder. It's a statistically more likely for white person to be murdered by a white person. Same thing for other races....it is racially profiling if cops use race in the determination of suspects. Most cops do not profile due to racist beliefs, they use it because a statistic and expereinces have developed stereotypes on the typical criminal. The same as you do.
You've attempted to redefine racial profiling so it does not include what you are doing in medicine. However, you are profiling.
calling liberals loons=not okay
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But that's still what goes on, just with another conceptual leap added on.
The trick is that cops have in their mind a profile of the "suspicious person," who is (by and large) a young black man. That may be based in statistics or it may not, but the problem is that they view young black men as inherently suspicious enough to be worth targeting. They can say "it's not racist, I'm just stopping guys who look suspicious" all they want--still, the reason they look suspicious is because they're black.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
Not to get into too much detail, but this approach is so paternalistic that it strikes me as satire.
First, there is some non-zero chance that a Black kid will learn to swim (or whatever that's a proxy for in this example). That chance may be driven by things that are cultural. So when picking and choosing things to drive the political-cultural dialogue, those lines of conversation that redress the underlying causes for non-intrinsic differences also have a great effect in remedying or not-remedying those differences. And this line of of laying the blame of cultural oppression on modern Whites does anything but redress cultural differences, and to the contrary, exacerbates them. So in the example, teaching Black kids that they need a special program to "learn to swim" through the fact of making one makes it less likely they they learn to swim on their own, or go swimming with White friends. You've just created a self-reinforcing problem.
Second of all, there's some significant debate about whether this program to teach Black children "to swim" would actually succeed in doing so. When there's some kind of cultural difference that we believe isn't fair, jumping to a government solution rather than a cultural one seems inapposite. They might go to the program, pass the program, then return to whatever conditions spawned the problem, forgetting how to swim in the meantime. The question should be why Black kids aren't swimming, answering that question in places where it's possible to be answered, removing any systemic barriers, and then focus the rest of the cultural-political force into reformulating the culture underlying those conditions.
The presumption seems to be that the government succeeds in doing whatever it tries. In reality, the American government is set up to be one of limited powers, enumerated in the constitution. Hundreds of years of social and legal backdrop makes the government best at things that are specifically enumerated, such as the Commerce Clause.
I don't mean to belittle anyone's experiences, but you should keep in mind that you can't walk a mile in anyone else's shoes any more than they can walk a mile in yours.
Everyone suffers misfortune. A White person can't say which misfortunes they would have suffered if they had been Black. But a Black person can't say which misfortunes they would NOT have suffered if they'd been White. Neither can know what it's like to have been a member of any other race.
So, take a person who was born into religious fundamentalism, or is a veteran, or some other minority. They will probably suffer directly from these things, simply in the form of opportunity cost on things that the educated and affluent were participating in instead of religion, military, what have you. Maybe they suffer some misfortune. They might feel the need to attribute it to the bad things that have happened to them. But in a lot of cases, there's no real way to know why certain misfortunes happened. They may be the same misfortunes among all disadvantaged groups. But attributing misfortune to being a member of a certain group shouldn't just be an automatic. There are particulars to blame for that disadvantage that are more intrinsic to the situation that resulted. Maybe spending time in a church that tells you not to go to college disadvantages you. Maybe poverty sucks. You can't always control any of this stuff. But seeing things always in terms of class, then automatically attributing it to class prejudice rather than intrinsic disadvantage is mostly a learned behavior.
The goal is to take accountability for the things that you have control of, learn to live with the things that you don't, and learn to associate with people who assess you on your value as an individual.
No, but I'm willing to wager that "getting called ******" is something that doesn't happen to white folks a lot.
Your point about there being economic and educational elements to all of this is well-taken, however, you're still ignoring certain fundamental aspects of the minority experience in this country which we take for granted. It's a little rich to see upper-middle class white guys complaining about getting called "cracker" by a poor black dude when, more likely than not, they'd make that poor black dude jump through a lot more hoops to rent a room or to get a loan than the poor white dude down the street.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
Well, maybe. But I don't automatically accept the value of singling out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types. Black guy and White guy aside, chances are greater than either that the landlord won't rent to a disabled person for fear that they won't get their rant, not to mention fear of having to install a bunch of ramps, what not. That's why Title VIII protects all of them, including the White guy.
And if White guy never shows up to bring a civil suit for not being rented an apartment, it's probably because he's learned that he can't be discriminated against de facto because of his race, and not because he never actually is. There are lots of neighborhoods in Chinatown where you can not get an apartment if you are White.
All considered, learning where and when to play the victim card is a learned behavior, and the process of learning that behavior can cause more harm than the actual discrimination.
By far my favorite thing about this philosophy of life is that people who believe in it have armfuls of excuses and rationalizations so they never take accountability for their actions. Looking for a sentence like that one is the perfect way to zero in on people with no sense of perspective.
The value in "singling out race-motivated social dysfunction" is that it is both still omnipresent and incredibly pernicious to a huge percentage of the population. Blacks and Latinos in this country constitute something close to 30% of the population; they are disproportionately impoverished, poorly educated, and forced (by both economic and racial circumstances) to live in dangerous and poorly-serviced slums. Do the problems go beyond the fact that people notice they have a different skin color? Sure. But the fact that race is one of the strongest correlating factors for poverty is no coincidence.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
No problem, you also strike me as satirically absurd.
That would totally be an incisive jab at a flawed way of viewing race in America if you were talking to anyone else. But you're not, so it just looks like you've got a checklist or something.
Almost everyone I know who is able to swim learned from swimming lessons so I'm not sure why you think the concept is terribly paternalistic. I was never a fan of tossing kids over the side of a boat and waiting for them to come up (but maybe that why so many white kids under five drown?).
The success or failure of the program is irrelevant to the discussion of what should count as "fair" or "equitable" treatment of individuals within a population.
That's nice but I don't really care about your political posturing. I'm sure it gets you a lot of pats on the back in other forums. Is that where you got that checklist you're apparently still using?
It is extraordinarily difficult to lose implicit memory. If you'd prefer to talk about a scenario where three in five black children become severely brain damaged we could do that, too. Doesn't really change my position.
One possible reason is that no one teaches them because no one in their peer group knows. Increasing the number of swimmers would help address that. Basically we would synergism of reformulation of the buzz-word paradigm and set up a program that teaches swimming.
I spent that whole paragraph waiting for a link to someone selling The Fountainhead on Amazon. I'm glad your so insecure about your political beliefs that you have to insert a pitch completely at random, though, makes me super happy.
Tell me what moral impeartive you are using to assert ones acountability for no other reason than their skin color? How is it "rationalizing" or an "excuse" to point out my skin color has nothing to do with the way things are?
calling liberals loons=not okay
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No one can respond to what you're saying unless you say something. Lots of word salad, no calories. Like chewing celery.
You don't know me, so you don't know any actions I've taken that I'd need to take accountability for.
It's obvious he/she feels you have to be acountable for the effects of racism.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
Well, this explains why we would look at race-motivated stuff, but it doesn't establish priority for it such that we would "single out race-motivated social dysfunction from other types".
Personally, I would say anything that we can put our finger on as a source of injustice deserves a good look. But I think that the presumption should be that logical, intrinsic attributes about someone's personal condition should be looked at first, since they seem to be the most rationally related. So, this approach would redress poverty wherever it exists, racial poverty included.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that race correlates to poverty. The US obviously has a not so distant history of racial oppression. But determining the cause doesn't necessarily indicate the solution. You get a cold, and you take antibiotics. It doesn't matter whether you got the cold from going to school or staying at home. Knowledge of what caused is helpful to avoid it in the future, but a remedy along those lines is not automatically the best course.
Because saying "we shouldn't look at race first," however good your intentions are, usually has the effective result that no real injustice, racial or not, is ever confronted.
Be aware of singing as if you were half dead,
or half asleep:
but lift your voice with strength.
Be no more afraid of your voice now,
nor more ashamed of its being heard,
than when you sang the songs of Satan.
Incidentally, I had actually considered talking the possibility that the drowning risk for blacks was based on other factors besides or beyond the lack of swim education, as a bit of a pedantic foray into how statistics can be tricky. But I decided it wasn't worth it and just stuck with the clean model of drowning being a single-variable function of swimming ability.
First off, while this statement is technically true if things improve to a 100% swimming rate since zero is three times zero, I don't think the spirit of the statement is accurate in this happy event. But that's a nitpick.
The more substantial problem is that the statement is an abuse of the meaning of the statistics. To say that a black child is three times more likely than a white child to drown is an abstraction. It would be a legitimate use of this statistic for an actuary, tasked with estimating a person's likelihood of death but given no information about that person other than their race, to estimate that a black person is more likely to drown than a white person. But this is an empirical probability, not a real probability. It arises only from ignorance of the details. When kids drown, it is not through a random process (Neptune rolling dice, perhaps) which checks their race and gives them worse odds if they're black. Kids drown because they don't know how to swim, because they swim in risky places, because they don't practice boat safety, et cetera. Race is only a proxy for these real risk factors. A black kid and a white kid with the same risk factors have the same chance of drowning - it's just that an actuary assessing black kids at random is more likely to find a kid with the risk factors than an actuary assessing white kids at random. And if this were not the case, if the actuarial numbers for black kids and white kids were identical, that would not alter by one iota the drowning risk for a child with the risk factors, black or white.
So it's not completely accurate to say that as a parent of a black child, your child is three times more likely to drown. You're not the parent of a statistical average, or of a randomly selected child about which nothing else is known. You're the parent of your child, with individual risk factors that you can learn about and exercise some control over; possibly the city government or community center can help you with that. But the help ought to be distributed with equal priority to every kid who displays the same risk factors. Now, in my simplified model, the only risk factor was pure inability to swim. Obviously, reality is more complex. But even in the real world, blackness is not a risk factor in its own right. Neptune is colorblind.
The goal is to treat each individual person fairly, without discrimination based on their race.
Of course the reason is tied to their race. It does not follow from this that their need is more urgent. There's a reason why every one of these kids didn't learn how to swim. How do we decide that "historical racism" is a more worthy reason than "aquaphobic parents" or "child abuse" or "just grew up in a desert town without a swimming pool" or whatever else? As long as the reason produces the same result of being unable to swim, the child is at the same risk (pace Jay13x's complications). To say that children at the same risk deserve different treatment in order to engineer a more equal-appearing population is both oxymoronic on its face and ominous in its implications.
That is a response to a claim you made up, not any claim I made. The claim I made was that any white person who does not learn how to swim will in turn not be able to teach their kids how to swim, just as any black person who does not learn how to swim will not be able to teach their kids how to swim. This is true regardless of how many whites or blacks do learn how to swim; the domain of the proposition is strictly those who don't. I'm also making the assumption that a black person and a white person can be expected to have the same number of children. (Admittedly I did not state this explicitly the first time around; furthermore, it is not quite true in the real world. But again, we're dealing with a simplified model in order to explore our values as clearly as possible.) So from these premises the logic is straightforward: if you can trade off whites and blacks in the swim class on a one-for-one basis, picking a black kid over a white kid (or, for that matter, a white kid over a black kid) will result in no change to the expected number of future kids who have a non-swimming parent. So, reasoning according to the number of lives saved and valuing each life equally, it is pointless to make such a choice. It only becomes "profitable" in the utilitarian calculus if you value the lives of one family more than the lives of the other. Which you... shouldn't.
Obviously this cultural inheritance isn't perfect, or otherwise every white kid would be able to swim. But some can't; some, in fact, drown. You're focusing on the "many" and forgetting that "many" is not the same as "all". This is troubling reasoning, especially in a conversation about the treatment of minorities.
The model also specified that 120 of those white children and 20 of those black children can already swim. They therefore are in no need of help and are not applicants. (If one did file an application for some reason, we could summarily dismiss it.) The pool of applicants is 30 whites and 30 blacks.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I don't think people need to take "responsibility" for their skin color. I assure you, however, that Justice1337 has never taken responsibility for anything in his life. He uses demands about other people's "accountability" as a way to avoid having to be accountable himself.
Warning for flaming