[RasputinsBro]

Slight off-topic. I'm sure this has been said before, but I'm saddened to catch myself doing it. All my life I've been indifferent to matters of race, and so if I'd read 10 years ago about 3 black girls doing whatever I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But after what's been happening in recent years, I just caught myself thinking: "3 black girls? I wonder if they didn't win as part of the diversity quota" :-/ I maintain that "affirmative action" does more bad than good in the vast majority of the cases.

On-topic: In any case, prevalence of occurrences like the reported trolls are why I no longer give the benefit of the doubt to people who claim "there's no racism". For a while you had the excuse of not being aware, but now you're just intentionally adding noise to the conversation.

[Latty]

You are buying what the racists are selling - the idea that progress for minorities comes at the expense of white people.

Almost all affirmative action is designed to help pushing inclusion and participation, not just pushing the end goal. You set a target for numbers of candidates you interview to be minorities, which helps you get more opportunity to find capable people who happen to be minorities. They still have to be the best candidate at the end of the day.

People acting without any discrimination doesn't magically fix the world - look at Chess. Sure, women could play in tournaments, but they largely didn't. It took the creation of women's only tournaments to grow a community and give role models, and now we have women who are grandmasters and play in normal tournaments very successfully.

Even something as simple as your subconscious bias while hiring, if you see more minority candidates, your mental model of what someone who can do that job looks like will change, and maybe when it's borderline you don't instinctively just go with the white guy because that's what's familiar.

Trying to make a world where all people have equal opportunity is important. Right now, too much of the time the opportunities just aren't there because of history. It's not as easy as saying "you can't discriminate" to someone overtly racist, it's having a classroom and getting one of the girls to try programming - something she might never try (because it's not a "girl thing"), even if it's something she might love doing, if she did.

The defaults and patterns of our society are built on our history, and our history was racist and sexist. Changing that requires active thought and effort, and painting that as just trying to bring the straight white man down is the aim of these kinds of people.

[RasputinsBro]

> You are buying what the racists are selling - the idea that progress for minorities comes at the expense of white people.

I didn't say that affirmative action comes at the expense of white people, I said (implicitly, by presenting an example) that it comes at the expense of the people it tries to help.

[Latty]

Because people assume they must be there for "diversity reasons", which is assuming that they are being artificially raised up in a way that disadvantages everyone else. It's one step removed, but the point stands.

We can't just ignore the imbalance that exists due to past inequality, act equally now and pretend there are no problems any more. Fixing that imbalance doesn't have to mean pulling anyone down, and that response ("it must be because they are taking the opportunity from someone else who is more capable") needs to be fixed, not the act of trying to pull people up to fix past wrongs.

[hrktb]

> I maintain that "affirmative action" does more bad than good in the vast majority of the cases.

Even if it was a case of affirmative action, their work still gets the chance to get criticized and touch people’s eyes. Arguably with no action it could have rotten in some binder in a desk, so isn’t “something” still better than nothing ?

[RasputinsBro]

> Even if it was a case of affirmative action, their work still gets the chance to get criticized and touch people’s eyes. Arguably with no action it could have rotten in some binder in a desk, so isn’t “something” still better than nothing ?

To be clear: I'm NOT saying this was a case of affirmative action.

You pointed a positive consequence of affirmative action. I agree it exists and that it's positive.

My observation was just that in my opinion it has a much much larger negative consequence. It gets neutral people like me, for whom race has always been a non-issue, to now wonder "is this a real achievement, or is it just affirmative action?" This is a real effect, I just caught myself doing it.

[IanDrake]

I’ve never met anyone who claims racism doesn’t exist. Perhaps I haven’t met the right troll?

The odd thing about racism is that we typically see it in the US as a asian/black/white/hispanic issue where historically race was finer grained, especially when talking about a much more homogeneous population.

Historically Brits would consider the French, Irish, or Italians as a different race, and, yes, have racist views about those people.

What I learn from that is, even if the US was 100% “white”, racism would still exist as we would find increasingly small differences to categorize people into races and then discriminate.

The problem is that discrimination based on categorization is how the human brain works.

[insickness]

> I’ve never met anyone who claims racism doesn’t exist.

The anti-affirmative action argument doesn't say that racism doesn't exist. The argument against affirmative action is that society should aim for equal opportunity rather than equal outcome.

[IanDrake]

Affirmative action IS institutional racism in that it codifies advantage to one race over another.

One could argue about the intention of affirmative action, but I don’t think one could argue that it’s not racist, using the dictionary’s definition of racism.

[RasputinsBro]

> One could argue about the intention of affirmative action, but I don’t think one could argue that it’s not racist, using the dictionary’s definition of racism.

As is often the case, the dictionary gives multiple definitions.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/racism

You're using definition number 2, the person you were responding to was maybe using definition number 3.

(Although we get it, your point still stands.)

[IanDrake]

That’s fair, thanks.

What I was trying to say, without saying it, is that rasism is not what the cultural Marxist are trying to sell - “power + privilege”.

[cimmanom]

And those in favor of affirmative action would say that it's a way to support equal opportunity later in the pipeline when earlier stages of the pipeline have failed to do so.

[tripletao]

Intra-white racism was totally a thing in the USA. Jacob Riis ("How the Other Half Lives") is sometimes considered to have had progressive views on race, because he didn't consider black people to be strictly worse than white; but that probably just reflects his low opinion of Southern Europeans.

Such racism is mostly dead now, because generations of generic-white intermarriage would make it hopelessly confusing. My suspicion is that as long as distinct races are perceived, racism will continue, and the absence of that intermarriage is simultaneously evidence of that racism and a cause of it.

[RasputinsBro]

> I’ve never met anyone who claims racism doesn’t exist. Perhaps I haven’t met the right troll?

I think you haven't met the right troll.

If you ask "are you saying that racism doesn't exist?", the sophisticated troll will not give you a yes or no answer. If he said yes he would lose because there are so many examples that it exists and he would be unmasked as an obvious troll, if he said no he would lose because then you would have some justification in whatever your claim was.

> The problem is that discrimination based on categorization is how the human brain works.

Yes, I think that is right.

[dibbsonline]

Off topic: I just wish people understood what a troll is rather than using the term for anyone abusive or bigoted. Like you aren't getting trolled simply by getting hateful engagements on social media.

On topic: As long as it's not considered racist just because they are African American. It's like where I live a woman at a sports match threw a banana at an indigenous person, completely ignorant to any race issue. Yet the media ran it way out of proportion, I would say it was the media that were racist, they set a narrative which followed which was deeply saddening to me.

[dhimes]

It's like where I live a woman at a sports match threw a banana at an indigenous person, completely ignorant to any race issue.

Unfortunately, that's one of those symbols that people recognize as being a racist attack. I may get mad at my local church, but where I live I can't burn a cross in my yard to show that anger.

I once picked up my child from a new day care. We are white and the woman in charge is black. I picked up my son and said to him, "there's my little monkey" (he was my "boat monkey") and the woman was taken aback. A moment later she realized what I had said, but just using the term "monkey" in front of her set off some sort of warning apparently.