[beaconstudios]

Being "woke" goes beyond just being a decent person though, because most people's metric for decency is interpersonal decency. My understanding is that the sociological concepts that go into "wokeness" include intersectional analysis, microaggression theory, critical theory, 3rd wave feminism, gender theory etc. I think these ideas are mostly good (with the exception of microaggression theory), but they go way beyond "just be decent to other people" and into the territory of deep academic and systemic mindsets that are far from the default in the individualist West (and especially the US). I mean damn, half these ideas are French, and France is pretty culturally different from the US, French academia even moreso.

For example: not being racist on an individual level is pretty intuitive and obvious to most people, and mostly comes down to being a decent human being. Being institutionally anti-racist is a totally different thing, and way more involving, because you're not just not being a dick to people of a different race; you're trying to counteract systemic disadvantages.

[_3u10]

It also presupposes such systemic disadvantages exist. Not sure why so many people from other countries immigrate to places that are so obviously systemically biased against them.

Or why when institutions such as Harvard actually do systemically discriminate against Asians it’s routinely ignored by the woke crowd.

Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America?

Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination?

[Zababa]

> Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination?

I've tried multiple time the argument "if we have quotas in top positions like board of directors, high-prestige public institutions, we should also have them in bottom positions. Where are the inclusivity programs for prisons?". The answer that I've always received was "these are totally different", as in you end up in a board of directors due to chance and privilege, but you end up in prison due to your own actions.

While this argument is a bit stupid and not really constructive, I find it surprising how easily it reveals that people apply very different standards to different social issues. It seem that for most people, the mechanism which makes men dominate society is totally different from the mechanism which makes men be at the bottom of society. My explanation for that is that the glass ceiling comes with a glass floor.

I personally haven't found other people talking about things this way, but that may be me not researching enough. I also find it unfair that some people would be in this "glass box" just because of how they were born. But I'll admit that I find it troubling when I hear people talking about "breaking the glass ceiling" all the time, which seem to benefit mostly people already well-off in society that want event more (at least for positions like board of directors), while leaving people to rot in prison because they're male.

[_3u10]

Men likely just commit more crimes. I do think there is huge bias in sentencing though. You have to know how to interact with police tho, I think many men's intuition on how to do this is lacking.

Lawrence Summers got in a lot of trouble discussing this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Summers#Differences_b... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis

[Zababa]

> Men likely just commit more crimes.

I think the thing that makes men commit more crimes is the same that makes them be at the "top". Thank you for that link about the variability hypothesis, that seem to be what I'm thinking about.

[nasmorn]

Committing crimes without getting caught is also how you can become a board director. There are other ways too obviously. Mostly wage theft, anti competitive crimes or some embezzlement. The kind of crimes privileged people would commit.

[Zababa]

Fair point, though I have honestly no idea of the percentage of board directors that have committed white collar crime.

[beaconstudios]

Your arguments betray that you don't actually understand what systemic disadvantages are. It's not used to mean intentional discrimination; it means that the way our society is set up results in discriminatory outcomes even if nobody is actively being discriminatory.

To address your gender disparity in incarceration example: yes, that is a systemic problem. Men commit more crime than women, and if you dig into the reasons why, it's going to relate to things like lack of opportunity to compete and succeed through legitimate means. People in poverty stricken areas have much less of a chance to succeed through legitimate economic means so the ambitious turn to crime. That's a systemic problem.

[evancox100]

> Men commit more crime than women, and if you dig into the reasons why, it's going to relate to things like lack of opportunity to compete and succeed through legitimate means.

Pretty sure that the main driver here comes down to testosterone and men’s overall higher levels of impulsivity.

[orand]

Bingo. Read the recent book T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven. It covers this and related issues in great scientific detail. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250236061/

[beaconstudios]

yeah sorry I should've said explicitly that men are also more likely to be aggressive and competitive, so given the constraints of poverty, are more likely to go into crime to fulfil those needs.

[eru]

> Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America?

You mean they have some of the lowest rates of admission when corrected for GPA? Or lowest rates in some absolute sense?

> Why is the difference in incarceration rate between men and women or the police shooting rate not presented as systemic discrimination?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AcceptableTarget...

[_3u10]

Basically, the GPA / exam scores required for Asians to be accepted is far higher than any other group.

To exclude them Harvard gives Asians low personality scores. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/us/harvard-asian-enrollme...

[judge2020]

> It also presupposes such systemic disadvantages exist.

But it would be incorrect to presuppose that absolutely none exist, which is why they have a culture of reviewing and examining such a possibility.

[_3u10]

Of course. I think the vast vast majority of people abhor racism and discrimination in the US and Canada yet our countries are described by the woke as bastions of this kind of thought when the vast majority of the evidence points to it being two of the most welcoming and accepting of differences.

[zapita]

> Can anyone explain to me why Asians despite having some of the highest scores and GPAs have the lowest rate of admissions to some of the wokest institutions in America?

Because of legacy admissions, also known as “rich white kids skipping the line in spite of low GPAs”. There’s nothing “woke” about Ivy Leagues…

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jan/23/elite-school...

[wpietri]

I agree that at one point maybe being oblivious to systemic problems could go along with being decent. But these days I don't see how being a decent human is compatible with either, "I don't want to learn whether you're getting the short end of the stick" or "I know you're getting the short end of the stick but I'll never do anything about it": neither seem decent to me.

I'll also note that although those particular theoretical frameworks were originally popular ways to understand certain problems, there are plenty of other ways to understanding.

As an example, let's take the microagression where white people want to touch black hair. This is a common problem [1][2][3], and one certainly can situate it within a whole host of racist microaggressions and a broader theoretical framework. But one can also just say, "Dude, black people are not pets. Keep your hands to yourself." Or in the middle, the handsy person can listen to black voices on this and get a personal understanding of why it's a demeaning thing to ask/do. That doesn't require any theory, just the sort of empathy and respect that is at the core of human decency.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2020/01/08/stop-as...

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/b5c3fa4e-e6c0-11e9-9743-db5a37048...

[3] http://www.cnn.com/2011/LIVING/07/25/touching.natural.black....

[garfieldnate]

I hate that you've called this "aggression", like it's a kind of morally reprehensible violence. People like to feel puffy hair, black person or not. Ask a white person with dreds if anyone has ever felt their hair. In Japan, people like to feel my arm hair, which is blonde and almost invisible and completely foreign to East Asians. It's harmless. It's completely natural that humans are interested in the physical variety of other humans. Now, you can obviously say or do something racist or mean while touching that hair, but the act of touching hair cannot itself be deemed aggressive without knowing the context. You would have to understand the social context of black people (apparently) being tired of being touched all the time in order to know that you should avoid doing this specific thing, which makes this a "faux pas".

[wpietri]

I'm sure you do hate it. Many people hate recognizing that their own behavior has been harmful to others.

> the act of touching hair cannot itself be deemed aggressive without knowing the context

I have never in my life had random people walk up and start petting me. Be honest. If I walked down the street feeling the hair of each man I passed, how long do you think it would be before I got punched?

So white people already know perfectly well you don't just go around touching strangers. It's just that some will make an exception for black people because they are seen as other/lesser.

I would add that your notion that a microaggression is ok due to white ignorance of the experience of black people at the hands of white people is itself a racist notion.

And giving an example in Japan doesn't change much for me, as as Japan is a notoriously racist place. (For those unsure, a quick Google of "racism in Japan" will help. And I think you could understand that what's harmless to you as a high-status foreigner is not always going to be harmless for other people. Especially, say, a marginalized group whose inferior status was established America's founding and persists to this day.

[garfieldnate]

When reading your original post, I thought there was an implicit assumption that any case of a white person feeling a black person's hair was automatically classified as a racist "micro-aggression". Re-reading your original post, I think I probably misunderstood you, but I'll explain my thoughts a bit here since we have a thread started.

>Many people hate recognizing that their own behavior has been harmful to others.

I've never felt a black person's hair. I'm generally not a touchy person.

>I have never in my life had random people walk up and start petting me.

I actually think we're talking about different things. In my mind I was seeing a friend ask another, "hey, sorry, I know it's weird, but can I feel your hair? I'm curious what it feels like." The friend says "yes" or "no" and the interaction goes on from there. There are countries/cultures where strangers will touch others, but it's a pretty foreign concept to me.

>your notion that a micro-aggression is ok due to white ignorance

The word "aggression" implies willing injury or intimidation of another person. Hurting someone's feelings on accident is also bad, but it doesn't make sense to label them the same way. You're absolutely right to say that the context was completely different in Japan, and that's exactly the point. You can't unilaterally label an action like touching hair as aggressive in all contexts. If someone thinks fuzzy hair is neat and they don't have any sense of a racial divide, then they would feel curly caucasian red hair or African dreadlocks and not think anything was different about the two actions.

If you classify all interactions between all white people and all black people in terms of their racial differences, then how do we properly get rid of racism? If in the US a white and black person have to keep slavery in the back of their minds during every interaction, how are they ever supposed to act normally or integrate? How do we ever expect to overcome our differences if we have to constantly remind ourselves of them?

I really like concrete initiatives for helping those that have been historically and presently disadvantaged: paying meaningful reparations, fixing police and the justice system, UBI, etc. But I dislike social notions that impede communication and drive wedges between people. After all of the actions that we take to help everyone in our society to thrive, the end goal has to be social harmony, and I think we need to be careful not to attribute all unpleasant interactions to voluntary aggression or racism.

[wpietri]

> I've never felt a black person's hair. I'm generally not a touchy person.

My point is not about hair. It's that it's the white people who have done very little reflection on this topic that have strong enough feelings that they have to argue endlessly about when it's ok to point out America's endemic racism. DiAngelo's paper on this covers the topic well: https://libjournal.uncg.edu/ijcp/article/viewFile/249/116

> The word "aggression" implies willing injury or intimidation of another person.

No. People often do things without making choices fully conscious of roots of their feelings and the broader implications. Indeed, that's the human default. See Kahneman's System 1 vs System 2 work.

> How do we ever expect to overcome our differences if we have to constantly remind ourselves of them?

You already know the answer to this. Imagine a junior developer asking, "How can we ever get anything done if we have to be worrying about all the possible ways something would break?!?" Is that a problem while learning? Yes. Does it prevent progress? No, just the opposite.

America has always been a racist place. For a long time it was carefully and consciously structured that way. We have been making spotty, two-steps-forward-one-step-back progress since Reconstruction, where we removed many of the formal, legal supports. But that's just the most visible surface of the problem. What drove the laws was white attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors handed down over generations. Those still persist. (For more on this, see Kendi, Oluo, Mills, and Loewen.)

To truly end that, white people are going to have to step up, pay attention, and root those things out. It's a multi-generation project. One that, given the US Right's self-generated panic about teaching white kids about America's realities around race, we are backsliding on.

I get that this makes you uncomfortable. I also spent years avoiding the necessity to face it. Social harmony is a good long term goal, but we cannot measure progress toward that by looking at white comfort.

[ygjb]

> People like to feel puffy hair, black person or not. > ... > In Japan, people like to feel my arm hair, which is blonde and almost invisible and completely foreign to East Asians. It's harmless.

Do you extend this perspective on unwanted touching to other parts of the body without consent? People like to do things to and with other people. The thing that makes doing that a form of aggression is doing those things without consent.

> Ask a white person with dreds if anyone has ever felt their hair.

Please point to the cultural and historical legacy of white people being stripped of their freedom, dignity and agency when comparing the experiences of white folks to Black folks. That sets aside the entire discussion of cultural appropriation related dreadlocks which is related to, but not at the core of the point I am trying to make.

> Now, you can obviously say or do something racist or mean while touching that hair, but the act of touching hair cannot itself be deemed aggressive without knowing the context. You would have to understand the social context of black people (apparently) being tired of being touched all the time in order to know that you should avoid doing this specific thing, which makes this a "faux pas".

The fact that you dismiss the documented experience of Black people as "apparently" being tired of being touched all the time says pretty much everything anyone in the audience needs to know about whether you are arguing in good or bad faith. The point is further driven home by the fact that you are contrasting your own anecdotal experience with an awareness of the social context of why this is an issue.

[knorker]

To address what parent post asked in the first sentence though: Is it "aggression"? Isn't that like calling "a dirty look" a "microrape"?

I'm not saying I don't understand how it can be an unwelcome experience to be touched and prodded, but "microaggression" is a term out there like "silence is violence" and "words are violence" in the possibly most literal real-life version of Orwell's writings, even (in its overtness) possibly outweighing the real life society he was describing at the time.

[ygjb]

First, touching someone without permission isn't a micro-aggression. Depending on the jurisdiction, the location of the unwanted touching, and the age or power disparity between the two, it can range from harassment to assault.

The fact that this discussion is even happening in the context of Black people and their hair is frustrating because the implicit bias is that somehow individual curiosity overrides another persons expectation of freedom from interference or right to not be fondled. If we were talking about a casual grope of a woman's breast because people are naturally curious, I would expect that most people would be moderately outraged.

Also, while a "dirty look" is subjective, "leering" is a form of sexual harassment in many jurisdictions.

While I appreciate that your perspective that microagressions, silence is violence, and words are violence are Orwellian, your perspective also reveals a pretty clear ignorance of the nuance and impact that these slogans capture. I don't know if it's an ignorance that stems from a lack of knowledge and experience, or a more insidious and willful ignorance that stems from the type of thinking that allows for or encourages "marketplaces of ideas" that tolerate and debate some of the most awful and toxic values, but it doesn't really matter. Up in the thread I stated, and I stand by it, workplace inclusiveness and diversity training is intended to reach those who can be taught, and inform those who can't of the consequences of failing to at least act in a baseline socially acceptable fashion for the duration of the work day.

It would be a better world if more people cared about the impact of what they do and say, but in the absence of that, most of us will settle for people who can at least act like they care.

[knorker]

> First, touching someone without permission isn't a micro-aggression.

Now you're changing the subject. You and I both know that "oooh, nice hair, can I touch it?" is also counted as "microaggression".

A misunderstood social signal (e.g. a raised eyebrow) can be called a micro-aggression.

Most migroaggressions involve nothing physical, nor any ill intent. That doesn't make them right. They can still be hurtful. E.g. "you're the whitest black person I know" sure is a stupid thing to say.

"Hey, nice hair" is also a thing banned in these trainings. Because the receiver can infer that their hair is unique, exotic, and that they are different and maybe don't belong here.

So "hey, nice haircut" is banned from workplaces under all circumstanses. Ok, fine. Nobody needs to comment on appearance in the workplace, why would they?

But it's not "aggression". It's nothing like it.

And this is what "microaggression" is. This is what's being stamped out.

> individual curiosity overrides another persons expectation of freedom from interference or right to not be fondled

It does not, I agree.

> If we were talking about a casual grope of a woman's breast because people are naturally curious,

Jesus christ you're going way overboard in changing the subject. I got it already: You want to change the subject.

> Also, while a "dirty look" is subjective, "leering" is a form of sexual harassment in many jurisdictions.

But is it a "microrape"? The difference here is a controlling use of language.

If someone walks down the street and get checked out by a passer by, they were not "almost raped". To say that they were is insulting to rape victims, a perfectly normal person who just looked at their surroundings, and language itself.

> workplace inclusiveness and diversity training is intended to reach those who can be taught, and inform those who can't of the consequences of failing to at least act in a baseline socially acceptable fashion for the duration of the work day.

Yup. But I think it's failing at it. There's plenty of bad behavior to stamp out. But it's also being replaced by other bad behavior. Like telling people that being white means that you as an individual have these attributes, and shutting down a colleague saying "you are a man, and therefore can't be a part of this conversation or decision".

I don't know if you bought into the "intent doesn't matter" crowd, but if you have, then the fact that inclusivity and diversity training has good intentions doesn't matter.

> It would be a better world if more people cared about the impact of what they do and say

Diversity & inclusiveness activists at companies don't have a monopoly on these values. And I wish they would stop pretending that they did. Because they sure don't actually live their stated gospel.

[wpietri]

If I come up to you, violate your personal space, and start running my hands over your body, you will absolutely see it as aggressive.

If you think that's not the case, go out and try doing that to the first 10 men you see on the street. Heck, try it with a couple of cops.

So yes, calling more modest unwanted touching a microaggression is perfectly appropriate.

[wpietri]

One other way to look at this it through the broader system. Since America's founding, black people have been treated as inferior. How have they been kept in what white people saw as their place?

Some of it has been open violence, of course, with lynching and race massacres being the most obvious. There was also plenty of more quiet violence, the unmarked graves and the vicious but survivable beatings.

But that's relatively rare because it is backed up by a host of more subtle things. Things that might lead to violence, especially if an uppity person persisted in acting like an equal. Threats, of course, but also menacing looks, harsh words, bad attitudes, etc.

This is summed up in ADL's pyramid of hate. The top layer is built on the layers beneath: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/documents/pyramid-of...

So we talk about microaggressions because the societal system of white supremacy uses both macroaggressions and migroaggresions as a continuum of actions that maintain the racist status quo, continuously informing both black and white people of their assigned place.

[knorker]

"oooh, nice hair, can I touch it?" is also counted as "microaggression". Just the words.

A misunderstood social signal (e.g. a raised eyebrow) can be called a micro-aggression.

I don't think you actually know what "microaggression" means. You should educate yourself on its definition.

The main source of microaggressions are in fact words, and words that while rooted in ignorance (and people, like you, should educate themselves), are not in fact in any shape or form "aggressive" or even have any form of negativity associated with them.

Take the "you're the whitest black person I know", from the "I, Too, Am Harvard". Well, that's sure a stupid thing to say. But is it "aggression"? Obviously not.

[beaconstudios]

Given he was writing about a mix of Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany, I don't think the tendency for social justice people to assign overly provocative words to their ideas is worse than those places.

[knorker]

I don't think you're familiar with Orwell, and the meaning of Orwellian.

Did my comment read to you like I didn't know what real life societies he was writing about? I explicitly described how they fit into my point exactly in order to make people not reply with comments like yours.

[garfieldnate]

I wrote more thoughts above in response to wpietri, but I just wanted to clarify that my usage of the word "apparently" was meant with the opposite intention: someone on the internet said something about black people, and I can't claim it through personal experience to be the truth. From wpietri's reply above, I believe they are also basing their thoughts on hearsay, which makes it double hearsay.

[beaconstudios]

> But these days I don't see how being a decent human is compatible with either, "I don't want to learn whether you're getting the short end of the stick" or "I know you're getting the short end of the stick but I'll never do anything about it": neither seem decent to me.

The novel part isn't the interpersonal part like "don't try to touch black people's hair" - that's just basic common sense, and it's extremely cringey that there are people who do that and think it's OK. The novel part is the systemic aspects of progressive thinking; my primary academic (hobby) interest is in systems theory and cybernetics, so through experience I can say for a fact that most people find systems thinking to be unnatural or alien. It's a different way of looking at the world to thinking in terms of intent and individual actions, which is the norm in the West.

[wpietri]

For sure, which is why I said there were other ways to understanding.

A lot of my education here has come from people just talking about their daily lives on social media and in person. Many years ago I ended up going from having a pony tail to shaving my head. I was telling a group of friends that it was weird how differently people treated me. E.g., seeing people cross the street rather than walk near me. A black member of the group said, "Well now you know."

The systems-thinking aspect of it came to me later, as I was looking for explanations for all of the little bits of data that I kept coming across. It was only then that I found the more academic takes useful.

But I think these days it's very, very hard for a white person to credibly and honestly have no understanding that there are big problems with race in the US. Which I think is why we're seeing the right-wing moral panic around "Critical Race Theory", which few can define but many are sure is such a problem that we need laws to prevent white children from learning about actual white history.

[skyde]

how do you “counteract systemic disadvantages” without simply disadvantaging all white peoples ( that would be racist against white people)

Or by doing simply giving extra benefit (affirmative action) to one group ?

As we have seen with affirmative action it put people from china India and japan in the same bucket and give them less preferential treatment compared to African Americans. So it just seem that the minority which speak louder about injustice is the one that get the most benefit.

I agree that systemic racism is a thing but I have never seen a single proposed solution which is not simply “reverse racism” or positive racism.

We should be able to give equal opportunity to all group without explicitly helping one group or disadvantaging one group!

[beaconstudios]

Let me frame this up in terms of white/black disparity in the US, as it's the clearest case: black people have for a long time been explicitly discriminated against at an institutional level, and even when you remove this, they will collectively remain at a disadvantage until corrective action is taken. Traditionally the suggested solution is reparations, but organisations have decided that to do their part they should engage in affirmative action. Of course affirmative action slightly disadvantages white people on an individual level, but the argument is that black people are disadvantaged on a societal level from said discriminatory history, so it balances out.

Affirmative action isn't actually a systemic solution though, it's an individualistic solution. A systemic solution would be something like creating a government fund to invest in infrastructure and enterprises in historically redlined areas and help to bootstrap the economic uplifting of poorer black communities.

Do bear in mind though that I'm from the UK so this is just my understanding of an issue I'm not personally familiar with.

[eyelidlessness]

> For example: not being racist on an individual level is pretty intuitive and obvious to most people, and mostly comes down to being a decent human being. Being institutionally anti-racist is a totally different thing, and way more involving, because you're not just not being a dick to people of a different race; you're trying to counteract systemic disadvantages.

Sincerely acknowledging this may be confusing: it’s the equivalent of recognizing that you’re being graded or compensated fairly while you see someone else not being treated that fairly… and then not shrugging it off.

It’s not a deep philosophical concept. It’s living in a society with responsibility to everyone else in your society.