Group Disparity is not in itself Systemic Racism

This right here deserves its own thread. It is a confusing of group averages for individuals. That there is a high number of black people in poverty does not in itself mean that black people who are not in poverty are being treated unfairly.

Mere group number differences are not racism, systemic or otherwise. It may be a red flag and tool to help find racism, but that's it.

I would like to see people arguing against racism abandon this error. It hurts rather than helps the effort. It leads to more racism, not less.

Instead identify and rectify actual racism, and actual systemic racism, such as research studies including no racial minorities and leading to results or applications that may not be applicable to racial minorities, such as facial recognition programs that best recognize white faces, AI programs that associate dark skin with criminal behavior and suggest through correlation that the best hire is white, etc.

 

To be more concise than my OP above:

Rules that harm the poor harm more blacks than whites, but don't necessarily harm blacks more than whites. There is a difference. This is a very common fallacy in logic and I am curious what the name for it is.

 

I am not particularly interested in who is right or wrong on the forums, etc. This is a very common mistake that lots of people make, maybe even most people. I rarely see it pointed out. And I would like people to be more aware of it.

 

You are asking a poster to fully flesh out an opinion based on a fallacy.

That's not gonna happen.

You called out bullshit and will get ignored. It happens all the time

 

I don't think LangleyMan was posting in bad faith. And exploring the issue could be interesting, both with him and with others. There could also be something I'm not seeing.

 

Pick a race and give them some extra benefits. Just don't make it white folks those dudes are too successful already.

 

Yes, and that's why we should help people based on need, not based on race, ethnicity or gender. Women have long been discriminated against in business, but that doesn't mean my mother who was mayor of a small city or my daughter who is a bank vice president needed or deserved help.

What's happened to Asians and blacks in this country is racism.

 

Yes. And those women who are poor don't need or deserve more help than men who are poor or vice versa. Same goes for people of different races. All that should matter is need. Black people do not suffer more from poverty than white people just because there are more of them who suffer from poverty.

Yet that's a line I constantly hear repeated from many different people.

 

Exactly.

 

Strange you are being agreeable here now.

What you have described isn't systemic racism. It's just poor people. So the question is, what SYSTEM in today's America is specifically targeting black people to hold them back?

Because I can show you policies specifically designed to hold or punish white people.

 

Hoping for humor here, or we need a separate thread to discuss this.....

 

The term “systemic racism” is improperly used by those too ignorant to understand statistics or basic logic. Or just to garner attention. Race baiters, pundits, politicians, etc.

The closest thing to systemic racism in this country TODAY, is affirmative action and DEI policy. By definition they promote discrimination based on race and gender. You can’t argue around it or justify it by claiming it’s to correct disparity. There is no disparity to correct unless you want to correct ALL disparity. Good luck getting anyone who promotes AA or DEI to actually objectively look at ALL disparity and treat it the same. They can’t even define what equality means without confusing it with equity.

And THATS why it’s discriminatory. And that’s why those people are a farce.

 

Equality means to treat everyone the same.

Equity means to make things fair.

But life by nature, isn't fair. And so to achieve fairness, you need to either punish or promote various groups. If you define those groups based on race, then boom! You are being racist.

And to make it worse, we as a society absolutely will not punish black people with equity in area's they excel to enforced "equity diversity and inclusion" There is no demand to get more white people in Basketball for example.

But there sure as **** is a demand to get even more black people in Football and Hockey.

We have gone full bore CRT as a nation, and it's cancerous and degrading our society.

 

We've been through hundreds of efforts to remove systemic discrimination, to the point of literally discriminating against non-black people and providing favoritism- often that lowered standards of acceptable performance as well. It was of course wrong to impose segregation, but the too we have imposed integration- such as requiring racial percentage in the hires of companies doing government contract work, to the extent of forcing white children to be bussed to primarily black schools.... Which I can say as a parent of one such student- was a terrible idea. The objectives of removing the physical, system racial barriers have been well achieved. Opportunity is open to most every person regardless of race. This is a kind of equality, that society had power to change. On the other hand- there are poor people in every race. Violent people, depraved people, angry people- and successful, happy people. These are not things society has the power to change, because the only person with that power is the individual. You do not make a person wealthy by giving them money- you make them dependent, and that is psychologically toxic. You do not give them self-respect by praising them- you teach them to depend on peer respect to be able to believe they have value, and that too.... makes them dependent. The bottom line is that a society can remove unjust barriers, but it cannot give people that which they can only earn from themselves.

Self-respect is perhaps the most valuable metric of your psyche- and it's actually quite clear. It means that you respect the person you are, and the ability to shape that is totally in your own hands. Make all you actions such that you can totally respect them (not justify them, but respect them without compromise) and you become your own man, free from the control of anyone. When barriers you can't control are no longer significant, the battle to control those you can is still there to fight. Many will never try. That is not societies fault, but such people will blame their condition on the rest of the world... and since they will not change themselves, nothing will ever change for them.

We have an obligation to do the right thing. That has been done, and those who recognize it are thriving. Those who refuse to accept the responsibility for things only they can change will be demanding somebody fix them for the rest of their lives- and neither self-respect nor peace with self will ever be theirs. That is a condition only they can change, and the image the change or lack of change generates is their own doing. Beyond respecting yourself, building peer respect comes from deserving respect, not demanding it. That's a choice they can make; but one that can't be made for them.

 

So like, a speeding ticket being a set amount of, say, 100$ is systemically racist because a hundred dollar fine hurts the poor harder and therefore black people harder.

therefore we should make speeding tickets be a percentage of your income so everyone is impacted fairly?

And when the poor are paying $5 but speeding far more often and the rich are paying $10,000 but speeding far less, this won’t necessarily create safer roads but at least we won’t be racist.

Am I on the right track here?

 

Flipping the coin to the other side, if we as a nation put money in the hands of the poor in such a manner as to bring the percent poor to the same level regardless of race, we'll be helping native Americans, Blacks and Hispanics to a greater degree than white and Asian Americans.

The trick, though, is to get the money past the state government legislators and governors and into the actual hands of the poor. Doing so is, it appears, akin to trying to smuggle daybreak past a rooster.

Regards, stay safe 'n well.

 

While m,any people think giving people money benefits them- most don't realize the downside of it. Happy people are generally independent people who can stand on their own. Dependent people are usually not very happy people- because they don't have that freedom, they feel "owned" in some way by whatever they are dependent on, and they resent being dependent.

I think there are two kinds of "help", but only one really does that. The right way is a hand-up, meaning we give support to a person in need who would be standing on their own if they could- and once they are back to that, would be there to help others the same way. The old farm tradition of gathering to rebuild a barn lost to storm of fire for example. The people providing it like themselves, because the see the good they have done. The person helped sees the quality of his neighbors, and will be first in line to help when someone else needs it. Everybody wins.

The other kind of help is a "hand out". This is used by the person is down to avoid the need to get up and do for themselves. When it runs out, they expect more will be provided. The can't have real self respect, because they are living a parasitic kind of existence. They have to blame others for not giving them enough, in order to keep avoiding that truth, so they are never grateful- and everybody loses.

I would suggest that money spent through the system be used to remove barriers to opportunity, to be based around the hand-up concept, rather than supporting the generational welfare scenario.
There are times when the best help is to step back and let the person come to terms with the basic obligation of all living things- to support yourself.

Taking care of just one person- if we all do that, then we don't force someone else to do our job for us; not become burdens on people we don't even know.

 

I always figured systemic racism meant not necessarily intentional policy, but the way systems can end up producing racist results, like the examples in the OP. There are probably many more such situations.

 

I take systemic racism to mean a system..."systemic" that targets groups based on race.

A system that hurts poor people and blacks representing most of the poor people, is NOT systemic racism. But offering aid ONLY to poor BLACK people, IS systemic racism.

 

I have a saying that speaks to that....

People say that life isn't fair....

Well my answer to that is this.... The fair comes to town once a year and you missed it.

 

That's another good example of the error I am talking about. It actually does hurt poor people more than rich people, and if there was no other penalty but the fine then rich people could actually speed with impunity, which would be completely unfair.

But just because there are a lot of poor black people does not mean this would hurt a poor black person anymore than a poor white person, so it would NOT hurt black people more.

There is a huge difference between hurting more of X and hurting X more. And I think many fail to spot that difference.

 

Yes. I have been saying that for decades. Help the poor and you will be slowly ending disparity between the groups, and not doing it in a racist way.

 

How about research that uses only white subjects that is then used to implement policy, which ends up inadvertently not being very applicable to non -white people? That sort of thing is systemic, and unintentionally racist. Some AI programs used to help recruit for hiring can use correlation to success and may conclude that the best hire will be a white man, etc. That sort of thing.

 

You are being racist towards black people by favoring one race over another race. Using only white test subjects in research on something that isn't going to be limited to just white people is faulty research. It's only malicious if you set out to ONLY hire white people specifically as test subjects. If it worked out that only white applicants applied, that is not systemic.

You shouldn't hire on group based bias, otherwise Asians would get all the jobs. You hire the individual based on that person's individual worth.

On the flip side...lowering the standards so that more black people apply or get the job is actually also...racist...towards black people.

 

I always thought that if people wanted to imitate and be like others in some race that they are not that they should imitate successful Asians.