"Races" aren't qualified for anything. Neither are star signs or favorite Hogwarts houses.
Individuals are qualified or unqualified. If a company happens to end up with less than 1/4 Ravenclaws or not very many Virgos, it doesn't mean hate is a reason. It could be that the Ravenclaws that applied were a bit less qualified than those from the other houses.
I guess my point is, doing the statistical analysis for race and gender and drawing conclusions, while being completely blind to the one single factor any sane hiring manager should be focusing on -- actual qualifications for the role -- doesn't make any sense.
And a common rebuttal to the objection is that systemic racism is often difficult to untangle in a way that produces a neat chain of cause and effect (not least of which because discrimination can happen unconsciously or secretly); because the impact exists whether intent can be shown or not, the desire remains to ameliorate that impact.
If the issue happens upstream of the defendant to a claim - generally an organization being sued by an individual with fewer resources - it incentivizes such entities to push for changes upstream, so that they don't get stuck with the bill.
> And a common rebuttal to the objection is that systemic racism is often difficult to untangle in a way that produces a neat chain of cause and effect (not least of which because discrimination can happen unconsciously or secretly)
We have a "disparate impact" and nobody can prove what proportion of it is due to things like parental income or childhood education as opposed to racism on the part of the employer. Because the former considerations are real contributors, the metric can regularly be expected to exceed the threshold even if the contribution of racism by the employer was zero. Doesn't that imply that we're essentially accusing people of racism at random?
> because the impact exists whether intent can be shown or not, the desire remains to ameliorate that impact.
The median household income for Asian Americans of Indian ethnicity is more than double those of Burmese ethnicity:
This is objectively a disparate impact and likely shows up in several other metrics in addition to income. Disparate results can almost universally be obtained by arbitrarily segmenting the population into different groups and comparing the midpoints. Americans of Australian ancestry have a higher median income than those of Irish ancestry, Bolivians higher than Cubans. The result is often because the lower down group has a history of being oppressed.
What reasoned means can we use to determine which groups get the benefit of these methods to ameliorate the disparity and which don't? What should be done about the inherent impossibility of doing them simultaneously, e.g. because hiring a South African woman over a Haitian man would reduce the disparity on one axis while increasing it on another? Notice that considering each group separately could result in unconditional liability because either available alternative puts you over the threshold for one group or the other.
> If the issue happens upstream of the defendant to a claim - generally an organization being sued by an individual with fewer resources - it incentivizes such entities to push for changes upstream, so that they don't get stuck with the bill.
Do we want to apply this logic to other things? The median income in California and New York are significantly higher than they are in Alabama or West Virginia and they have higher ranked public schools. We can correspondingly expect that when applicants from different states apply for the same job, the ones from California and New York (even if they're the same race etc.) are more likely to be selected because they had more advantages growing up, even though none of them chose where they were born.
By the same reasoning we should then have the federal government penalize employers for hiring the applicants from the more affluent states so that it "incentivizes such entities to push for changes upstream, so that they don't get stuck with the bill." Does it make sense to do that?
That would end exactly at "Harrison Bergeron" world as described by Kurt Vonnegut, would it not? If every perceived advantage would require you to wear a "handicap".
What do you mean? That's 20th century technology. It's making individualized evaluations. The elites wouldn't put up with that. They'd either have to take handicaps themselves or risk people noticing that they don't.
That's the beauty of aggregate statistics. You have some elite job with 100 slots. Before you had 60 of the slots going to cronies and the remainder being allocated on merit. The cronies were disproportionately of the same ethnicity so your statistics are skewed, but don't worry, all the cronies still get their slots. Because statistics can be balanced by getting even more cronies, this time of a different ethnicity, and giving them as many of what used to be the merit slots as you need to manipulate the average. Using statistics is perfect for pretending that you're giving people something when you're actually taking something away.
It was "mild" because they rolled the would-be losses into high-risk vehicles and strategies that eventually created the GFC, which included Fed policy to juice asset markets. The Dotcom bubble was the rolling over of the Reagan/Papa Bush-era savings and loan crisis (Greenspan was involved in that, too), and (tinfoil hats on now) a massive bond market liquidity crisis preceded the COVID pandemic flash crash and emergency liquidity injections/stimulus/PPP by a scant few months (and was quietly swept under the rug).
We deserve what we get if we don't act on the obvious pattern, at this point. We've spent half a century throwing the public under the bus just so that a few oligarchs don't have to pay out for their bad bets, and Greenspan was absolutely their man for a significant portion of that campaign in the class wars.
I learned this 35 years ago to the tune of Clementine, youre using black sheep, my spouse uses another tune, but what funny is I learned it not with the 'i' endings, but with the dictionary form (sometimes called base-3) 'u' forms.
u tsu ru tte
bu mu nu nde
ku ite, gu ite
without the shi shite as that had been learned well ahead of the lesson adding ta/te forms.
I just think it's interesting how readily a little ditty tune helps people with recall, regardless of the actual tune.
I've generally found this kind of thing annoying in my various attempts to learn languages - in one of my high school spanish classes the teacher thought it was important to have us learn a little song to memorize the six present tense forms of the to-be verb ser: (yo) soy, (tu) eres, (el/ella) es, (nosotros) somos, (vosotros) sois, (ellos/as) son. My thinking was, there's only six forms to memorize, and the verb is an incredibly common one ("to be"!) so they'll get constantly reinforced anyway. The song is silly and isn't really helping anyway.
I feel similarly about the transformations for the Japanese -te forms and -ta past tense marker. The entire system is:
So basically ten patterns which group into 5 subpatterns. There's some logic behind them - the -te and -ta morphemes originally got added to the -i/pre-masu/ren'youkei stem and then underwent some idiosyncratic consonant reductions in godan verbs. But, really, it's only ten patterns, you can just memorize them; and these are incredibly common verb forms that get used all the time so you'll have them reinforced frequently if you are at all engaging with the language. It's a lot less to memorize than if you were learning Ancient Greek or Sanskrit or something.
The Legos were being sold to fund the college education of the old man's young descendants IIRC. So, like the killing, the alleged issue is a corporation stealing from a young man, actually.
By law, they monopolize up to half of a child's waking life for more than half of the year. This time commitment requires that parents put at least one meal, a substantial portion of the child's physical development, and almost all of their intellectual development (and, by extension, a substantial portion of their behavioral development) in the hands of the school.
If educational institutions are not taking seriously their potential influence on the social outcomes of their students, they're completely misunderstanding the practical mantle they've taken on. And so have you.
That's one philosophy, sure. My philosophy is that schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed, no matter what rhetoric they put out about equity and social problems.
(There are limited situations where it does make sense, logistically, for schools to provision social services. E.g. meals for students who don't have access to steady food sources. But those are relatively uncontroversial, as opposed to curricular and classroom management practices that make sacrifices of schools' educational integrity for a theoretical goal of equity, while failing to even deliver that.)
> schools that graduate students who are illiterate and innumerate have failed
I don't disagree.
But at the same time, it's also important to ask: was that child offered to learn and apply themselves in the same, stable environment as a child from a more wealthy upbringing? If the answer is no, that child was done a disservice. If the answer is yes, and they still fail, obviously don't graduate them...
The goal shouldn't ever be "Just pass everyone" it should be making sure that every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
> every child has the same opportunity and circumstances to succeed.
If you’re 18 and can’t read/write/math there is no opportunity to succeed, giving them a diploma doesn’t change that. At some point the child is just out of time no matter the circumstance.
I'm not sure where you got the idea that, "A school shouldn't pass students who haven't attained grade-level mastery," and, "Schools have an obligation to support the development of children beyond their basic academic achievement," were mutually exclusive. I certainly didn't state that.
12th Grade: AP Calculus, C average, one D quarter (in the middle of my parents' divorce, onset of body dysmorphia/dysphoria, college entrance applications, senior research practicum)
College Sophomore Year: Applied Calculus, aced, highest final score in the class
Post-college self-study: Failure to advance
Circumstances affect performance.
>so if you can compute a derivative by 12th grade, it's due to racial discrimination benefiting you or something
Within the wider historical scope, in America, specifically: yes. Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that. That's why it's systemic. A cold summer day doesn't negate the existence of climate change.
In what situations would you attribute effects to concrete, near-term causes instead or abstract, historical ones? In particular, why do you attribute academic success in some areas to historical racism instead of (presumably) modern poverty? In other words, given a cohort of poor kids and not poor kids, which outcomes of each group would you assign to historical racism and why? In particular, would you expect different groups to perform better or worse after controlling for things other than race and experiences of racism?
Wrong premise. Near-term and historical causes are intertwined, inexorably-linked. Both cohorts are the result of historical racism. Hence,
>Even if you're in the group that's being discriminated against, and succeeding despite that.
I would expect the continued, sustained, and unburdened efforts to address and undo the effects of the policies and behaviors that make up what we know to be and have been systemic racism are necessary in order to remove historical racism as a cause of contemporary circumstances.
If understand you correctly, your answer to my question would be "never", that is, you would always attribute some blame to historical causes. Okay.
I am left with more questions, however. To paraphrase your final paragraph, you expect that efforts to undo the effects of past racism—those effects which we collectively call systemic racism(?)—is necessary to snip that past racism from the causal chain to present ills. But I'm left wondering if this language of systemic racism is even particularly useful in describing the situation.
That is, it seems the manifestation of this framing is to address these downstream effects (poverty, etc.), none of which are inherently racial, but affect educational outcomes. But it seems to me that framing the problem nonracially and focusing solely on the proximal causes of educational issues has the same (or better!) manifestations as the racial framing.
In short, I feel the systemic racism framing is unproductive, because in a prudent implementation it merely adds discussion of distant causes, while identifying the same social issues to address. In an imprudent implementation, it would not only cloud the field with historical discussion, but distract from important proximal issues which don't fit the historical frame, while at the same time alienating people who feel excluded or infantilized or condescended upon based on their immutable characteristics, which is scarcely outweighed by a possible ethnic rallying effect which could boost participation.
I think I need to provide a concrete hypothetical to tidy up. Consider a cohort of struggling students in Virginia, say, old coal town. The sociologist correctly identifies historical racism as a factor in some of the students' issues. So they... what? Acknowledge it? What for? They begin their real work addressing (somehow, idk) the homework environments kids have, their encouragement to succeed, the parents' support, school supplies, whatever. And race comes into the calculations exactly... never. I imagine it would be very disturbing if it did. "We're gonna help the black kids first because Jim Crow happened and that means they need it more." Well... maybe! Why make the approximation? Just focus on the proximal causes and get a precise prescription, no need for rounding.
>You're arguing that teaching calculus in public school is a form of eugenics.
If that's your assessment, then you are, ironically, yourself proof of the failure of the American education system. (If you were educated in it. If not, you're proof of the failure of whatever system you were educated in.)
There is no reasonable read of the previous message that could lead the to conclusion that that was its argument. None. Zero.
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