AgnosticBoy wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:47 am
Mithrae,
Before I answer some of your questions, I wanted to share to types of errors I tend to find in the reasoning of yours and some others here:
1. You try to establish systemic racism based on isolated instances of racism. Obviously, the two aren't equal, nor can you make a case for that even if they were a lot of cases.
2. You fail to distinguish if some factor (e.g. race) is a cause or if it's just correlation, or incidental, or secondary. For instance, your point about police shootings of Blacks. Is it being done because of race or is it being done because resisting the police, and Blacks just happen to resist more than any other race, on average? If so, then race was obviously not a cause but if you don't bother to look if it's just incidental or correlation to something else, then many will jump to conclusions about racism.
I'm willing to bet that I can poke holes in a lot of the viewpoints on this thread because they commit one or both types of error.
No-one in this thread has posted anything about police shootings of black people. Of course if you just make up the arguments you want to 'poke holes in,' I'm sure you will also be able to persuade yourself that you've done a damn fine job of it too
AgnosticBoy wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:47 am
Mithrae wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2020 4:44 pm
Out of interest Agnostic Boy, what's your highest level of educational attainment?
I'm in college now, and I have a two year degree so far.
So you don't know yet whether you will even manage to attain a bachelor's qualification, but you're happy to tell others that they should be pursuing second or third degrees? I've known folk whose plans for further education have been interrupted by crippling depression, suicide or other illnesses. I've known others who simply don't have the aptitude, intelligence or perseverance for it. And still others who've got the qualifications and applied for hundreds of jobs, without success. Recently I went up to stay with my Mum for a week, and she's got a poem
Judge Gently hanging on her toilet wall; it seems quite appropriate here.
AgnosticBoy wrote: ↑Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:47 am
Mithrae wrote: ↑Wed Sep 09, 2020 4:44 pm
Furthermore - as you yourself
inadvertently showed in another thread - even in the case of education we see evidence of systemic disadvantage against black and Latino people. Compared against white people pursuing/attaining the same level of qualifications, those groups
- were much more likely to require loans for college (85.9% vs. 66.8% for white students)
- needed to borrow more
- were more likely to work while studying
- required a full year longer to complete their bachelor's degrees
- were less likely to find employment after graduation
- had
more than twice the unemployment rate (9% vs. 4.2%, shown in the referenced report), and
- even when employed, were unable to find as well-paying jobs.
Your attempts to blame others for their circumstances were proven misguided even by your own information over a month ago, yet you've continued trying to denigrate them regardless.
If you are using all of these points to make a case for systemic racism then you're committing the error that I brought up earlier (error #2). The systemic disadvantage is not a matter of race, although there is a pattern or consistency there, but that is a correlation or even incidental to the cause. Nowadays, the problem or cause is the financial/educational status of the parents. I'm sure more White students have parents who can support them financially than Blacks but that will change when
more Blacks get into higher education. And when this population of Blacks become parents, then I'm sure they'll also be supporting their kids through college and you'll see that borrowing gap and all the other factors you mentioned start to become more equal between the races.
Firstly, I posted that link and information because it clearly shows the falsehood of your claims that education is a straightforward panacea to any and all racial disadvantages, and it's shown that for over a month, yet you've continued to blame and vilify black people as "suppressing themselves" and "making excuses for not even trying" based on your education spiel. The fact that those figures are
also evidence of systemic racism is a secondary concern... though it's understandable that you want to avoid acknowledging the more obvious, primary point.
Now you're apparently saying that since historical racism resulted in lower rates of prosperity and education among black people, what can be seen in some of these statistics are just indifferent
ongoing consequences of racially-delineated systemic disadvantages... but not active systemic racism? Perhaps with a microscope we would be able to see the distinction. But I refer you back to the Atwater quote in
post #6; biases and discrimination don't need to be explicitly spelled out in racial terms at the policy level to be racially motivated and more importantly to have devastating racial consequences. Furthermore (and I would think fairly obviously) the callous indifference of a people or government to the ongoing effects of prior discriminatory policies is very much the same sort of thing as overt racial antipathy: Suggesting that the disadvantages suffered by this generation of black people pursuing education as a result of discrimination against prior generations simply don't matter - that it's not active hostility and those disadvantages will fade away eventually, so the evidence can be quietly ignored as irrelevant - would be akin to saying that if you've locked someone in a pit all you need to do to make things right is unlock the door and assume that eventually they'll manage to climb out! According to the Wikipedia definition quoted in the OP systemic racism doesn't refer only to the presence of active impediments to a particular group, but also a "failure to provide an appropriate and professional service" - in this case, the fact that black people deserve
equal opportunities in the pursuit of higher education, rather than these ongoing disadvantages resulting from more overt discrimination.
And thirdly your comments would be relevant only to the first four of those bullet points in any case - to the disadvantages in
attaining higher education - and not to the last three regarding biases/discrimination at the employment end. As Bust Nak has pointed out (though you continue to mischaracterize the scientific studies in question, whether out of wilful duplicity or simply not understanding them still unclear) on that score it has been extensively shown that race itself is indeed the specific variable which disadvantages black and Latino jobseekers, regardless of educational attainment; with an otherwise identical resume, Tyrone and Jose will get significantly fewer callbacks than Angus and Charles. Exactly
why that is the case is less clear - at the most charitable, we might speculate that it could be simply implicit biases resulting from a heuristic of association between the job in question and the white workers who more commonly do it - but that it amounts to a very real and significant systemic racial disadvantage seems indisputable.