←back to thread

677 points saeedjabbar | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
wottamap[dead post] ◴[] No.23544704[source]
The messages that need to be said right now are very difficult to say because people have steeled themselves. But they need to be said. This is not meant to be flamebait, I truly deeply believe these messages need to be heard and understood, so please understand that I'm speaking in good faith here. If you feel strongly that I am wrong, please reply with well thought out reasons why. I will listen.

Articles like this do the black community a disservice.

Society pretending that there is massive racism when there isn't is itself structural racism.

If you believe you cannot succeed due to all this racism, that will be sulf-fulfilling.

Blacks that believe in widespread racism will be less likely to go to university and get a job.

Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed.

I'm not saying there isn't any racism. But I am saying that the level of racism is low, and the remaining racism is probably impossible to eliminate. The way to improve the lives of blacks is to stop focusing on and zooming in on racism, which makes it look a lot bigger of a problem than it really is.

Lived experience is not the way to determine why people do what they do. The hearer is not the expert on what the speaker means when he/she speaks. Like hanlon's razor, don't attribute to racism that which can be attributed to a simple embarrasing mistake. If you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The recent protests due to police behavior is justified to call attention to a real problem, and police need to be less militarized and better trained. However, the belief that they are systematically hunting down black people for extermination is untrue and only harms the black community, because if you believe that, you are more likely to consider lawful persuits hopeless, more likely to engage in crime instead, and more likely to resist arrest which means you'll be much more likely to be killed by the police. It's self-fulfilling.

jgwil2 ◴[] No.23544842[source]
> Blacks that believe in widespread racism will be less likely to go to university and get a job.

> Blacks that believe cops are out to kill them will be more likely to resist arrest and get killed.

Do you have any evidence for these assertions? I would be surprised if so, particularly with respect to the second, since police killings are notoriously difficult to gather data on, but I would certainly be interested to hear it.

replies(1): >>23545406 #
wottamap ◴[] No.23545406[source]
No, not on this specifcally. But there's plenty of psychological research that shows (for example) that if you tell kids they are gifted, they perform much better.

Whether this psychological effect is more or less damaging than the racism is probably undeterminable. But because society widely believes the racism is the bigger problem, and my instincts run the other way, I'm taking the other side.

replies(1): >>23546298 #
1. charlesu ◴[] No.23546298[source]
You're right, telling people that they are good at something may very well lead them to perform better at it.

But what if society subtly, almost subliminally suggested that some kids are gifted in, say, sports but not school, while others are gifted in school, but not sports? Or what if society suggested that some men are more prone to violence than others? What if those embedded in our media and even our language? Do you think that would have some kind of effect on teachers and students, police officers and citizens? There are studies that suggest that this actually happens. Psychologists have found that young children are aware of gender and race stereotypes despite receiving no explicitly instruction whatsoever.

I'd ask you to reconsider being contrarian for the sake being contrarian. Obviously, you should interrogate society's assumptions as well as your own. But you should do so from the standpoint of neutrality to the extent possible, rather than knee jerk contrarianism, which isn't always useful. Flat Earthers and anti-vaxxers are contrarians too.