Of course that's true. I wasn't so much trying to provide evidence as to point out that people who felt comfortable saying "I'm not racist but I don't think this country is racist either" should not feel comfortable socially expressing that position anymore. Social proof may not be evidence but it is powerful in changing people's minds who might not be as receptive to facts and figures. I don't mind if people believe the right thing for the wrong reasons (at least these days with how anti-science a segment of the population seems to be.)
> at least these days with how anti-science a segment of the population seems to be
Considering the truly abysmal track record of the social sciences [1], this seems at the very least understandable with regards to the "non-hard" sciences.
>should not feel comfortable socially expressing that position anymore
What people feel safe in expressing, when "safe" means "safe from peers disagreeing with you," is a terrible reason to believe something. If I came back with a poll of my local area that said all of my peers thought racism wasn't systemic, would you council me to agree with them? That's an extremely dysfunctional way of thinking.
Yea, both of these points are so bad as to be almost parody.
Not only should you never, ever base your beliefs based on avoiding the discomfort of being an outsider, but you also should never, ever, use majority opinion as some sort of proof of... anything.
If you did, you’d have advocated for slavery if only you’d been born south of the Mason Dixon years ago.
Honestly, I'd just edit the link at this point if I could since it seems to have triggered so many people. My assumption, again, was that anyone who doesn't believe in systemic racism at this point is not going to be swayed by statistical evidence. I am not advocating that any critical thinker be persuaded by majority opinion.
Luckily we're all critical thinkers here and we crave statistical evidence. I assume that means we also all believe systemic racism is a problem in the US. But in case you're an outlier I hope that link helps.
That said, everything in that link has been true literally forever (for the US.) But opinions are only changing now. Maybe 30% of the United States didn't see those stats before now but I find that hard to believe. I think social proof, despite not being actual proof, is more powerful than you folks would like to believe it is.
With all due respect, I'm not sure the BI graphs are great support for the thesis. All of the economic ones are essentially the same: if you're poor, you have less savings, are less likely to be employed, less likely to be CEO, less likely to have health insurance, and so on. They're expected to be correlated, so in some sense they are not as informative as a whole as one might guess from the large amount of them. It's also not clear that this has anything to do with racism, economists would point to a whole load of confounders which mags like BI tend to skip over.
The one I found interesting was marijuana, where at least we have two measurements of the same thing, smoking up and getting caught with the stuff. That could be expanded on, as there's a thesis out there that police focus their resources unreasonably on black people.
A really good study that investigated this would be something like the essays in Steven Levitt's books. A load of numbers, a load of potential explanations, dig into the numbers and every explanation falls (eg if abortions reduced crime it would be correlated across other datasets, ie countries) except for one or two.
At the moment my leaning is actually with you, but mainly from anecdotal evidence. Almost every trip I've had to America has has this weird race-vibe to it at some point. I go to a wedding, and everyone is 95% a minority race. I go to a comedy night, comedian jokes about my race. I hear someone talking, I somehow know what colour they are before I see them. So something about the society has race coded into it.
And then of course there are these horrendous incidents that we hear about every now and again, where some poor black man has been shot by police. I'm sure far more have simply been mistreated, because just by it coming up in conversation with other people, it turns out one of them witnessed such a beating.
But what we need is proper statistical evidence. The BI charts you've got there would be torn apart by an economist in a second.
> Here is some statistical evidence for systemic racism
None of those charts appear to be controlled for confounders. Doing that correctly is hard, but not doing it at all is ridiculous. It allows you to "prove" that many engineering schools (with majority-white admissions boards) are racist against white people in favor of Asians, or that "racism" exists to the benefit of first generation African immigrants who by many metrics are better off than the US population average.
> I think social proof, despite not being actual proof, is more powerful than you folks would like to believe it is.
It can be effective in convincing people on political issues, but that's pure tribalism. It's anti-science, because it "works" independent of whether there is any truth in the assertion or not.
It’s not argument ad populum, it’s actually arguing that you should feel excluded or discomforted not being in majority.
Anyway, I think the systemic racism discussion isn’t so clear and requires heavy analysis to get it right, you can’t hand wave it, and I’d love to have a nice discussion, but not so much to have it here.
> should not feel comfortable socially expressing that position anymore
The fact that this meta-view (that one shouldn't feel comfortable expressing a certain position) is becoming mainstream is deeply concerning. It is a terrifying attempt at extracting compliance from political opponents.
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