The US is completely obsessed with race. It's utterly bizarre to me. I often ask people what race has to do with anything, but they never seem to provide me with a convincing answer...
This is one thing I never understood. Im conservative and race rarely crosses my mind. Having grown up military and been in the military you perform your duties and hang out with a range of people. Not once in my 11 years in the military did I see race brought up. After getting out and being in tech, race is brought up all the time that. Those who 'skew liberal to progressive' have an unnatural obsession with race. Why is that?
People have an "unnatural obsession with race" because they want to fix race issues they believe exist in our society. It is not really difficult to understand.
the thing is, there is a very strong awareness of race in us society, and it factors into a host of conscious and unconscious decisions. the net effect is that the "tilt" of the field you play on is sharply affected by your race. also, since society is in many ways fairly segregated along racial lines, your background and environment are often a factor of your race too.
officially ignoring that fact does not level the field; it just lets the people favoured by the inequities in the current setup continue to have the luxury of ignorance, while everyone else struggles along with no help from the system.
tl;dr: calling it an "obsession with race" does the people actually trying to help by compiling this data a signal disservice
What is the American obsession with race? I'm sure there's a more useful explanation behind these rates (perhaps family tradition of marriage, income, place of living etc. etc.).
I truly believe that most discussions about race get it all wrong. The problem is not race. The problem is culture. Different groups of people of the same race have different cultures. And it is culture, not race, that is the #1 reason for how successful people are in general. That’s why you see different groups of the same race having very different outcomes. And not just for non-whites. The “white trash/red neck” culture is very different from the “urban professional” culture. Knowing about somebody’s culture tells you a lot more about their lives than their race. Your culture is the underlying OS of how you live your life and the decisions you make.
Because we have a lot of people who are oppressed based on their race. The real question is why is America so obsessed with oppressing people based on race?
Race is one of the foundations of the American experiment, we refer to it as the ‘original sin’ (slavery). We never did anything about it until the Civil War, and then again with Civil Rights. It still lingered, as black/white were bisected in society. Then further subdivisions amongst other races. It’s part of our dilemma, we’ve been circling this problem since the beginning of the country.
America in general really struggles with the impulse to gate-keep opportunity. It’s true, America has the most opportunities in the world, but the natural human impulse to gate-keep kicks in. It can happen with race (‘we don’t want too many of ______ in our neighborhoods), it can happen with immigration (‘we don’t want too many _______ in this country), it can happen with class (‘Not everyone deserves what we deserve’), and so on.
My fear is the solution is still drenched in the same gate-keeping. The solution is not to gate-keep back the other way (‘they excluded us, so let’s now exclude them’). Same problem.
The investment portfolio rebalancing strategy doesn’t sit well with me. Life is not a weighted ETF where you can just go ‘divert the 50% of funds from commodities into a new distribution of 10/10/10/10/10 of crypto, gold, treasuries, etc).
Americans have a virtualization problem. Most Americans see that their country is diverse on TV and the Internet, but in their day to day, they really don’t intermix. Even if we do intermix, it’s still generally virtualized in such a way you only see them, like on TV or on the Internet. It’s even worse in non-major cities. It’s easy for most Americans to fool themselves into thinking they are open-minded, but it’s a whole different thing being comfortable watching another race on YouTube, than sharing a neighborhood with them.
I’ve mixed two different views here, apologies, but it’s a convoluted problem in America. It should be out of our minds by now, yet it isn’t. It’s so bad (or has been so bad) that we are literally setting race/gender quotas at this point, truly sad state of affairs.
————-
Edit:
I just want to add a small anecdote on how disconnected the discussion about this is. Usually we try to offer a chance to people who come from underprivileged backgrounds. This discussion usually falls on deaf ears because many Americans cannot fathom what it was like to go to an inner-city public school. They can’t imagine (no experience) what it’s like to sit next to classmates in the 12th grade who read at a 4th grade reading level (but are on track to graduate high school). If you can’t imagine that, then of course the discussion is a non-starter and will sound completely unfair. I’ve sat in those classrooms and all I could think was ‘holy shit you are gonna need all the help you can get’.
It’s just a country of a bunch of entry-level inexperienced citizens. Neither side has exposure to the other side.
reply