Since you have a history of breaking the site guidelines and have been continuing to post flamebait to HN, I've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> ...are just more academically inclined than others...
It's not "races", it's culture. We should just remove this whole idea of "race" from our understanding of social phenomena, all it can do is mislead. There are African, Black subcultures like the Igbo and Ashanti that achieve to the highest levels academically (including in the West!) and Asian subcultures that don't place any focus on education, and struggle as a result. Culture is what matters. Forget race.
I have lived in a USA urban metropolitan area most of my entire life.. Asian and Black are not nearly descriptive enough terms.. there are massive variations in the populations.. as the post above said.. its not sufficient, and directly misleading, to distinguish people in education.. secondly, "White Males" repeatedly get left out of special offers and incentives, and there are tons of those special incentives, for decades.. the educational spectrum of "White Males" is also huge .. its a real mess and people get angry about the topics right away when discussing them..
This is not much better, and is often used (without implicating the parent commenter) by racists as codeword cover. Again, I'm not implicating you, but consider for what reasons they use it.
Think about it: What do you know about these 'cultures'? Have you lived in one? How do you even define the word - is there a definition outside pop politics? Is it a static thing? Over time or space? Do you have any data correlating this thing with educational outcomes? Notice we have lots of people talking about black 'culture', etc., but WTF do they know? Where are the black people who actually know something? Would you ask someone from Mumbai about the culture of Rio?
One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth. We are discriminating openly against poor kids. And you only have to see the condition of schools in poor communities to make that immediately clear.
Our society provides few educational opportunities or career opportunities, is often openly discimrinatory toward them, uses a legal system that abuses them, and mocks and attacks anyone who tries to do anything about it. I've been around these 'cultures' - I know hard-working people, like you and me, but struggling to get by every day, struggling to help their kids, and absolutely despairing against the impossible odds and the growing mountain of hate and disregard. You can't imagine it until you see it day after day after day.
One thing I've been told, when I've made an effort, is that it's useless, it's pointless, the white wealthy majority will never, ever allow it. And I've come to see that they are right, to a degree - that is how it plays out every time. One way or another, there is always a reason to shoot down anything that will give black people a way up, and it's been true for generations. 'Culture' is just another one. Forget what you believe, just watch and see if that hypothesis is matched by the data. I used to think like many on HN; the data showed my theory was wrong, and the data always wins out (or it's not scientific reasoning).
And then I come to HN and see people doing the exact same thing, repeating the same arguments that inevitably lead to the same place. And my God, imagine being black and reading this stuff about yourself, your family, your kids, on HN.
> One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth.
Really? I'd love to see a study on how kids of lottery winners fare wrt. educational outcomes. That would be the real way to isolate that "wealth" factor from differences in cultural norms (and yes, generational effects of previous achievement, such as your grandparents being literate and passing on a basic awareness of education to their descendants) that merely happen to correlate in the long run with wealth. Want to take bets?
> ... One way or another, there is always a reason to shoot down anything that will give black people a way up, and it's been true for generations. ...
I really, really don't understand this claim. "Culture" is actually a very malleable thing even in the short-to-medium term, so if it happens to be a big causal factor on bad outcomes this means that efforts to help Black people achieve are more, not less likely to succeed! Compare "racism and discrimination" which basically nobody knows how to tackle in anything like an effective way. If anything it may well be that once broad outcomes improve, this will help obviate much of the previously existing motive for harmful prejudice and discrimination against Blacks.
> Compare "racism and discrimination" which basically nobody knows how to tackle in anything like an effective way.
We certainly do know how, and we've done it. The message of hopelessness is the message, perhaps unwittingly, of the white supremacists, who want nothing to be done, who want racial division to appear hopeless and unavoidable.
From segregation and lynchings in the 1950s, we now have civil rights, almost universal acceptance of interracial marriage (I think the surveys ~1960 showed ~3% acceptance), African-American education and welfare has skyrocketed - but from such a low point that it still has far to go. We elected a black President. Racism in other circumstances has died - against Germans (esp. in Revolutionary times), Italians, Irish, Catholics, Jews, Mormans, etc. etc.
But now they have made it fashionable to argue against even the presence of racism, against all fact and observation - even in this very thread, where someone openly claimed race determined educational outcomes. I periodically here openly racist comments from white people I know - as a simple example, when the plan to pay for community college fell through in Congress, one white person I know said, with a laugh, 'thank god; now we won't have to pay for blacks to go to college'. And people take it up. We live in the post-truth world, where people align with whatever can be insisted upon, and many are and will pay the cost.
>> One thing that does correlate with educational outcomes, more than anything iirc, is parental wealth.
> Really?
Yes, you can find the research easily.
> If anything it may well be that once broad outcomes improve, this will help obviate much of the previously existing motive for harmful prejudice and discrimination against Blacks.
We have 400 years history of racism; attributing it to educational outcomes has no basis.
Nobody is making any assumptions or predeterminations about cultures, the point is that we need to recognize that it's not the color of your skin or your heritage that determines your placement, it's the environment you grow up in. Coincidentally, this does match up with your 'parental wealth' claim, since any pair of upper-middle-class parents is more likely able to afford to live in an area with schools rated at least 6 by GreatSchools, thus giving their child(ren) a better opportunity at education.
> We are discriminating openly against poor kids. And you only have to see the condition of schools in poor communities to make that immediately clear.
The way I see it, the only thing directly hindering any integration of lower-class and higher-class kids in schools is what I said above - housing prices and general zoning laws that make it nearly impossible to build low-cost housing in existing high-class areas. Any time there is a housing project (read: reasonably priced apartments), "NIMBY" happens and nobody wants the new complex to be built since it'll directly lower the home values of the existing houses in the area; in general, the administration running the local city/county government has to follow their constituents' wishes, so this likely isn't going to change until some higher government passes a law softening the power of zoning laws. This combined with how schools are heavily funded by their county's property taxes creates a barrier where the poorer schools don't get the funding they need to level the playing field and poorer parents can't move to put their kid in better education, thus keeping it hard for the child and their future generations to climb out of poverty.
> it's not the color of your skin or your heritage that determines your placement
Where could that come from? There is an enormous history of racism in the US, and plenty of it overtly, less overtly, etc. right now. You could see it in this thread, where someone literally said that race was the determining factor. You have to blind yourself not to see it over and over in our society.
And yet it somehow doesn't affect people or their educations? Instead of fighting a political battle, what can we do to end it?
> this does match up with your 'parental wealth' claim, since any pair of upper-middle-class parents is more likely able to afford to live in an area with schools rated at least 6 by GreatSchools, thus giving their child(ren) a better opportunity at education.
I wonder if the research controls for that; it would tell us a lot.
> the only thing directly hindering any integration of lower-class and higher-class kids in schools is what I said above
There is plenty of data to observe; we don't have to guess. What is your guess based on? In my non-systematic and few observations, attempts at integration are resisted aggressively by white parents, especially now. Also, remember school busing.
Over time, observe if the hypothesis that I was told - that I doubted and argued against, and that I had to admit I found true to be - see whether it is true: There is always another story, another explanation, year after year, generation after generation, but the result always consistent with racial discrimination.
I’m saying that, right now, those aren’t direct factors, although they are generally the factors that have put the current generation of African Americans in this situation of living in poverty/being apart of the lower class. My point is that no school is worse because 99% of the students are black, they’re worse because they don’t have any expensive houses paying dividends in the form of property taxes to match the luxuries afforded by richer communities.
> In my non-systematic and few observations, attempts at integration are resisted aggressively by white parents, especially now.
This is not contradictory to my point, I’m simply detailing the ‘how’ in their efforts to oppose integration. Nobody is going into school board meetings asking them to put up barriers to prevent black people from integrating, they’re making sure affordable housing projects are never approved.
I agree that funding through real estate taxes is a mechanism of what is called structural racism ("the factors that have put the current generation of African Americans in this situation of living in poverty/being apart of the lower class"), but there are other mechanisms, and there are directly racist beliefs. I don't know how you can claim there are not plenty of racist beliefs, or that they magically have no impact. Off the top of my head, from the last six months, said to me personally by white people:
- 'Everyone knows that black people are biologically inferior.'
- With a smile, and disdain: 'Did you see that Biden's college funding failed? We won't have to pay for the blacks to go to college.'
Look at what happens if racism is brought up on HN: It is shut down vigorously, endless responses saying that it doesn't exist, challenging every aspect, major or minute or imaginary and mostly just argumentative. It must be proven beyond any shadow of a doubt, better than the Laws of Motion, despite overwhelming evidence - why are the standards impossibly high? Imagine all that energy going into addressing racism.
Why are you so determined to deny its existance, even beyond the limited thing about housing? You can see it everywhere, see stories of it everywhere. Talk to any black person, who actually lives it and sees it - don't argue, just be curious. I've never talked to one black person who shares the prevelent view on HN.
> the only seemingly rational explanation for inequity is discrimination
Wait, this is not what I said and is not how serious social science is done. In many ways, public K-12 education is equally abysmal for everyone. It may not overtly discriminate, but it lets people fall through the cracks in a way that amplifies the causal influence of pure luck (i.e. randomness, noise in outcomes) and external factors such as different cultural attitudes and generational history (such as whether your grandparents and great-grandparents happened to be educated or at least literate), that account for much of the observed correlation with race.
15 day old account, comments so far: races are just have different academic aptitudes, the US needs fewer immigrants, crypto is cool, the US needs fewer immigrants again, and the main agenda: the US needs to stop sending weapons to Ukraine.
