Click on the Twitter thread, learn a thing or two. We still live in a caste system in America:

https://twitter.com/cypheroftyr/stat...56345823240192

https://twitter.com/cypheroftyr/stat...56759935254528

nsfw language

Yeah, not much to learn there. Institutional racism sucks and is brutal for minorities in this country.

The assertion that middle class black people have it better than dirt poor white people on whole is pretty absurd in my opinion.

"Learn a thing or two", zzz yeah how about you try to learn a bit yourself outside of your limited twitter sphere and video games?

I think it's useful to try to explain to people that "racism" encompasses more than individual prejudice, i.e that systemic and structural problems like those in the criminal justice system are greatly important, and those issues don't impact white people.

But I think that starting that conversation with the line "POC can't be racist towards white people" is perhaps not the most useful approach. The problem is precisely that most people are going to read that as "POC can't have prejudicial attitudes towards white people", which is trivially false. If that's how they read the tweet, they scoff at it, and never proceed further to the part where it's explained that a different definition of racism is being employed, then I don't think that's likely to be very helpful.

Note: I don't think there's anything wrong with the person tweeting expressing their frustration however they want. I just don't think "POC can't be racist against white people" is a very good framing of the issues to employ more generally, from an activist perspective, even though it makes sense once you understand what is meant by "racism". The first problem is to make people aware of what the actual problems are and are not.

Yeah that seems like a fair point. A common issue with a lot of these problems is that they are very nuanced, but political messaging has always been based around simple, atomic messages because those are much easier to sell and much more readily received by larger amounts of people. And starting out with that original sentence kind of takes the nuance of the larger point out of it.

One way to think about it, if you're black and middle class, you can still get racially profiled--in your car, at the airport, walking down the street. Those run-ins with the police can be anything from annoying to deadly.

Your Freudian slip is showing

Agreed. This is obviously what Dan MEANT to say.

Tell him to try again. Nothing in that referred to some generalized 'having it better/worse'.

Mistyped in the one post. But my point is simply that I disagree that the system favors a broke ass white person over a middle class person of color.

Sorry guys, but ol Appalachian JimBob under the poverty line is kind of less favored than a middle class person of color by "the system". That assertion is absurd. "Look at hiring practices, look at leadership roles", uhhh okay?

i never understand the point of these posts. So middle class black people should shut up? So racism doesn't exist? Spell it out, Dan. This seems important to you.

Just read every post he makes as "white people are the truly oppressed race".

A white convicted felon is more likely to be hired than a black man who never committed a crime in his life. Chew on that for a moment.

Sure, but some black people are doing better in a very general sense than some white people. We've got to be clear about that for reasons that will presumably one day become apparent.

What is wrong with you? Clearly I am not saying either of those things.

Einbert links to this persons twitter and tells me to read and learn some things.

What he links to is one of the points that person states is that the system favors a dirt poor white person more than a middle class person of color.

I find that an absurd claim.

Have some self respect. No need to be a clovis level scumbag with your lies and accusations.

I think a lot of people, myself included, are tired of einbert's posting. A yuge majority of it is on the topic of the thread title, but it usually isn't on the topic that is being discussed at that moment in the thread.

He also posts in volume unseen by mankind at this point in history. He posts so many unrelated and random tweets & links that he often times doesn't have time to post an explanation of why he posts something or his opinion of it - which is frustrating to many.

Are you saying a white criminal is more like to get a job that both he and a black man who didn't commit a crime apply for?

Do you have a link that supports this claim?

Here's one

Here's a different (and slightly more recent) study with slightly different results:

So there's some variation in results, but the results are still striking. Racial biases in hiring are pretty well-established, even if not every study supports the more striking headline that black-without-felony has a smaller chance of receiving a callback for an interview than white-with-felony.

The '03 study isn't that relevant considering it was 14 years ago.

I read a bit about the 2nd study and it sounds like they did 3 different experiments to come to the conclusion that some people are racist. While I think it would be difficult to find anyone in America who would deny some people are racist I don't think their findings necessarily prove this.

From my understand, one of their studies takes a random group of women and men from different races and gives them fake resumes (half of which says the person is a felon) and has them interview for a job. The study says that the only difference in the applicants is their sex, race & half of them have a felony, but they ignore the fact that we don't really know if we have a fair comparison. How do we know women aren't better at interviews,Hispanics don't prepare more for an interview, white people don't speak the English language (or whatever language the company is looking for) as well as others races, or African Americans aren't better educated? It is possible that there are differences in races/sexes that may point to either no racism being present at all or no racism in the hiring process but racism in other aspects of life prior to that sample of people getting to the interview.

Maybe if I read all 111 pages of that study I would see they somehow measured to make sure none of this was going on, but I can't imagine a scenario where they could test how good someone was in an interview.


Analogy (all numbers are made up): 4% of college bball players are Hispanic, but only .0125% of NBA players are Hispanic isn't proof that NBA scouts or GMs are racist.

Possible reasons for this change in the % of Hispanics making it to the NBA:
there is racism going on at the draft
there are racist events that take place prior to the draft that the GM/scouts have nothing to do with
there are other explanations on this phenomenon that doesn't include racist events

table of contents on the first page under "research methods//research design" --> p25

It takes a long time to do research well. I don't think the '03 study is suddenly irrelevant. Would I love it if interesting research got updated every 3 years? Yes. Is that going to happen any time soon? No. There's not enough funding.

You seem to have misapprehended the purpose of the research, which is not to prove that "some people are racist." The purpose of the study is to investigate the impact of incarceration on employment, including racial differences in impacts, and then to suggest policy ideas that might mitigate those impacts in order to allow ex-inmates to reintegrate into society better. Like most research, they try to fill in gaps from previous research, for example by collecting data from a different geographical area, and by looking at impacts to women as well as men.

First, they took steps to mitigate the kind of confounding variables you mention. That is, they trained the applicants (p. 25-26), so there's no question of racial or gender differences in preparation between applicants, nor of problems speaking the language. Secondly, these aren't really interviews, they are in-person applications for low-level jobs. Third, their results are both consistent with prior research and replicate results from resume-only studies where your concerns don't apply. The consistency suggests that these kinds of explanations aren't sufficient.


Again, you seem to misunderstand the purpose of the research, but, considering just how much research there is that finds racial bias in so many contexts using so many different methods, your first suggestion seems quite dubious.

However, it is also true that research into racial inequality is not actually meant to conclude that all white people are consciously and intentionally racist. I've talked about this before. It is undoubtedly true that, in part, the persistence of racial inequality in wealth and income is a result of pre-existing inequality as a result of past racist policy, whether or not that same racism continues in the same ways. In other words, black people are way more likely than white people to live in concentrated poverty, in single-family homes, with less access to good education, and less resources, and that undoubtedly has an impact on employment. Not all of that impact is explained by individuals expressing individual prejudices, but it is very much a consequence of "racism" understood more broadly.

There is an enormous body of evidence that connects present inequality to a combination of structural factors with long histories as well as persistent prejudicial attitudes which help to reinforce the structural factors already mentioned. This is "racism" but it doesn't reduce to just individuals. But this explanation is for more compelling than just wondering aloud whether maybe black people just really are inherently "different", i.e inferior at getting jobs.

Yeah man, about 95% of research paper pages are just fluff. No real reason to read them or a synopsis of them before commenting.

https://twitter.com/pwussies/status/843333923828645888

What does the bold mean? Particularly the "system favors" part.

Yes, I'm aware that's the language the tweeter used. That's the point.

You dont just get to rewrite the meaning of the word racist whenever it suits your needs. So not only is it not useful to frame it like this its factually wrong according to the dictionary. What authority does this women have to change the meaning of words as they appear in the dictionary?

If she said institutionalized racism then that is an argument I can at least listen to.

Are you familiar with this women and how do you know what she means by racism?