Cleaned up some threads and moved posts here.

"The systemic level" is something you made up yourself as an arbitrarily high standard so that you get to claim that systemic racism no longer exists. No lefty who talks about systemic racism uses the term to mean that the entirety or even the majority of a given industry has to be racist for it to apply. Literally the definition from the coiner you cited is that racism baked into a single organization is sufficient for the term to apply. You're being a little less silly than when you tried to prove that systemic racism because different police departments didn't have exactly the same rates of violence against Black people, but only slightly so. You've still made up in your own head a standard that the people you're arguing against aren't using and don't ascribe to so as to try to stop them from using a term in a way that they're not using it.

Is there anything that you and cupee/etc actually disagree about apart from what to label it? I'm sure there must be and it might be enlightening to focus on that because what to label things is a very dull argument. It's not even silly like the personal name calling thing, it's just very dull and uninteresting.

Do you, for example, agree that job applicants are on average racially discriminated against based on their name?

Again, it's important to you all that I call discrimination, systematic racism.



I'm challenging that. You are doing what Cupee is doing. The term and definition is being challenged, and your rebuttal is the definition. What ever semantics you want to use, systematic, normalization, institutionalized, etc etc. Redlining is not a "normal", "systematic", "institutionalized" practice today. If you think it is, you should get group of investors together, really. Citing a few cases of redlining does not indicate it's normal, systematic, or institutionalized.

You want to talk about within a specific organization, go for it, but that's not what's ocuring here. "America is systematically racist". "Police are systematically racist", despite there being 18K different police departments (organizations) and have different outcomes.

You think so.

Yes, I do. I also think people are discriminated on any number of unfair factors. I don't think it's possible to eradicate discrimination completely, and I'm not talking about just racial discrimination. My issue is always been the extent. I can tolerate one bad bank (as long as there are consequences for that bad bank), and I agree there are bad banks out there. That's not what these folks are arguing, though. They repeatedly argue the entire system is broke (i.e. "banking industry") That's simply not true, and I find it odd (sarcasm), anti-capitalist are the ones who push these "systemic racism" arguments the hardest.

Ok. So to stick with the job application thing, your view is that if we picked a major company at random the chances of it failing the job application fairness test is low? We can't be precise but would you guestimate < 5%, <10%, <30%, < 50%?

Reviewing Job application based on a name is not a good test. It proves if you have a black name, you will be discriminated against and it might not even be raced based as the reason for some of the discrimination, and there is no evidence that you would be discriminated against again, by the same person. That does not give a good indication of extent because there are not many of those people in society. "Black names" are just not that common. I'm also willing to bet if you put the contact/name on the bottom of the resume, the extent of that discrimination would be reduced substantially becasue you are reducing the emphasis/focus on the name, which should not be a factor either way, and you are putting more of focus on relevant factors, consequently reducing the arbitrariness of decision making. I would also expect the name "Billy Bob" to get a fair amount of discrimination as well, maybe not to the same extent.

I also believe if you filtered those resumes through one hiring manager, one day they may discriminate based on name, and another day they will call that same name for an interview (because they are using arbitrary factors in their decision making).

Not to worried about discerning the underlying reason here as worried about the effect which is discrimination against black people on average.

Well that's agreeing with the point. This isn't about people being racist, it's about an unconscious cognitive bias and yes sometimes part of the solution is reducing the focus on the things people are cognitively biased about.

The commonness of black names is not the issue. The result of the test is in revealing cognitive bias not in determining how important this particular congitive bias is?

It stills seems we agree that there's a real bias here, I'd just like some vague guestimate from you on what proportion of major companies are likely to test positive for it?

There's no suggestion that other types of discrimination don't exist.

Quite possibly but we're looking at averages here.

A definition is not something you can just challenge. You can try to argue that one is using it inconsistently, or that the definition doesn't agree with other widespread usage, but having an alternative definition isn't wrong as long as one is clear and consistent. It's a definition!

I am not sure I ever actually said "America is systemically racist," despite your quotes. I think it's a difficult statement to assess, because "America" isn't a singular organization. Systemic racism is widespread in America, including but not limited to federal law enforcement. That being a subset of the US government, one could reasonably say that the US government is a systemically racist organization using our definition.

Red lining may be a less widespread practice today, but that doesn't mean that the racism is gone. Black people are still packed into ghettos, meaning that the injustice of red lining has not been undone. Furthermore, the legacy of redlining makes all manner of other systemic racism easier to implement.

What is a good, non-race-based, reason to call back a James but not a Jamal on otherwise identical resumes?

What's a good reason not to call back Billy Bob, but call William back? If you wanted to get the bottom of this, you would test Jamal against Billy Bob. But that test is never ran.


Conventions. If you don't abide by conventions, you will be discriminated against, irrelevant of race.

It is absolutely still happening at an industry wide level today. One of the articles previously linked in this thread specifically talks about the fact that while discrimination in the housing market has reduced (black people no longer being prevented from viewing properties, told that a property has been sold when it hasn't been etc) discrimination in the mortgage and loan market has barely reduced at all since the 70s when redlining was supposedly made illegal.

To quote from the abstract of the paper itself:

Essentially discrimination in the housing industry has improved a fair amount but the banking industry as it relates to home ownership still has industry-wide discrimination that results in disadvantages for black people. This is literally a textbook example of systemic racism that exists to this day and to say otherwise is to deny reality.

@willd

Why not profit off the underserved market?

https://www.chicagotribune.com/busin...503-story.html

According to Conservative Larry Elder there was bias against names like Gertrude & Penelope also.

I don't actually care what you call it. You are the one using our term, systemic racism, and saying that it doesn't exist based on a definition that we do use. It's nonsense.

Exactly. You expect people to follow white conventions. That is racist.

You never fail to never address what's actually being argued and try to sneak in premises.


There are innumerable amount of conventions that are not based on race. Such as an oddly spelled name would be discriminated against. Having a bias against unconventional names is not racist. It's having a bias against unconventional names.

You seem to have a bizarre belief that the free market is all powerful and that inefficiencies can't exist because someone would be taking advantage of it to make a profit. In the real world things aren't that simple and the existence of an inefficiency doesn't automatically mean there is lots of (or often even any) profit to be made by trying to eliminate that inefficiency. This is especially true if: it is a huge market with massive competitors; the person/company trying to do so is not already involved in the market; and/or the profit margins in the market are small.

That's encouraging I would certainly expect and hope that there has been progress in the last decade. Can I take it you agree with this part of your quote

Already asked and answered. Because they are poor. Because of systemic racism.

If there is no profit to be made, that means they are not being discriminated against because of race, but rather profitability.

You assert that oddly spelled names are discriminated against, but you have no data that they are, and that even if they are, that it is to the same degree as Black names. Furthermore, there is literally nothing about being named Jamal that makes one less fit for a job, ceteris paribus. Yet, it undeniably happens. This undermines your whole claim that the Free Market would treat Black people equally due to the profit motive making inefficiency like this a source of opportunity.

Oh right, it's not racism to steal from Black people, never repay them, and then treat them like **** because they are poor.

Right, that's why your "studies" are not really indicative of what you think they are until that's tested for, but strangely it's never ever been tested for. That's the point. You asked me what other factors could be a reason. I point to some other reasons that it could be.....your argument is there no evidence of that, which you are right. The truth is, it's never been studied. That's why I don't put as much stock in the resume studies that you do. I've cited a research paper previously (that you are aware of) alluding to this problem with these "resume studies" that you and other are so found of...but they have really glaring deficiencies.

What evidence do you have that "Emilee" and "Ryleigh" and "Kaleb" are getting less callbacks just like "Jamal"?