Re: Good White People
 

AUTSR (always use the seinfeld reference)

Re: Good White People
 

People aren't going to give up anything tangible unless they are forced to do so or unless it benefits them in some way. 95% of people are interested only in taking care of their families and personal well-being (whether they admit that or not). I can't even really fault that attitude because in it's not in a human's DNA to give a damn about, for example, whether black people have a fair fight in life. Most people just don't care and aren't wired to care. What they care about is feeding and housing their families - the same thing humans and most other animals have cared about since the beginning of time. I wish we weren't wired that way - but we are. I wish this board represented the mindset of the country, but in reality most Americans (and most people) collectively aren't particularly interested in the well-being of non-family/non-friends. I guess my point is that you're right: it's going to take generations for the field to level. It will happen, but it's going to take a while.

As you can see, I don't have a lot of faith in humans to ever do the right thing. At least in the short term.

Re: Good White People
 

You don't seek out to make black friends, or Asian friends, or female friends, or gay friends, or any other category of friends. You either make them as you would any other friend, or you don't.

It is bizarre to actively solicit a person's friendship based on background. If you hit it off with this woman, she's a friend. If not, she's an acquaintance.

I don't have enough hours in the day to give a shit about someone's race, ethnicity, sexual preference, or any other differentiating factor beyond a person's control. Most people are such annoying, irritating, or insipid fucks it's damn hard to find a decent person to have dinner with these days. I say if you find one you like who's shining day glo green, trans-sexual, and a fundamentalist Zoroastrian, it's a win. Go with it. If not, maintain an open mind and keep looking.

Re: Good White People
 

I see a lot changing. My kids, for instance, don't even identify the race of people they are describing. My daughter had a black roommate in college and I didn't know the girl's race until we went down for her graduation. My son's date to a HS dance was black. Again, I had no idea until I opened the front door one day and she was standing there.

Even the kids of a few people I know that are definitely racist and not particularly circumspect about it tend to be more color-blind. I think that color-blindness will lead us to a more level playing field.

As a hardcore 5%er, I think our ranks are gathering.

Re: Good White People
 

In fairness, it's also painful to see people refuse to discuss the race aspect of things. I was shooting the shit with a black guy in line at a store the other night. Don't know him, just happened to get in an extended conversation. My job came up, and he asked if the criminal justice system was as fucked up as it appeared in the media. Struck me odd from a black guy, whom I assumed had seen its racist tendencies up close. But he asked a question, so I answered: "It's totally set up to screw poor people, and particularly poor minorities." For reasons I'll never understand, most whites will never say shit like this out loud, even to black friends. It's like talking about money, or sex - they assume it's too ugly for discussion. That's just fucking stupid. The guy's black, he asks a question about a racial incident. Cut the politeness shtick and answer the question.

Re: Good White People
 

I agree. It's happening. Slowly and organically - I see it too with my kids.

Re: Good White People
 

Like Sebastian, I too do not see race or ethnicity. Not because, like Sebastian, I am too busy to be distracted by these trivial details. I am actually unable to distinguish different races and ethnicities. I am post-racial.

Re: Good White People
 

I can't judge you one way or the other for leaving. I've left this board many a time. But it's been more for my sanity than anything else. And I'm not sure why the last exchange you had made you so angry, but I haven't been privvy to whatever has been building up here while I was on pb-hiatus. But give yourself a break and come back when the anger has subsided a bit. I like to hear different perspectives as long as it's not pure small-minded hatred. And I think there is very little of that (if any) over here these days.

I posted about this later in the string.

I think affirmative action is the perfect example. Very few people understand that it is a remedial program meant to fix the effects of racial discrimination in hiring and admissions, etc. They think of it as free gifts to black people at the expense of some deserving white person who never actively participated in discrimination. They simple cannot see or do not want to see that the effects of hundreds of years of oppression have put white people in a significant position of power and privilege, and black people in the position of perpetual recovery. Their focus is so hyper-focused and narrow that they can block out all of the other opportunity that their privilege confers and throw a fit over the one thing they didn't get that they so richly "deserve" (which is based on a system--high school grading schemes, standardized exams, the whole educational system up until that point--that is designed to reward those who are privileged and punish those who are not).

When I say white people need to give something up I mean that that attitude where they believe they deserve something based on the system they fucking created to reward themselves should be the first thing to go. Once that is gone, the mental approach where you believe you're giving something up in order to try to create a level playing field goes next. And then, when a black person gets a promotion in a company in which they are the only black person anywhere near the C-suite that a white person didn't, that white person may not view it as them having lost something that should have been theirs.

Whenever I am involved in hiring and I have to fight for someone whose grades may be a little lower than the kid who went from great school to great school, I try to provide some context larger than the firm's typical myopic, grades-only approach. This kid pulled herself out of fucking Gary, Indiana, went to a not-so-great undergrad, and managed to get into and succeed at a top 30 law school. Do you know how motivated this person is compared to the candidate you want who has a gpa 2 points higher? Do you realize how much catching up she had to do based on the substandard education she got at her public schools? Do you understand the level of loyalty and gratitude she will have for the firm that takes a chance on her? If you take this other kid he'll be gone the first time you don't match Simpson's bonus structure because he just knows he deserves it. I've had this conversation time and time again.

Good for him. When I was a paralegal I had a senior associate who put me on all his stuff. He was the son of a baker who put himself through undergrad and law school and who understood who I was. I point this out because he is a white guy, but he gets it. He understands. Usually, the most frequent and passionate pushback I get is from white guys like him who didn't have the advantages of wealth, but who have fought hard for what they have. He knows that when the white partners at the white shoe firm at which we worked look at him, they see a fighter who pulled himself up by the bootstraps. When those same white people look at the black associate (singular) he had working for him back then, they saw something completely different. I've been loyal to that guy for 20 years.

It's a huge problem. Firms can't wait to say "There just aren't enough qualified black candidates." I think people have been trying to change this by investing in kids very early on and trying to lead them towards law school because the fix isn't to hire as many black law students who make law review as you can. The fix is to go to junior high schools and high schools and talk to kids and institute programs so that they know a future in fields of law they've never, ever been exposed to, exist.

Yeah. This is why I go on rants about private schools. White flight combined with the emergence of private schooling and educational district-gerrymandering have created huge swaths of cities that have just been outright neglected.

TM

Re: Good White People
 

Why do you think I asked him to post about it?

TM

Re: Good White People
 

Agreed, but I have a problem with those examples. And I guess it comes down to a question of whether risk minimization is true racism. The decision to lend is a risk analysis. If black neighborhoods tend to be poor neighborhoods, and poor ones have higher default rates, is a lender racist for charging a higher rate? Perhaps the outcome is racist, but the racist intent is absent. If an HR manager uses data suggesting people with certain black sounding names tend to be less advantageous hires, is that really racist, or is that engaging in cold, amoral risk analysis? I'm not suggesting an answer one way or another, but big data is making this already complicated question a whole more so.

This is where I become a little confused. I don't see what whites are giving up in becoming less racist. White people had an advantage being born white. Nobody's asked us to concede anything. We've been asked not to hold other people down. Or get behind police who murder them. But economically, it's not a zero sum game. The more black people advance, the more the economy grows, the more everyone benefits over the long term. Am I missing something here?

Nothing has more empty calories than white guilt and its gaudy public expressions of sympathies. But keep in mind - this is America, where no one has an attention span much beyond that of your average lab rat. In regard to almost everything problematic, we're all about awareness, and outcry. But when it comes down to the tough work of actually fixing the problem, we've already moved on to the next tragedy over which we can publicly display our dismay.

Re: Good White People
 

I'm with you. Although, I will say this: Poor people (and most of my experience with poor people revolves around poor people of color) give shit up to other poor people all the time. The attitudes I see in poor neighborhoods do not exist in wealthy ones. Wealthy neighborhoods are designed to not only keep people out, but to isolate families with fences and huge lots and private clubs, within. I know plenty of poor people and they look out for each other. I know plenty of well-off people and sure, they give to charities, but if the family down the street is struggling it's just a shame.

I'm sure you've seen those videos where a guy, dressed normally, goes out and asks people if he can have some of their food because he's hungry and gets rejected by people with money again and again, but asks a homeless man if he can have some of his pizza because he is really hungry and is immediately given a share. Or the video of the homeless man who is handed a winning lottery ticket (for like a few hundred bucks) who wants to share it with the guy who set it up as an experiment. Whether it's something like that or the study that showed that it's the older, poor, black women who are x-times more likely to give up their seat to a pregnant woman on public transportation, there's just a different attitude that comes from having nothing and not believing you deserve a ton of shit.

I think it's easy to say that we focus on our families because it's the acceptable way of saying, I don't give a fuck about other people. But, like you said, we really should recognize that that's what we're saying. If your attitude is, "I want to give my child every advantage in life," okay. But no one should pretend that there isn't a flip side to that coin.

TM

Re: Good White People
 

If one has designed one's life, consciously or not, in such a way that one will never come across a minority who is not in a service position, then maybe one should rethink one's approach.

TM

Re: Good White People
 

I call bullshit. The black neighborhoods tend to be a greater risk, because they are populated by poor black people. That's what you're saying, and that ain't pure economics.

What's more, even if it's a bigger risk than lending to the nice white folks who are buying a second home in Door County, so what? Take the risk. Give people a chance. Chase makes enough money that it can afford to lend millions more than it does to minorities and people in lower income brackets, wind up eating every single one of those loans, and they would do better than one bad credit default swap. Which is funny, because credit default swaps are based on the assumption that there will be a decent number of failures by large corporations run and owned by rich white people.

As for the HR guy, I'd fire em just for looking for that kind of data. So maybe the black kid has a higher learning curve. Put in more effort, take more time. Make it better. Because let's face it, we both know what the underlying cause of that performance disparity is, and it isn't who worked harder in school.

Re: Good White People
 

Fucking stop it. Maybe you selectively chose to ignore the words "everything else being equal?" Your push back on the mortgage example is ridiculous. If I earn x dollars a year and have x assets and you earn the same and have the same and we both want a house that is worth exactly the same amount, and the only difference between the two of us is the racial make-up of the neighborhood in which we live, the fact that you have a lower interest than I, is fucking racist. And it's institutional. Maybe they default with more frequency because their rates are significantly fucking higher for bullshit reasons. Read the studies about redlining. Hell, read the definition.

Your second example is even more stupid. What fucking data are you talking about that suggests people with black sounding names tend to be less advantageous hires? What a ridiculous thing to say. Amoral risk analysis. Suck a dick.

You're looking at it from a macro level instead of the personal level that people use to view this stuff. I've already written a bunch about this, so I'll avoid repeating myself.

TM

I think this is partly what the woman in the article was saying.

TM

Re: Good White People
 

Seriously, I am not there yet, but attempting. I figure if I can shame myself enough by saying in my head, "It's irrational to consider race or ethnicity" enough, I might get there someday.

But then I wind up litigating against people who fit stereotypes, and their cultural ticks become relevant for purposes of assessing how they'll behave in the case, and let perceptions of how others of their culture might play the game inform how I behave. Some folks do fit the stereotypes, and it'd be malpractice not to expect certain things from them.