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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35891 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 3, 2022

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How much is a very large part? Can you list off a few specific metrics in which you believe that black Americans underperform, give the relative numbers for some other races, and then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely? Can you also provide what you'd expect the numbers to look like for other races in a hypothetical no-discrimination-at-all environment?

I mean, you do have some kind of "X specific discrimination which happened in these specific ways at these times caused these gaps, which I expect to persist for this many generations.", right? It would be very silly to claim that you had any idea what the expected but-for-slavery-and-Jim-Crow outcomes of black Americans relative to all other colors of American would be absent that kind of comparison, after all.

Let's get some actual numbers around this, both in terms of how you see things now, and how you'd expect to see things differently with a few specific point interventions.

then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely?

This is a silly hypothetical given that, absent the legacy of slavery, most African Americans would not be here at all. Nonetheless, we can observe immigrant groups from Africa whose circumstances of arrival more closely mirror that of Asian immigrants, and they tend to do pretty well. Recent Nigerian immigrants and their children out-earn the national average.

I don't really grasp the thrust of the rest of your comment. Obviously it's going to be very, very difficult to parse out the effect of every specific aspect of historic and structural racism, but so what?

Hmm. I don't think that the circumstances of recent Nigerian immigrants actually do mirror, e.g., those of turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants particularly well, but I'd be interested to hear you break down what you think the salient features of Asian immigrant waves were, and how they compare to the circumstances of the given Nigerian wave.

We've got a lot of immigrants to a lot of nations being done by a lot of ethnic groups across a lot of history for a lot of reasons under a lot of circumstances; we should be able to tell pretty quickly which of those factors (if any of them) most saliently predict outcomes.

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