I was basing this on the pregame talk and twitter comments from last night. My feeling, if the media asks and discusses there's some talk behind the scenes. I don't have an editor so I can editorialize.
This is absolutely correct. Systematic racism is nothing more than individual people making racist decisions. Change the people making the decisions, or make them stop making such decisions, and you won't have racism.
Bingo. And based on what I've seen this weekend, that's what's happening. Some of it is getting lost in the "America! Get out if you don't love it!" reaction from certain quarters but certainly this has brought an increased spotlight on the issues. Even if that's just for a few days that's at least something. And again, all reports are that this is something the kids decided to do, not something that outsiders agitated for or adults told them to do. If all it results in is a few days of making people think about the issues, that's still a pretty good result for what 55(?) kids to come up with for a quick demonstration.
I could not disagree more. A society is not merely an aggregates of individuals; there are cultural assumptions, reinforced modes of behavior, inherited assumptions and biases, media messages, and of course institutionalized practices and laws.
All of which result in individual decisions. At the end of the day, racial discrimination involves an individual (or group of individuals) acting, or failing to act, against another individual, or group of individuals, based on race. Looking at it from housing, an area I work in, racial discrimination was pretty open historically, and you could trace pretty easily who took discriminatory actions, such as signing and recording a covenant preventing the sale of a piece of property to black people. There wasn't any real complexity to it.
Redlining was not SIMPLY a matter of individual decisions, though. And no "individual decision" gets made in a vacuum. The degree to which any particular individual makes a "decision" is heavily modified by the degree to which friends, family, coworkers, members of ones community, and society as a whole validate/reinforce the tendency to act one way or another. It's like "public opinion"--that is not simply an aggregate of individual opinion, either; group psychology and media reporting/filtering play a role.
I agree, from my time working in housing and housing police, you're right, it was easy to track. It was virtually everyone, not to mention near universal discrimination in lending. When virtually every housing subdivision in a town is covenant protected from sale to any non-white, that is systemic, when it's made illegal for any party down the sale chain to sell to any person with sufficient legal tender.
But those decisions were made by a pretty small cadre of people. The owner of the company that developed the subdivision believed that selling to black people would lower the value of the property (and he was right, because white people would be less willing to buy a home in a new subdivision if one of their neighbors was black). So he had his lawyers draw up and record a restrictive covenant. There wasn't some grand, shadowy conspiracy- it was a decision made by a handful of people for easily discernible reasons. Similarly, redlining was a policy adopted by the management of mortgage lenders because they held the bigoted notion that black people couldn't be trusted to pay back their loans. Maybe we're arguing semantics here. But, I see policies like this being enacted by particular individuals. And, until laws were passed to ban such behavior, nothing could be done about it.
You'll also find that most of them were born fairly well-off. There were several decades when almost 100% of East Asian immigrants to the US arrived as graduate/professional students. There's been research showing that members of disadvantaged minorities at MIT actually tend to do better than white or Asian kids with the same high school grades and test scores. This makes some sense: if they were able to achieve the same things in high school with less resources available to them, then they should do better when they have access to the same educational resources. So MIT has framed its affirmative action policies as being for the purpose of admitting the applicants most likely to succeed.
Racism didn't have to be conspiratorial at all then. It was expected by society that black people were either a threat or a nuisance and had to be legally segregated. That's the definition of institutional systemic racism. You'd have a point, if it wasn't a near universal practice for housing (restrictive covenants & redlining). It wasn't just this developer or that it was all of them. In the town I grew up in, it was every subdivision from from 1900 to the mid-60's and included Indians, Mexicans and "Orientals". And lets be honest, housing & property was one of the major vehicles of generational wealth that allowed the middle class in the US to develop, particularly after WWI & WWII. When minorities were being held back from transferring the equity/wealth of a home from parents to children for 60 years, the effect of that prevented the growth of the minority middle class that everyone wonders "why can't they just buys homes and start businesses..." Pat McCrory to US | UNCLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!! North Carolina Governor Drops 'Bathroom Bill' Lawsuit Against U.S. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-...ernor-drops-bathroom-bill-lawsuit-against-u-s
Probably happend around the same time the word minority stopped meaning "a group that is less than the majority" and started meaning "colored folks that aren't doing so great".
Not quite right, particularly in regard to the Japanese. Almost all Japanese property was confiscated during WWII, within the lifetime of many living people. So they started from scratch, yet are now a group with one of the highest average income of any nationality/ethnicity. And your response begs the question--even if they are wealthy today, how did Asian Americans succeed so much (outperforming whites in many regard) in the first place despite rampant discrimination. And tons of research shows that students who receive affirmative action are generally better served if they attended schools that they would have gotten into without affirmative action.
Statistically, that's certainly helped by the fact that that population is less than 1% (roughly .38%) of the current US population, including those of mixed ancestry.
The majority of Japanese Americans today are descended form people who arrived after WWII ended. You'll actually find a sharp line between Americans of East Asian descent whose ancestors immigrated before and after WWII: those who were here longer are poorer, those who arrived later are wealthier. This is mostly because, from 1945 into the 1970s, almost all of the East Asian immigrants to the US arrived as students. So the reason Asian Americans have appeared to succeed so much is: the successful ones started wealthier. They arrived on American shores with bachelor's degrees and with acceptance letters to graduate and professional degree programs in hand, and graduated into high-paying jobs, which means their children were mostly born into affluence. They were also skimmed solely from East Asia's intellectual elite; almost all were in the top 3% of their college classes. But it's also important to note the bimodal distribution in Asian-American income. The descendants of Asian immigrants who didn't arrive as graduate or professional students are in fact poorer than white Americans on average. That speaks to the discrimination that still exists. As for affirmative action: it may depend on the school, but MIT's experience has been that the underrepresented minorities outperform whites with similar high school grades and test scores, and this pattern has been consistent over decades.
Discrimination may play a part in that, but the non-student Asian immigrants were, in many cases, refugees (such as the Hmong). It's not surprising that relatively uneducated, poor immigrants who may not speak English have a tough time becoming as wealthy as white Americans. Yes, but in many cases, the white kids with similar high school grades and test scores aren't getting admitted with those grades and scores, while their underrepresented minority counterparts are. That's where the complaint is. It's hardly surprising that people don't see the fairness in someone with lower numbers getting in over their kid. Not sure what you mean.
You are using quite a broad brush to paint a certain ethnicity. I'm not personally offended but this is why all views in a discussion like this should be heard.
It's not a huge stretch to say that black people were generally not welcome in the new post-WWII subdivisions.
Are the minority grades lower or are they similar (roughly equal). To be perfectly blunt, the fact that minorities can even be accepted into college these days doesn't erase the impact of 150 years for them not being able to even set foot on campus, let alone attain the jobs and income/wealth that those jobs allow.
That unfairness shouldn't be paid back by unfairly keeping other kids out of college based on their race. But, this is a dead end argument. There's no real new points that can be discussed on AA. It's like abortion, or gun control.
Not according to this research paper, which shows that only 1/3 of the growth (not even total population) of Japanese population in post WWII can be attributed to immigration from 1945-1980. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=15&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi99ZaxqpzPAhUBTyYKHVzDDd8QFghvMA4&url=http://www.tsukuba-g.ac.jp/library/kiyou/2003/7.ONOZAWA.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHPDzzvijQuwTTgcLKg1b_X1zAIHg&sig2=zcJZbRVmv96hFHO9OZ9TEA And by the 1980's, Japan became a relatively wealthy country, and immigration from Japan to the USA greatly decreased. Finally, about Chinese--how wealthy could the Chinese immigrants have been coming out of a impoverished, communist country? Private wealth was only legalized in the last 25-30 years or so.