The Concept of Privilege

[carpedm9587]

How would you make two parents available to everybody?

I woudn't. That has nothing to do with anything I've said.

[carpedm9587]

1) What if their capabilities are based on personal attributes? Men are physically stronger than women, for example. How would you fix that?
2) What if discrimination is natural and rational (IE: capabilities and personal attributes correlate)? For example, one of the institutional privileges blacks have is that they can get into college with much lower scores than other races. This makes the average black college graduate's diploma worth less than that of someone of another race. So everything else being similar, it would be entirely rational for the employer to pick the non-black candidate over the black one if their resumes are similar.

Since "strength" is a capability - it falls in the latter set.

I have also said I find "affirmative action" repugnant. That being said, there is a reality that black K-12 students are less likely, statistically, to be in a school that has adequate resources aand funding than white students. So THAT is what we should be tackling. Straighten that out, and the college issue will take care of itself.

[carpedm9587]

Whenever my kids say, "That's not fair!", I tell them, "And you know what? Life isn't fair. Get used to it."

Now that I think about it, they haven't used that objection for some time.

And when the unfairness is systemic - it needs to be addressed, not "gotten used to."

[Mountain Man]

Perhaps that's why I have a strong gut moral reaction against both you and MM embracing the "life's not fair" / "I'm not fair" thing. My response is: Okay, so it's obviously morally wrong for something not to be fair, what are you doing to fix it? Writing "I'm not fair" on a board comes across to me as being functionally equivalent to writing "I'm a bad person" on the board.

One of the reasons I haven't put you on ignore is because I would miss out on comedic gems like this.

My son doesn't think it's fair that he can't stay out until midnight and hang out with his friends. How would you suggest I "fix" this situation to make it "fair"? Let him stay out as late as he wants? Try to convince his friends' parents to adopt an earlier curfew? Or tell my son, "I don't care if you think it's unfair, I don't see any good reason for you to stay out that late."

[Darth Executor]

I'm reminded of a book I read a while back: Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States.

The author is a US professor who while visiting NZ observed an election and was surprised how zero politicians mentioned "freedom" the way politicians of all parties constantly do in the US, while politicians of every political party in NZ were talking about "fairness" which he felt was little-talked-about in the US.

He was curious about this and traced it back to NZ being colonized from Europe a bit later than the US was, and as a result, European political thought had moved forward to taking democratic freedoms for granted (NZ automatically became a democracy after colonization, there was no fight for it the way there was in the US) and had moved on to trying to optimize free societies by focusing on fairness.

The US has become a bit stuck on the issue of "freedom", and talks about it through to the present day, and hasn't yet progressed much onto "fairness". Whereas NZ had freedom ingrained from the beginning and has spent the past 100+ years on "fairness" and trying to optimize society to be as fair as possible.

Perhaps that's why I have a strong gut moral reaction against both you and MM embracing the "life's not fair" / "I'm not fair" thing. My response is: Okay, so it's obviously morally wrong for something not to be fair, what are you doing to fix it? Writing "I'm not fair" on a board comes across to me as being functionally equivalent to writing "I'm a bad person" on the board.

NZ is not a free society, they apparently criminalize freedom of speech that strikes at the heart of progressive dogma.

[Cow Poke]

And that completely discounts contexts and places where the deck is stacked against in ways that are simply unjust.

Why do you do this? There are CERTAINLY places and situations where it works, and there are always exceptions. It does NOT completely discount....

[Mountain Man]

And when the unfairness is systemic - it needs to be addressed, not "gotten used to."

Everybody faces inequalities in life. That's the point. The problem with trying to "fix" them is that it's far too easy to trample on the rights of the "privileged" simply because it's easier to tear someone down than it is to build them up, and so much of liberal policy is designed to tear people down in the name of "equality".

[Darth Executor]

Since "strength" is a capability - it falls in the latter set.

I have also said I find "affirmative action" repugnant. That being said, there is a reality that black K-12 students are less likely, statistically, to be in a school that has adequate resources aand funding than white students. So THAT is what we should be tackling. Straighten that out, and the college issue will take care of itself.

It really won't. School funding has little to do with student success. I went to the second most ghetto high school in my city (another school had more black kids stabbing each other than we did), and then went to night school recently to get my grade 12 bio/chem credits (i never took them in HS)at a much better funded, well performing school. The quality of education was about the same. The student (me) was very different. The outcomes too. The differences in school performance are mostly due to the differences in students, not funding or teachers. There are plenty of unintentionally comedic tales on the Internet about white liberal teachers who met great success teaching other white liberals kids going to ghetto schools to impart their wisdom and being utterly destroyed there.

IE (possible language warning, been a while since I read it):

https://nypost.com/2016/01/17/my-yea...c-high-school/

One "privilege" I have is that I was born in a developing country. So a lot of the myths progressives tell each other about cause and effect are pretty obviously false to me.

[Starlight]

Writing "I'm not fair" on a board comes across to me as being functionally equivalent to writing "I'm a bad person" on the board.

That's downright moronic.

Can you explain to me why you don't see it that way?

[Joel]

I would not categorize these as "implicit bias." For example, as best I can tell, there is a stronger ethic in Asian families to study/excellence then there tends to be on caucasian/black families. This has been documented several times in several studies. So there is a tendency for Asian students to out-perform caucasian/black students. Again, that doe snot mean all asian students operate this way and all caucasian/black students are lazy morons not worthy of school. It is simply a disparity in emphasis as an overall average.

I would not consider that reality "implicit bias." There is nothing "baked into the culture" (that I know of) that gives Asian students an advantage that caucasian/black students cannot gain with the same effort.

But if someone is tossing out my resume with at a higher rate because I have a black-sounding name, cutting me from consideration for the orchestra because I have breasts, or calling the cops on me because I am black, these are examples of "implicit bias." These are the things the person being disadvantaged has no control over, and we need to raise awareness and educate. Where appropriate, we need to take legal action.

I agree with that distinction. Just to be clear I wasn't suggesting the former to be implicit bias either. (I said, "Could this also include things that do not create implicit bias...?")
Just to double check: I understand you here to be saying that you are not saying we should/need to fix all disparities. Rather, you are focused only on fixing the problem of bias/prejudice. I think you said that too in your OP, separating out privileges of circumstance.

Might it be difficulty to accurately identify where there is this implicit bias? Sure, where one can do a controlled experiment, one might reveal bias of particular persons in a particular place and time (e.g. a particular orchestra?). But it may be more difficult to identify it everywhere? From the above, we can see that from statistical disparities we cannot jump to the conclusion that the cause is bias. Nor can we make eliminating a disparity the measure of success.

I think that's a big cause of people doubting the extent of bias. There has been a lot of claims of such and such disparity proves bias where it was later shown that the disparity was caused by other factors. After seeing a lot of that, people start to grow more suspicious of claims of bias. Which is going to make the work of raising awareness more difficult.

[Cow Poke]

Everybody faces inequalities in life. That's the point. The problem with trying to "fix" them is that it's far too easy to trample on the rights of the "privileged" simply because it's easier to tear someone down than it is to build them up, and so much of liberal policy is designed to tear people down in the name of "equality".

Not only that....

you have one kid where you tried to anticipate his obstacles and "fix" them for him, and eventually, he runs into something you haven't "fixed", you can't always be there to "fix" them, and has no idea how to move forward.

you have another kid who grew up learning that there are inequities, challenges, problems, threats... and you teach him how to deal with them... when you're not there to "fix" things for him, he has the strength and experience and knowledge and determination to assess the problem and overcome.

[Cow Poke]

Can you explain to me why you don't see it that way?

"Fair" is relative. Fair to whom? It's just dumb to assume that teaching a lesson about life somehow means "I'm a bad person". That's beyond stupid. I'd be a bad person for lying to them and pretending everything was wonderful and life was always good and free from trouble.

[Darth Executor]

And when the unfairness is systemic - it needs to be addressed, not "gotten used to."

It only needs to be addressed if it's artificial. Otherwise it may or may not be unfair but it's not unjust.

[Joel]

He was curious about this and traced it back to NZ being colonized from Europe a bit later than the US was, and as a result, European political thought had moved forward to taking democratic freedoms for granted (NZ automatically became a democracy after colonization, there was no fight for it the way there was in the US) and had moved on to trying to optimize free societies by focusing on fairness.

Note also that the American colonists recognized that democracy and freedom are not the same thing and can tend to be at odds.

[Starlight]

I'd be a bad person for lying to them and pretending everything was wonderful and life was always good and free from trouble.

You didn't say you wrote "life isn't fair" you said you wrote "I'm not fair".

That makes it relatively hard to reinterpret as you teaching them that were injustices in the world that they could aspire to fix when they grew up.