UKC

I'm interested in crowd-sourcing the strongest evidence of racism in Western countries.

I do not doubt that racism exists, or even that it is more common than many suspect. However, much of the evidence for racism I've come across doesn't meet scientific standards for evidence. Since a lot of work has been done on this topic, I'm interested in separating the wheat from the chaff. Since we have a lot of scientifically minded folks here, I suspect you know of well-controlled studies that I haven't seen. The traditional definition of racism—one that closely approximates to racial prejudice, rather than power + prejudice, or disparities in representation without race being shown to be the causal factor—is the one I'm most interested in. Whether the outgroup that 'racism' is directed to has shifted to a more fuzzily defined one (one no longer strictly defined by race, hence the scare quotes) is an interesting question but not the one I'm keen to address here.

Finally, I'm sorry if there is general fatigue around this topic. I've been in rural South America for a year, largely removed from discussion of recent events, so I may well be insensitive to such fatigue.

Evidence cited as a evidence for racism usually falls into one of three categories:

1) Personal reports. Given the variation in how racism is defined, combined with the fact that individuals are often not the best judge of whether racism was the cause of a particular outcome in their lives, such reports are not a reliable source of evidence for the above.

2) Evidence of population-level statistical disparities. Studies such as the one described in the first graph here (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z) fail to control for other factors, such as the degree to which arrest is resisted by black defendants if the police officer is white vs. black. In extensively controlled studies, some disparities disappear (lethal force) and others remain (non-lethal force). The following is an example of the work required to perform the proper controls: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_analysis_tables_fig.... In a UK context, harsher sentences given to black criminals for the same crimes may have explanations that are not founded in racism, such as rates of guilty pleas: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-do-black-criminals-get-ha....

3) CV studies. Some of these show an effect (this study was widely publicised: https://uh.edu/~adkugler/Bertrand&Mullainathan.pdf), but when equalising for class connotations in the names used, the effects can disappear (for example: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13504851.2015.1114571). Most studies (including this one: http://csi.nuff.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Are-employers-in-Britai...) do not control for class and other factors.

Finally, serendipitous social experiments that equalise groups for race—such as black Americans vs. second-generation Caribbean immigrants, indistinguishable on racial characteristics alone—show very different group statistics related to success, broadly defined. (Naturally, this example does not speak to possible differences in the legacy of past racism on each of these groups, even though both are descended from populations subject to slavery). Are any of you aware of counterexamples along these lines (harder to come across, I know, since all but one factors need to be controlled for)?

Again, my motive here is to collate the best examples, not to affirm that the fact that "without randomly assigning race, we have no definitive proof of discrimination", as Roland Fryer puts it in his study, means that lesser evidence is necessarily insufficient to assume discrimination as the casual factor in a given case.

In reply to Jonny:

So why do you not doubt it?  Because perhaps it's so self evident?  How about thinking about scientific ways you might disprove it?

As it happens this was on R4 today:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000nl8x

In reply to Dave Garnett:

I'd imagine it's quite hard to be scientific about someone saying"Why don't you F... Off you Black C.....?"

In reply to Dave Garnett:

A good study seeks to discover an outcome, not "think about ways to prove or disprove".

Since you have listened to it, does it reference any studies?

In reply to Cobra_Head:

I've experienced racism myself. It exists. Are you suggesting such reports are the most objective evidence we have?

In reply to Jonny:

Why? 

In reply to Jonny:

One of your links took me to a meta study on "correspondence tests" covering 43 papers: "Ethnic discrimination in hiring decisions: a meta-analysis of correspondence tests 1990–2015". I've no idea which, if any of them, controlled for class but all show a negative effect for a "non-white" name.

The Bertrand and Mullainaithan paper you link to actually rejects class as a reason for discrimination, see section IV (B) in the paper. From a quick reading of the paper, they do two things: firstly, look at address, which they argue is a strong proxy for social class. Secondly, they try to rank the fake names they use by social class, using the mother's details as found on the birth certificate,.

The Darolia paper you link to suggests that there could have been a positive change since the Bertrand and Mullainaithan study, but since the former was published in 2015, things could of course have gone backwards since then. This paper is similar to another Fryer and Levitt (2004), which agrees with your hunch - they say once you control for socio-economic factors, there's no negative correlation. I don't see this as a rejection of racism, rather a suggestion that it might work through other channels - in the US, there's the famous case of post-WW2 subsidised housing being specifically bared to black people, with an associated effect on racial inequality on wealth (rather than income).

I'm interested as to why you ask for scientists to look at this problem, given that it is most defintely a social science problem...

In reply to seankenny:

Are social scientists not scientists?

And also, to be precise, he asked for high quality evidence, instead of say, personal anecdotes. This of course, can be provided b anyone, but normally high quality evidence is produced via the scientific method.

In reply to Jonny:

A good study tries as hard as it can to disprove a hypothesis, and if the hypothesis still stands at the end we accept it for the time being. 

Even the least scientific, worst designed study in history will have had an observed outcome. It would just be folly to draw any conclusions based on that outcome. 

In reply to cp123:

Well, that's quite a debate, but speaking as someone with a social science background, I wouldn't feel confident being asked to look at a bunch of papers on physics or chemistry! And there are lots of issues in social sciences around data, biased regressions, etc that make even answering simple questions like the effect of schooling on wages actually quite difficult.

I think there's a difference between showing the existence of racism, and the broader social effects of racism, for example in the job market or in the criminal justice system. The OP seems to want links which show the later, whereas personal anecdotes are find to show the former.

In reply to Stuart Williams:

I would rather express the aim in terms of testing a hypothesis. This is not the same as a reader seeking to "disprove that racism exists", as Dave put it. I am not going to be the one doing the science, so all this is moot.

Sean has reponded to the question I asked, and I look forward to looking at the details when I have a moment.

In reply to seankenny:

In my estimation a scienctist is someone who uses the scientific method in order to discover information about the world around us. I would agree that there is a hierarchy of intellectual difficulty, running from say the physical sciences through the biological sciences down towards the social sciences, but they should all be using the same method. And whilst the intellectual difficulty may ramp down as you move to the social sciences, the complexity of running a study properly may increase. 

No-one is disputing racism exists just like no one is disputing murder exists, but the degree to which it exists including the extent of negative effect it has on society as a whole should really be answered by evidence higher in objective quality than anecdotes alone.

In reply to Jonny:

It references the experiences of Somalian immigrant who is now a barrister and examines, with some eloquence and subtlety, the respective effects of race, class, and intersectionality.  But no; no Mann-Whitney U tests or confidence intervals - he's not Carl Heneghan.

In reply to seankenny:

Why would you? I don’t think that being confident about something you aren’t trained in is a marker of what is a science. I imagine that a physicist wouldn’t feel qualified to give an opinion on biology. That’s not to say they aren’t both sciences.

Again, I don’t think that the difficulty of answering questions or the quality of the available data disqualifies anything from being a science. The data might be messy and hard to work with, but to my mind that’s all the more reason to apply a rigorous scientific process. Surely it’s the method applied rather than the data available that determines a science from, say, an art? 

In reply to Stuart Williams:

 

I think my point was he was asking the wrong people. And social sciences tend - by their very nature - to be somewhat more provisional in their results, and for good reasons. 

I’m all for using scientific method! I just don’t necessarily think asking scientists a social science question is particularly productive. And I’m trying to point out that data about the social world is very, very messy and hard to gather. 
 

In reply to cp123:

On what evidence do you place social sciences as easier than the biological ones? 

In reply to seankenny:

Okay, I am broadly with you there I think, - if I've understood your point that if one will accept nothing less than rock solid "proof", with no possible alternative interpretations, then they may be disappointed.

I don't think he's necessarily asking the wrong people though - he made an appeal to "scientifically minded" people to provide some reasonable quality evidence. That seems a fair question fair, no? Feels a bit strange to think that any social scientists with knowledge on the matter would look at that and think "that rules me out".

Edit: Sorry, I think that's might be coming across as a bit argumentative - if so I hold my hands up and mean nothing by it, long day.

+1 for your question about why the assumption social sciences are easier - I often think the messy data etc adds an additional challenge that arguably makes them harder to do well.

In reply to seankenny:

Admittedly anecdotal - I have studied physics as an undergraduate, biophysics as a postgrad and have a postgraduate certificate in teaching, aka social sciences, and the last was by far the lowest in difficulty and also in quality of data required in order to write a passable paper.

I recon you could explain the ideas of a social science topic to a biologist and they would understand it all quite quick. That wouldn't work the other way around.

In reply to Stuart Williams:

I would agree, but things like the replication crisis in social sciences indicate neither the scientific method is being followed properly nor is its absence being picked up by effective peer review

In reply to cp123:

I would say there is a difference between “intellectually easier” and “done badly”. At least if we are talking about the subject matter rather than the standard it is taught to, which feel like very different things

In reply to seankenny:

To clear this up, I didn't!

I said that "much of the evidence ... I've come across doesn't meet scientific standards for evidence" and addressed "scientifically minded" people here.

EDIT: I missed Stuart's dealing with this above. What he said.

In reply to Stuart Williams:

Fully agree. But the studies arent being done properly and hence arent harder to do.

This by the way, is the general picture. There will no doubt be some exceptional thinkers designing brillant studies in the social sciences, and some areas of the physical sciences with less difficulty, but on the whole, the concepts get conceptually eaiser as you go from physical to biological to social.

In reply to cp123:

Aye okay, I see your point. I guess I was thinking about it from a slightly different perspective - thinking about intrinsic difficulty of answering the questions posed (and answering them well), rather than the accepted standard within the professions. 

In reply to Jonny:

You're also going to run into the issue that a lot of the so called academic work has been plagued by postmodern thought. Helen Pluckrose does a good 35min summary of the issue here: youtube.com/watch?v=xoi9omtAiNQ&

In reply to Stuart Williams:

No - I fully agree - trying to tease out the complex web of cause and effect (especially when the damn things your measuring have a mind of their own!) is insanely difficult.

In reply to cp123:

Anecdotal on my side, but a degree in maths and philosphy then graduate study in economics, on the later courses there were plenty of maths, physics and engineering graduates, none of us found it easy (tho perhaps somewhat easier than maths, which definitely wasn't easy). I'm not entirely sure economics has been affected by post-modern thought, and though the replication crisis is a problem, it's not psychology or sports science!

In reply to Jonny:

Have you ever tried to pass an implicit bias test ?

https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/user/agg/blindspot/indexrk.htm

Often quite revealing.

In reply to Alyson30:

I did it a couple of years back, yes. Mild bias in favour of darker-skinned people.

How was it revealing in your case? Feel free not to divulge.

In reply to Jonny:

In my case strong bias against black people. I’ve done it several times and always same result.

Unfortunately most white people have a similar result as mine,this doesn’t mean we are all rampant racists it’s just that our brains are wired to prefer those who look like those we grew up with. It would be foolish to think that this doesn’t have massive consequences if left unchecked.

My impression is that racism on skin colour has been for the most part marginalised (but not eliminated) in western societies however new forms of racism, such as xeno-racism have appeared and are very potent and widespread, but not always recognised for what it is.

In reply to cp123:

https://blogs.harvard.edu/factual/is-education-a-social-science/

''Social sciences encompass a wide variety of disciplines as economics, political science, human geography, demography, and psychology, among others. And it also includes education.''

<raises hand> Using one example to generalise with, could seem to be unscientific.

In reply to seankenny:

OK, onto the actual data.

Like you, I only have access to the final document. The authors mention "holding their skills, qualifications and work experience constant" but not socioeconomic status/class. I can only assume it wasn't controlled for. This is important given how often controlling for it reduces effect sizes in other studies.

Yes, I noticed these analyses. The statistical power is a concern, as the authors concede, especially considering that they rely on what power there is to find an association between the effects they found and the class-weighting of the names.

It's certainly not an unequivocal outcome that one finds in CV studies in general, especially given that the better-controlled studies find less of an effect. It would be good to see a large, well-thought-out study. 

One addition I'd like to see would be variation in the quality of CVs as another variable, alongside other modes of proof-of-competence in the application. A blank CV with only a name attached would receive a judgement based on the net base rate associated with that name (and its associations with a specific race, class and whatever else, although all but one of these factors should be controlled for). In the absence of racism, new information would gradually predominate as the best evidence of the candidate's competence. Since racism is essentially the overweighting of race as a prior, we would expect it to be resistant to increased information pertaining to competence. Variation in CV quality and additional knock-down evidence of competence would allow us to tease this out. 

Of course. It's a rejection of racism at the callback stage, and little else.

It's a complex picture. Another case was when black homeowners were dispossessed in the 1950s to build a low-income housing project (Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis).

In reply to Alyson30:

Thanks for sharing.

I have serious reservations about the science behind the IAT, especially regarding the extent to which it translates into actions. I don't believe unconscious bias training is the path we should be going down to deal with racism. But assuming the biases the test identifies are real, I wholeheartedly agree with you that much of this depends on familiarity. Plain old conscious biases depend on this too.

One behavioural sequela of this fact, for me, is a tolerance towards those who didn't have the multiracial upbringing I had, only a part of which was of my own making. Not a tolerance of intolerance, but in many cases a tolerance of what for some would be crudeness or insensitivity.

In reply to Jonny:

Trawl through the last 50 years of Political Science and International Relations to see how racism and 'ethnocism' has ebbed and flowed among one branch of science. It's basically a course in how to get away with it and is alive and well right now with matters like addressing China, the Islamic world and Africa.

Things the west might label as racist or xenophobic can be seen as perfectly defensible in other places.

In reply to Jonny:

I'm not at all certain that they are. It's a shame this test has gained so much traction: despite the dramatic claims that it predicts biased behaviours, quite a bit of research has cast doubts on both its reliability and its validity. There seem to be a large number of confounding factors including familiarity with societal stereotypes (sometimes leading to a paradoxical result of more racially-aware/conscientious subjects appearing more biased), knowledge of what the test measures(!) allowing it to be gamed (leading to the result of genuine biases being successfully disguised), unfamiliarity with particular types of faces, training effects etc., etc. Perhaps most concerning is a fairly low test-retest reliability - Alyson30 seems quite unusually consistent but I wouldn't care to guess what it actually says about her racial attitudes - does she think it's a true reflection of her biases? Worryingly, the very act of taking the test has been suggested to harden existing bias. 

The original authors have pushed back at some of these findings calling them "complacency", but like you I think they're pushing far too much meaning into too small and too ambiguous an effect. The only point on which I really agree with them is that implicit biases do exist and do affect some behaviours. 

edit: hopefully for clarity...

In reply to kamala:

Well put.

Absolutely. I'd go further and assert that all behaviours are affected by biases, and that biases essentially represent statistical priors that somewhat approximate Bayesian base rates—the gold standard for statistical reasoning. There is quite a bit of evidence for this in psychological and neuroscientific contexts.

In other words, we face the world with an assembly of expectations (most of them sub-conscious). In the context of a CV, to use an example from this thread, one expectation might pertain to the competence of a candidate given their name. Since names encode class, ethnicity, parental preferences (or personal ones in the case of name changes) etc. to a certain extent, they inform the construction of a prior that represents a best guess of that candidate's competency in the absence of any other information. Since a name is a (very) weak encoder of competency, this guess will be a poor one but nonetheless one that is better than chance. New information (evidence), such as that contained in the CV, is then combined with the prior in a process that accounts for the estimated precision of the prior and evidence distributions, resulting in a new prior that applies to future information.

In a basic sense, then, priors themselves are prejudices. A more appropriate mapping, in my opinion, would have prejudice correspond to the failure to correctly update priors given new evidence, or more likely to the excessive weighting (overestimation of precision) of one's priors.

The conclusion of this detour into the mechanics is that biases themselves are not the problem; rather, the problem resides in letting them dominate new information—a process impinged upon by all sorts of cognitive and behavioural processes. Given technical improvements in the IAT, there is no reason why such biases won't be identifiable in theory, but identifying them will only reveal the priors that any statistical reasoner has towards every aspect of the world (not just race) without consideration of the dynamics of their updating. Similarly, the process by which biases lead to actions—which is the only way such biases manifest themselves in the world, for better or worse—is another process not considered by a focus on biases themselves.

In reply to Timmd:

 <Points clearly at the board> Did you miss the 'Admittedly anecdotal' part of my post?

In reply to seankenny:

I tend to lump them all in as "ologies".

"You've got an Ology?"

In reply to Jonny:

I've not really got the time or the inclination to get too deeply into a critique of various labour economics papers, but...

This is true. And if there has been a change in employers attitudes since the original study in 2002, what we may be seeing re the importance of socio-economic status is the importance of racism in creating social structures which are fairly persistent.

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. The authors seem quite bullish that they've tested for socio-economic factors and found them absent.

If you say so!

In reply to seankenny:

Could be, if racism is the cause of those social structures.

They concede that their study uses a low n, which they use as an explanation for variation in callback rates explained by name alone, but they then try to discern various correlations within subgroups of this n to test the hypothesis that class associations of names may explain apparent effects of ethnicity associations. Unsurprisingly, they didn't have enough power to reject the null hypothesis of no effect of class associations.

I gave a more detailed explanation in my reply to kamala, in case you're interested.

In reply to Jonny:

I was a bit short with you yesterday, for which I apologise.  I didn't realise I was so woke, but something in the tone and polish of your first post rang some alarms bells.  So, let's try again with some more charitable assumptions.

I'm a bit conflicted about your line of reasoning.  Compared with a lot of sociology, it should be pretty easy to design a CV study to establish the level of both racial and social (not to mention gender) bias associated with names.  By choosing names that are typical of particular ethnic, cultural or social groups (and even class within specific cultural groups it this should be perfectly possible.  What uncontrolled biases that remain can be ironed out by using large enough samples.  What can be done for names, can be done for school, university, age or postcode (although I thought blind reviewing of CVs was now common in UK at least - I still get US CVs that list names and addresses, although not date of birth).     

I accept that, in some cases, it's hard to deconvolute class and race where a the one (in this culture at least) is so closely defined by the other.  Does this really matter?  Is it not sufficient to demonstrate that a particular intersectionality is unfairly discriminated against?

I'm not sure I agree that a good study should always be neutral.  It's perfectly fine Popperian methodology to test a current hypothesis and seek to disprove it.  Not all research is exploration of a white space (no pun intended), much of it is testing current assumptions.  In the case of racial and class bias in employment opportunity, it's fair enough to start from the pretty much universal assumption (based on many personal experiences, which, although anecdotal, are often convincingly evidenced) that bias is frequent and widespread and design experiments that seek to challenge the assumption and test the possibility of alternative explanations. 

Assuming, of course, that the investigators are genuine and are committed to publishing and discussing the work whatever the outcome and are not, in reality, attempting to generate convincing pseudoscience.

My problem with the over-zealous application of strict scientific methods to slippery social models (particularly by people who don't really have a firm grasp on experimental science)  is the treacherous interface between complex attitudes, behaviour an language on the one hand, and hard numbers and statistical analysis on the other.  As the old cliche has it, the plural of anecdote is not data.  No matter how meticulous your treatment of the quantitative data, if its translation from the qualitative is itself arbitrary, biased or insensitive, it's meaningless.        

Edit:  Nearly forgot, I think the Harvard IAT is interesting, although easily gamed.  Actually, I got a result pointing out my sexism for refusing to say that women didn't do an unfair share of child care!   

In reply to Jonny:

Good luck arguing that racism *isn't* a cause of much of the social structure of the United States.

The paper says: "The p-values indicate that we cannot reject independence at standard significance levels except in the case of African-American males where we can almost reject it at the 10-percent level (p = 0.120). In summary,this test suggests little evidence that social back-ground drives the measured race gap."

Here I'm taking "independence" to mean the call back rates were independent of the authors' measure of socio-economic status (ie. mother's education).

I understood your reply, but didn't find it a particularly convincing description of how an actual hiring process might work, but rather a convincing description of how to shoehorn reality into a particular theory. I see your point but suspect that not having the information necessary to overcome (or not) racial bias would result in another confounding issue, ie that CVs with not enough information on get rejected for that very reason.

Ie "A blank CV with only a name attached would receive a judgement based on the net base rate associated with that name," strikes me as unrealistic outside of a strict laboratory setting.

In reply to Jonny:

Of course not, exactly the opposite!!

Most of this will go unreported / logged / recorded, so how are you supposed to scientifically quantify something for which you have no data?

I know it exists, which was precisely my point.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

It's not so much that being scientific about it is difficult.

It is more that the people calling black people "coons" ( youtube.com/watch?v=zs3L3vLE_ns&t=37) may very well be the same people accusing others of racism, claiming to be anti-racist themselves, and quite possibly flying the flag of BLM. 

The accusation, the term's politicised re-definition, and its over-use has rendered it the present-day equivalent of both witchcraft accusations and concerns about McCarthyist fears that racists existed around every corner.

In reply to RentonCooke:

I wasn't thinking of the word coons, surprisingly!!

In reply to Jonny:

No, a blank CV with only a name would cause instant rejection, on the grounds that the sender - no matter their class or race - would have been either too careless or too stupid to realise their submission contains not enough information to persuade me to hire them!

Thanks for your long reply, am a bit frantic at the moment so it'll be a while before I can write a considered reply - I see your points but disagree on some - so the discussion may have died down by then...

In reply to kamala:

Of course—just a thought experiment to illustrate what a base rate is (and not one that was directed at you because I thought you wouldn't already know—quite the opposite on the evidence of your previous post).

Sounds good, looking forward to it!

In reply to Dave Garnett:

Thanks for the reply Dave. Looking forward to replying to you when I have some time.

In reply to Jonny:

Your (mine) data suggest a moderate automatic preference for European American children compared to African American children.

In reply to Jonny:

Prison sentences on average being ten years longer for black men in the UK than for white men for the same crimes could be a place to look?

In reply to Cobra_Head:

Do a qualitative study?

In reply to Timmd:

Starting at what length of sentencing? That's a very intriguing claim and I'd like to know more about it.

I'm not questioning the fact that blacks get longer sentences than whites but in what type of sentence is a ten year disparity between races   the norm?

The OP is looking for evidence and he will be hard pushed to find any to support your claim, I reckon.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

It's clearly bollocks. The vast majority of sentences are under ten years for a start.

In reply to Timmd:

Really?

And, because I know you love an edit, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1100628/prison-sentence-length-in-engla....

In reply to Dave the Rave:

Who do you suggest we do that?

"Excuse me sir, I notice you have dark skin. Have you ever been call a black C....?"

In reply to Dave the Rave:

Of course you could do that, but to be honest, no one really cares enough to do it, do they. We pretty much know there's prejudice in day to day life, but we do next to nothing about it, besides making a few platitudes now and again.Worse in the US than here, I think, but still we're not making massive strides forward.

In reply to Sir Chasm:

You can probably blame me for taking something quoted on a BBC programme at face value, about the life chances of inner city youths. 

I'm going to do some digging...

In reply to Cobra_Head:

It's a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualitative_research

In reply to Timmd:

Whether it's ten years or not, you're right that there is a disparity.

The average custodial sentence in 2017 was 26 months for black offenders and 18 months for white offenders: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/crime-justice-and-the-la...

Whether or not racial prejudice is the causal factor is undetermined. See this link from the OP: https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-do-black-criminals-get-ha...

In reply to Jonny:

I was told to f+++ off back to England a few weeks back.     He was not well pleased when I pointed out that out of the 20 houses in our little hamlet only 1 was owned by a Welsh person  and it was the scruffyist one out of the lot.          Owed by his brother.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

We do know that it exists, yes. Getting numbers helps us to know how widespread it is and how much of a consequence it has on concrete outcomes.

Knowing the cause of worse outcomes for certain groups is important. If they turn out to be due to prejudice not based on race but on class, or not due to prejudice at all but some other factor, then the measures we should take to change things will be different.

In reply to Jonny:

I wasn't saying it can't be measured, simply it's difficult to quantify, people don't reports it and there aren't many surveys to get responses back, so we all know it exists, but at the moment there doesn't seem to be much measuring / recording happening.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

The face of racism has changed. It isn't directed so much at skin colour, race of ethnicity anymore.
In the west it is now mostly directed at the displaced, the dispossessed and the uprooted. But we still measure racism based on skin colour or ethnicity. We are missing the elephant in the room.
 

In reply to Alyson30:

Try telling that to my mixed race brother!

In reply to Cobra_Head:

Just to be clear this doesn't mean that BAME of mixed race people don't suffer from these new forms of racisms, if only by association.

Take for example the whole issue of the hostile environment and the government-sponsored suspicion of foreigners in general.
This isn't directed at any particular skin colour or race, but by association anybody who "looks" foreign will be caught up in it, so it encourages discrimination against some races - but only as a secondary effect.

As an example, you can have the least racist landlord or employer in the world, if you subject them to huge fines if they rent properties to illegal immigrants, they well might -  consciously or subconsciously - associate any person who isn't white with an English sounding name with potential foreigner, therefore a risk.

Note that this situation leads to a big misunderstanding.
The victim will - rightly  - feel discriminated against and assume it is because of their skin colour, but the perpetrator has genuinely no racist tendencies.

So one side ends up protesting loudly against racism, whilst the rest feel that the issue is exaggerated and doesn't recognise itself as racist, and they are both right.

In reply to Alyson30:

if its not directed at skin colour, race or ethnicity than it's not racism!  You provide the most perfect example of somebody who sees racism where there is none. 

xenop

In reply to Alyson30:

Don't you think the least racist landlord or employer, would realise it was a race issue, and therefore, racist decision.

I see what you're saying, but the example is flawed. They might not be racist, but they are propagating racist issues, and I would expect them to recognise them as such.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

When I say not racist I mean by that in the outdated definition of the term.

My whole argument is indeed that the definition of racism needs to be updated to recognise this form of “xeno-racism”.

In reply to climbercool:

Semantics over substance.

It maybe not racism in the most narrow, status, definition of term, but the semantic doesn’t really matter. If you prefer, call it “xeno-racism”.

The effect on people is the same, It denigrates them, segregates them, and put them at a disadvantage.

If someone discriminates against you because you are foreign looking or because you have black skin, the behaviour is, in substance the same.

In the UK, at least, discriminating against someone because of their skin colour is widely viewed as abhorrent, and it has been thankfully mostly eliminated.

However discriminating against someone because they have a foreign accent or are foreign-looking is seen as mundane, or even appropriate. Of course BAME communities are more likely to be seen as such so they are disproportionately impacted, this new form of racism causing old fashioned racism by the backdoor.

In reply to Alyson30:

You make a great point about the sorts of pressures that lead to biases being formed, and how these biases can be misapplied. I tend to agree that the new form of outgrouping you describe might well be the elephant in the room, potentially along with other novel or not-so-novel forms of prejudice.

I do disagree about the language issues though. First, I think the popular conception of racism has expanded to include new forms that aren't strictly based on race. Few took their time in calling Farage racist for his Romanian-next-door comments, for example. None of these people would refer to the "Romanian race".

Second, I think this expansion is regrettable. We have plenty of cognitive bandwith to assimilate "xeno-racism" or a yet more precise variant into our vocabulary. Keeping these boundaries as sharp as possible matters for identifing the causes of sub-optimal outcomes, else we can't do a study that controls for race independently of nationality or other outgroup membership. This matters, in turn, for the reasons I described above: different causes will have different solutions.

In reply to Jonny:

To an extent, but yet we have a government that pushes racist policy on a massive scale which isn’t recognised as such, simply because it doesn’t target a particular phenotype or a particular origin, but instead a more vague concept of “foreign-ness”.

 

I am not that bothered about semantic, but at the end of the day xeno-racism is as bad as old fashioned racism and has similar consequences.

But for a lot of people if it’s not targeting a race, then it isn’t racism, and if it isn’t racism, it’s therefore acceptable.

In reply to Alyson30:

This ^.

Surely, it's just a degree of hatred of difference.

@ Jonny

There's a long tradition of anti-Semitism, being down played because the Jews aren't a race.

Where are you going to put the people like Romanians and Jews on you scale of "injustice" for want of a better word, simply because they aren't a race?

I pretty certain, although technically not racism, the people dishing it out don't know the difference.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

Race is a made up and arbitrary concept only important  and relevant to those who believe it to be.   But surely the Romani and Jews are much more of a "race" than say Black, asian or Hispanic .  Both Romani and Jewish people have very distinct genetic traits that prove they have been breeding as sperate groups for millenia, so why do you say they are not a race?

In reply to climbercool:

As you said it's a made up and arbitrary concept. 
The point is that we observe the racialisation of a more heterogenous group, those of perceived or real “foreign origin” or “non-indigenous”, but it's harder to identify.I

Discriminatory behaviour towards people who simply have a foreign sounding accent, or are born somewhere else, for example, can be routinely accepted, but if applied to skin colour, would be considered unacceptable.

In reply to climbercool:

Your' post had you been a Labour supporter less than a year ago would quite possibly have had you accused of AS and you'd have been asked to leave the party.

Judaism, is a religion, there are many different races who are Jews, so how could it classed as a single race.

As you suggesting the Russian Jewish bloke is the same race as the Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jews. In Israeli, there are accusations of racial hatred against Israeli's and the Ethiopian Jewish immigrants.

work that one out!!

In reply to climbercool:

We seem to have  moved from talking about Romanians to discussing Romani and they are far from the same thing. 

In reply to Tom Valentine:

A good point, missed that one.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

I have a bee in my bonnet that applying logic to race is pointless because science and logic are of trivial significance compared to the views of racists.

The most important aspect of race is racism over which the people on the recieving end have no veto. This most significant aspect is NOT constrained by logic or morality.

In second place self identify by choice.

Then in a distant third or near total insignificance to the everyday meaning of race is science, evidence, evolution, logic, history and pre-history.

Hence for practical purposes races are mostly defined by racists or racism.

I may have positions 1 and 2 in the wrong order but I am sure logic or evidence is of near trivial significance in a very distant third place.

Defining race by logic is like defining something by the least significant and most trivial aspect.

It's like defining humans as "has toenails". It's logical  and evidence based but misses the point.

In reply to elsewhere:

Agreed, if it looks like racism or sounds like racism, it's probably racism, without any semantics. Or more bluntly it's just bullying to a greater extent.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

I take it further, maybe too far.

If racists say it is a race then it is a race.

Logic, morality and anti-racists don't decide racial classifications of what a race is, racists do.

In reply to elsewhere:

What if racists say  it's not a race, just a nationality ?

"I don't mind Indians, they're OK, it's Pakis I can't stand"

Heard that loads of times.

In reply to Tom Valentine:

I have a second more all-encompassing bee in my bonnet that applying logic to bigotry based on any combination of race, religion and nationality is pointless. 

And equally an Indian Hindu might be attacked by somebody who shouts about Muslims and/or Pakistanis but I don't rely on those doing the shouting to have good judgement, logic or an evidence base.  

I obviously don't argue that religions & nationalities are defined by bigots to the same degree as race because religious or national bigotry is in a hopefully distant third place after self-identity and the actual existence of religions and nations.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

 

It is  common among Jews to consider themselves a race, i see it as a race because many people who are not even religous still consider temselves to be Jewish.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2019/12/19/is-judaism-an-ethnicity-...

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/jun/12/what-does-it-mean-to-b...

 I dont't like the idea of categorising groups of people into seperate races but it's not my decision.  Given that Africa is more gentically diverse than the rest of the world combined it is very possible that an ethiopian jew is more similar genetically to a russian jew, than your average two black people are to each other. 

In reply to climbercool:

Well that's where we differ, there is likely a massive difference between a Russian Jew and an Ethiopian Jew. Considering I'm white Caucasian, would my race change if I converted to Judaism?

The Jews of Ethiopia aren't Jewish because they all come out of Israel, but because they converted to Judaism some hundreds of years ago (9th Century) , and through the generations have continued that tradition.

It's as daft as saying Catholics are a race or Muslims are a race.

In reply to climbercool:

Do you have any evidence for this? I realise Africa is a big place, but the rest of the world is too.

In reply to Cobra_Head:

Humans evolved in Africa. Everybody else is descended from the minority who migrated out of Africa going through genetic bottlenecks (ie movement of small groups). Basically if you ain't African you are one of 6.6 Billion inbreds with a dash of Neanderthal.

Africans who stayed did not go through those genetic bottlenecks. And did not cross-breed with Neanderthals and others.

https://www.google.com/search?q=genetic+diversity+in+africa+vs+world

That's not academic literature but there's loads of reputable sources and you can find the academic literature if you want to.

In reply to Dave Garnett:

That's OK. I've since had a look at a few of the threads that emerged in June, and much of this was covered then and I hadn't seen it. Nothing of interest emerged there in terms of studies, but I could have expected the potpourri of response types I've had here: "Why are you asking?" / "What is the value of statistics in the face of lived experience?" / "You're cherry-picking, shoehorning, using motivated reasoning, etc.". I do understand the fatigue, which is why I was careful to hone in on the statistical issues in the OP and issue the caveats I gave, but that just seems to inflame suspicions regarding motives instead of placating them. In any case, the end result has been that not a single study has been presented when high quality studies can and do exist (the Fryer one I linked to is a notable example). Either no-one is aware of them, or presenting them is seen as meaningless in the face of something so self-evident. Part of this was my fault for not making it clear that I was looking for strong evidence for the social effects of racism, rather than name-calling and racial prejudice per se, or perhaps I just have unreasonable expectations of social science as a natural scientist.

I agree that this should be possible. The trouble is that few existing studies compare like with like, and the effect tends to wane the closer they get to doing so.

If the biases are systemic (as in consistent in their valence), they won't be ironed out. Otherwise racial prejudice would be too!

In terms of policy implications, I think this distinction does matter, given how the conclusions of such studies aren't typically interpreted in an intersectional manner.

I completely agree. I was taking issue with your injunction to disprove the hypothesis given my position as a reader and not as the one who was going to be conducting the study. A reader looking to disprove a hypothesis will be prone to cherry-picking, which my request for the most convincing study was designed to avoid.

Sure, that would be a fair stance for a researcher to take, but in the absence of studies with that explicit aim, well-controlled studies aiming to demonstrate the existence of racial prejudice would adjudicate on the same question.

I agree with you here too, although in any case where there is no explicit cause for believing that bias was involved (such as a police officer shouting racial epithets while they mistreat someone), group statistics are the only means of knowing that prejudice influenced a particular outcome. Sometimes, our intuitions can be wildly mistaken, and getting it wrong has consequences (considering the police to be consequentially racist if they are in fact not).

You said it perfectly yourself above: "No matter how meticulous your treatment of the quantitative data, if its translation from the qualitative is itself arbitrary, biased or insensitive, it's meaningless."!