Bill O'Reilly Denies then Proves White Privilege

[Hindenburgia]

[*]My response to the stop-and-frisk one has two parts:

1. First, the better of the two responses: stop-and-frisks would be much more likely to be done in a neighborhood that is known for having a high crime rate, through a combination of there probably being more of a police presence in higher-crime neighborhoods and heightened suspicion on the part of the police officer. Poorer neighborhoods tend to have high crime rates. Black people are more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than white people. This would on its own make black people more likely to be stopped and frisked than white people, especially since I would suspect that, since black people tend to be poorer than white people, black people would be more likely to be walking rather than driving when compared to white people, also making them more likely to be stopped and frisked.

Yeah, how about no. Again, you REALLY REALLY need to do some additional research on this topic. We ALREADY have cases that have been brought to courts demonstrating that in fact, minorities were being targeted and illegally discriminated against. I don't give a crap if the majority of the city is black and thus the majority of people stopped and frisked are black. I have a problem when there is no actual reasoning behind the stopping and frisking (not to mention that there are, in fact, more white people than black people in New York City).

See, he's the thing. The supposed purpose of stop and frisk is to catch people who may commit a crime or contribute to committing a crime before it happens and drives further crime. The thing is, though? It doesn't fucking do that. And the vast majority of these stops are done solely on the basis of whether the person is a minority. It has nothing to do with poverty. It's racism. Plain and simple.

First of all, nowhere did I say I supported the practice of stop-and-frisking. I'd intended to explicitly mention that I don't, but it appears I had forgotten to do so, so I suppose that is my fault for being unclear.

Regardless, I was unaware that such a case had, in fact, gone to court and been determined already. In that case, seeing as they would have access to far more information regarding the specific situation than I do at this moment, I see no good reason to doubt the decision. My apologies for not keeping up on the judicial cases of the NYC police department.

And now for the second response, which is the far less optimistic of the two. Racial profiling (which, for the record, I very, very much disagree with, though I do know a number of people who don't) is the usage of statistics to attempt to identify likely criminals. While attempting to correlate race with the likelihood of being a criminal is very much a fool's errand, especially with how prone it is to confirmation bias (the criminals you don't find are the ones you don't know of, after all), since black people tend to be poorer, and the poverty is positively correlated with crime, one can see where such a notion would come from. It's a dumb, dangerous notion, but a notion nonetheless, and one that needn't be based upon racism.

No, this is ENTIRELY, at its core, based upon racism. How do you even fucking think this started? This started from the racist belief that black people are inherently less intelligent and more violent that originated during the period before the Civil War. It then translated to stereotypes of black people in general, which lead to shit like Blackface. Later on it would rear it's ugly head in the form of negative stereotypes of black people in media in general. Hell, even Looney Tunes did it:

See, here's what you don't understand. The fact that African Americans are statistically over-represented in crime did not come before the stereotypes. The stereotypes came BEFORE the over-representation in crime. And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded, which inevitably led to crime. And the sad part? Because of this, a good deal of white people look at this and say "SEE! WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG!" which only further justifies the discrimination in their minds. It's a viscous cycle, one that AT ITS CORE is inherently ground in racism. To deny otherwise is to essentially deny a large bulk of American history and race relations.

First of all, I would ask you to be slightly more careful when deciding to shorten quotes. I do not intend to imply that you were attempting to purposefully misrepresent me, but the way you shortened the quote from my post in this section to only remove the sentence I included to clarify that I do not, in fact, believe that racism is not a part of that sort of thing or even that racism is only a minor part. Here's the sentence for reference:

Though I'd be more than a little surprised if most instances of racial profiling didn't have some degree of racism underlying them.

No harm no foul and all - I just ask you be a little more careful.

Regardless, I never intended to imply that the stereotypes came later, especially since those particular stereotypes are far older than even you are saying, with blackface dating back to the mid-1800s and the stereotype itself dating back much, much further, probably to before the country was even formed.

Rather, I'm more arguing against when you say things like this:

And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded

I challenge you to find me a modern example of black people being segregated/"shoved into districts" against their will that wasn't then overturned by the courts, much less one where these districts were then "defunded".

Yes, these things started in racism, and I am completely unsurprised to know that, for a disappointingly large number of people, they still are. But racism is unquestionably not the only factor, and potentially not even the main factor. Insisting that it is simply because it was is not a valid argument.

From the article:
In other words, in poorer neighborhoods, where they can't afford larger homes and therefore do more stuff outside, people are easier to catch smoking. And since black people are more likely to be in such neighborhoods, those are the people the catch there.

Oh, come on. Did you even bother to read the entire article? It says, not long after that:

The unequal arrests rates are not confined to a single U.S. region or to urban areas with larger black populations, the ACLU said. That discrepancy is found throughout the country, regardless of the size of the black population of the location and at all income levels, the data shows.

So no, your conclusion is utterly wrong to apply that specific quote (that's in the context of the District of Columbia, by the way) to the nation as a whole in an attempt to gloss over the racial component here.

My apologies, for I indeed didn't catch that part, though I did read the entire article. In that case, yes, it's probably more telling of some manner of racial profiling.

[Mavorpen]

First of all, nowhere did I say I supported the practice of stop-and-frisking. I'd intended to explicitly mention that I don't, but it appears I had forgotten to do so, so I suppose that is my fault for being unclear.

Regardless, I was unaware that such a case had, in fact, gone to court and been determined already. In that case, seeing as they would have access to far more information regarding the specific situation than I do at this moment, I see no good reason to doubt the decision. My apologies for not keeping up on the judicial cases of the NYC police department.

It's fine. That's why we discuss these things: to transfer information to each other and be exposed to new arguments and pieces of information.

First of all, I would ask you to be slightly more careful when deciding to shorten quotes. I do not intend to imply that you were attempting to purposefully misrepresent me, but the way you shortened the quote from my post in this section to only remove the sentence I included to clarify that I do not, in fact, believe that racism is not a part of that sort of thing or even that racism is only a minor part. Here's the sentence for reference:

Though I'd be more than a little surprised if most instances of racial profiling didn't have some degree of racism underlying them.

No harm no foul and all - I just ask you be a little more careful.

*sigh* Except, I didn't argue that this is what you believe. I argued against the claim that

It's a dumb, dangerous notion, but a notion nonetheless, and one that needn't be based upon racism.

My argument is that it is INHERENTLY based upon racism. I never claimed that you hold the belief that racism plays no part or only plays a minor part.

I challenge you to find me a modern example of black people being segregated/"shoved into districts" against their will that wasn't then overturned by the courts, much less one where these districts were then "defunded".

Why would I provide evidence for something I didn't argue?

Yes, these things started in racism, and I am completely unsurprised to know that, for a disappointingly large number of people, they still are. But racism is unquestionably not the only factor, and potentially not even the main factor. Insisting that it is simply because it was is not a valid argument.

First of all, utterly NOTHING in my post stated it is the ONLY factor. I said that racism forms the BASIS of this. Second, it absolutely is the main factor. To claim otherwise suggests that a large portion of the stereotypical and racist beliefs against black people magically disappeared. This hasn't happened. It's up to YOU to prove that it isn't the main factor. YOU'RE the one insisting that the racism no longer forms the basis with utterly no evidence to back that claim up.

[Hindenburgia]

Not to imply that I believe you to be lying, but could you provide a reference for the home-value-per-dollar-income of a house owned by a black person being lower, on average, than that for a white person? I've never seen that even claimed before, so I am more than a little wary of accepting it to be the case out of hand.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/resear ... k/rusk.pdf

Having read the whole PDF, I would like to point out the first table, on the bottom of page three. It clearly shows that average home-value-per-dollar-income for white people was in fact surpassed by that of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American people. In the accompanying explanation (section three on the same page), this result is explained with the fact that these minorities tend live in wealthy neighborhoods, which inflates the home-value-per-dollar-income measure, distorting it in a manner that is unfair for reasons unexplained. Instead, they opt to represent their data in the form of a mean of the means, which they do not explain their reasons for doing beyond a completely uninformative "The typical values (mean of the means) listed in the final column of Table 1 more accurately reflect the situation of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American home-owners" (3).

However, on page four of the report we find the following:

With one exception, the Philadelphia metropolitan area’s 151 wealthiest census tracts (ranked by homeowner income) were majority-white neighbor-hoods.

Which one would expect to inflate the home-value-to-income-dollar measure for white people for the same reasons as before. It is neither explained nor mentioned again.

In addition to all this, the second table (the one on page four of the report) notes only the "racial isolation index" and "typical racial dissimilarity index" for black people being "statistically significant". Nowhere does the report explain what this is explicitly, the only relevant passage appearing to be "Though variations in home-value-to-income ratios existed (plus or minus) for each minority group with regard to white levels, there was no statistically significant relationship between the variations and the lower levels of racial dissimilarity and racial isolation for minorities other than blacks" (4).

For your second point, I would also be curious to see a source, though I am slightly more skeptical of it being the case because I don't see how that would be measurable in any sort of reliable manner.

http://ann.sagepub.com/content/609/1/200.abstract

Specifically from the paper:

Underlying and contributing to these policies and practices have been tradi tional racial stereotyping and discrimination. African Americans have been par ticularly affected as several studies have found them to be the most disfavored minority group by whites as well as other racial and ethnic groups (Charles 2005). Evidence indicates that it is the presence of blacks, and not just neighborhood conditions often associated with black neighborhoods (e.g., bad schools, high crime) that accounts for white aversion to such areas. In one survey, whites reported that they would be unlikely to purchase a home that met their require ments in terms of price, number of rooms, and other housing characteristics in a neighborhood with good schools and low crime rates if there was a substantial representation of African Americans. The presence of Hispanics or Asians had no such effect (Emerson, Chai, and Yancey 2001).

That isn't from the paper, but rather the abstract, and somewhat bizarrely the paper, despite seeming to be about exactly it, doesn't actually seem to include anything supporting your point that

white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans

I couldn't even find the "survey" mentioned in the abstract anywhere in the body of the piece, even after looking through it several times. Could you give me a page number for a relevant passage?

Most of the rest of the post you replied to was an explanation of the phenomenon of "white flight". Seeing as you appear to disagree with that explanation (judging by the very first sentence of your reply), could you explain what you disagree with in it? I wasn't talking about home-value-per-dollar-income but rather simply regarding income, so I don't see how the second part of your reply is relevant, though I suppose I might just have not followed your point fully.

The point is that you're completely wrong about what "white flight" even is. White flight involves white people flocking out of multiracial neighborhoods to homogeneous neighborhoods. It has nothing to do with their property value decreasing beforehand because of some unforseen occurance. It happens because either a) property values decline BECAUSE more minorities (blacks in particular) move into the neighborhood or b) the whites FEAR property value declining because of blacks moving in. It happens even when the blacks have comparable income. And as a consequence, they take the money spent on maintaining their relatively good infrastructure with them.

I agree with you in that those are all possible triggers of white flight, but I have almost always heard it referred to with the property values falling first, and would suspect that the people who are that bigoted would have largely left as part of the massive waves seen in the later half of the 20th century.

[Mavorpen]

Having read the whole PDF, I would like to point out the first table, on the bottom of page three. It clearly shows that average home-value-per-dollar-income for white people was in fact surpassed by that of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American people.

I don't know why. It's irrelevant to my argument.

In the accompanying explanation (section three on the same page), this result is explained with the fact that these minorities tend live in wealthy neighborhoods, which inflates the home-value-per-dollar-income measure, distorting it in a manner that is unfair for reasons unexplained. Instead, they opt to represent their data in the form of a mean of the means, which they do not explain their reasons for doing beyond a completely uninformative "The typical values (mean of the means) listed in the final column of Table 1 more accurately reflect the situation of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American home-owners" (3).

Okay. Still irrelevant.

However, on page four of the report we find the following:

With one exception, the Philadelphia metropolitan area’s 151 wealthiest census tracts (ranked by homeowner income) were majority-white neighbor-hoods.

Which one would expect to inflate the home-value-to-income-dollar measure for white people for the same reasons as before. It is neither explained nor mentioned again.

In addition to all this, the second table (the one on page four of the report) notes only the "racial isolation index" and "typical racial dissimilarity index" for black people being "statistically significant". Nowhere does the report explain what this is explicitly, the only relevant passage appearing to be "Though variations in home-value-to-income ratios existed (plus or minus) for each minority group with regard to white levels, there was no statistically significant relationship between the variations and the lower levels of racial dissimilarity and racial isolation for minorities other than blacks" (4).

Again, what is the relevance of ANY of this with respect to my argument.

That isn't from the paper, but rather the abstract, and somewhat bizarrely the paper, despite seeming to be about exactly it, doesn't actually seem to include anything supporting your point that

white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans

I couldn't even find the "survey" mentioned in the abstract anywhere in the body of the piece, even after looking through it several times. Could you give me a page number for a relevant passage?

What the hell are you even talking about? That quote isn't in the abstract. Do you not know what an abstract is?

[Hindenburgia]

First of all, I would ask you to be slightly more careful when deciding to shorten quotes. I do not intend to imply that you were attempting to purposefully misrepresent me, but the way you shortened the quote from my post in this section to only remove the sentence I included to clarify that I do not, in fact, believe that racism is not a part of that sort of thing or even that racism is only a minor part. Here's the sentence for reference:

Though I'd be more than a little surprised if most instances of racial profiling didn't have some degree of racism underlying them.

No harm no foul and all - I just ask you be a little more careful.

*sigh* Except, I didn't argue that this is what you believe. I argued against the claim that

It's a dumb, dangerous notion, but a notion nonetheless, and one that needn't be based upon racism.

My argument is that it is INHERENTLY based upon racism. I never claimed that you hold the belief that racism plays no part or only plays a minor part.

I wasn't saying that that is was you thought I was saying - rather that the way you picked the quote from my post kind of misrepresents what I was saying. I'm not saying you did it intentionally, of course - just that it happened. Again, no harm no foul.

Regardless, I appear to have misunderstood you. I didn't realize that you were arguing that it was inherently based upon racism, and is so regardless of all other factors.

I challenge you to find me a modern example of black people being segregated/"shoved into districts" against their will that wasn't then overturned by the courts, much less one where these districts were then "defunded".

Why would I provide evidence for something I didn't argue?

...Eh? This is where you claimed that:

And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded, which inevitably led to crime.

You claimed that black people were "segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded". Unless you were talking about how things were 50+ years ago (which I'm pretty sure we both agree were pretty awful, to put it lightly), I don't know what you are talking about.

For reference, here's the context of my request:

Rather, I'm more arguing against when you say things like this:

And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded

I challenge you to find me a modern example of black people being segregated/"shoved into districts" against their will that wasn't then overturned by the courts, much less one where these districts were then "defunded".

Yes, these things started in racism, and I am completely unsurprised to know that, for a disappointingly large number of people, they still are. But racism is unquestionably not the only factor, and potentially not even the main factor. Insisting that it is simply because it was is not a valid argument.

First of all, utterly NOTHING in my post stated it is the ONLY factor. I said that racism forms the BASIS of this. Second, it absolutely is the main factor. To claim otherwise suggests that a large portion of the stereotypical and racist beliefs against black people magically disappeared. This hasn't happened. It's up to YOU to prove that it isn't the main factor. YOU'RE the one insisting that the racism no longer forms the basis with utterly no evidence to back that claim up.

...Except that isn't a claim. The positive claim is that racism forms the basis for this stuff. You're the one making that claim. I have been saying that, while I don't dispute that racism is a factor, I would dispute it being the main factor, simply because that is a much harder claim to make and I have not seen sufficient data to support it. Yes, historically, it would have been the main factor. But saying that society has changed enough to warrant re-evaluating that claim is not at all unreasonable, especially since one can point to specific events that are good indicators that very significant change has taken place, even restricting it to the court of public opinion. For instance, instead of getting lynch mobs when a black man is judged innocent and protests against allowing them to attend the same schools as white people, we now get protests when a black guy is killed by police under suspicious circumstances. That's not claiming that "a large portion of the stereotypical and racist beliefs against black people magically disappeared" - that's observing that society has changed in quite a major way over the last number of decades.

[Kelinfort]

You wanna dismantle those power structures? Get active in the community. Join the school board. Join the city council. Join the fucking police force, for god's sake. The only ones who really seem to do so are white folks (god, I sound like Obama). And in a town composed primarily of black people blacks are mostly going to be the ones who get arrested and pulled over. Not because they're more likely to commit crime but because they make up most of the population.

The point I was trying to make is that all many blacks do most of the time is blame white people. I'm not trying to be rude or insensitive or racist or anything like that. I'm trying to lay down some constructive criticism. All I'm saying is stop complaining and start getting active. You wanna see some change happen? Make it happen.

You want to make it happen? You want to actually fix these communities? It's not just them who have to out effort towards this, everyone in this nation must, and therein lies the problem. All we have to do to fix these communities is simple: show them society and the political powers that be actually give a damn about their lives and their communities.

Build community centres, YMCA's, make school about collaboration, teach African cultural history, have police officers meet with the people they serve and answer their questions, build daycare for single mothers, build Pre-K for all kids, regardless of wealth, fund the schools and make the police more honest and transparent, while making them more accountable, make drug legislation punish sellers, not users, reduce the punishments and give tax breaks to businesses in economically depressed areas along with a credit for hiring ex convicts and giving them a stable job, provide more urban housing, more parks, more libraries. This is the start we need to begin to address our racial issue. Show them you give a damn about their lives and they will give you the rest.

Just a repost of what yet should been done.

[Hindenburgia]

Since we appear to keep leap-frogging over each-other's posts, I am going to wait for your response to my last post before typing up a response to your last one, if that is alright with you.

[Mavorpen]

...Eh? This is where you claimed that:

And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded, which inevitably led to crime.

You claimed that black people were "segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded". Unless you were talking about how things were 50+ years ago (which I'm pretty sure we both agree were pretty awful, to put it lightly), I don't know what you are talking about.

I'm saying that, based on how you phrased your post, you misunderstood my claim. The way you phrased it made it seem as though I was arguing black people were physically shoved out of their homes against their will and into run down neighborhoods. That's not my claim. My claim is that black individuals willingly moved into white neighborhoods, but because of cases of "white flight" and the like, became segregated, and as a CONSEQUENCE of this were "shoved into districts that were defunded."

...Except that isn't a claim. The positive claim is that racism forms the basis for this stuff. You're the one making that claim. I have been saying that, while I don't dispute that racism is a factor, I would dispute it being the main factor, simply because that is a much harder claim to make and I have not seen sufficient data to support it.

Right, and I've given reasoning and evidence for my claim. You've given me nothing to work with, only baseless conjecture.

Yes, historically, it would have been the main factor. But saying that society has changed enough to warrant re-evaluating that claim is not at all unreasonable, especially since one can point to specific events that are good indicators that very significant change has taken place, even restricting it to the court of public opinion.

No, it certainly is unreasonable. You've so far FAILED to provide any tangible evidence of this claim.

For instance, instead of getting lynch mobs when a black man is judged innocent and protests against allowing them to attend the same schools as white people, we now get protests when a black guy is killed by police under suspicious circumstances. That's not claiming that "a large portion of the stereotypical and racist beliefs against black people magically disappeared" - that's observing that society has changed in quite a major way over the last number of decades.

So do you have any actual tangible evidence that would make me reevaluate that claim? Because the only thing you've demonstrated is that black people aren't physically assaulted unjustly en masse anymore. That says utterly nothing about underlying stereotypical and racist beliefs and their effects on how the country is structured. It disproves or addresses nothing I've argued. I'm not arguing that black people are facing lynch mobs.

[Hindenburgia]

Okay, I think I understand your argument a bit better, now, though I'm still a little confused on a few things.

Having read the whole PDF, I would like to point out the first table, on the bottom of page three. It clearly shows that average home-value-per-dollar-income for white people was in fact surpassed by that of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American people.

I don't know why. It's irrelevant to my argument.

In the accompanying explanation (section three on the same page), this result is explained with the fact that these minorities tend live in wealthy neighborhoods, which inflates the home-value-per-dollar-income measure, distorting it in a manner that is unfair for reasons unexplained. Instead, they opt to represent their data in the form of a mean of the means, which they do not explain their reasons for doing beyond a completely uninformative "The typical values (mean of the means) listed in the final column of Table 1 more accurately reflect the situation of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American home-owners" (3).

Okay. Still irrelevant.

However, on page four of the report we find the following:

With one exception, the Philadelphia metropolitan area’s 151 wealthiest census tracts (ranked by homeowner income) were majority-white neighbor-hoods.

Which one would expect to inflate the home-value-to-income-dollar measure for white people for the same reasons as before. It is neither explained nor mentioned again.

In addition to all this, the second table (the one on page four of the report) notes only the "racial isolation index" and "typical racial dissimilarity index" for black people being "statistically significant". Nowhere does the report explain what this is explicitly, the only relevant passage appearing to be "Though variations in home-value-to-income ratios existed (plus or minus) for each minority group with regard to white levels, there was no statistically significant relationship between the variations and the lower levels of racial dissimilarity and racial isolation for minorities other than blacks" (4).

Again, what is the relevance of ANY of this with respect to my argument.

That isn't from the paper, but rather the abstract, and somewhat bizarrely the paper, despite seeming to be about exactly it, doesn't actually seem to include anything supporting your point that

white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans

I couldn't even find the "survey" mentioned in the abstract anywhere in the body of the piece, even after looking through it several times. Could you give me a page number for a relevant passage?

What the hell are you even talking about? That quote isn't in the abstract. Do you not know what an abstract is?

First of all, yes, I do know what an abstract is. The part that you quoted me in your post here is quite similar to the abstract:

For your second point, I would also be curious to see a source, though I am slightly more skeptical of it being the case because I don't see how that would be measurable in any sort of reliable manner.

http://ann.sagepub.com/content/609/1/200.abstract

Specifically from the paper:

Underlying and contributing to these policies and practices have been tradi tional racial stereotyping and discrimination. African Americans have been par ticularly affected as several studies have found them to be the most disfavored minority group by whites as well as other racial and ethnic groups (Charles 2005). Evidence indicates that it is the presence of blacks, and not just neighborhood conditions often associated with black neighborhoods (e.g., bad schools, high crime) that accounts for white aversion to such areas. In one survey, whites reported that they would be unlikely to purchase a home that met their require ments in terms of price, number of rooms, and other housing characteristics in a neighborhood with good schools and low crime rates if there was a substantial representation of African Americans. The presence of Hispanics or Asians had no such effect (Emerson, Chai, and Yancey 2001).

The abstract, however, is decidedly different, and I'm not actually sure why I thought they were the same, in retrospect, and a ten-second search brings up the section in question on page eight. My apologies.

My point still stands, though, regarding the source itself not appearing to support your point that

white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans

Now that I'd found that particular section, however, I dug into it and looked for that last reference, and I have to say it is far more persuasive than any of the other sources I've seen on the topic. Here's the link:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3088879
This source has managed to convince me that there is still a widespread set of preconceptions and prejudices that result in discrimination against black people. I would like to see the same study done again in order to obtain newer data, but aside from that it's very good.

Now, the topic that spawned all of this was the idea of racial privilege. While you have convinced me that widespread, unconscious racism does still exist to an extent I hadn't previously thought, I would very much still separate the two. The idea of racial privilege is that one group gets benefits not given to other groups. Yet, all of the sources that have been used in our conversation have shown that it isn't that white people have privilege over minorities, but rather that it is black people who have been suffering as a result of discrimination. And even more centrally, while I have been convinced of the existence of widespread, unconscious racism against black people from white people on said scale, I would still not at all subscribe to any sort of race-wide guilt, fault, debt, benefit, or aid, which in an integral part of the concept of racial privilege.

Regarding the relevance of that first half of my post, following the post-chain back up leads me to this post of yours:

This wasn't because of racism, or even any one person or group. Because black people tend to be poorer than white people, the people who end up in poor neighborhoods tend to be black.

Complete and utter bullshit. If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing. This means that even when homeowners in a neighborhood have roughly the same income, black-owned homes are STILL worth less. We've also found out that white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans. You can't explain away this shit with poverty. It's racism. The sooner people stop denying this, the quicker we can address these issues and help minorities in general.

While this appears to be supported by the source on a first read, they way they have presented their data is very strange, and my post was intended to explain why that source does not, in fact, support your post, though in retrospect I probably should have made that clearer in the post itself.

...Eh? This is where you claimed that:

You claimed that black people were "segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded". Unless you were talking about how things were 50+ years ago (which I'm pretty sure we both agree were pretty awful, to put it lightly), I don't know what you are talking about.

I'm saying that, based on how you phrased your post, you misunderstood my claim. The way you phrased it made it seem as though I was arguing black people were physically shoved out of their homes against their will and into run down neighborhoods. That's not my claim. My claim is that black individuals willingly moved into white neighborhoods, but because of cases of "white flight" and the like, became segregated, and as a CONSEQUENCE of this were "shoved into districts that were defunded."

Yes, in that case I have very much misunderstood you. That is exactly what I had thought you were arguing, primarily due to your use of phrases like "shoved" and "defunded", which implied active forces working towards this result. Knowing now that this is not the case, we appear to be in agreement regarding what is occurring, though it would appear I have a far more ambivalent response to it. Basically, I regard it as a trend, but you seem to regard it as something else, though I'm not sure what - could you elaborate?

...Except that isn't a claim. The positive claim is that racism forms the basis for this stuff. You're the one making that claim. I have been saying that, while I don't dispute that racism is a factor, I would dispute it being the main factor, simply because that is a much harder claim to make and I have not seen sufficient data to support it.

Right, and I've given reasoning and evidence for my claim. You've given me nothing to work with, only baseless conjecture.

Yes, historically, it would have been the main factor. But saying that society has changed enough to warrant re-evaluating that claim is not at all unreasonable, especially since one can point to specific events that are good indicators that very significant change has taken place, even restricting it to the court of public opinion.

No, it certainly is unreasonable. You've so far FAILED to provide any tangible evidence of this claim.

For instance, instead of getting lynch mobs when a black man is judged innocent and protests against allowing them to attend the same schools as white people, we now get protests when a black guy is killed by police under suspicious circumstances. That's not claiming that "a large portion of the stereotypical and racist beliefs against black people magically disappeared" - that's observing that society has changed in quite a major way over the last number of decades.

So do you have any actual tangible evidence that would make me reevaluate that claim? Because the only thing you've demonstrated is that black people aren't physically assaulted unjustly en masse anymore. That says utterly nothing about underlying stereotypical and racist beliefs and their effects on how the country is structured. It disproves or addresses nothing I've argued. I'm not arguing that black people are facing lynch mobs.

That whole part of my post was largely due to what I now realize was very much a misunderstanding of your position. My apologies.

[Mavorpen]

Now, the topic that spawned all of this was the idea of racial privilege. While you have convinced me that widespread, unconscious racism does still exist to an extent I hadn't previously thought, I would very much still separate the two. The idea of racial privilege is that one group gets benefits not given to other groups. Yet, all of the sources that have been used in our conversation have shown that it isn't that white people have privilege over minorities, but rather that it is black people who have been suffering as a result of discrimination.

Uh...kay? Then you have an issue with the term itself. And sure, you can argue the term not really accurately describing what's being argued, but I don't see any point to that if me or other people aren't actually arguing white people have "privileges" in the exact meaning of the term.

And even more centrally, while I have been convinced of the existence of widespread, unconscious racism against black people from white people on said scale, I would still not at all subscribe to any sort of race-wide guilt, fault, debt, benefit, or aid, which in an integral part of the concept of racial privilege.

No it isn't. "White guilt" is a really shitty straw man and doesn't actually address any arguments actually made.

While this appears to be supported by the source on a first read, they way they have presented their data is very strange, and my post was intended to explain why that source does not, in fact, support your post, though in retrospect I probably should have made that clearer in the post itself.

The way they presented their data isn't strange at all. And you haven't demonstrated at all why my source doesn't support my argument. You pointed out stuff about the paper that you don't understand and then used an argument from ignorance that because you don't get it, therefore the data is "strange". That's nonsense. My source explicitly demonstrates that wealthy minority neighborhoods have less home value than wealthy white neighborhoods and that poor minority neighborhoods have less home value than poor minority neighborhoods. You did utterly nothing to show my source does not support me. You grasped at straws and argued from ignorance.

Yes, in that case I have very much misunderstood you. That is exactly what I had thought you were arguing, primarily due to your use of phrases like "shoved" and "defunded", which implied active forces working towards this result. Knowing now that this is not the case, we appear to be in agreement regarding what is occurring, though it would appear I have a far more ambivalent response to it. Basically, I regard it as a trend, but you seem to regard it as something else, though I'm not sure what - could you elaborate?

...What?

That whole part of my post was largely due to what I now realize was very much a misunderstanding of your position. My apologies.

It's fine.

[Slavonian kingdom]

[*]My response to the stop-and-frisk one has two parts:

1. First, the better of the two responses: stop-and-frisks would be much more likely to be done in a neighborhood that is known for having a high crime rate, through a combination of there probably being more of a police presence in higher-crime neighborhoods and heightened suspicion on the part of the police officer. Poorer neighborhoods tend to have high crime rates. Black people are more likely to live in poorer neighborhoods than white people. This would on its own make black people more likely to be stopped and frisked than white people, especially since I would suspect that, since black people tend to be poorer than white people, black people would be more likely to be walking rather than driving when compared to white people, also making them more likely to be stopped and frisked.

Yeah, how about no. Again, you REALLY REALLY need to do some additional research on this topic. We ALREADY have cases that have been brought to courts demonstrating that in fact, minorities were being targeted and illegally discriminated against. I don't give a crap if the majority of the city is black and thus the majority of people stopped and frisked are black. I have a problem when there is no actual reasoning behind the stopping and frisking (not to mention that there are, in fact, more white people than black people in New York City).

See, he's the thing. The supposed purpose of stop and frisk is to catch people who may commit a crime or contribute to committing a crime before it happens and drives further crime. The thing is, though? It doesn't fucking do that. And the vast majority of these stops are done solely on the basis of whether the person is a minority. It has nothing to do with poverty. It's racism. Plain and simple.

And now for the second response, which is the far less optimistic of the two. Racial profiling (which, for the record, I very, very much disagree with, though I do know a number of people who don't) is the usage of statistics to attempt to identify likely criminals. While attempting to correlate race with the likelihood of being a criminal is very much a fool's errand, especially with how prone it is to confirmation bias (the criminals you don't find are the ones you don't know of, after all), since black people tend to be poorer, and the poverty is positively correlated with crime, one can see where such a notion would come from. It's a dumb, dangerous notion, but a notion nonetheless, and one that needn't be based upon racism.

No, this is ENTIRELY, at its core, based upon racism. How do you even fucking think this started? This started from the racist belief that black people are inherently less intelligent and more violent that originated during the period before the Civil War. It then translated to stereotypes of black people in general, which lead to shit like Blackface. Later on it would rear it's ugly head in the form of negative stereotypes of black people in media in general. Hell, even Looney Tunes did it:

See, here's what you don't understand. The fact that African Americans are statistically over-represented in crime did not come before the stereotypes. The stereotypes came BEFORE the over-representation in crime. And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded, which inevitably led to crime. And the sad part? Because of this, a good deal of white people look at this and say "SEE! WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG!" which only further justifies the discrimination in their minds. It's a viscous cycle, one that AT ITS CORE is inherently ground in racism. To deny otherwise is to essentially deny a large bulk of American history and race relations.

From the article:
In other words, in poorer neighborhoods, where they can't afford larger homes and therefore do more stuff outside, people are easier to catch smoking. And since black people are more likely to be in such neighborhoods, those are the people the catch there.

Oh, come on. Did you even bother to read the entire article? It says, not long after that:

The unequal arrests rates are not confined to a single U.S. region or to urban areas with larger black populations, the ACLU said. That discrepancy is found throughout the country, regardless of the size of the black population of the location and at all income levels, the data shows.

So no, your conclusion is utterly wrong to apply that specific quote (that's in the context of the District of Columbia, by the way) to the nation as a whole in an attempt to gloss over the racial component here.

The real translation.of this post:"OMG I am so oppressed. All the failures of my life is due to racism".

[Slavonian kingdom]

Caucasian =/= white. Caucasian includes Arabs, Iranians, Turks, and Berbers.

Except most Turks are white (west mediterrenean + balkan with anatolian and central asian influences)

They are all white in fact. It is just that the progressives need to furtermore divide people.

[Hindenburgia]

Now, the topic that spawned all of this was the idea of racial privilege. While you have convinced me that widespread, unconscious racism does still exist to an extent I hadn't previously thought, I would very much still separate the two. The idea of racial privilege is that one group gets benefits not given to other groups. Yet, all of the sources that have been used in our conversation have shown that it isn't that white people have privilege over minorities, but rather that it is black people who have been suffering as a result of discrimination.

Uh...kay? Then you have an issue with the term itself. And sure, you can argue the term not really accurately describing what's being argued, but I don't see any point to that if me or other people aren't actually arguing white people have "privileges" in the exact meaning of the term.

Except that is exactly what people have been arguing. Otherwise all that it is is plain, old racism.

And even more centrally, while I have been convinced of the existence of widespread, unconscious racism against black people from white people on said scale, I would still not at all subscribe to any sort of race-wide guilt, fault, debt, benefit, or aid, which in an integral part of the concept of racial privilege.

No it isn't. "White guilt" is a really shitty straw man and doesn't actually address any arguments actually made.

I have seen enough people espouse it (mostly elsewhere, thankfully - not a lot of people here seem to take it particularly seriously) that I feel I should include it in that disclaimer.

While this appears to be supported by the source on a first read, they way they have presented their data is very strange, and my post was intended to explain why that source does not, in fact, support your post, though in retrospect I probably should have made that clearer in the post itself.

The way they presented their data isn't strange at all. And you haven't demonstrated at all why my source doesn't support my argument. You pointed out stuff about the paper that you don't understand and then used an argument from ignorance that because you don't get it, therefore the data is "strange". That's nonsense. My source explicitly demonstrates that wealthy minority neighborhoods have less home value than wealthy white neighborhoods and that poor minority neighborhoods have less home value than poor minority neighborhoods. You did utterly nothing to show my source does not support me. You grasped at straws and argued from ignorance.

Here's the part of my post that is relevant here:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/resear ... k/rusk.pdf

Having read the whole PDF, I would like to point out the first table, on the bottom of page three. It clearly shows that average home-value-per-dollar-income for white people was in fact surpassed by that of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American people. In the accompanying explanation (section three on the same page), this result is explained with the fact that these minorities tend live in wealthy neighborhoods, which inflates the home-value-per-dollar-income measure, distorting it in a manner that is unfair for reasons unexplained. Instead, they opt to represent their data in the form of a mean of the means, which they do not explain their reasons for doing beyond a completely uninformative "The typical values (mean of the means) listed in the final column of Table 1 more accurately reflect the situation of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American home-owners" (3).

However, on page four of the report we find the following:

With one exception, the Philadelphia metropolitan area’s 151 wealthiest census tracts (ranked by homeowner income) were majority-white neighbor-hoods.

Which one would expect to inflate the home-value-to-income-dollar measure for white people for the same reasons as before. It is neither explained nor mentioned again.

In addition to all this, the second table (the one on page four of the report) notes only the "racial isolation index" and "typical racial dissimilarity index" for black people being "statistically significant". Nowhere does the report explain what this is explicitly, the only relevant passage appearing to be "Though variations in home-value-to-income ratios existed (plus or minus) for each minority group with regard to white levels, there was no statistically significant relationship between the variations and the lower levels of racial dissimilarity and racial isolation for minorities other than blacks" (4).

And this is the post that it is in response to:

Not to imply that I believe you to be lying, but could you provide a reference for the home-value-per-dollar-income of a house owned by a black person being lower, on average, than that for a white person? I've never seen that even claimed before, so I am more than a little wary of accepting it to be the case out of hand.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/resear ... k/rusk.pdf

The source was provided not regarding the wealthy-wealthy and poor-poor neighborhood matching, but rather to the more general claim of white people getting better measure regarding housing-value-per-dollar-income.

And "strange" was a polite way of saying "there are problems with it, and I have suspicions regarding its trustworthiness, but you appear to trust it so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt". Not only did they completely fail to justify several of their most central data processing decisions, but they didn't even apply them consistently.

For this post I dug a little deeper, and considering the report does not appear to have been cited in more than a handful of small studies and the author has not only published a (highly opinionated, from the looks of things) book on the subject (titled Cities without Suburbs) and is the founding president for an advocacy group known as "Building One America", I have to say that the report really isn't actually all that trustworthy a source.

Yes, in that case I have very much misunderstood you. That is exactly what I had thought you were arguing, primarily due to your use of phrases like "shoved" and "defunded", which implied active forces working towards this result. Knowing now that this is not the case, we appear to be in agreement regarding what is occurring, though it would appear I have a far more ambivalent response to it. Basically, I regard it as a trend, but you seem to regard it as something else, though I'm not sure what - could you elaborate?

...What?

Due to your use of aggressive, highly active phrases like "shoved" and "defunded" to describe what was happening, I had thought you were saying that there was some sort of deliberate element to white flight, though I now realize that that was not what you were saying. As a great deal of this conversation has been spent clearing up misunderstandings, especially on my part, I would like to make sure that I am not still misunderstanding you, especially since, though we appear to agree on the actual events at hand, tone of your posts suggests a more negative view of the phenomenon than the one that I hold.

[Hindenburgia]

Yeah, how about no. Again, you REALLY REALLY need to do some additional research on this topic. We ALREADY have cases that have been brought to courts demonstrating that in fact, minorities were being targeted and illegally discriminated against. I don't give a crap if the majority of the city is black and thus the majority of people stopped and frisked are black. I have a problem when there is no actual reasoning behind the stopping and frisking (not to mention that there are, in fact, more white people than black people in New York City).

See, he's the thing. The supposed purpose of stop and frisk is to catch people who may commit a crime or contribute to committing a crime before it happens and drives further crime. The thing is, though? It doesn't fucking do that. And the vast majority of these stops are done solely on the basis of whether the person is a minority. It has nothing to do with poverty. It's racism. Plain and simple.

No, this is ENTIRELY, at its core, based upon racism. How do you even fucking think this started? This started from the racist belief that black people are inherently less intelligent and more violent that originated during the period before the Civil War. It then translated to stereotypes of black people in general, which lead to shit like Blackface. Later on it would rear it's ugly head in the form of negative stereotypes of black people in media in general. Hell, even Looney Tunes did it:

See, here's what you don't understand. The fact that African Americans are statistically over-represented in crime did not come before the stereotypes. The stereotypes came BEFORE the over-representation in crime. And these stereotypes are largely WHY blacks were segregated and as a consequence shoved into districts that were defunded, which inevitably led to crime. And the sad part? Because of this, a good deal of white people look at this and say "SEE! WE WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG!" which only further justifies the discrimination in their minds. It's a viscous cycle, one that AT ITS CORE is inherently ground in racism. To deny otherwise is to essentially deny a large bulk of American history and race relations.


Oh, come on. Did you even bother to read the entire article? It says, not long after that:


So no, your conclusion is utterly wrong to apply that specific quote (that's in the context of the District of Columbia, by the way) to the nation as a whole in an attempt to gloss over the racial component here.

The real translation.of this post:"OMG I am so oppressed. All the failures of my life is due to racism".

...Are you referring to my post or his? Sorry, but it's a bit late here, so I'm having a bit of trouble working out which it is.

[Mavorpen]

Except that is exactly what people have been arguing. Otherwise all that it is is plain, old racism.

I don't really care since it's irrelevant to me, but I haven't seen a single person argue that.

I have seen enough people espouse it (mostly elsewhere, thankfully - not a lot of people here seem to take it particularly seriously) that I feel I should include it in that disclaimer.

And again, I don't really care because it's irrelevant to me, but I haven't seen a single person argue for "white guilt." I don't even know what you mean by "race aid."

Here's the part of my post that is relevant here:

Having read the whole PDF, I would like to point out the first table, on the bottom of page three. It clearly shows that average home-value-per-dollar-income for white people was in fact surpassed by that of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American people. In the accompanying explanation (section three on the same page), this result is explained with the fact that these minorities tend live in wealthy neighborhoods, which inflates the home-value-per-dollar-income measure, distorting it in a manner that is unfair for reasons unexplained. Instead, they opt to represent their data in the form of a mean of the means, which they do not explain their reasons for doing beyond a completely uninformative "The typical values (mean of the means) listed in the final column of Table 1 more accurately reflect the situation of Asian, Hispanic, and Native American home-owners" (3).

However, on page four of the report we find the following:

With one exception, the Philadelphia metropolitan area’s 151 wealthiest census tracts (ranked by homeowner income) were majority-white neighbor-hoods.

Which one would expect to inflate the home-value-to-income-dollar measure for white people for the same reasons as before. It is neither explained nor mentioned again.

In addition to all this, the second table (the one on page four of the report) notes only the "racial isolation index" and "typical racial dissimilarity index" for black people being "statistically significant". Nowhere does the report explain what this is explicitly, the only relevant passage appearing to be "Though variations in home-value-to-income ratios existed (plus or minus) for each minority group with regard to white levels, there was no statistically significant relationship between the variations and the lower levels of racial dissimilarity and racial isolation for minorities other than blacks" (4).

And this is the post that it is in response to:

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/resear ... k/rusk.pdf

The source was provided not regarding the wealthy-wealthy and poor-poor neighborhood matching, but rather to the more general claim of white people getting better measure regarding housing-value-per-dollar-income.

Uh... what the actual fuck? No, the source WAS, in fact, regarding this. Why? Because that was my original claim. THIS was my original claim.

Complete and utter bullshit. If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing.

[...]

So yes, this source absolutely does support my ACTUAL claim, and not the claim you seem to have thought I was making. I really have no idea how I didn't catch that misrepresentation of my claim, but the claim you wanted sourced WASN'T the claim being made in that post.

And "strange" was a polite way of saying "there are problems with it, and I have suspicions regarding its trustworthiness, but you appear to trust it so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt". Not only did they completely fail to justify several of their most central data processing decisions, but they didn't even apply them consistently.

Again, they didn't "fail" to do anything. Papers like these have a target audience. They expect you to understand the fundamentals of the topic being discussed and thus the underlying methodologies of the paper. There is utterly no reason to be suspicious. This is simply a case of you not understanding it. It isn't the paper's fault at all.

For this post I dug a little deeper, and considering the report does not appear to have been cited in more than a handful of small studies and the author has not only published a (highly opinionated, from the looks of things) book on the subject (titled Cities without Suburbs) and is the founding president for an advocacy group known as "Building One America", I have to say that the report really isn't actually all that trustworthy a source.

That's nice. I really don't care about your opinion on the study. You haven't produced a single empirical piece of evidence yourself.

Due to your use of aggressive, highly active phrases like "shoved" and "defunded" to describe what was happening, I had thought you were saying that there was some sort of deliberate element to white flight, though I now realize that that was not what you were saying. As a great deal of this conversation has been spent clearing up misunderstandings, especially on my part, I would like to make sure that I am not still misunderstanding you, especially since, though we appear to agree on the actual events at hand, tone of your posts suggests a more negative view of the phenomenon than the one that I hold.

...Kay?

[Kelinfort]

Except most Turks are white (west mediterrenean + balkan with anatolian and central asian influences)

They are all white in fact. It is just that the progressives need to furtermore divide people.

The edge.

Alright, we'll just call people, people. That is, once you acknowledge Africa has had and continues to have a huge cultural impact on the US.

[Hindenburgia]

Except that is exactly what people have been arguing. Otherwise all that it is is plain, old racism.

I don't really care since it's irrelevant to me, but I haven't seen a single person argue that.

I have seen enough people espouse it (mostly elsewhere, thankfully - not a lot of people here seem to take it particularly seriously) that I feel I should include it in that disclaimer.

And again, I don't really care because it's irrelevant to me, but I haven't seen a single person argue for "white guilt." I don't even know what you mean by "race aid."

Racial aid would be aid (e.g. money, etc.) given to a person because they are of a certain race.

Some examples of what I am talking about, in varying levels of implication and in varying types:

I am sick of white males denying the fact that white privilege exists. As a white male, it is disturbing that so many of us, are unable to get a grip with reality that white privilege is a major problem in today's society. Do you think white privilege is a big problem and how do we get rid of it?

Actually, you described several items that fall under white privilege.

A white person can turn on the television and be reasonably sure that he or she will not be the subject of negative stereotyping on a program.

A white person can assume that he or she will not be negatively impacted by racial profiling.

A white person can be more assured of receiving a fair sentence, or at least a lesser sentence than a black person charged with the same crime.

That's all part and parcel of privilege.

We'll we kinda control the government no big deal though. After all I agree in part of what your saying but theirs still the idea if the whites as the ruling race as we tend to hold the majority of highly powerful positions within the nation.

I understand the frustration of feeling like you're being blamed for this. However, instead of saying "Why don't they do this?", how about focusing on "Okay, what can i do from my end?" Maybe it's not much. Maybe it's not automatically tossing Jamal's resume to the side if you're hiring. Maybe it's refusing to watch shows that tend to portray black people as criminals, and not as professionals. Maybe it's not hovering over the young black man as he shops at your store. Yes, the black community has a lot of work to do. We can make it easier for them simply by not making it any harder than it has to be.

How about your very own post?

I don't know why they would do that. Every month is White History Month.

Again, like I said, there are very few people on the forum who subscribe to the full-on, Tumblr-esque nonsense you sometimes see float around the internet, and most of those who do crop up don't appear to be active for very long. There are still those who subscribe to lesser iterations of it.

Here's the part of my post that is relevant here:


And this is the post that it is in response to:


The source was provided not regarding the wealthy-wealthy and poor-poor neighborhood matching, but rather to the more general claim of white people getting better measure regarding housing-value-per-dollar-income.

Uh... what the actual fuck? No, the source WAS, in fact, regarding this. Why? Because that was my original claim. THIS was my original claim.

Complete and utter bullshit. If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing.

[...]

So yes, this source absolutely does support my ACTUAL claim, and not the claim you seem to have thought I was making. I really have no idea how I didn't catch that misrepresentation of my claim, but the claim you wanted sourced WASN'T the claim being made in that post.

Let us start from the top of this little chain of posts. You made this post:

This wasn't because of racism, or even any one person or group. Because black people tend to be poorer than white people, the people who end up in poor neighborhoods tend to be black.

Complete and utter bullshit. If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing. This means that even when homeowners in a neighborhood have roughly the same income, black-owned homes are STILL worth less. We've also found out that white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans. You can't explain away this shit with poverty. It's racism. The sooner people stop denying this, the quicker we can address these issues and help minorities in general.

I responded with this post:

Complete and utter bullshit. If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing. This means that even when homeowners in a neighborhood have roughly the same income, black-owned homes are STILL worth less. We've also found out that white people actively avoid multiracial neighborhoods, and that if they found a home that was in a neighborhood that fulfilled their criteria (good schools, low crime rate, etc.), they wouldn't buy it if there was a substantial representation of African Americans. You can't explain away this shit with poverty. It's racism. The sooner people stop denying this, the quicker we can address these issues and help minorities in general.

Not to imply that I believe you to be lying, but could you provide a reference for the home-value-per-dollar-income of a house owned by a black person being lower, on average, than that for a white person? I've never seen that even claimed before, so I am more than a little wary of accepting it to be the case out of hand.

For your second point, I would also be curious to see a source, though I am slightly more skeptical of it being the case because I don't see how that would be measurable in any sort of reliable manner.

Most of the rest of the post you replied to was an explanation of the phenomenon of "white flight". Seeing as you appear to disagree with that explanation (judging by the very first sentence of your reply), could you explain what you disagree with in it? I wasn't talking about home-value-per-dollar-income but rather simply regarding income, so I don't see how the second part of your reply is relevant, though I suppose I might just have not followed your point fully.

To which you responded with this one:

Not to imply that I believe you to be lying, but could you provide a reference for the home-value-per-dollar-income of a house owned by a black person being lower, on average, than that for a white person? I've never seen that even claimed before, so I am more than a little wary of accepting it to be the case out of hand.

http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/resear ... k/rusk.pdf

For your second point, I would also be curious to see a source, though I am slightly more skeptical of it being the case because I don't see how that would be measurable in any sort of reliable manner.

http://ann.sagepub.com/content/609/1/200.abstract

Specifically from the paper:

Underlying and contributing to these policies and practices have been tradi tional racial stereotyping and discrimination. African Americans have been par ticularly affected as several studies have found them to be the most disfavored minority group by whites as well as other racial and ethnic groups (Charles 2005). Evidence indicates that it is the presence of blacks, and not just neighborhood conditions often associated with black neighborhoods (e.g., bad schools, high crime) that accounts for white aversion to such areas. In one survey, whites reported that they would be unlikely to purchase a home that met their require ments in terms of price, number of rooms, and other housing characteristics in a neighborhood with good schools and low crime rates if there was a substantial representation of African Americans. The presence of Hispanics or Asians had no such effect (Emerson, Chai, and Yancey 2001).

Most of the rest of the post you replied to was an explanation of the phenomenon of "white flight". Seeing as you appear to disagree with that explanation (judging by the very first sentence of your reply), could you explain what you disagree with in it? I wasn't talking about home-value-per-dollar-income but rather simply regarding income, so I don't see how the second part of your reply is relevant, though I suppose I might just have not followed your point fully.

The point is that you're completely wrong about what "white flight" even is. White flight involves white people flocking out of multiracial neighborhoods to homogeneous neighborhoods. It has nothing to do with their property value decreasing beforehand because of some unforseen occurance. It happens because either a) property values decline BECAUSE more minorities (blacks in particular) move into the neighborhood or b) the whites FEAR property value declining because of blacks moving in. It happens even when the blacks have comparable income. And as a consequence, they take the money spent on maintaining their relatively good infrastructure with them.

As you can see, I split your original post in two - one part regarding the disparity in house-value-per-dollar-income, and the other regarding white people avoiding multiracial neighborhoods (which was only confined to neighborhoods where the other race was black, as you recall). You then continued this split, which indicated pretty clearly that you understood it. Therefore, that cannot be the problem.

Now, I would like to emphasize a specific part of your post (italics mine):

If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing. This means that even when homeowners in a neighborhood have roughly the same income, black-owned homes are STILL worth less.

The last sentence was your first point. Yes, there were sentences before it, but your sentence structure very clearly indicated that those sentences were support for that last one. Under most circumstances, I am incredibly open to the possibility that I misunderstood someone - far, far more than most. But in this case, you were very clear with your writing, and you really can't interpret it any other way.

And "strange" was a polite way of saying "there are problems with it, and I have suspicions regarding its trustworthiness, but you appear to trust it so I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt". Not only did they completely fail to justify several of their most central data processing decisions, but they didn't even apply them consistently.

Again, they didn't "fail" to do anything. Papers like these have a target audience. They expect you to understand the fundamentals of the topic being discussed and thus the underlying methodologies of the paper. There is utterly no reason to be suspicious. This is simply a case of you not understanding it. It isn't the paper's fault at all.

This isn't a case of, "I don't understand how standard deviation works, so their numbers are wrong!" This is a case of "In this situation, measure A (i.e. the mean home-value-per-dollar-income) would be the usual choice to communicate this data. However, they claim that measure B (i.e. the mean of the means of home-value-per-dollar-income) is somehow 'better'. Okay, fair enough, now they need to explain why it is 'better'." And they didn't. It's also a case of "Over here, they specified that they identified a set of outliers that were inflating a particular set of data. Okay, but over here there is another set of potential outliers that, if the others were skewing the data, would also be skewing the data. However, at no point do they account for this or otherwise mention it, especially since it would, if anything, act counter to the outliers mentioned earlier."

For this post I dug a little deeper, and considering the report does not appear to have been cited in more than a handful of small studies and the author has not only published a (highly opinionated, from the looks of things) book on the subject (titled Cities without Suburbs) and is the founding president for an advocacy group known as "Building One America", I have to say that the report really isn't actually all that trustworthy a source.

That's nice. I really don't care about your opinion on the study. You haven't produced a single empirical piece of evidence yourself.

And this is a case of "After looking into the author's background, I have noticed two conflicts of interest - namely, that he has written a non-scholarly book on the subject that takes a very firm stance on a particular side of the study's own issue (specifically, the one that the study itself concludes in favor of), and that he is the founding president of a political advocacy group whose campaigns are supported by the result of this study."

Put simply, none of the methodologies in the paper are particularly hard - nothing more complex than taking the mean. If we were dealing with anything more complex - even so much as a normal curve - it would be fair enough to ask if I understood the methodologies in play. But taking the mean is something that you learn in the third grade, and you use all your life. It really isn't that difficult.

And the guy's background's a joke, reliability-wise. Even a fraction of it would be enough to disqualify this from scholarly publication (which I'm guessing is probably at least part of the reason it appears nowhere in any such publication). Instead, it appears on the website of a political think-tank which seems to mostly be described as being somewhere on the center-left end of the scale, according to the various sources on the (probably overly-sourced) "Political Stance" section of the Wikipedia page.

[Mavorpen]

Racial aid would be aid (e.g. money, etc.) given to a person because they are of a certain race.

...What the hell? Who argued for this?

How about your very own post?

I don't know why they would do that. Every month is White History Month.

What is that even supposed to demonstrate?

As you can see, I split your original post in two - one part regarding the disparity in house-value-per-dollar-income, and the other regarding white people avoiding multiracial neighborhoods (which was only confined to neighborhoods where the other race was black, as you recall). You then continued this split, which indicated pretty clearly that you understood it.

Uh, no, it doesn't. I thought you were asking me about MY original claim. You split my post into two parts, and only ONE of them was what I ACTUALLY claimed. The other, now that I read your post over again, is a straw man and wasn't actually my original claim. So no, my claim WAS, in fact, substantiated by my source.

Now, I would like to emphasize a specific part of your post (italics mine):

If you compare wealthy black neighborhoods to wealthy white neighborhoods, the wealthy black neighborhoods have less home value per dollar of income. If you compare poor black neighborhoods to poor white neighborhoods, it's the same exact thing. This means that even when homeowners in a neighborhood have roughly the same income, black-owned homes are STILL worth less.

The last sentence was your first point. Yes, there were sentences before it, but your sentence structure very clearly indicated that those sentences were support for that last one. Under most circumstances, I am incredibly open to the possibility that I misunderstood someone - far, far more than most. But in this case, you were very clear with your writing, and you really can't interpret it any other way.

Yeah, no. You absolutely can interpret it any another way. And that only requires that you read that part SPECIFICALLY within the context of what I posted previously. What I posted is NOT the same as claiming that "the home-value-per-dollar-income of a house owned by a black person being lower, on average, than that for a white person." My claim was that when you compare homes in a black neighborhood, the average property value is going to be less than for homes in a white neighborhood. I don't see how you could have gotten ANYTHING else out of that when actually reading it in context.

This isn't a case of, "I don't understand how standard deviation works, so their numbers are wrong!" This is a case of "In this situation, measure A (i.e. the mean home-value-per-dollar-income) would be the usual choice to communicate this data.

Why?

However, they claim that measure B (i.e. the mean of the means of home-value-per-dollar-income) is somehow 'better'. Okay, fair enough, now they need to explain why it is 'better'." And they didn't.

Yes, they did. Again, this is ENTIRELY a case of you not understanding what's being said. The source's job is not to hold your hand. The source expects you to understand basic statistical methodologies, one of which includes grand mean.

It's also a case of "Over here, they specified that they identified a set of outliers that were inflating a particular set of data. Okay, but over here there is another set of potential outliers that, if the others were skewing the data, would also be skewing the data. However, at no point do they account for this or otherwise mention it, especially since it would, if anything, act counter to the outliers mentioned earlier."

The fuck are you even talking about? If you're complaining that the source isn't applying the "typical value" methodology, then I don't even know if you're reading the same source as me, because the majority of the data uses that measurement.

And the guy's background's a joke, reliability-wise. Even a fraction of it would be enough to disqualify this from scholarly publication (which I'm guessing is probably at least part of the reason it appears nowhere in any such publication). Instead, it appears on the website of a political think-tank which seems to mostly be described as being somewhere on the center-left end of the scale, according to the various sources on the (probably overly-sourced) "Political Stance" section of the Wikipedia page.

And once again, I really, really don't care about your opinion on the source. You've given me utterly nothing of an empirical basis to work with that substantiates your claims.

[Slavonian kingdom]

They are all white in fact. It is just that the progressives need to furtermore divide people.

The edge.

Alright, we'll just call people, people. That is, once you acknowledge Africa has had and continues to have a huge cultural impact on the US.

There is no evidence for African impact but there is indeed an impact of AfricanAmericans who with Africa havr in common as Texas with Congo.

[Mavorpen]

The edge.

Alright, we'll just call people, people. That is, once you acknowledge Africa has had and continues to have a huge cultural impact on the US.

There is no evidence for African impact

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No.

If you mean the Native African culture than no as it has nothing to do with the US. It should be part of World history instead.

Except of course, this is bullshit to anyone that actually knows about US history.

Let me know when you actually read through that article.

[Slavonian kingdom]

There is no evidence for African impact

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No.

Except of course, this is bullshit to anyone that actually knows about US history.

Let me know when you actually read through that article.

As said earlier could you tell of which page of tge page are yoi refereing.

[Mavorpen]

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

No.

Let me know when you actually read through that article.

As said earlier could you tell of which page of tge page are yoi refereing.

And as I said earlier: the entire fucking thing. The ENTIRE fucking thing is about African influence on American culture. Read the whole thing. Seriously, reading is NOT a bad thing.

[Beta Test]

White privilege does not exist and it has never existed. It's a bullshit concept, anyway.

[Yumyumsuppertime]

White privilege does not exist and it has never existed. It's a bullshit concept, anyway.

That's lovely. Perhaps you'd care to take a crack at some of the posts in here showing how it does exist, has existed, and is a valid concept, then, instead of making broad statements like that.

[Slavonian kingdom]

As said earlier could you tell of which page of tge page are yoi refereing.

And as I said earlier: the entire fucking thing. The ENTIRE fucking thing is about African influence on American culture. Read the whole thing. Seriously, reading is NOT a bad thing.

I will when I catch some time. As a academic citizen I have to make sure if this source is worth of reading so could say what exactly is worth of reading.