Unfortunately it's not the people here that need to read this
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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In this community? It's useful for talking points
Lemmy in general? There's a lot of people on Lemmy who need to read this.
It might help someone explain it later though, it's a good parallel
You’d be surprised how widespread misunderstanding of systemic racism is, even on the left.
If you think that the problems (inequalities) racism brought ceased to exist with segregation, try learning about red-lining and how countless black neighborhoods got unfairly bulldozed to make space for highways. All that stuff happened only a lifetime ago, of course its effects can still be felt today.
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You could also use the same reasoning to argue that colonialism hasn't really ended either, when the colonialists went home they still left behind the scars of centuries of exploitation, that shit doesn't get washed away in a day.
Wells Fargo to pay $175 million in race discrimination probe - Reuters (2012) And let's not forget stuff like this happened just within the last 15 years.
colonialism is also still enforced today - IMF loans that force austerity policies on receiving nations, coups that topple popular governments and replace them with dictatorships that are friendly to western interests, the fomenting of civil wars and conflicts that frequently genocide entire populations, the sale of arms and training to far-right militias. neocolonialism doesn't involve direct rule but it's merely the form that's changed, not the character or the consequences.
... did you just straight-up post a reddit comment?
Aaand? People always sent screenshots of posts from other social media on social media. Nothing new.
Yes, lol.
But in my defense, I’ve had this saved on my phone for over a year, and I probably got it from /r/196 to begin with :p
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Well how else am I gonna read it? Open it on reddit???
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Damn this is an excellent example. I'm 100% going to use this image in the future, thanks!
My mother worked for a real estate firm in the late 90s in bay ridge, Brooklyn where she was told to tell anyone calling in who sounded black or had a "black sounding name" that nothing was available or to quote ridiculous prices.
This shit ain't gone away at all.
Also, it’s easier to completely demolish the building. Accommodations can be made much easier, but no one does it because it’s too much work, the disabled people of the metaphor are figuring out ways around it.
Also the anti-disabled people knickknacks are still displayed EVERYWHERE 
I live in hungary and when i went to san francisco one of the things i noticed that every shop, bus, street, etc was built in a way that it would be easy to use by disabled people. So regulations can help and people should support politicians eho actually want to change things(even when it turns out to be a little stupid like the cancer warnings on basically everything). Also californians are so warm and welcoming compared to hungarians.
to continue this incredibly labored metaphor, yeah things are kinda nice for everyone when there are accommodations for disabled, or mobility compromised people. There's a term for when accommodations for one group, like sidewalk curb cut-outs, actually have a multiplicative benefit for everyone, even outside of the principle group. Curb cut-outs on sidewalks make it easier for wheelchair users, and the blind, but also they benefit strollers, old people, and delivery people getting up the curb.
so making the house nice for disable people actually makes it nice for everyone.
to drop the metaphor, yeah getting rid of systemic racism is actually nice for everyone
And these ADA accommodations were hard-fought for by disability activists, many of them disabled themselves because nobody else cared! The same thing is happening with any kind of prejudice or injustice against any marginalized group. We need to stop with the "fuck you, I got mine" mentality if we hope to advance as a compassionate species. But the older I get, the more I feel the tribalism is too hard-coded into humans and is too easily exploited by greedy/fascist interests. Solidarity is the only way...if we could just get over ourselves for one second.
Not to mention that the hotel does what it can to keep existing through anti disabled propaganda and incentives for the workers to be anti disabled
“That’s just the culture around here”
The analogy is a little shaky but yeah that's a pretty good intro. The hard issue to solve here is with how this injustice is resolved. I think the most reasonable solution attacks the problem directly: rewriting racist laws (like zoning) and punishing or heavily disincentivising racist behavior in government officials (including police and judges). In the analogy, this would be equivalent to enacting hotel policies against discrimination and retrofitting disabled-accessible options into the building.
That still isn't directly Attacking the problem, you remove racist laws however you still have a system in place to add oppressive laws so they will come back. The problem isn't the laws or the government officials it's the whole damn system and unless you change the system it will continue to oppress. The hotel is designed to be discriminatory and to slowly go back to being discriminatory (as you said shaky anlogy) if changes are to be made. The only real solution is tearing the whole hotel down and building a park there
But on top of that, the previous owner raised the new one. On top of the hotel issue we now have the same issues, but with the new owner
What view are they trying to counter here? I understand all the words of the post and I agree with the logic but I don't see in what situation this argument is useful. Perhaps I'm lucky not to have been exposed to the people for whom it would be useful...
Edit: I saw some very clear answers to my questions after scrolling down a bit. I think I just didn't understand what the term "systemic" meant here.
"wow you are trying to punish x people for wrongdoings of their parents/grandparents" is the argument it's trying to counter.
Oh that's neat!
I thought this was fuckcars for a second and it would end differently , but very similarly!! Car centrism is another form of discrimination.
Yes! I’m very glad to live in a place where at 32 I still don’t need a driver’s license. I can see how crippling and isolating it can be to need a car (e.g. North America), but not being able to drive it.
I’m very much a car guy. I love cars, I love driving them, I love fixing them, etc.
I wholeheartedly wish they were purely optional. Please put less people on the roads, let more people use cheaper public transportation, and let those distracted drivers stay out of heavy machinery!
Not to mention, sometimes walking is just preferred. I visited Chicago without a car and it was fantastic. Walking and trains were all I needed, and it was great. Definitely want more of that around, especially for cross country options.
It's different with racism, because it's easier and cheaper to stop racist practices than it is to modify a building. And modifying a building isn't hard or all that expensive.
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"This is the way it's normally/always been done" is an extension of that shit, usually done to excuse things that should not be excused and can and should change.
Like what?
You want examples of systemic racism?
- Poverty is inherited and it's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Black people in America are poor because they used to be slaves
- White cultural traditions are legal in Australia. Many aboriginal cultural traditions have been made illegal in Australia due to land ownership changes
- Black people are under-represented in universities, so the university scientists building facial recognition apps aren't building them to work on black people
- Schools teach their lessons in english. Multilingual students who don't speak english at home often have a disadvantage in lessons that will be felt their whole lives
- Children of illegal immigrants may have never received identification such as a birth certificate and it can be hard to get this as an adult
- Whenever the police use robotic and computer systems to detect criminals the AI ends up racial profiling and harassing black people
Poverty is inherited and it's impossible to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Black people in America are poor because they used to be slaves
That's capitalism's fault. Poor white kids would face the same issues.
Black people are under-represented in universities, so the university scientists building facial recognition apps aren't building them to work on black people
That's just a lack of data points and not a system constructed by anyone. The data points should be increasing naturally.
Schools teach their lessons in english. Multilingual students who don't speak english at home often have a disadvantage in lessons that will be felt their whole lives
It'd be awesome if we can just solve language barriers generally. Before we can do that having a single official language in working situations seems to be not avoidable for productivity.
Children of illegal immigrants may have never received identification such as a birth certificate and it can be hard to get this as an adult
Not related to racism.
Whenever the police use robotic and computer systems to detect criminals the AI ends up racial profiling and harassing black people
Is this happening? I think it's straight out wrong to predict criminals with AI trained on previous data.
All in all I agree that many of the existing systems sucks but I don't think it's helpful to link every problem to racism. Disclaimer: I'm not black or white
That’s just a lack of data points and not a system constructed by anyone. The data points should be increasing naturally.
But why is the data lacking in the first place?
Lack of public black faces as suggested by previous comment? That's not a "system" tho, which would imply something like a policy to reject black faces as learning data.
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That’s capitalism’s fault. Poor white kids would face the same issues.
True, but that's not what the discussion was about. Black kids are disproportionately poorer than white kids, and that's because they inherited inequalities from the past, which came about because of slavery and systematic racism.
It’d be awesome if we can just solve language barriers generally. Before we can do that having a single official language in working situations seems to be not avoidable for productivity
What you are suggesting is a lingua franca, which is already the norm in multilingual countries. That's quite different from having a colonial language dominating over the others.
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Schools teach their lessons in english.
When you have to pick a language to teach in, isn't this the best language to teach in though, in a predominantly English speaking society?
I don't think segregating classes into separate language-based ones would be a good idea. That leaves kids not speaking English at home nor at school in an even bigger disadvantage in terms of learning English and we need we need kids of all different backgrounds mixing together so that they may understand and accept one another.
The solution are extra English lessons for both the kids and the parents, and financial support so that the parents can afford the time to learn English at these classes
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I'd add for the "school in English/dominant spoken language" part (because compared to the other it doesn't seem that bad) in a quite a few cases it stems from a previous active effort to suppress a culture that was never really 'fixed', not simply just "eh I don't understand so why do I have to cater for it?".
If you're European, chances are you can name a good few examples that happened in your borders, both as something you did or something that was used against you
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Poverty: Same thing for any people of any race the most important part is their ability to get an education that'll get them out of it while having stability, slavery has nothing to do with it.
Australia: I live in Australia what are you talking about?!
Black people are up to 4 times more likely to be accepted in American medical universities due to diversity quotas https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/med.png
Of course schools teach in the language of the country they are in do you expect them to teach in 5 different languages?!
It makes sense that the government doesn't want to encourage illegal immigration.
So facial recognition doesn't work on black people but ai facial recognition can discriminate against them?
Seriously it seems that your taking all this out of your imagination.
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structural poverty spanning generations, the legacy of redlining, a massive transfer of wealth out of the hands of the Black community, worse schools in the urban core, etc, etc, etc
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