Anyway, I'd be interested to hear more about the psychology of this.
I remember when I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in California, people talked about race way less than they do today. When ethnic representation became a common topic of conversation, I had a hard time believing it at first, because it seemed so self-evidently obvious to me that race wasn't a particularly important characteristic of a person. I actually had the experience of thinking back to my time in jr high/high school and thinking "wow, that friend of mine had dark skin, and they weren't from India... I guess they were Black, huh".
I'm not trying to claim that I didn't have subconscious biases related to race as a kid. I'm sure I did. But I do suspect they have become a lot more severe as a result of people talking about race so much -- it has become a much more salient characteristic. (I'm also more aware of trying to mitigate my biases and avoid microaggressions and so on, of course.)
So yeah, I'm curious to compare notes with other 90s kids in this regard. I'm white, but if I was Black, I imagine that I'd be way more self-conscious about it now than I was when I was growing up. (Like, if I'm the only white person in a group, I feel self-conscious about it now in a way that I didn't feel when I was a kid.)
*Not singling out Cholitas, but it's a group that may feel "other" to you.
With regard to the Cholitas thought experiment, I think my major source of discomfort is that at least one of them would look at me and think to herself "he's a patriarchical colonizer" and feel hostility from that. I'd feel more comfortable if I had a friend in the group who could vouch for me. Otherwise I'd worry the Cholitas didn't want me to be there.
I suppose that works in reverse as well -- an ethnic person might look at a group of white people and worry that one of them was present at Jan 6 or what have you.
What I miss from my childhood was the feeling that we're all in this together as human beings and race just isn't important. In the time & place I grew up, if someone was to start denigrating others on the basis of race, everyone would consider them to be an unimportant wacko. In that cultural context I wouldn't feel as much apprehension joining a group of Cholitas.
It’s very refreshing. It’s like the USA in my youth. Back in Chicago the racial tensions with blacks is far more. But still not as bad as one would assume. There’s a few that think their purpose in life is to scold you. A lot of that is just culture though, victimhood culture is permeating all racial groups in the US.
I feel bad for the woman who kept pointing out she was from Oakland and I kept just treating her like the Santa Cruz surf betties I had dated before not realizing what she was hinting at or that I might be taking her out of her comfort zone. I like to think the date we boogie boarded all day then ate pizza in the back of my truck while the porpoises swam by (learn their schedule Las Selva/Aptos peeps, 'running into' porpoises at the beach adds a little extra magic to a date for valleys not used to it) was good and not too uncomfortable.
Is as helpful as you may have intended. The comment was about not wanting to be the first, even if the group is welcoming, the commentator will still be the first/only person of color in the group and there is a discomfort inherent to that even if everyone is trying to be welcoming.
Also re “colorblind” policies of the 90a versus the explicitness of today, I think it’s similar to the current reckoning in journalism. We all have biases and pretending we don’t/acting like we are capable of pure objectivity simply hides them and makes them more difficult to combat. On the other hand explicitly acknowledging them allows you to consider how they might be influencing your decisions.
My feeling is that the best way to reduce subconscious bias is to have good race relations. And the best way to have good race relations is to have more positive interactions than negative interactions.
A thought experiment: Imagine a non-Mexican person says "I love celebrating Cinco de Mayo. It's an excellent excuse to drink tequila!"
As a culture, we can decide whether that's a positive interaction or a negative interaction.
We can make it a positive interaction by laughing and clinking glasses.
We can make it a negative interaction by calling the person out for cultural appropriation or trivializing an important Mexican holiday.
My intuition is that making it a negative interaction is a big mistake, because it worsens subconscious racial biases and generally makes the world a less pleasant place. I recommend playing this game https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb to better understand my intuition here. (Based on what I've read about Israel/Palestine, the game is an excellent description of why things have been getting so bad there lately.)
I say this from Mexico, sitting next to my Mexican wife and her mother.
To be clear, many Hispanics agree. Many of their ancestors played a role alongside the rest of their fellow whites. Whites are still admired by Asians as well.
This anti-white thing is largely an American phenomenon and other far left folks around the world that are resentful and cannot accept responsibility for their own condition. The rest of them deal with the hand they’re dealt, and go to work. As no one has more influence over their lives than them. We just accept it rather than adopt victimhood as a way of life. That’s how you create losers.
I actually wrote the initial draft of my comment with welcomingness as sort of a background assumption in my mind, and then I thought "wait a minute, even if I'm assuming that people would be welcoming, the person reading my comment might not. and given how hostile online discussions can get, it seems safer to err on the side of emphasizing welcomingness." That still seems roughly correct to me -- I think some topics have so much hostility associated with them that whatever you're going to say about the topic, it probably makes sense to also add in a bunch of welcomingness too, just so the discussion goes well.
I've heard similar things, but as a non-minority, you don't see what happens when you aren't looking or when people think they can get away with something without consequences, including social or professional consequences. Someone who is a minority has to live it 24/7, so they get a bigger picture that you don't.
You might be well-intentioned and surrounded by people who you believe are well-intentioned, but not everyone is, and plenty of the people who talk and act as if they're well-intentioned will turn around and betray those purported intentions when you aren't paying attention.
With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.
Yeah I totally buy that.
>With regard to race-blindness in the 90s and 00s, consider that today's focus on race is a reaction to the willful ignorance of the decades prior. Race mattered just as much back then as it does now, it's just that the majority in the past had patted themselves on the back and convinced themselves that it was a solved problem if they just stop talking about it.
If we believe racial discrimination is the root cause of racial inequality, then "talk about race less" (as a way to treat people more equally, and reduce discrimination) seems like a reasonable hypothesis to test. So the thing about people patting themselves on the back seems perhaps overly cynical?
I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s. For example, this Gallup poll indicates that Black adults believe race relations with white people have gotten much worse since 2013: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx
And I've seen research indicating that corporate bias reduction trainings typically backfire. Apparently if you want your company to have more diverse leadership, one of the most effective ways to do that is to create an official mentorship program which randomly pairs off junior people and senior people without regard to race. It seems that a junior employee of color gets better mentorship if they are regarded as a "junior employee at our company" as opposed to "junior employee of color". The mentorship program just works to overcome activation energy and create relationships between junior and senior people which might otherwise not exist due to awkwardness. (This is all from Chapter 8 of the book Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It)
The output of the 90s and 00s era was Obama getting elected president in 2008 and serving two terms. By contrast, I do think you can make the argument that Trump is in some sense a product of the woke era.
Trump's popularity exploded around July 2015: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2...
But e.g. the number of NY Times articles on "whiteness" were on an exploding trend by 2014: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
(The number of articles with those terms grows even faster after Trump becomes popular. I would postulate that the mechanism is something like this game I linked elsewhere in the thread https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb )
Anyway, my impression from reading right-wing Twitter feeds is that supposed woke overreach is a major motivation for Trump supporters, playing into the backfire point I mentioned previously.
I'm sure there is room to improve on the 90s and 00s. But I remain skeptical of the politician's syllogism: "We must do something. This is something. Therefore, we must do this."
This was the status quo for a very long time. Mentioning people's race was like mentioning people's weight. It didn't work.
> I'm also not convinced that what we're doing now is working better than what was done in the 90s and 00s.
The 2005 study "Are Greg and Emily More Employable Than Jamal and Lakisha" applied to jobs 5000 times with a stack of carefully crafted fake resumes that were randomly assigned names that were either stereotypically white (e.g. Greg, Emily) or black (e.g. Jamal, Lakisha.) The same resumes with white sounding names received 50% more callbacks. Over 5000 job applications. What we were doing in the 90s/2000s was not working and the fact that many white people find the polite approach more comfortable is not a good reason to stick to it. This isn't a social problem-- we're talking about people's basic chance of success in life. This idea that we can have equal opportunity by deliberately avoiding intervention is a proven fallacy. Pushing through the discomfort to find what actually works is a worthwhile undertaking. If another race with a far larger population was 50% more likely to get job callbacks than you were, I guarantee you'd agree.
The increase in political tension our culture has seen in the past decade plus is vastly more complex than the most visible catalyst of any given moment. Blaming social progress for the increasing resistance to social progress doesn't make sense. You could just as easily blame fascism or any other activist end of a political blob. As flawed and overly bandwagoned as it may be, "wokeness" is addressing real problems that oppress people in measurable ways every day. "Anti-Wokeness" is just another value signalling position to have that highlights political fault lines far older than any living American.
Although I appreciate the intentions of such people, as a non-white guy this always made me feel uncomfortable. That I'm not being welcomed for being a new member but rather a new member who's somewhat different (in color in this case). Whether this is at work, sports groups etc. I guess you call that a token?
Maybe the right compromise is to just be especially careful not to be rude to people who are underrepresented in the group, and not worry about it beyond that?
This isn't an attack and your sentiment seems genuine but obviously this person knows his fears are not logical. I doubt most people can will themselves into feeling accepted even if others, like yourself, do your best to them feel accepted.
That's why representation matters
