from Hacker News

Blacks with no criminal record have same sucess geting jobs as whites out prison

by elberto34 on 3/13/17, 7:12 PM with 25 comments

  • by misterbowfinger on 3/13/17, 10:15 PM

    He links to a study on unjust school funding:

    http://viz.edbuild.org/maps/2016/cola/resource-inequality/#s...

    The analysis here is flawed. An example that doesn't make sense is NYC. If you use the dropdown to go to New York and checkout NYC, your conclusion would be that all NYC students are unjustly funded and have much less than everyone else. But.... that makes no sense. New York City has some of the best public schools in the country.

    Yes, the funding is imbalanced and unjust. But it doesn't support his claim that it's biased towards whites and asian-americans. Asian-Americans are in many poorer neighborhoods in NYC but perform well in test scores despite the lack of funding.

    I should clarify - I'm not saying that school funding shouldn't be more balanced, or that imbalanced funding doesn't have a strong impact in other municipalities. But suggesting a one-to-one mapping of school funding to education quality by race is ridiculous. And yet, people make that lazy argument all the time. No one wants to dig into root causes.

  • by anothercomment on 3/13/17, 10:36 PM

    Article talks a lot about blame on white people, yet it doesn't even contain the information that black employers hire differently than white employers.

    Also, project implicit, the unconscious bias test referenced in the article, has been debunked: http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2017/01/psychologys-racism-meas...

  • by beat on 3/13/17, 9:40 PM

    Hard numbers are ugly numbers. This is important stuff.

  • by clock_tower on 3/13/17, 10:01 PM

    Could the headline be a little clearer? The typos in particular threw me off...

  • by heynowletsgo on 3/13/17, 10:13 PM

    That's because racism is just the extreme version of difference intolerence. Doesn't matter what the original group has in common, they will gang up on who is different, whatever the difference. The conversation shouldn't be limited to racial matters, the problem is lack of awareness that difference in and of itself causes the unaware to oppress.

  • by beloch on 3/13/17, 10:10 PM

    "Why do we discriminate? The big factor isn’t overt racism. Rather, it seems to be unconscious bias among whites who believe in equality but act in ways that perpetuate inequality."

    --------

    Aliefs[1] are a useful concept here. i.e. You may believe in equality but, thanks to the culture you live in, act against that belief unconsciously. There are a lot of reasons for people to alieve that blacks are less employable. Take, for example, Gangsta rap and it's continuing popularity. Here you have an art-form that glorifies materialism, violence, and lawlessness and is dominated by black artists. Few employers are likely to explicitly believe it is logical to fear or mistrust black job applicants because of gangsta rap, but its popularity nevertheless plants aliefs that contribute to the difficulties faced by black job-seekers.

    --------

    "Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, an eminent sociologist, calls this unconscious bias “racism without racists,” and we whites should be less defensive about it. This bias affects blacks as well as whites, and we also have unconscious biases about gender, disability, body size and age. You can explore your own unconscious biases in a free online test, called the implicit association test."

    --------

    It's important to draw a distinction between acting on racist beliefs and racist aliefs. Some would say the latter is being racist without knowing it, which is offensive to most and probably counterproductive to say. At present, racists are popularly viewed as demons to be mocked and punished. Even if there is a basis for calling someone acting on their aliefs racist, doing so is going to offend and hurt them and likely turn them against you. Subtler language is required here.

    [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alief_(mental_state)

  • by astrodust on 3/13/17, 10:05 PM

    Are there techniques for neutralizing the effects of things like race during the hiring process that could help make these sorts of decisions more objective?

    I'm reading The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis and it digs into things like this with great enthusiasm. Making people aware of their own inherent biases and devising criteria that help make objective decisions is not easy, but often necessary. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Undoing_Project)

  • by tabeth on 3/13/17, 10:27 PM

    I hate to go on my regular rant on this, but anonymous interviewing is the only answer. I could post literally thousands of studies, but everyone is already familiar with one of the more infamous.

    Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination

    http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

  • by partycoder on 3/13/17, 10:09 PM

    There are studies that show that given names associated with black culture are less successful in the job market.

    http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

    Not only in the job market but, also receive a worse treatment at schools and libraries.

  • by liberte82 on 3/13/17, 10:09 PM

    The headline makes it sound like "blacks who get out of prison with no criminal record have same success getting jobs as whites". That's how I read it, anyway, and I was wondering how you get out of prison without a criminal record. :)

  • by WorkingClassDev on 3/13/17, 10:19 PM

    I take it this is in America and not an international study?

  • by XJOKOLAT on 3/14/17, 9:19 PM

    Why was this flagged?