Guys, because I said “slavery ended 150 years ago” doesn’t mean that racism didn’t exist anymore after that! I suppose that feeling was more directed towards reparations or something, but it was in response to a poster that tried to make a distinction between the situation in Malaysia vis a vis the minority Chinese versus the African American.
My question remains…how do we as a society going forward with continually improving race relations (I’m going to assume that, since it appears to be so) remove a social program like affirmative action from the dole?
Well, I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. It’s far nicer of me to assume that you were simply ignorant of Jim Crow than to assume that you were perfectly aware of it but felt it necessary to use slavery as a rhetorical means of suggesting that blacks should have parity with whites by now.
No, there’s no government directive like that. AA is intended to help improve representation of minority groups who have historically been denied certain opportunities. I don’t think it’s intended to last until a point that we universally decide equality has been established.
Wouldn’t a fairer comparison be between Asian Americans and white Americans? You know, since we can eliminate the whole Jim Crow/slavery thing? Why do Asians, on average, outperform whites? Wouldn’t that answer provide some insight for the OP?
And what’s the deal with all the black threads anyhow?
Aren’t women, I guess white women, the primary beneficiaries of Affirmative Action and have been for some time? If so, then wouldn’t the first way to improve race relations, is to stop labeling Affirmative Action as a racial (black) program and a refer to it as gender one?
I live in Singapore. I see this very first hand. I don’t have any cites as such except my own observations and experience so take it for what its worth.
For the Malay, yes - there is a very very large agrarian / peasant culture that is living on the land, peasant huts, no power etc etc. I see it all the time. For this group, even if you are given “advantages” you often can’t take advantage of them. What good is a guaranteed place in university to you if you don’t learn to read in the first place?
Secondly, the Chinese have long been a wealthier group in Malaysia (I don’t know the histroical reasons so don’t ask me). But this does become self fulfilling and self perpetuating. Because of their wealth, they get a better education, (often full fee paying students at international universities) which means that they come home and get the best (highest paying) jobs. And so the cycle starts again.
Thirdly, the Chinese (IME, and in this part of the world) are very racist. They do very much support their own, and are prejudice against other racial groups - so they tend to hire from within their own race alot more. So you tend to have the merchant class hiring and training more Chinese - while the menail, labouring and service jobs tend to be more populated by the Malay.
Another thought is that different cultures place different emphases on different aspects of life. I remember one study from university (no cite right now, so sue me) that examined the differences in “White” and “Polynesian” performance in New Zealand. The outcome was that the white placed a far greater emphasis on status and job while the Polynesian considered family more important. The outcome of this was that the white were more willing to sacrifice family time to get ahead at work, move away from the family, whatever. While the Polynesian would take jobs that allowed them to spend more time with family, were not so dedicated because it simply wasn’t as important to them.
Given this dynamic of course one group is going to show marked differences in terms of “economic” performance. (I am making no value judgements here, just observations). I suspect you have something very similiar going on within Malaysia between Malay and Chinese.
Again my own observations here are that the Chinese think more long term and “economics” while Malay tend to focus more on shorter term taking care of family now. These are endemic cultural traits that positive discrimination has toruble addressing.
It might not be very fair to compare the Malays to the Chinese, though. For some reason, the Chinese seem to do particularly well wherever they go.
I’m in Singapore, just south of Malaysia (about an hour’s drive away, actually) and I must agree that there is a view that Malays are “lazy”. Whether that’s true or not I have no way of telling - my Malay colleagues seem just as hardworking as anyone else.
As a whole, though, Singapore has about 75% Chinese, 20% Malay, and 5% Indian (roughly). The circumstances between Singapore and Malaysia are roughtly equal - we were one country 50 years ago, after all. We have fewer affirmative action programmes for Malays than Malaysia, but there are some. And we have the same problem with Malays being overrepresented in the poorer sectors of society. The Indians minority, however, generally doesn’t have as much of a problem.
Why is that? I have no idea. Could be genetic, could be cultural. You didn’t see Malays going to the states to set up laundries after all.
Just my WAG, Malays tend to have bigger families. The poorer Chinese tend to have bigger families too. Correlation does not imply causation, but I think that’s a trend that’s rather obvious.
This is an extremely good point. It’s sort of easy to look around at how near-universal the view of racism as the ultimate evil is within American culture, and forget that things were very much not that way very much within living memory. No one of college age today grew up in that era, sure, but many of their parents surely spent some time within it. It’s not at all yet something whose immediate effects are confined to history textbooks.
That’s certainly true and perhaps myself, as someone that grew up integrated due to my military upbringing failed to appreciate in the late 1970’s and throughout the 1980’s.
I suppose it’s very easy for me to say that I don’t really perceive a racist component in the workplace (again, assuming possibly with ignorance that affirmative action is in place for minorities to get a fair shake at being hired rather than for women, as someone posited above) as a white male, married with family and approaching 40 years old.
But I had many friends that were minorities of every stripe (career military families have a way of getting around), I never experienced anything other than softcore racism (jokes, etc) in my life, and I can look at the sucessess that many, many black people (even aside from the stereotypical “wicked jump shot or slinging the rocks”) enjoy today.
I know that we are not fully free from racism and we likely will never be. But conditions in this country in terms of race have improved so rapidly and so well that I am wondering when we will see not the end of racism, but the propping up of minorities by governmental dole not because we are outraged by it (“just get a job, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, loser!”) but because it will no longer be necessary.
And how do we make that determination? Studies? “Studies Show That Black People Now On Par With Whites In SAT’s…Time To End Affirmative Action?”
Sorry, misclicked.
In Spain one of the biggest hurdles in (take your pick) “ending anti-gypsy racism” or “mainstreaming gypsies” or “destroying the traditional gypsy culture” was getting them to value schooling and stable jobs. So long as they preferred being on the move, marrying their 13yo daughters to their 15yo sons and not being able to read, nobody could force them to do otherwise. Now they are often on the move (many of the people who go to a different town’s weekly market each day of the week, and many summer-fair workers are gypsies), they tend to marry later but still younger than payos, an unmarried woman isn’t seen as “broken” any more (mind you, this used to be true of payos as well, the gypsies just took longer) and they can read and do taxes and get grants for school and some are going to college.
I took part in an international project which included a South African factory. That factory offered literacy training, ESL training and other courses, but very few people took advantage of them. After seeing the middle-level managers walk everywhere with the new manuals and consult them constantly for a couple weeks, suddenly people weren’t just signing up: they were asking whether the courses were available for relatives too (they were). Again, values.
Asians outperform whites in the US, and ethnic Chinese outperform other Malaysians because, as a group, they are differently enabled genetically.
The ONLY reason this sort of statement is rejected outright is that it is unpalatable and politically incorrect. However mother nature never promised to be either.
If we were talking about breeds of horses or any other mammal sub-populations there wouldn’t be any tenderness to the topic. However with people our gut reaction is that it just can’t be so because we don’t want it to be so, and we begin to look for every other possible explanation. We look for historic reasons…we look for cultural reasons…we look for unfair measurement…we look for special excuses…anything but the obvious: success of various populations in various endeavors reflects an average innate ability for that endeavor.
Genetics defines a maximum potential. Obviously external circumstances can allow that maximum potential to be realized, or limit it. If you give me greater opportunity and the best teaching I could be better at math, but never great at it. Genetics is not the only thing. But it’s a huge thing, and differences in genetically-determined maximum potential as well as genetically-determined frequency of the best-capable individuals is what drives both culture itself and success of individuals within a broader culture.
Sure, a shopkeep might be from a wealthier family than a peasant farmer. But why is his family shopkeepers in the first place and the other from a family of peasant farmers? Why are some groups consistently dominant and others consistently taken advantage of? Why are the same populations successful whether they are minorities or majorities? I could look at scores from local high schools in Illinois and scores from most other countries I can think of and pretty much predict the chinese would be over-represented in the top tiers.
Of course, the larger the cohort being described, the looser the genetic consistency; there are subpopulations within the nation of China who do very poorly and others who do very well, for example. It’s probably more accurate to say that those genetically enabled for higher maximum intelligence potential on average do better in any culture over time, and that populations where the genes expressing for that trait are more prevalent do better as a population. Because one of our tendencies as humans is to self-identify with a particular group, those sorts of traits tend to retain their distributions within “ethnic” or “racial” cohorts.
In our society, where we put a value on diversity and justice for all, we must use race-based affirmative action if we want more equal distribution of the fruits of society among all its peoples. If we don’t actively do that, we’ll continue to see inequality among the self-identified cohorts and a persistent perception of injustice.
It doesn’t matter if the maldistribution is from genetics and it doesn’t matter if we shouldn’t identify with races. We refuse to accept genetic explanations and we are atavistically inclined to identify by clans. Therefore, until either of those change, we need to make some active efforts aimed at giving a place at the table to underperforming populations even if there is some expense and unfairness to the better-enabled. As the OP’s example shows, the better-enabled will find ways to succeed anyway.
