Again, this is where him being foreign helped. He had no career in the US, the risk to him was tiny. He could make a lot of money, and if he failed, he could go back home and continue as he was (like Piers Morgan did).
Well, yes. It’s not proof, but it is evidence. Especially when that discrepancy favors the majority culture and there is past history of hiring discrimination.
But that’s not really the issue. Discriminatory hiring practices are but one aspect of bigotry. What you are missing is that it’s entirely possible for someone to perform an action that is not motivated by bigotry, but still produce a bigoted result. This is because they are working within a system built by past bigotry to have advantages to the majority culture.
You are putting forth a well-meaning but old theory, often called “colorblindness.” It proposes that you can deal with
racism in society by ignoring race. But a whole lot of racism is unintentional, based on unconscious human biases. So the result of ignoring race, even at that individual level, can often still wind up discriminatory.
And that discrimination is resilient over time. It perpetuates itself, since you don’t have to be consciously supporting it. If a certain group holds most of the money and power, they don’t need to actively discriminate to make it where that group stays in power. People will subconsciously prefer the people who are like them. The groups who don’t get hired have less experience.
It’s an unbalanced scale. And you can’t fix an unbalanced scale by putting the same amount of things on one side. It will still remain off balance. Correction involves actually deliberately trying to fix the overrepresentation. Not with “quotas” but by deliberately seeking out diversity in those areas.
There’s an old saying: "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong. That is colorblindness racial theory.
That said, if you want a simpler way to look at things than all that, here’s an answer that looks at the proverbial forest.
You said yourself that race has no bearing on whether someone would be able to do this type of job. There also is not a lack of willingness by people of color to do the job. All things being equal, then, you would expect that, with a wide enough sample, no one group would be overrepresented.
That this is not the case proves that everything is not in fact equal. An unequal outcome, without other factors, proves unequal opportunity.
I would expect pretty much no exployment area to show perfect identity group representation for the reason that all things are never equal and cannot be equalised perfectly because doing so means managing and engineering the outcome.
“without other factors” is doing far too much work here. Your unspoken assumption is that for any unequal employment outcome you are somehow able to simply diagnose what that “other factor” is and wish to alter the outcome by some degree of brute force.
How committed are you really to this concept? The demographics of primary school teachers is massively skewed, is that due to discriminatory hiring practices and no equality of opportunity? How many current teachers are you suggesting we sack in order to rebalance it?
You surely can tell he’s using hyperbole. But, yes. Their job is to put on a show that people will want to watch. They would be bad at their job if they ignored aspects their audience cares about out of some outdated ideas of how to deal with bigotry.
The actual best cure for bigotry is exposure to diversity. There’s a reason why people start becoming less homophobic when they interact with more gay people.
Only after people become more aware can you then start to treat these things like they don’t matter.
Outdated ideas like ruling people out of jobs because of their sex, their sexuality, or their ethnicity?
It’s a lovely bit, but he is exaggerating for comic effect.
a) There’s no way someone of his demographic had never had some form of tacos while living in South Africa. It’d be Old El Paso crispy or similar, but he’d have had them, I find it unbelievable he never did.
b) South Africans do not call diapers napkins. We only call them nappies.
I’m talking conceptually here. In the real world, it won’t cancel out perfectly, no. You’d need the sample size to exactly match to have no error bars.
But there should no significant difference, as long as all other factors are controlled for. If there is nothing in the system that is biasing towards the overrepresented group or biasing against the underrepresented group, then the input and output should be representative.
No unstated assumptions here. I’m flat out saying there are no other non-bigoted reasons. Conceptually, if some group is underrepresented, there are only four possibilities: (1) there is some inherent trait for why the person cannot do the job. (2) They don’t want go out to get the job (3) The person doing the hiring is biased towards the overrepresented group (4) There is some sort of bias in the system itself.
Those last two are bigotry, even if unintentional.
As for “brute forcing the solution”: I offer no solution at that point, because I was dealing with the conceptual aspects. The only solution I pointed out was in the longer part of the post. But, even then, I wasn’t giving a full solution. I was just showing why colorblindness doesn’t work. To propose a full solution would be to provide a simple solution to a complex problem.
Yes, it is. But I would not propose firing teachers, any more than I proposed firing Jon Stewart to replace him with Trevor Noah. We were talking about hiring practices. And I do support preferential hiring of qualified teachers of color, LGBT teachers, and—yes—men. But note that word “qualified”: they need to be roughly equally capable of doing the job.
It would, however, be too far to create some sort of quota system, where you hire X number of women and X number of men and X number of LGBT teachers and X number of women of color.
That said, even if I didn’t support this, the fact that men, LGBT people, and people of color are so underrepresented in teaching field is definitely due to bigotry. A lot of it is systemic (e.g. discrepancy in payment in other fields), though some isn’t (“don’t say gay” bills and such). Hell, some of it is bigotry (intentional or not) on the part of the potential applicant, e.g. thinking teaching is “women’s work.”
Obviously, you have the concern of not wanting to hire someone who can’t do the job–you don’t want your kids taught badly. Just like you don’t want to hire someone who couldn’t handle the Daily Show. But, when dealing with a national show, the pool of potential talent is large enough that there is no reason to think there would be no PoC’s or women who could not only handle but would excel at the job.
Still, note that I’m having to give a lot more qualifiers than before with teaching, because none of this is simple. The point of my post was to point out that your understanding of what is bigoted is too simplistic, not trying to sum up all of the experts and solve this problem entirely.
I mostly just see your claim that I was being bigoted to be exactly part of the problem. Your idea that colorblindness and its equivalents are the answer was already tried, and failed.
“Brings a different perspective” is a circumstantial ability, not inherent. It’s dependent on inherent traits, but is not, itself, an inherent trait.
How else are you going to get a different perspective on, say, gender issues than by looking at hosts of a different gender?
Neither are they all that mentally flexible.
Is that the difference being looked for? No, I don’t think it is. There are plenty of white male hosts from across the political spectrum.
That is utopian thinking and does not manifest in the real world. We don’t know and cannot know the myriad pressures and preferences within complex cultures that drive free choice within a free society.
You say “as long as all others factors are controlled for” I don’t think you have a hope in hell of getting anywhere close to doing that with any accuracy at all.
You seem to be contradicting yourself here. You say there are no non-bigoted reasons for underrepresentation and then immediately go on to list 4 categories, two of which clearly contain non-bigoted possibilities.
Also, the opportunity space and complexity of (2) dwarfs everything else you mention. That may well be the largest source of variation and the one that you can never fully direct or control. If you are certain that the variation seen is definitely coming from sources (3) and (4) then you are unlikely to be fully considering the actual reasons behind underrepresentation.
In any case. I contend that the problems with (3) and (4) can and have been addressed and that continuing to do so, with an end goal of removing the prejudice and bias, is the best solution.
I agree that the situation is not simple.
However, It is a fact that hiring practices that use immutable characteristics as a factor for employment are prejudicial, discriminatory and yes, bigoted. I don’t think you have a leg to stand on if you were to suggest that they aren’t.
You may think they are warranted in some cases, but that is not at all clear to me and it is where we would strongly disagree.
I never mentioned “colorblindness”. You claim that it has been tried and failed, I don’t accept that. I think that hiring practices are getting better and better all the time as regards equality of opportunity.
If you think it is failing, I’d have to ask what you think success actually looks like, because if it is a world with full and equal representation of all groups across all areas and pursuits then you are never going to be satisfied.
Given full equality of opportunity, groups will not necessarily distribute themselves equally across all of those areas. If you measure equality of opportunity by looking at the outcomes and ascribe the inequality of those outcomes to be the result of some form of prejudice, discrimination or bigotry then you are doomed to see it everywhere, forever.
If your solution to that is to engineer the outcomes to fit your pre-determined acceptable distribution then I’m sorry, you are doing more harm than good.
Well he is playing up the “foreigner” trope.
Plus a taco is at its base just a wrap with filling of meat, veggies and sauces. Pretty every culture has something like that and I am sure South Africa has that as well.
By interviewing and employing people who are able to provide a different perspective on gender. Not all people of a certain gender have the same perspective on the subject, nor does a difference of gender guarantee a difference of perspective.
You start by treating each person as an individual rather than as a representative entity of an identity group.
Hopefully he won’t then fail spectacularly at home, as Piers Morgan did.
Natively, no, actually. South Africa’s Black cuisine doesn’t feature any kind of wraps. Strictly porridge-based.
Our creole cuisines, like Cape Malay cooking, do.
But I’m not saying Noah would be familiar with a generic wrap, I’m saying he’d be familiar already with actual tacos (well, TexMex crispy tacos, at any rate - whether the taco truck served those or more authentic Mexican ones, it’s impossible to tell)
Sure. And the best pool to start interviewing would be … ?
No-one said that.
Yes, it does. A non-white&male comedian is axiomatically not going to have a white male perspective.
All hiring involves weighing qualifications. In this case, not being a particular identity group is a qualification. Not that a person is representative of that group, but just membership of that group, is a disqualification.
For this role, people shouldn’t be considered for the identity they have. They should be considered for the identity they don’t. Because that particular identity is oversubscribed.
Beat me to it. I can’t think of a single occupation where there isn’t some subjective component to ‘best’.
There are some entirely skill based tasks where you can define a best - if you want to someone to run 100 yards as quickly as possible, you hire Usain Bolt (or you did, I imagine he’s lost a step). Someone is the fastest Rubik’s cube solver.
But for any ‘real world’ job, just defining the qualifications is inherently subjective, so anyone selected is going to have passed through that gate.
as wide a pool as possible, i.e. not excluding people of certain sex, sexuality or ethnicity
The perspective that a white male has is axiomatically the perspective of that individual white male. That is as much as you can say about it. There is no guarantee that it has anything in common with another white male, there is every likelihood that it will be very different indeed. You don’t know a priori, and you shouldn’t assume.
That is a distinction without a difference. A person is being disqualified from consideration because of who they are, not what they can do.
Again, a distinction without a difference. If I said that I would only consider player who weren’t black or mixed race for selection to the national soccer team because that particular identity was oversubscribed, I suspect you wouldn’t think that was fair. And you’d be right.
Surprised at the first bit I must adjutant. Ignorance fought.
As for the second, yes I did not make myself clear, i was making an observation (incorrect as it turns out) rather then commentating on availability of tacos in S Africa.
Actually, because of the immerse reach of American pop culture I would be surprised any major urban center in the greater Anglosphere which doesn’t have Taco places, there are 4 within a 5 on radius of my office in Islamabad, only one of which is good, (it’s run by a Mexican woman married to a Pakistani).
and education level, and photogenicity, and age, and funniness…
Yeah, no. Almost all jobs have narrower pools than “everyone”. “As wide as possible” in this case is (or ideally should be, I should say - wouldn’t surprise me if a Pale Male sneaks in again) narrower than you’d like. Tough.
Which is a white male perspective.
That’s plenty.
No. But it is not, and can’t be, a non-white, non-male perspective.
Yes.
What, you think I’m going to deny it?
Soccer players aren’t there to give their perspectives on things like the job in question.Try a different tu quoque, this one is broken.
There are 4 within 10 min walk of where I’m typing, too. 
I can’t vouch for their quality, I’ve only had the real deal a couple of times.
Of course he is exaggerating. Someone who grows up in South Africa is not likely afraid of taco trucks. Of course he does know what a taco is. He knows what a napkin is and has been offered them many times in the US before this - and even if not, it is very obvious from the context to anybody - no food place would offer you a diaper. I can’t speak as to the words used in SA, so you are probably right here.
It still speaks to his skill as a storyteller and the accents are a nice touch.