The stats on black/white/Asian college achievement makes for an uncomfortable discussion. It's okay to suggest that systemic racism is why black people don't participate in college as much as you'd expect based on their prevalence in society, but it's also okay to say that the reason Asians are over-represented is because culturally they've made it a huge priority to attain as much education as possible.
Maybe we should focus less on trying to identify and somehow solve systemic racism and more about making it culturally acceptable and desirable for black people to enter the STEM fields. Highlight the superstars in STEM who are kicking ass (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson) and encouraging people to identify with him and motivate them to work even harder.
Exactly. The cognitive dissonance must be painful, for some people.
Poverty explains part of it but there is a cultural and familial part too.
Society isn't responsible for everything.
>Would it also be okay to suggest Asians are over-represented because of unearned Asian privilege?
That would be an incredibly stupid and unequivocally false thing to suggest because the odds are actually stacked against Asians, and they must work harder than most other people to achieve the same thing. Asians have earned everything they've attained in this country. They deserve whatever success they've gotten, and for that, they receive undeserved discrimination and disrespect.
> "That would be an incredibly stupid and unequivocally false thing to suggest because the odds are actually stacked against Asians, and they must work harder than most other people to achieve the same thing."
As an Asian, I don't agree with that. Many Asians emigrated from Asia with very little possessions and started their lives in Western countries in conditions as bad or worse than the poorest native born, including a significant language barrier and, yes, racism in their newly adopted homelands. Yet, by and large, they have built successful lives.
I'd describe the statement as incredibly accurate and unequivocally true.
I think you are misreading something. I am arguing against the suggestion that Asians have unearned privilege which allowed them to become successful in America.
Not sure about other Asians, but most South Asians that immigrated to US already had degrees and were upper-middle class (having the money to buy international plane tickets automatically qualifies you to be upper-middle class). Sure they had to live poor initially but their mentality was "this is temporary and we will improve our situation soon enough".
> Sure they had to live poor initially but their mentality was "this is temporary and we will improve our situation soon enough".
so to get back to the grandparent post's question - why don't black people have this same mentality? What is it that's specific that's causing the disparity between asians and blacks?
1. Poverty, especially generational poverty, is extremely difficult to get out of. Studying in a university means you won't be able to help your family financially for 5-8 years. Which can be really difficult for many.
2. No role model. Let's say you can somehow manage those hardships. But how do you know all this effort and education loans will be worth it? There are not many role models for African Americans in STEM so they are afraid to dream big. For Indians it's very easy, our culture (especially the Brahmin upper-middle class culture) has always had plenty of role models.
3. They never really paid the true price of getting out of poverty. Education in India and China is highly state sponsored, so all the quality education you got there was mostly tax paid, which enabled them to immigrate to US in the first place. If you give African Americans the same quality education fully sponsored by the state things will change for them too.
So these are true for the current generation of immigrants.
What about the generation of asians [0] that were from the beginning of the 19th century? They broke out of poverty, despite all the same disadvantages.
I don't believe the Indians and Chinese who immigrated back in 1900s ever got rid of poverty. It's only the last few decades of educated immigrants that changed the narrative that Asians are the model minority, it's been a part of US propaganda for decades now - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/11/29/the-r...
I can see the same happen in my ancestry too. The ones who migrated back in 1900s or during the wars never made it big while the educated ones who went there after 50s are doing well.
My great grandfather immigrated to USA in 1920s from Kapurthala in Punjab. Most of his descendants work as nurses if they went beyond high school, few went to college but almost all own property, so I’m not sure what you mean here.
So they were military/landlords back in Punjab and did the same in US? Where's the American Dream™ upgrade? Btw if you were a Jatt in Punjab you were already upper-middle class but now in US you downgraded to lower-middle class.
I would like to see if a Chamaar from Punjab was able to go to US before 1960s and able to become a land owner.
He was Muslim, not Jat or Rajput as far as I know (and yes I know you can both but he didn’t have any sort of obvious last name like Rathore or whatever) I don’t think he owned any land there. Hence the upgrade. I think he imported itar at one point but mostly ran small tuck shop. I think his cousins might have owned land near Batala but after 47 they lost it and went to PK. He did buy the land he built his house on in Cleveland though.
One obvious result is generational poverty and what hints at 'learned helplessness' of sorts and loss of hope. It isn't limited to just the racial context. London schools found that their low end of the bell curve were native working class children. Worse than even refugees from a non-privileged background in even the 'relative to origin' sense.
The phenomenon is larger than race, although it may be involved in any given instance or manifestation. It is a shared cliche for successful professionals hailing from both inner city to suburbs and dying small town Midwest that they never want to return to. That 'they're ones of the ones who made it out of that (shit/hell)hole', along with a disgust at its inhabitants or melancholy resignation that they are stuck in dysfunction, along with optional lingering resentment over mistreatment by the local crab-bucket.
I'm not sure anyone has an answer for how to solve those issues. A hypothetical solution probably wouldn't be very popular even if it isn't anything morally or ethically uncomfortable just from how 'counter-intutive' it would have to be.
I don't understand why you are arguing these points at me. I didn't say anything about whites. Unarmed Asians being killed less by police and Asians being capable of racism doesn't mean Asian Americans are privileged lol. What are you trying to say bro? Just come out and say it.
Anyway, Asians did not succeed from a position of privilege. They succeeded in spite of everything the American voter (largely white) voted for to keep them down.
There's no positive stereotypes. Given the stereotype that Asians are smart, what happens to impoverished Asians who did not have a good education and upbringing and aren't as smart as others? They get demoralized and are cast aside in many cases.
I don't see how you could ever come to the conclusion that Asian people don't have it harder than white people given the wiki links I've provided. Given how American/white culture often disrespects and mocks Asian culture and classifies them as uncreative followers unfit to lead.
Asian success is not proof that Asians are privileged or have it easier than other people. Asian success came in spite of everything done to them in this country. They put their head down and gave their sweat and blood to get where they are now.
Of course stereotypes can be positive (see the links provided). Either depending on the context or for the group overall. And, moreover, a stereotype doesn't come from nowhere. It's based on some factual truth.
So because some Asians aren't smart the fact Asians in general are seen as smart is bad for them? Why not see it from a different perspective : Asians that aren't so smart still benefit from the image that they are and may still get some advantage from it.
And you think there are no stereotypes about white people? Russians are alcoholics, latin people are ... etc.
I think you're using "white" to mean WASP.
You can't have it all : if they're praised for being studious and disciplined they can't also be seen as super nonconformists and rebelles... Both type of traits involve a different mental structure.
When you say "odds are stacked against" someone, you have to compare to some other group to see what the "default" odds are. And privilege is not limited to the law. If a white person preferentially hires or promotes other whites, you'd claim those whites benefited from privilege. But you won't say the same for Asians, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act? Or because you just don't believe such a thing happens, despite evidence to the contrary [1,2]?
>If a white person preferentially hires or promotes other whites, you'd claim those whites benefited from privilege. But you won't say the same for Asians,
Untrue, I have not claimed this anywhere or have implied such a thing.
Claiming Asians in the US have never benefited from privilege implies exactly that, unless you tweak the definition of privilege depending on what group you're judging.
When I did my computer engineering undergrad, there were just a handful of US-born white people (or black people) in any of my classes. They were mostly filled with the children of working-class immigrants and foreign students.
edit: we joked that the progression of generations went: immigrant maid/janitor -> engineer/nurse/lab tech -> doctor/lawyer -> artist/unemployed philosopher
As a former teacher I 100% support surveillance (hopefully video) monitoring in the classroom. Parents need to see first-hand how bad student behavior can get.
Adolescents require a sense of privacy in order to properly grow into functional and successful adults. I was under constant surveillance as a child and wasn't able to start "being me" until I'd left home. My development was straight up stunted by constant surveillance. There are too many abusive / helicopter parents out there for this to possibly be a good thing.
I can only imagine what life would be like if my control-freak step-grandmother had access to tapes of me learning how to interact with my classmates and participating in cognitive rebellion against their draconian, hyper-religious control over my personality. Instead of being punished 75% of the time it would have been 100% of the time. I would not have been allowed to contact any of my friends because they all grew up in more sensible households and represented threats to my guardians' control over me.
And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual.
Maybe it sounds like a good idea at face value but you should resist espousing such views without thinking about every last detail.
>And this doesn't even touch the fact that normalizing children to surveillance is objectively a bad thing if you give a rat's ass about the future of this planet and peoples' ability to be individual.
Yes, but the powers that be don't actually want that. It's easier to control children that don't know better if they're prevented from learning that things could be better, much like it's antithetical to a racist government's power to educate people of races they don't like.
This is appealing to technocrats and other authoritarians, because They know better than You, but that's short-term thinking at its worst; what they fail to consider or calculate is that progress requires time and risk to occur.
I grew up free range. And I mean like, "going to the woods for a couple days, very back Sunday..." type free.
Was not able to do that degree with my own kids, but they had considerably more than their peers did. (Yes, I had to deal with helicopter parents a few times)
I'm fortunate to have enjoyed similar freedoms; my guardians would throw me out the door until night time and on weekends I would disappear without communication. Luckily the only thing they enjoyed more than controlling every aspect of my personality was pretending I didn't exist.
It was weird spending time with friends whose parents generally let them develop their own personalities and interests unhindered but who would have to check in or get permission every time we changed locations. Once I was out the house, I never felt the need to check in because neither did my guardians. Honestly I'm fairly certain they would hope I wouldn't come back one day. And I definitely had quite a few close calls.
As for my own children, I plan to do the same; their time is their business, as long as they stay out of trouble. Hopefully while at home I manage to drill some sense into their heads.
The worst of my teachers' behavior when I was a kid was beyond the pale, but no one took kids at face value.
Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people. No one believes how bad it gets in there, and for some reason, promptly forgets what it was like in school when they were growing up. Or they just didn't comprehend it at the time.
I'm curious why in such an environment even if tapes existed you believe that students and parents would have any access to such tapes even if authorities within the school reviewed such and knew what you were saying to be absolutely true.
I'm curious, did you attend a large(ish) school or a smaller school?
I attended what most people would consider a "small" public high school in the U.S. (rural area, less than 1,000 students, one high school for the entire county), and never experienced anything like what you're describing.
Teachers knew students by name (given the smaller size of their classes; for example, there was one band teacher for the entire school), as well as students' parents by name.
I never experienced or observed bad bullying or even physical violence (except for some minor skirmishes, usually between friends) during my school years.
We surely had our share of social awkward people, but they were left alone unless they themselves acted out, and they usually still made some friends.
We didn't have true bullies. Maybe occasionally somebody from a higher grade would tease somebody younger, but never for long let alone repeatedly. Beating somebody up would have been a great crime worthy of grave penalties in our eyes, and we would have stopped it and then have ratted out whoever it was in a heartbeat. If somebody tried to bully somebody beyond what we considered acceptable teasing or be aggessive to somebody, the class mates would protect whoever it was, even the social awkward kid. This only happened once in my peer group with a dude who had freshly transferred from another school (moved cities IIRC) trying to be the "cool" guy picking on an awkward kid, starting to slap him. He quickly learned that if you want to bully or fight one of us, you will fight all of us. Forming a crowd around him telling him to leave his victim alone, fuck off and never try it again with anybody was enough. A few years later we were buddies with him.
There were some students who gave teachers a somewhat hard time, but mostly "class jokers" who probably suffered from ADHD. I only ever had one class mate who posed such a problem the teachers could not handle her within our school. She was then sent off to a special care place specializing in teens with her kinds of problems, not as a punishment or some bullshit "zero tolerance" policy but to help her.
This is of course just my personal experience in the two schools I personally visited, but it makes me genuinely wonder how the dynamics in a school can change and deteriorate to a point where constant bullying and even beat ups are tolerated and common (whether it be due to obliviousness or fear). But I know it happens, and happens a lot.
I went to a small elementary school; a small-ish middle school, and a large "talented" high school. The last was by far the best environment. The first two were in the suburbs; the last in a major city.
The middle school was the worst of the bunch, but the unhealthy power dynamics are everywhere. Students who, if they don't care for their grades, teachers have zero leverage over. Teachers with little to no accountability, and a bunch of hormone-rich assholes to look after. All locked in together day after day.
> Fact is, school is a horrible environment with disgusting power dynamics in every direction, which doesn't do anything to bring out the best in people.
*In the US. My own school experience in Europe could not have been more different than what you describe. When looking for a solution, we should not forget about places that have (or had) good school systems.
It seems... wrong to reduce this to a U.S. and Europe dichotomy, there are a lot of great schools in the U.S. and I assume there are bad ones in Europe as well.
Sorry, I did not mean to imply that. Just that school is not inherently terrible.
After all, I can only vouch for a few schools in one country in Europe. And that's outdated info - I hear things have been slowly getting worse here as well.
Edit: Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood. Some statistics could clear things up...
> Yet I do get the impression schools are worse in the US, at least from how they're universally portrayed by Hollywood
When I studied abroad in Europe, other exchange students regularly asked me how us Americans learn anything when we are constantly talking during class as seen in any highschool teen drama movie. As if Mean Girls was a documentary. I was dumbfounded.
People assume art imitates life. That, aside from a few liberties taken to make a more interesting story, movies try to faithfully represent reality. And when so many movies all share the same spin, one assumes there's some truth behind that spin.
A big part of what people think about daily US life, past and present, is shaped by movies. E.g. we didn't learn about Mt. Rushmore, Drive-In theaters, the FBI, Thanksgiving, or Miranda rights in school.
*Everywhere. My own school experience in Europe was pretty much the same as he described. And it is not only my school experience either, there were many cases of unpunished power abuse that the teachers engaged in in nearby schools.
ESL teacher here. I agree with your comment (although not necessarily with the reasoning).
This week inwasnput incharge of the whole technology deot behind out school and the boss asked me to find a way to forward the cameras to their main office.
They asked it was possible and I gave a non committal answer promising to get back to them next week, purely because I know some teachers are uncomfortable about this.
Personally I'm all for it. I've seen it in Korea (I'm in Japan btw), where parents can see real time feeds of the classrooms.
Personally, i don't have an issue. I have a full audio and video camera in my room, and I'm willing to open that to the owner(and if they want the parents) in real time.
A lot of teachers over here seem to take it as an insult though. As if their personal freedoms are being enchroached.
I think there is more reason than to show how badly their children are acting though. A co worker was accused of sexually assaulting a student a few years ago (different school). They happened to still have the recordings on hand and after showing the full month in question to the oarentx the student admitted to makjgbitnuo to try and stop doing extra after school studies. That's one reason it's damn important, and the converse side of course.
I'm of the mind that having a camera(and audio) in a classroom that parents can access in real time is not just an excellent safety precaution, it's also a great way for parents to learn about their children's study and learning methods!
I side with the teachers on this one. Parents should not be able to watch their kids' classroom in realtime. There are helicopter parents out there, now they will be helicoptering the poor teachers and other students.
I think surveillance should still be used but with limitation, similar to police bodycams. Have audio/video recording and provide it to the parents if an incident arises or if there is a reasonable request from a parent. This introduces subjectivity but if carefully implemented that could be minimized.
I am concerned that desensitizing the future generations to constant surveillance could have bad consequences down the line, when people suddenly become ok with living in a 1984 type environment because that's all they know through their formative/school years.
But yeah some kind of unobtrusive bodycam style system for forensic purposes only (no access for parents) seems a reasonable middle ground.
Whilst I support the premise that schools might want security cameras for security reasons (finding out who beat someone up etc), it’s basically been shown that schools can’t be trusted with that kind of technology. I imagine that it would have a huge chilling effect on student development if everything was constantly being monitored (and who knows who watches the tapes).
There is a huge difference between what is described in the article, and a simple video recording that you're describing.
A video system is ultimately a facilitator of human-scale behavior - recorded footage can be played back as objective evidence or representative examples. A proper video system would have an append-only audit log of what was accessed by whom, available to the entire community. But even without that, the limit of abuse is confined to what a petty school administration could accomplish. Whereas the system in the article is practically begging to create perverse incentives that lead to mechanized abuse ("your son has been suspended for repeated aggression incidents" - meanwhile it's simply something about their voice that sets off a poorly implemented trigger). The fallout from these problems then gets default-labeled as "nobody's fault" because the non-techie bias is to trust machines' biased interpretations as if they're facts.
Gosh,do you think there could be a bug where black males are evaluated as "more aggressive" than white females, by the AI system? Surely it would be calibrated against that, perhaps by using police officer's professional judgment as training labels...
OMG lol i was going to agree with you with all the recent tragedies lately and then you had to drop because of student behavior. well i have seen teachers take it out on students too...
