10 ms·

> But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students. Wow, using a word such as segregation, which has connotation

by _hilro 5y ago

> But the highly selective and racially segregated program will be replaced for incoming students. Wow, using a word such as segregation, which has connotations of 'by design' sure lays bare their hand. Just to be clear, there is no segregation(of any kind) amongst the students in the program. In fact, there is no segregation at all. There's just not equal representation of the makey-uppy USA racial classifications. But why let facts and clarity rule over emotional clickbaity sub-headlines?

chucksmash 5y ago
What an egregious choice of wording. I feel like the bystander in this PBF comic[1] when I see things like this. [1]: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/
bloooop 5y ago
It's important to realize that the program is segregated by intent and by design. The segregation is NOT accidental. That's true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs in the US. That's not fundamental, and not true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs worldwide. Worldwide, such programs are meritocratic pathways to socioeconomic mobility. In the US, the story is much more complex. Most such programs were explicitly structured to keep African Americans and immigrants out. This was structured in admissions exams (which were often designed, for example, around mastery of one dialect of English, even in contexts like math, where that's irrelevant), in geographies of such programs, and in many other elements. That this intent is no longer present today is irrelevant. Those structures remain, perpetuate, and in many ways, become self-reinforcing. The current politically popular fix? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and nuking the programs from orbit. At that point, no one without wealth can get ahead. We need something more nuanced, but we're not going to get that if we don't first acknowledge the issue. Refs: You can look at documents like this one, from over two decades ago, citing references well before then, talking about how to reduce some of the intentionally segeregatory impacts of gifted-and-talented admissions testing: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource... (and it's worth noting how little has happened in the intervening decades)
- threatofrain 5y ago
  Under your perspective, were NY gifted and talented programs designed to exclude blacks but include Asians (among the poorest demographics in NYC) as the largest plurality? And why?
  - bloooop 5y ago
    No. They were designed from a lineage of decisions intended to exclude blacks and to include whites. That's not my perspective; that's a historical fact. That's why I referenced a Dept. of Education OCR report, which in turn references National Academies publications and similar sorts of credible references, all predating the current social justice political climate. How decisions made in the eighties and sixties impact families in 2020 is sort of complex. Now, I move away from fact to my perspective. My perspective is that many Asian immigrant families are more likely to: - Come from a culture which values education, and especially measurable outcomes in education (e.g. math, rather than creativity) - In some cases, come from cultures with 2000+ year histories of civil service exams and meritocracy - Often lack the same sorts of wealth or support networks as American families, which puts a lot more pressure on having kids become self-supporting and independently successful - Are less likely to be successful in fields which rely on having strong US-based social networks than white families, which also pushes towards areas like STEM. ... a plethora of effects like these leads to immigrant (and especially Asian immigrant) families being heavily over-represented within the system which was resulted. On the other hand, if my family was on the Mayflower, and my uncle can get my kid a job at his law firm, my aunt can hook him up with a management position in her marketing firm, and if neither does that, at least we own the house and he can always live here, there's a lot less pressure. I have a lot more incentive to let kids be kids, let kids play more, and school less. So immigrants, and especially Asian immigrants, now tend to do well in this system. It continues to discriminate against blacks, though. Why is this hard to accept?
    - threatofrain 5y ago
      > Now, I move away from fact to my perspective. I mean, the majority of your prose comes after your description of facts, and details your pet theory on how advantageous Asian culture and parenting is an adequate explanation for the effect sizes we're seeing — that a very poor demographic in NYC would come to fulfill the plurality of NYC's gifted and talented program. And something about how Asians come from 2000 years of test taking, so they're really good at tests (but not necessarily "good")?
mc32 5y ago
People like to blame society or the system. Some of it is but there is also parental responsibility and small/immediate culture which has greater effect. If you have parents that come from poor backgrounds and despite that produce kids who overrepresent in achievement, people in some corners like to brush that under a rug and anyone who highlights that is guilty of falling for the "model minority". Problem is, that's a cop-out and veers on crab mentality. Some subpopulations simply push their kids to study more and play less than others. That's just how it is. The parents may have two jobs, but still manage to instill an education mindset into them --a minority of these kids will look back and say that their childhoods were not fun, and that is likely true, but I don't think they'd be have a better life trudging away as a HS dropout or similar. And surely some parents overburden their kids to study "respected" professions. But that's a different problem. Within a particular ethnicity or "race" some subpopulations have dedicated parents and others don't. If I were born in the south to "hillbillies" my odds for landing in talented and gifted would go way down, not because of race, or ethnicity but because the culture of the parents and the immediate culture. But take South Koreans 1st gen and compare them to Philippine 1st gen or Pole and Romanian and that's a no-no.
pacbard 5y ago
The context for the use of "racially segregated" is probably within the current anti-racist movement (see, for example, Kendi's work). This movement has moved away from labeling racist a policy that was implemented with racist intent (like segregated schools during Jim Crow) towards labeling racist a policy that has unequal outcomes based on race, regardless of policymakers' intent. If you start from that perspective, it naturally follows to label G&T education as segregated if we observe that one group being overrepresented in it and another group being underrepresented. Of note here, it's the assumption that the distribution of gifted and talented eligibility attributes is uniformly distributed among different groups of students and that somehow the system is not picking up eligibility signals for specific students. There is some emerging evidence that this is the case for Black students, as the identification gap between Black and White students closes when the G&T assessor is Black (I think that Grissom has a recent paper on this). If we reject the uniform distribution assumption, we end up assuming that the G&T eligibility traits are unevenly distributed among students, which I believe is one of the longest lasting beliefs of racist thought in education.
- mc32 5y ago
  Among humans it's likely evenly distributed, but... the blame for unevenness should fall more on the parents who rear their kids to fail rather than on the system who fails to find those rough diamonds. The parents should suffer most of the culpability. They are the ones steering their kids to poor outcomes via parenting styles.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Parents do not exist in a vacuum. If we accept racism did (or does) exist, it presumably would affect the parents of said victims which would lead to the poor outcomes for the kids. Said disparity would grow as the kids would be then denied said opportunity on the basis of their parents' failure. The kids' kids would then suffer the same, and so forth. In other words, how would you "punish" (if that's even necessary) the parents without punishing the kids?
    - 5y ago
flexie 5y ago
Even if it's not intended by design to segregate based on color, but just an unfortunate effect, when that effect is known for years and nothing is done, then I think it's OK to call it segregation. Many of the parents I know who has kids that were accepted in the gifted and talented program had very expensive tutoring in order to be accepted. We are talking thousands of dollars for toddlers. That's tutoring that most Black and Latino New Yorkers simply cannot afford. And their parents paid these obscene amounts in order to avoid that their kids were stuck at the mostly Black ordinary public schools with kids from the projects. I don't think NY Times claims that the parents are racist. But the fact remains that they try to get their kids from mostly Black schools into mostly white schools.
- darthvoldemort 5y ago
  The G&T program in NYC is mostly ASIAN not white. This is the problem for activists. Also, Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC so activists can't blame systemic racism or economic disadvantages. So better to just destroy the program than explain why Asians who are non-white and poor are able to succeed when other minorities can't.
  - flexie 5y ago
    Asians in NYC are only the poorest demographics if you include the large, and poor and growing groups of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Arab, Iraqi, Syrian etc. immigrants in your definition of Asian. Those are not the Asians overrepresented in the G&T program. And yes, I know those countries are in Asia.
zozbot234 5y ago
The article states that the GATE program featured a high-stakes entry exam which could place incoming students in a 5-years long separate "track". While "segregated" is a harsh term to describe this, it does seem like something which would introduce high disparity in outcomes due to what's essentially random luck/noise. It looks like they'll be replacing this with a more finely-designed system featuring "accelerated" learning for those students who are doing well at any given time in some specific subjects, which seems more appropriate to current needs.
endisneigh 5y ago
Segregated doesn't mean "by design." What definition are you using? Segregation can exist as a manifestation of some process. It doesn't have to be some person manually dividing people. Your entire comment rests on a false premise.
- _hilro 5y ago
  > word such as segregation, which has connotations of 'by design' My entire comment does not rest on a false premise. 1) My comment commented on the use of the word segregation and it's implications. * and 2) the fact that the program is not racially segregated using any dictionary definition of the word. > Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a (natural or legal) person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination This program is not that, no matter how hard you try and squint to make it seem so.
  - endisneigh 5y ago
    Webster, Dictionary.com, Oxford and others define segregation as: > separated or divided along racial, sexual, or religious lines. Perhaps the NYC editor was using that definition. If you use any of those definitions, then yes your comment is objectively incorrect.
    - detaro 5y ago
      And several of those also provide definitions that include explicit policy of doing so, further reinforcing the point that the connotation exists.
      - endisneigh 5y ago
        Sure, but words have different definitions. My point is that a charitable read of the article is using the definition that applies in this scenario per the article, and therefore the original comment is incorrect. Obviously an uncharitable read can lead one to dismiss the intentions of everyone involved.
mrblampo 5y ago
Look up segregation in the dictionary, it does not have to imply intent.
- _hilro 5y ago
  Spend any amount of time greater than 0 reading books and articles which use the word segregate. Segregation/segregate is defacto used as a noun/verb with intent behind it.
bitwize 5y ago
If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated. School antisegregation laws care nothing for intent, only for effect.
- _hilro 5y ago
  > If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated. No, it is literally not "by definition" segregated. Using the phrase 'by definition' is not that powerful a modifier that every word that surrounds it suddenly becomes true. That's the most nonsense thing ever. Secondly, read the line I quoted: > highly selective and racially segregated program The program is not racially segregated. The NYTimes just needed to sneak in the word segregation because it's a very strong explosive word. To do that, it hammered it incorrectly to a place in a sentence which gives the impression the program itself is racially segregated.
  - geofft 5y ago
    I grew up in a school district in the deep south that was racially segregated, as found by the court system, until a month before I graduated. This was in 2006. Not last century. The school district didn't, of course, test people by race or have a Colored Students High School or whatever. What they did was to put schools and school zones in ways that happened to line up with strong demographic differences in swaths of the city. My elementary school was in a white part of the city, and I can remember maybe two black classmates. My middle school (because that's where they put the gifted and talented program, as it happens) was in a black part of the city, and from my memory it felt like a majority of the students who were zoned to be there were black. This school district was, once again, "racially segregated" in the eyes of the law. The law didn't ask whether the school district officials were motivated by racism in how they drew the lines; that's simply not what the term means.
    - xboxnolifes 5y ago
      Which I agree would be racially segregated. But the original comment stated that the determiner was "not enough blacks" not "intentionally setting school boundaries to avoid blacks".
barney54 5y ago
The problem for NYC apparently is that the largest ethnic group in the program was Asian.
- superflit2 5y ago
  Following the IQ distribution by races. I can scream whatever I want about people being equal and have equal capabilities. But that is a lie. Genetics is a huge factor in disease, skills and behavior. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
  - enkid 5y ago
    Race does not exist genetically. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...
    - superflit2 5y ago
      Oh yes. Very BLM article. Whole medicine has know for years that diseases and treatment differ by race. Saying that it does not matter will only make things worse for other races. Several labs are actively pursuing black and other minorities as volunteer for their clinical trials for this reason. If that does not matter we will never see studies looking for African americans or Asians.
    - mc32 5y ago
      That's true... but then "racism" cannot exist. So people keep the idea on life support. Maybe culturalism is a better word.
      - nobody9999 5y ago
        > That's true... but then "racism" cannot exist. So people keep the idea on life support. Maybe culturalism is a better word. The proper term is bigotry.
zentropia 5y ago
Some people don't like institutions that will enlarge racial inequality gaps.
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  The problem with this approach at a glance is that it seems to aim to decrease the size of the gap by bringing the top end down, as opposed to bringing the bottom end up. We should be focused on providing more opportunities to the underprivileged, not removing opportunities from the privileged. This is the whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing, but in reverse. We should raise the tide further rather than draining the water so everyone can be equally stuck in the mud. There are also problems inherent with breaking this down along racial lines. Removing gifted programs from public schools doesn't affect people who have the means to seek out additional tutoring, private schools, etc. Rich kids will still get extra education. But surely there are plenty of kids in these programs who _aren't_ from a privileged background, who are now having their opportunities to compete with wealthy kids reduced. This whole idea seems incredibly poorly thought out, and the focus on race as the most important factor seems, to my eye, to be a big part of the issue.
- chucksmash 5y ago
  Why would it necessarily enlarge racial inequality gaps?

by _hilro 5y ago

chucksmash 5y ago

What an egregious choice of wording. I feel like the bystander in this PBF comic[1] when I see things like this. [1]: https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/ https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/

bloooop 5y ago

It's important to realize that the program is segregated by intent and by design. The segregation is NOT accidental. That's true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs in the US. That's not fundamental, and not true of many of the gifted-and-talented programs worldwide. Worldwide, such programs are meritocratic pathways to socioeconomic mobility. In the US, the story is much more complex. Most such programs were explicitly structured to keep African Americans and immigrants out. This was structured in admissions exams (which were often designed, for example, around mastery of one dialect of English, even in contexts like math, where that's irrelevant), in geographies of such programs, and in many other elements. That this intent is no longer present today is irrelevant. Those structures remain, perpetuate, and in many ways, become self-reinforcing. The current politically popular fix? Throwing the baby out with the bathwater and nuking the programs from orbit. At that point, no one without wealth can get ahead. We need something more nuanced, but we're not going to get that if we don't first acknowledge the issue. Refs: You can look at documents like this one, from over two decades ago, citing references well before then, talking about how to reduce some of the intentionally segeregatory impacts of gifted-and-talented admissions testing: https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource.pdf https://www2.ed.gov/offices/OCR/archives/pdf/TestingResource... (and it's worth noting how little has happened in the intervening decades)

threatofrain 5y ago
Under your perspective, were NY gifted and talented programs designed to exclude blacks but include Asians (among the poorest demographics in NYC) as the largest plurality? And why?
- bloooop 5y ago
  No. They were designed from a lineage of decisions intended to exclude blacks and to include whites. That's not my perspective; that's a historical fact. That's why I referenced a Dept. of Education OCR report, which in turn references National Academies publications and similar sorts of credible references, all predating the current social justice political climate. How decisions made in the eighties and sixties impact families in 2020 is sort of complex. Now, I move away from fact to my perspective. My perspective is that many Asian immigrant families are more likely to: - Come from a culture which values education, and especially measurable outcomes in education (e.g. math, rather than creativity) - In some cases, come from cultures with 2000+ year histories of civil service exams and meritocracy - Often lack the same sorts of wealth or support networks as American families, which puts a lot more pressure on having kids become self-supporting and independently successful - Are less likely to be successful in fields which rely on having strong US-based social networks than white families, which also pushes towards areas like STEM. ... a plethora of effects like these leads to immigrant (and especially Asian immigrant) families being heavily over-represented within the system which was resulted. On the other hand, if my family was on the Mayflower, and my uncle can get my kid a job at his law firm, my aunt can hook him up with a management position in her marketing firm, and if neither does that, at least we own the house and he can always live here, there's a lot less pressure. I have a lot more incentive to let kids be kids, let kids play more, and school less. So immigrants, and especially Asian immigrants, now tend to do well in this system. It continues to discriminate against blacks, though. Why is this hard to accept?
  - threatofrain 5y ago
    > Now, I move away from fact to my perspective. I mean, the majority of your prose comes after your description of facts, and details your pet theory on how advantageous Asian culture and parenting is an adequate explanation for the effect sizes we're seeing — that a very poor demographic in NYC would come to fulfill the plurality of NYC's gifted and talented program. And something about how Asians come from 2000 years of test taking, so they're really good at tests (but not necessarily "good")?

mc32 5y ago

People like to blame society or the system. Some of it is but there is also parental responsibility and small/immediate culture which has greater effect. If you have parents that come from poor backgrounds and despite that produce kids who overrepresent in achievement, people in some corners like to brush that under a rug and anyone who highlights that is guilty of falling for the "model minority". Problem is, that's a cop-out and veers on crab mentality. Some subpopulations simply push their kids to study more and play less than others. That's just how it is. The parents may have two jobs, but still manage to instill an education mindset into them --a minority of these kids will look back and say that their childhoods were not fun, and that is likely true, but I don't think they'd be have a better life trudging away as a HS dropout or similar. And surely some parents overburden their kids to study "respected" professions. But that's a different problem. Within a particular ethnicity or "race" some subpopulations have dedicated parents and others don't. If I were born in the south to "hillbillies" my odds for landing in talented and gifted would go way down, not because of race, or ethnicity but because the culture of the parents and the immediate culture. But take South Koreans 1st gen and compare them to Philippine 1st gen or Pole and Romanian and that's a no-no.

pacbard 5y ago

The context for the use of "racially segregated" is probably within the current anti-racist movement (see, for example, Kendi's work). This movement has moved away from labeling racist a policy that was implemented with racist intent (like segregated schools during Jim Crow) towards labeling racist a policy that has unequal outcomes based on race, regardless of policymakers' intent. If you start from that perspective, it naturally follows to label G&T education as segregated if we observe that one group being overrepresented in it and another group being underrepresented. Of note here, it's the assumption that the distribution of gifted and talented eligibility attributes is uniformly distributed among different groups of students and that somehow the system is not picking up eligibility signals for specific students. There is some emerging evidence that this is the case for Black students, as the identification gap between Black and White students closes when the G&T assessor is Black (I think that Grissom has a recent paper on this). If we reject the uniform distribution assumption, we end up assuming that the G&T eligibility traits are unevenly distributed among students, which I believe is one of the longest lasting beliefs of racist thought in education.

mc32 5y ago
Among humans it's likely evenly distributed, but... the blame for unevenness should fall more on the parents who rear their kids to fail rather than on the system who fails to find those rough diamonds. The parents should suffer most of the culpability. They are the ones steering their kids to poor outcomes via parenting styles.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Parents do not exist in a vacuum. If we accept racism did (or does) exist, it presumably would affect the parents of said victims which would lead to the poor outcomes for the kids. Said disparity would grow as the kids would be then denied said opportunity on the basis of their parents' failure. The kids' kids would then suffer the same, and so forth. In other words, how would you "punish" (if that's even necessary) the parents without punishing the kids?
  - 5y ago

flexie 5y ago

Even if it's not intended by design to segregate based on color, but just an unfortunate effect, when that effect is known for years and nothing is done, then I think it's OK to call it segregation. Many of the parents I know who has kids that were accepted in the gifted and talented program had very expensive tutoring in order to be accepted. We are talking thousands of dollars for toddlers. That's tutoring that most Black and Latino New Yorkers simply cannot afford. And their parents paid these obscene amounts in order to avoid that their kids were stuck at the mostly Black ordinary public schools with kids from the projects. I don't think NY Times claims that the parents are racist. But the fact remains that they try to get their kids from mostly Black schools into mostly white schools.

darthvoldemort 5y ago
The G&T program in NYC is mostly ASIAN not white. This is the problem for activists. Also, Asians are the poorest demographic in NYC so activists can't blame systemic racism or economic disadvantages. So better to just destroy the program than explain why Asians who are non-white and poor are able to succeed when other minorities can't.
- flexie 5y ago
  Asians in NYC are only the poorest demographics if you include the large, and poor and growing groups of Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Arab, Iraqi, Syrian etc. immigrants in your definition of Asian. Those are not the Asians overrepresented in the G&T program. And yes, I know those countries are in Asia.

zozbot234 5y ago

The article states that the GATE program featured a high-stakes entry exam which could place incoming students in a 5-years long separate "track". While "segregated" is a harsh term to describe this, it does seem like something which would introduce high disparity in outcomes due to what's essentially random luck/noise. It looks like they'll be replacing this with a more finely-designed system featuring "accelerated" learning for those students who are doing well at any given time in some specific subjects, which seems more appropriate to current needs.

endisneigh 5y ago

Segregated doesn't mean "by design." What definition are you using? Segregation can exist as a manifestation of some process. It doesn't have to be some person manually dividing people. Your entire comment rests on a false premise.

_hilro 5y ago
> word such as segregation, which has connotations of 'by design' My entire comment does not rest on a false premise. 1) My comment commented on the use of the word segregation and it's implications. * and 2) the fact that the program is not racially segregated using any dictionary definition of the word. > Segregation is defined by the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance as "the act by which a (natural or legal) person separates other persons on the basis of one of the enumerated grounds without an objective and reasonable justification, in conformity with the proposed definition of discrimination This program is not that, no matter how hard you try and squint to make it seem so.
- endisneigh 5y ago
  Webster, Dictionary.com, Oxford and others define segregation as: > separated or divided along racial, sexual, or religious lines. Perhaps the NYC editor was using that definition. If you use any of those definitions, then yes your comment is objectively incorrect.
  - detaro 5y ago
    And several of those also provide definitions that include explicit policy of doing so, further reinforcing the point that the connotation exists.
    - endisneigh 5y ago
      Sure, but words have different definitions. My point is that a charitable read of the article is using the definition that applies in this scenario per the article, and therefore the original comment is incorrect. Obviously an uncharitable read can lead one to dismiss the intentions of everyone involved.

mrblampo 5y ago

Look up segregation in the dictionary, it does not have to imply intent.

_hilro 5y ago
Spend any amount of time greater than 0 reading books and articles which use the word segregate. Segregation/segregate is defacto used as a noun/verb with intent behind it.

bitwize 5y ago

If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated. School antisegregation laws care nothing for intent, only for effect.

_hilro 5y ago
> If a school system or program doesn't have enough black kids in it, it is by definition segregated. No, it is literally not "by definition" segregated. Using the phrase 'by definition' is not that powerful a modifier that every word that surrounds it suddenly becomes true. That's the most nonsense thing ever. Secondly, read the line I quoted: > highly selective and racially segregated program The program is not racially segregated. The NYTimes just needed to sneak in the word segregation because it's a very strong explosive word. To do that, it hammered it incorrectly to a place in a sentence which gives the impression the program itself is racially segregated.
- geofft 5y ago
  I grew up in a school district in the deep south that was racially segregated, as found by the court system, until a month before I graduated. This was in 2006. Not last century. The school district didn't, of course, test people by race or have a Colored Students High School or whatever. What they did was to put schools and school zones in ways that happened to line up with strong demographic differences in swaths of the city. My elementary school was in a white part of the city, and I can remember maybe two black classmates. My middle school (because that's where they put the gifted and talented program, as it happens) was in a black part of the city, and from my memory it felt like a majority of the students who were zoned to be there were black. This school district was, once again, "racially segregated" in the eyes of the law. The law didn't ask whether the school district officials were motivated by racism in how they drew the lines; that's simply not what the term means.
  - xboxnolifes 5y ago
    Which I agree would be racially segregated. But the original comment stated that the determiner was "not enough blacks" not "intentionally setting school boundaries to avoid blacks".

barney54 5y ago

The problem for NYC apparently is that the largest ethnic group in the program was Asian.

superflit2 5y ago
Following the IQ distribution by races. I can scream whatever I want about people being equal and have equal capabilities. But that is a lie. Genetics is a huge factor in disease, skills and behavior. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289621000635 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...
- enkid 5y ago
  Race does not exist genetically. https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-reshaping-race-debate-21st-century/ https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/science-genetics-res...
  - superflit2 5y ago
    Oh yes. Very BLM article. Whole medicine has know for years that diseases and treatment differ by race. Saying that it does not matter will only make things worse for other races. Several labs are actively pursuing black and other minorities as volunteer for their clinical trials for this reason. If that does not matter we will never see studies looking for African americans or Asians.
  - mc32 5y ago
    That's true... but then "racism" cannot exist. So people keep the idea on life support. Maybe culturalism is a better word.
    - nobody9999 5y ago
      > That's true... but then "racism" cannot exist. So people keep the idea on life support. Maybe culturalism is a better word. The proper term is bigotry.

zentropia 5y ago

Some people don't like institutions that will enlarge racial inequality gaps.

agentwiggles 5y ago
The problem with this approach at a glance is that it seems to aim to decrease the size of the gap by bringing the top end down, as opposed to bringing the bottom end up. We should be focused on providing more opportunities to the underprivileged, not removing opportunities from the privileged. This is the whole "rising tide lifts all boats" thing, but in reverse. We should raise the tide further rather than draining the water so everyone can be equally stuck in the mud. There are also problems inherent with breaking this down along racial lines. Removing gifted programs from public schools doesn't affect people who have the means to seek out additional tutoring, private schools, etc. Rich kids will still get extra education. But surely there are plenty of kids in these programs who _aren't_ from a privileged background, who are now having their opportunities to compete with wealthy kids reduced. This whole idea seems incredibly poorly thought out, and the focus on race as the most important factor seems, to my eye, to be a big part of the issue.
chucksmash 5y ago
Why would it necessarily enlarge racial inequality gaps?