subgenius wrote: ↑Thu Nov 19, 2020 12:34 am
So are the white posters on this board excited about welcoming new members to their privilege circle?
Yes, very much so. Because i don't think of myself primarily as a white guy, but as a practitioner of <discipline redacted>. My circle of privilege (and I have a few of those) actively seeks out people who are good at doing <discipline redacted> regardless of national/ethnic/religious/cultural origin, and I regard many non-white people as valued colleagues, not because I want to be nice to the poor non-white people, but because they are good at what they do, which is the only thing that matters.
Precisely because I want to have lots of talented colleagues, I want to recognise the problems faced by a non-white child of high intelligence who is born into an environment where it is hard to get a good education that will enable them to compete successfully for college entry with the children of rich white people (who have paid for expensive private schools and intensive tutoring designed to ace university selection procedures). That involves actively seeking out such students near the end of their secondary education, and enabling them to do the catch-up work that will enable them to enter courses in <discipline redacted> on equal terms with their fellow students. 'Students of colour' are not underperforming because of their race, but because they tend to come from families and communities that are much poorer than and worse provided with educational opportunities than those of whites.
This will of course help only a small proportion (a 'top slice') of the poor non-white kids whose life-chances have been greatly reduced by their birth environment. And it is hard to run such programs as they need to be run - certainly not as 'easy entry' to courses in which the students are not equipped to perform adequately. But given the huge advantages conferred on the averagely talented children of rich white parents, one has to do one's best with imperfect and inadequate solutions. The real remedy is to make sure that all communities have access to really good-quality education, irrespective of their financial means.
(Of course, if that could be achieved, we would then have to face up to another set of problems, those likely to follow from the establishment of an efficiently meritocratic society. But so far we are a long, long way from that.)