A professor admits she faked her racial identity

[Wahoo Redux]

the benefits of native White Americans. That group nevertheless has responsibility for fixing the problem using the power conferred by their position.

Do we?

I am willing to do my part because I care about people and the future, but is it my "responsibility"?

This was exactly the question I posed: why is it my "responsibility" to fix something that I had no part in making?  The cultural dynamics, rightly or wrongly, were established before I was born.

I was born into this world and I suffered or benefited from what came before me.  Now I choose to help if I can, but I do not see why I should be expected to refuse, offer up, or relinquish anything that I have unless I decide I want to participate, which I do.

There is a discussion going on that I should not feel "guilt"----but there is a lot of de facto guilt being hefted my way, whether or not people want to admit it.  I think we liberals are losing this battle because of this very attitude and they way we lecture people who are not absolutely in concert with us.

[Hibush]

Many faculty are immigrants, and have no historic debt or benefit. However, European immigrants in particular have many of the benefits of native White Americans. That group nevertheless has responsibility for fixing the problem using the power conferred by their position.

So exactly how much difference is there in the standard of living of "European" immigrant faculty and non-European immigrant faculty? If the one group gets lots of benefits and the other gets none, then the difference should be pretty stark.

Positive and negative discrimination affecting non-European immigrant faculty varies widely of course. Recent European immigrants tend to get much of the positive discrimination experienced by white Americans, so I used that as the group to make the statement about.

A hundred years ago, Europeans dominated US immigration, and there was a lot of distinction among European immigrants of different origins. The phenomenon is the repeating pattern of society putting particular groups at the bottom (no matter how homogeneous the society seems to outsiders).

[Parasaurolophus]

Do we?

I am willing to do my part because I care about people and the future, but is it my "responsibility"?

This was exactly the question I posed: why is it my "responsibility" to fix something that I had no part in making?  The cultural dynamics, rightly or wrongly, were established before I was born.

If you've benefited from an injustice that was not of your own doing, it seems to me you have a moral responsibility to compensate those who were harmed by it. That responsibility is clearly less than that incurred by the perpetrators.

If people acted unjustly on your behalf, it seems to me you have a moral responsibility to compensate those who were harmed by it (e.g. victims of the Bush- and Obama-era torture programs, separated children and their families, overthrown political regimes, etc.). That responsibility is clearly less than that incurred by the perpetrators.

Sometimes, we contribute to injustice and harming others without realizing it (e.g. climate change). In that case, it seems to me that you have a moral responsibility to compensate those who were harmed by it. That responsibility is clearly less than that incurred by people who contribute to the injustice knowingly, deliberately, or at a larger scale.

[Hibush]

the benefits of native White Americans. That group nevertheless has responsibility for fixing the problem using the power conferred by their position.

Do we?

I am willing to do my part because I care about people and the future, but is it my "responsibility"?

This was exactly the question I posed: why is it my "responsibility" to fix something that I had no part in making?  The cultural dynamics, rightly or wrongly, were established before I was born.

I was born into this world and I suffered or benefited from what came before me.  Now I choose to help if I can, but I do not see why I should be expected to refuse, offer up, or relinquish anything that I have unless I decide I want to participate, which I do.

There is a discussion going on that I should not feel "guilt"----but there is a lot of de facto guilt being hefted my way, whether or not people want to admit it.  I think we liberals are losing this battle because of this very attitude and they way we lecture people who are not absolutely in concert with us.

I don't think you need feel guilty for things you had nothing to do with.

It is the present-day discrimination that is wrong. It is the present-day inequity from historic discrimination that is wrong. If you have power to do something to correct those wrong, yes you have a moral responsibility to do so. If you do nothing, then you do have something to feel guilty about.

Do it as a powerful person, not as a guilty person.

[marshwiggle]

Many faculty are immigrants, and have no historic debt or benefit. However, European immigrants in particular have many of the benefits of native White Americans. That group nevertheless has responsibility for fixing the problem using the power conferred by their position.

So exactly how much difference is there in the standard of living of "European" immigrant faculty and non-European immigrant faculty? If the one group gets lots of benefits and the other gets none, then the difference should be pretty stark.

Positive and negative discrimination affecting non-European immigrant faculty varies widely of course. Recent European immigrants tend to get much of the positive discrimination experienced by white Americans, so I used that as the group to make the statement about.

A hundred years ago, Europeans dominated US immigration, and there was a lot of distinction among European immigrants of different origins. The phenomenon is the repeating pattern of society putting particular groups at the bottom (no matter how homogeneous the society seems to outsiders).

Forget a hundred years ago. How is the recent immigrant faculty member from India or China materially worse off than the recent immigrant faculty member from Lithuania?

[apl68]

I wouldn't say "guilty," but I'd like Wahoo, and all of us white people, to be cognizant of the many ways we've benefited from racism through the centuries. For instance, if our families have been in the U.S. for at least 2-3 generations, we've most likely benefited from the mortgages and inexpensive suburban housing promoted to white people, and denied to Black people. As a recent clip going around emphasizes, it was written in many suburban housing mortgage contracts that the house could not be initially sold to Black people, nor resold to Black people. By and large white Americans have profited significantly over the decades from the rise in housing values, which they could only do because they were allowed to get onto the housing ladder in the first place.

How do you explain the similar standard of living in other countries (such as in Europe) where there was no legacy of slavery, and where the population has always been fairly racially homogenous? If white people in the US have only succeeded at the expense of others, countries which have never been ethnically diverse should have a significantly lower standard of living than white Americans.

All wealthy nations, without exception, grew wealthy through extensive participation in global trade networks.  If you're familiar with the history of global trade, it's not hard to find many, many examples where the nations that benefited did so at the expense of other parts of the world that supplied the necessary cheap raw materials and labor.  So it's possible to argue that wealthy nations that never imported African slaves or had much in the way of colonies still profited from those practices. 

For example, your country may not have had slaves growing cotton, but any textile mills they had in the 1800s probably relied on imports of slave-grown cotton.  In this view, to have grown up in a prosperous society is to be complicit in a global web of unjust trade and production practices.  Which continue to this day.  Most of the world's inexpensive garments are produced by sweated labor, most of the world's imported oil comes from nations run by tyrants or fanatics, etc.

Personally I view all of this as evidence of overall human depravity as taught in the New Testament.  Attempting to use this or that bad thing from history to stoke grievances and tar others with guilt and demand reparations for things that happened hundreds of years ago is like demanding an eye for an eye--once you start it, there's no logical place to stop, until everybody is blind and everybody ends up losing. 

It's more constructive to see what we can do about the bad stuff that is currently happening.  That's why though I am very much in favor of, for example, serious police reform, I get very frustrated with the absolutely endless rhetoric about how police shootings of black Americans are the moral equivalent of slavery, and are evidence of white America's ongoing depravity.  Yes, black bodies have been oppressed in the United States for hundreds of years.  It shouldn't be denied or forgotten.  But much of that's not really germane to fixing the current problem of keeping trigger-happy police officers from shooting black and other people today. 

It also ignores the ongoing problem of all different colors killing and raping other people of all different colors today.  Contrary to what so many BLM activists seem to believe, black-on-black crime, and black-on-white crime, and white-on-white crime, etc. are all still very much a thing.  Dealing with all of this is going to take a lot of working together by people of goodwill, and endless rehashing and stoking of old grievances is a distraction from that.

[Wahoo Redux]

the benefits of native White Americans. That group nevertheless has responsibility for fixing the problem using the power conferred by their position.

Do we?

I am willing to do my part because I care about people and the future, but is it my "responsibility"?

This was exactly the question I posed: why is it my "responsibility" to fix something that I had no part in making?  The cultural dynamics, rightly or wrongly, were established before I was born.

I was born into this world and I suffered or benefited from what came before me.  Now I choose to help if I can, but I do not see why I should be expected to refuse, offer up, or relinquish anything that I have unless I decide I want to participate, which I do.

There is a discussion going on that I should not feel "guilt"----but there is a lot of de facto guilt being hefted my way, whether or not people want to admit it.  I think we liberals are losing this battle because of this very attitude and they way we lecture people who are not absolutely in concert with us.

I don't think you need feel guilty for things you had nothing to do with.

It is the present-day discrimination that is wrong. It is the present-day inequity from historic discrimination that is wrong. If you have power to do something to correct those wrong, yes you have a moral responsibility to do so. If you do nothing, then you do have something to feel guilty about.

Do it as a powerful person, not as a guilty person.

Okay.  I don't feel like a powerful person, but I suppose in some regard I am.  I have done what little I can and will continue to do so, which I have made clear.

However, I reject the notion that it is somehow incumbent upon me or anyone else to sacrifice anything, particularly for cases in which I could face serious consequences.  I would save you from a burning car if I could; I might even be willing to risk my life; but if I am reasonably sure that saving you would result my own serious bodily damage or death, I reserve the right to keep myself safe.

The original subject of this thread probably did what she did because of psychological problems.  But she also probably reaped the benefits of pretending to be someone she is not; yes, she had plenty of success on her merits (which is why her predicament is too bad) but it is also reasonable to assume that her spurious status as a POC helped in her particular line of work----just like a young man of Indian descent who has a famous sister and who faked his way into med school with a 3.1 GPA because he could pass as African-American.

Again, I have seen with my own eyes opportunities denied to white people yet given to black people---for instance, two back-to-back tenure cases with almost identical problems, one white (denied), one black (granted) and the effect this had on the faculty who noted the disparity.  These are serious consequences.

Sure, we "people of power" can help but not at our own cost.  The good peeps here are pretending that these costs don't exist and/or they are relating history lessons about why these costs should be paid----and a great many people are now rejecting these ideas, particularly outside the academy.

Again, there are many reasons Donald Trump was elected.

[Hibush]

Again, I have seen with my own eyes opportunities denied to white people yet given to black people---for instance, two back-to-back tenure cases with almost identical problems, one white (denied), one black (granted) and the effect this had on the faculty who noted the disparity.  These are serious consequences.

One thing that happens today is that URM TT faculty get poorer mentorship than majority faculty to help them achieve tenure. What if you had helped the black assistant professor amass a tenure package that was strong enough to be approved without others questioning it? It's not running into a burning building, but it is one example of what faculty can do.

[Wahoo Redux]

Again, I have seen with my own eyes opportunities denied to white people yet given to black people---for instance, two back-to-back tenure cases with almost identical problems, one white (denied), one black (granted) and the effect this had on the faculty who noted the disparity.  These are serious consequences.

One thing that happens today is that URM TT faculty get poorer mentorship than majority faculty to help them achieve tenure. What if you had helped the black assistant professor amass a tenure package that was strong enough to be approved without others questioning it? It's not running into a burning building, but it is one example of what faculty can do.

Your response is very interesting to me.

Why do you believe that URM TT faculty receive poorer mentorship?  Who has said that?  Majority people can also receive terrible mentorship---my wife, who is white----has had awful mentors.  Expectations for tenure are in our faculty handbook and she asked around. 

And just FYI, the criteria for tenure are very, very low here.  Neither the white tenure candidate nor the black tenure candidate leapt over this very low bar.  The minority faculty was told at 3rd year review what hu needed to do.  Hu is an adult.  Minority or not, it is also hu's responsibility to know what the job entails.  Hu has a Ph.D. so hu is smart enough to read a faculty handbook.

And more to the point, why did you assume or conjecture that that is the case?

Respectfully, you just provided an excuse for differing standards. 

[financeguy]

Two things that are of interest recently:

People think that the "backlash" to the woke/BLM crowd will come largely from suburban whites and while this may be true, it ignores the fact that there are other minority groups that are not happy with this. Asians are not exactly pleased with the current CA attempt to bring back racial discrimination in college applications and Hispanics have just given Trump a lead in FL of all places (Hilary got 63% in 2016), possibly in large part due to all of the BLM focus while they were largely left out of the convention (AOC did get 60 seconds!) and none of the "POC" candidates for VP were Hispanic.

A psychology friend of mine (who as an Indian agrees with the former premise above) told me of a quote from the devil incarnate Charles Murray that he said in response to the Bell Curve. He said that when he was at Harvard in the early 60s and saw a black student he thought "that guy's probably smarter than me" due to the necessity to potentially overcome intellectual as well as additional obstacles to get there. What do you think someone thinks when they see a black Harvard student today? What value does the credential retain if many people have this opinion?

[jimbogumbo]

Okay, I think this funny even if not everyone here will:

https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2020/09/11

[marshwiggle]

Okay, I think this funny even if not everyone here will:

https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2020/09/11

That is pretty hilarious; white males have absolutely no obstacles ever on the road to success!!!!

[marshwiggle]

New stuff about Jessica Krug. She wasn't a fun date.

[financeguy]

lol...love the article's close. In general though I don't think it's a good idea to get super political from the right or left on a date. The key phrase in this situation the guy used is "getting a lecture" which no one really wants.

[Wahoo Redux]

Okay, I think this funny even if not everyone here will:

https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur/2020/09/11

Yeah, that's pretty funny.