They literally put it in the title. The scientists have this prejudice that some groups are advantaged, and that if they complain it’s caused by a misperception.
What people complain about is unfairness. Promoting an entire group based on skin or ethnicity is racism. One can’t assume that groups must be equal in the way they work.
There are only two ways we can solve racism:
- Give people equal opportunity and accept that groups will have different averages, on average,
- Pile up on whites, they’re basically only 10% of humanity so they will end up representing a smaller voting group in the long term, especially if they’re divided pro/against, so we can be unfair to them and punish the ones who complain.
Identity groups is what we call abstractions in software. Our small working memory can fit only 10 things at a time, so bundling people into "latino", "blacks", "whites" and "asian" boxes makes it all thinkable, at least. And just like in software, these abstractions are leaky: the set of properties that describes the white box, doesn't apply to many people in it.
Another shortcoming of our mind is thinking in the yes/no categories, instead of using probability distributions (for which we don't even have words in our language). This gets especially ugly when both flaws combine: "disadvantaged groups earn 15% less" - here the leaky "groups" are either advantaged or disadvantaged (no middle ground), and the group as a whole earns precisely 15% less (no variance, no bimodal distributions, just one exact number).
> The scientists have this prejudice that some groups are advantaged, and that if they complain it’s caused by a misperception.
100% correct. Calling these people "scientists" is giving them too much credit. These are propagandists using sciency sounding language to push a political agenda.
Neither of those ways will solve racism, and since racism will go unsolved, in 100 years we'll still be talking about how the past has passed and that NOW is the time for a meritocracy. 100 years of some groups falling further and further behind.
Looking at the state of racial relations in 1922 and how they changed in the 100 years since then, I sort-of doubt that the situation of 2122 will be anywhere close to today. Someone will probably oppress someone else, but the overall balance of power and ideas will be totally different than today.
In the Western context, that's probable. But no matter where you look, some groups will still lag in a bunch of metrics, xenophobia and racism will still exist in some form and will still be holding them back. That's always been the case and they certainly won't be solved with the two suggestions above.
They literally put it in the title. The scientists have this prejudice that some groups are advantaged, and that if they complain it’s caused by a misperception.
What people complain about is unfairness. Promoting an entire group based on skin or ethnicity is racism. One can’t assume that groups must be equal in the way they work.
There are only two ways we can solve racism:
- Give people equal opportunity and accept that groups will have different averages, on average,
- Pile up on whites, they’re basically only 10% of humanity so they will end up representing a smaller voting group in the long term, especially if they’re divided pro/against, so we can be unfair to them and punish the ones who complain.