Talking About: Racial Comparisons

hello there and as you can tell from the title today we're going to be talking about some heavy stuff and to be honest I wasn't that sure if this was a good idea or not I've been told that every time you talk about politics or religion you cut your audience in half but I've got a lot of opinions that I want to talk about and I figured that it was better to cut my audience in half now when it's tiny rather than six months down the line when I've got five million subscribers you know it just makes sense mathematically so then I got a comment recently on my video that I made about leafy and Milo Stewart and it was left by a guy called Jason Todd and he was taking issue with Milo's all white people a racist comment now in the first part of his comment he says you attempted to take a logical middle-of-the-road stance here but it's clear you have a bias he then gives the dictionary definition of the word racism then he says that some people can grow up without subconscious biases quote despite your belief that society at large is indoctrinating people to hold racist beliefs you seem to forget about the people who grow up in households where they are not raised with these subconscious beliefs now I disagree with that statement for a start because I don't think it's possible to have any sort of meaningful interaction with society in general and not come into contact with anything that might cause a subconscious bias you know excluding people who were raised by wolves or in fallout shelters or something I'd say that we all have some level of racial bias however I will concede it's hard to prove of a subconscious bias exists or not because it's subconscious you know by its nature it's hard to detect and now I personally wouldn't come out and say something like all white people are racist even though I do understand the argument because being white I have the luxury of avoiding the more confrontational racial arguments if I feel like it and I will gladly exercise my privilege in that regard but if I did have to say that all white a racist I'd bury the lede and waffle a lot and lay a lot of groundwork beforehand and then that just makes the statement lose its shock value and that kind of negates the point of saying it in the first place you see the argument to be had with the all-white people a racist approach if we grant that the person saying it is arguing in good faith anyway is one of efficacy you know on the one hand racism is a powerful word and it does draw a lot of attention to an issue that needs a lot of attention but on the other hand you are gonna get a lot of backlash saying something like that and is the increased attention worth the backlash it seems like for everyone that sticks around to hear the explanation you're gonna have turned someone else off and personally I just can't judge if that's worth it or not you know someone smarter than me can puzzle that one out so let's move on to the second part of Jason Todd's comment where he says quote however believing races are superior to one another on average in regards to certain things is perfectly reasonable and it's stupid to claim we're all perfectly equal in every way we aren't equal within our own race how can we be equal across races so first off I don't think you'll find many people who'll say everyone is literally equal in every regard usually when people say all races are equal they're talking about the possible range of potentialities you know rather than meaning to be completely literal about it Jason then goes on to say on average blacks make better basketball players on average Asians score higher on the SAT you cannot debate this so let's debate this now there's a few different lines of argument here and I'm gonna wonder pretty far away from Jason's actual comments but I will come back to address them specifically at the end first up is context and welcome to the wonderfully complicated world of statements which are true in one regard but not true in other regards and as an example let's first look at a simple statement which is hopefully free of any racial baggage okay dogs are larger than cats is that true well free of context that statement is neither true nor untrue if we're talking about domesticated dogs and cats then yes it's true that on average dogs are larger than cats Jason quite rightly includes this on average qualifier in his statements about black and Asian people now there are of course particularly small dogs and particularly large cats which make the statement untrue in every instance and newborn dogs are often smaller than fully grown cats but they're still dogs and even the words dog and cat need clarification you know a tiger is a cat technically so cats are ultimately larger than dogs on an individual scale you know what I'm getting at here is that depending on the context the statement can be read as true or untrue by itself it's meaningless let's apply this thinking to a comparative statement about different races and you've probably come across this one online before now I see this sort of thing all the time and it's usually justifying a reported police bias against black people or somesuch so is it a true statement well again by itself it can't tell us anything you know we need the context so let's talk about this statement and we'll see if we can't make it mean something so first off we need a location where are we talking about here are we talking about worldwide or in a specific country you know to narrow it down a bit we'll say America in America black people are more likely to be criminals than white people now then what does more likely mean exactly are we speaking genetically outside of capital are racist KKK types most people will say no not genetically just statistically for whatever reason you know cultural social economic or whatever and if we're talking statistically we you have to ask where do these statistics come from because of course we don't have a perfect record of all the criminals out there for what I hope for obvious reasons it's usually data taken from the police and the court system so we'll add this qualifier to and now this raises a lot of questions about how that data is gathered because there could be problems with the method of data collection let's imagine you're a new police chief in a city and you're looking at statistics that say black people are 20% more likely than white people to be criminals now you have limited resources and obviously you want to combat crime as effectively as you can so you logically choose to disproportionately target black people you know you're not racist you're just spending your resources tackling crime where the statistics say it's more likely to be now here's the problem with that a year down the line when you update the statistics you'll see an increase in black crime relative to white crime the extra time and effort you spent chasing black criminals meant that you caught more black criminals and the decreased focus on white criminals men you call fewer and now you're looking at statistics that say black people are 30% more likely to be criminals and you end up in a spiral you know this is how you end up in situations like black Americans being arrested for marijuana possession a national rate which is around triple that of white people despite black people and white people actually smoking weed at similar rates and that's just on the police end you know if we consider the court system we're going to have to add another qualifier to our statement because the justice system isn't perfect you know sometimes guilty people go free and sometimes innocent people get convicted and of course black people are more likely to be convicted of the same crimes than white people and they receive harsher punishments than white people and that has an effect on the stats too so we'll say that black people more likely to be found to be criminals because that's something that is actually measurable with a degree of confidence and there's something else to be considered what is considered a crime changes over time you know certain things that were illegal become legal and vice versa and some of those things can disproportionately affect different races you know for instance what happens to that inflated number of black people considered criminals for marijuana possession if marijuana possession gets legalized suddenly you're looking at a completely different set of statistics so you rarely need a time scale in there as well and I'm sure there are other things we could talk about like consider one guy who's a banker who defrauds the country of Millions he only counts as one criminal the same as a guy who gets busted for shoplifting counts as one criminal and more realistically the banker probably counts as no criminals because he donates huge amounts of money to the people who get to decide if he's a criminal or not but we're going to get enough topic a bit there so for the sake of sanity we will take a break here and if you haven't noticed by now I really don't like statements like the first one and I'm very keen on people giving the full context when they're talking about things like this why is that well coming back to Jason Todd for a minute he answers this in a comment where he says I apologize if the you cannot debate this seemed harsh in assuming but in my mind it's near impossible to debate the validity of statistics that have proper citation maybe you mean arguing or making statements on the implications of such averages and yet that's pretty much it you see if you just say this a lot of people are gonna start making assumptions often genetic racist assumptions and of course a lot of the times you do see a sentence like this it's because the person saying it wants people to make those assumptions you know this statement isn't good enough by itself and my opinion is the same for what we will call the positive statements that Jason wrote in on average blacks make better basketball players and on average Asians score higher on the SAT because both of those things are only true in certain regards you know if we look at something like on average Asian score higher on the SAT now the assumption a lot of people will make there is that this means Asians are on average genetically smarter than black people and that is a lazy and unscientific deduction when there could be lots of other reasons behind why Asian people tend to score higher on the SAT and let's think about a few of those now first off a huge predictor of your own academic success is your parents academic success and another is your parents financial status now it follows that richer better educated parents have richer better educated children and now here's the thing a considerable amount of American black people alive today either remember having to go to segregated schools or they are the children of people who went to segregated schools you know it really wasn't that long ago that black people legally had to go to worse underfunded schools and get a worse education than white people it's not ancient history that little girl in the Norman Rockwell painting you know she's still alive she's a teacher and she's not even that old really it's you know these sorts of things take a lot of generations to shrink to the point where they're statistically insignificant now on the other hand Asian people are comparatively much more likely to be college-educated and there's a few reasons behind that now it's going back aways here but there's a few things you could read up on like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 the Immigration Act of 1924 the National Origins Act the Asian Exclusion Act and whatnot but you can probably guess right now from the names that for a long time the US government didn't want a Asian people coming to America and these acts were all repealed around the time of the Second World War now recent legal Asian immigration into the u.s. is voluntary and of course requires a certain skill set or a certain amount of wealth or both and the population of China for instance is massive and there's always relatively rich educated people looking to move to the US now the majority of recent Asian immigrants into the u.s. have bachelor's degrees and their children and grandchildren will grow up with relatively rich college-educated parents and they are the Asian people who are taking the SAT you know a bunch of impoverished North Korean farmers they are not going to be taking the American SAT and if they did they would do you see this statement is just not enough by itself it's technically correct in one regard but to really understand it you need to know the history and the context and all that good stuff now one good point of comparison here is that young black children who are adopted tend to do better on tests than other non adopted black kids and that's because to adopt a kid you need to prove a certain level of financial security safety and stability that a lot of non adopted kids don't have adopted kids are generally growing up in richer safer households and as a result they do better in early academic tests you see if you change the circumstances you get different results however we can only get so far looking at this scientifically because we're missing a key part of the scientific process and that's a control test you know we don't have another America that's free of racial bias where all races are economically equal to compare to we can't do the SATs over one year and say okay guys this time we're going to try it without a history of racial oppression and where everyone grew up in a financially secure stable household you know it's just not possible so it's a bit irresponsible to be throwing out unscientific ideas like this one just because they happen to be technically right in one regard and I think there's a point to be made here about technically being right people love being right a little aside before I end the video I remember a series of Richard Dawkins tweets where he was ranking how bad deaf rent types of rapes are and saying things like mild pedophilia is bad violent pedophilia is worse date rape is bad stranger rape at knifepoint is worse and like I'll disagree with Richard Dawkins on that point but even if he's right and he might even be right you know shut up shut up Richard Dawkins being right isn't an excuse for being a prick I hope Richard Dawkins wife never asked him if her ass look fat in a dress actually he just got divorced recently so who knows maybe she did that's so unfair so anyway guys thanks for watching I know this is a bit of a weird boring talky video with not much going on but uh let me know what you think it's a little experiment and a thanks to Jason Todd who even though we disagree you know he was relatively nice about it and he didn't call me any horrible names or anything so that was a refreshing change thank you Jason although he did end this comment by saying you got to be careful with stuff like that I'm sure you don't want alt-right storm front as flooding your videos and that's just not true I do want that that sounds like it would be funny so please share this video to a bunch of racist people you have my blessing to do that

Channel: Shaun

Views: 398,727

Rating: 4.8841805 out of 5

Keywords: shaun jen, race, racial comparisons, talking about

Id: dNo-A55rJ8s

Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 05 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/jo-stick]

This video says "Don't Watch This One" in the thumbnail so I never watched it before now. Did not regret disobeying said thumbnail.

[u/Aldebaran135]

A star is born.

[u/srsly_its_so_ez]

Huh, I'm pretty sure that I had looked all the way back in his channel already. I must have forgotten that his CinemaSins videos were from before he did anything political

I think once he got into politics his channel really went downhill ;)

Edit: why did this comment get 4 downvotes, does anyone know? It's not because of the obvious joke I made, is it?