Nordic » Wed Mar 02, 2016 10:36 am wrote:I saw a story earlier today, but now I can't find it, where "a study" showed that white people believe they are victims of racism far more than black people.
Now that's seriously fucked up.
News coverage of statistics is just as mangled and lifeless as their attempts at discussing science or culture or reality. But the original surveys are quite interesting.
For instance, late last year there was a great YouGov survey on politics and race --
PDF link here -- which absolutely everyone managed to fuck up their articles on, it was kind of beautiful to witness. I really have to wonder how Journalism Schools can still exist if these conglomerates are just going to keep having interns do all the actual writing. To the credit of those zany kids, though, a lot of the headlines in the wake of the YouGov survey were something along the lines of
"White Folk Say Black Folk is Takers" and that is...accurate.

Methodology wrinkle of note:
Respondents were asked to identify which class they consider themselves. 45% of white Americans identify as working class while 52% identify as middle class. There is very little difference between working class whites (49%) and middle class whites (51%) in how likely they are to view black Americans as 'takers'.
That's because I bet there is very little difference in household income & education between those two
self-identified categories, which probably map in Venn diagram format as two overlapping circles.
One of the more curious wrinkles there was about
identity...
White Americans (38%) are much less likely than either black Americans (83%) or Hispanics (62%) to say that their racial identity is important to them. There is very little difference between working class (38%) and middle class (40%) whites on this issue, though conservative whites (44%) are slightly more likely than liberal whites (37%) to say that their race is important to them.

Seems like focusing on white people might not be the best solution to addressing racism, based on that little clusterfuck. Crackers are out here
really trying to be post-Racial. Don't interrupt the process.
For another classic journey down WTF Lane that you'd probably enjoy with your young kin, this OK Cupid summary on their user statistics is legendary stuff:
http://blog.okcupid.com/index.php/race- ... 2009-2014/