White Man’s Paradise
Everyone’s a little bit racist
It’s true.
But everyone is just about
As racist as you!
If we all could just admit
That we are racist a little bit,
And everyone stopped being
So PC
Maybe we could live in -
Harmony!- Avenue Q
nb: in this post i intentionally entirely ignore gender issues to simplify discourse.
It is nearly impossible to imagine the norm of explicit racism that prevailed up to just three to four generations ago. How does a human being speak to another human being, who is of a different race than him/her, and have both humans openly acknowledge/take for granted the difference in social stature just by virtue of being born a different color?
I don’t judge whether this is right or not – I can only note that over the past several decades we have tried to fix this innate cultural bias by firstly legislating it away – making explicit racial discrimination in the job market place illegal – and secondly by changing our own norms to no longer explicitly referring to racial characteristics in a negative light (positive ones, like “oh Chinese people are so hardworking” or “once you go Black…” are still o.k.).
However, in a manner ironically similar to financial regulation, the problem has become if anything a little more insidious and indirect – we have implicit racism in the workplace, and definitely in the friendship and romance market.
If you think just a little about it, you realize this phenomenon is not simply because people simply like to mingle with others of their own kind. While that fact may be true, it is insufficient to explain why people of different races treat some races more favorably than others, and why the ordinal arrangement of races by people of different races is also highly correlated. Something else – implicit racism – is at work.
Again: I do not judge here, I observe.
–
the social sphere
Just the other day a white fraternity brother I have never met sent out a feeler looking for bros in Singapore to meet up. Another white brother responded, adding, “Welcome to white man’s paradise.” I responded too.
They met up without me.
the professional sphere
Modal probability densities (i.e. the highest likelihood regardless of the spread or even weighted average of the racial distribution) at the workplace: If you’re white, you are likely in a managerial, senior position. If you’re black but born and raised in a Western country, you are probably also senior but not quite the boss. If you’re brown, you may or may not be senior but you gravitate to certain sections of the bank which are noticeably (perhaps statistically significantly) browner than others. If you’re mongoloid, you are likely an analyst. If you’re African, Hispanic, or others – you may work in IT, or some other support function, or not – you are too rare of an occurrence to make much of a distribution estimation
(In both spheres the split may really be more about cultural background than racial background – however the two are intensely linked and anyway the world “culturalist” doesn’t have the same stigma or connotations for me to really make much of a point.)
–
I do not judge, nor desire to spend much time bemoaning this state of affairs. Reality is what it is and powerful institutional factors at play mean that it is likely to persist for a good amount of time despite your best efforts at changing things. More to the point – I am also guilty of implicit racism – choosing my bosses and workplaces by racial mix, treating friends of different races unequally. I do think that it is better to be conscious (or not-in-denial) about something you actually are – if not because it is a problem that you want to fix, then simply because it may reveal some of your cognitive biases that prevent you from making better decisions.
But I do think it is very true that this world we have created for ourselves, particularly in Southeast Asian countries like Singapore, is indeed a white man’s paradise. Our most attractive girls go for white men, and we get sloppy seconds. Our best jobs go to white men, and we are just happy to be working for a white man because the alternative is working for a man who is not white.
Not all of this is racism; to some extent there is selection bias already operating because 1) there is no reason for a white man to leave his country unless it is for a managerial job here, so lo and behold most of the white guys here are managers, and 2) the markets in the developed countries are, well, more developed, so white people bring expertise and sophistication unavailable to locals, justifying their managerhood.
But in the social realm the selection bias explanation is moot. In here there is more of a “soft power” element that I hypothesize originates from the cultural dominance of Western entertainment and products – Hollywood, TV sitcoms, talkshows, news channels, British documentaries, Australian nature shows, German cars, French wine, French luxury goods, Italian fashion. There is just a general halo effect surrounding everything considered Western, and what better embodiment of that than the White Man.
So, yes – these are the facts of modern society. While we would like an egalitarian society the real world is anything but – and kick and scream all you want but you can’t help being born what you are. Just be thankful that our society offers you ways out which did not exist previously – to cite the most obvious example the path of meritocracy, where you earn power, respect, money in accordance with the value of what you are able to produce. (as someone who leans libertarian I of course do think this is the most unambiguously positive social improvement over the past four centuries).
The example of the Jewish lawyers and investment bankers in Gladwell’s Outliers comes to mind: Yes, God gave you lemons. Boo hoo. Make lemonade, find a new God, whatever.
Don’t sit there wailing about the lemons.
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