Enthusiastic Reader > Recent Status Updates

"The particular irony is that the more competent the Black person is, the more likely this bias is to occur."

120: "when an evaluator expects a weak performance and sees a strong one, the strong performance is attributed to unstable causes such as luck or effort ... [which] can change and are therefore unreliable. However, strong performances based on ability will probably be repeated."

120: "The bias was even more apparent when the Black person being rated was in a position superior to the White evaluator. While high-ability White supervisors were accepted by subordinate White raters as being somewhat more intelligent than themselves, White evaluators consistently described high-ability Black supervisors as significantly less intelligent than themselves."

120: "Though the information that had been provided about the candidates was identical, the Black applicants were evaluated significantly less positively than the White applicants."

119-120: "When the applicant had moderate qualifications, Whites were evaluated slightly better than Blacks, but not significantly so. However, when the applicant had strong qualifications, there was a significant difference between how strong White candidates and strong Black candidates were rated."

119: "a study was conducted in white White college students were asked to rate college applicants who on the basis of transcript information were strongly qualified, moderately qualified, or weakly qualified. In some cases the applicant was identified as Black, in other cases as White. When the applicant was weakly qualified, there was no discrimination between Back and White applicants. Both were rejected."

111: "Though a White person may need to describe the racist things a parent or spouse has said or done, to tell the story to a person of color may reopen that person's wounds. Listening to those stories and problem-solving about them is a job that White people can do for each other."

110: "Support groups of this nature help to combat the social isolation that antiracist Whites often experience, and provide places to forge new identities."

109: "'allies need allies,' others who will support their efforts to swim against the tide of cultural and institutional racism."

109: "One of the consequences of racism in our society is that those who oppose racism are often marginalized, and as a result, their stories are not readily accessed. Yet having access to these stories makes a difference to those Whites who are looking for ways to be agents of change."

Response to quote from p 65: Teaching in a public school usually requires a college degree. Growing up in poverty makes it that much more difficult to get one. Likewise, a conviction will make it difficult or impossible to get a certificate, and even an arrest on a candidate's record will make it difficult to get hired.

p 65: "Black Southern schools, though stigmatized by legally sanctioned segregation, were often staffed by African American educators, themselves visible models of academic achievement."

p 194-195: "Broadly speaking, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an extensive "financialization" of the global economy, which altered the structure of wealth in the sense that the total amount of financial assets and liabilities held by various sectors increased more rapidly than net wealth." FINE. YOU WIN, PIKETTY. I GIVE UP.

p. 21 - "Common across these examples is that in the areas where a person is a member of the dominant or advantaged social group, the category is usually not mentioned… It is taken for granted by them because it is taken for granted by the dominant culture… In the absence of dissonance, this dimension of identity escapes conscious attention."

p. 20 - "I ask my students to complete the sentence “I am ___,” using as many descriptors as they can think of in sixty seconds." This sounds interesting!

I still don't really understand the capital to income ratio and what it means in practical terms. *sigh*

p. 163: "whenever more than half of national income goes to labor and one chooses to capitalize the flow of labor income at the same or nearly the same rate as the flow of income to capital, then by definition the value of human capital is greater than the value of all other forms of capital." I feel like I ought to be able to understand that but it just goes round and round and gets nowhere in my brain.

p. 155: "the United States enjoyed a much more stable capital/income ratio than Europe in the twentieth century, perhaps explaining why American seem to take a more benign view of capitalism than Europeans." I know what he means here but I was not aware that Europeans were more anticapitalist; would have loved to see some references and/or examples.

p. 153: "After World War II, real estate and stock prices stood at historic lows. When it came to progressive taxation, the United States went much farther than Europe, possibly demonstrating that the goal there was more to reduce inequality than to eradicate private property."

p. 148: "[the second factor is] the low asset prices that obtained in the new postwar political context of mixed ownership and regulation." This is confusing and I think it's a translation issue; "obtained" is a transitive verb and is used here without a direct object, so I'm not sure what the author intends. It might be some economics thing I'm just unfamiliar with.

P 148: “some people consequently chose to maintain their standard of living by gradually selling off part of their capital.” But if there are sellers, there must be buyers. Where was that wealth going?