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this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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I have to disagree with a reply to this before me because I think this example doesn't do the comment about statistics mentioned above justice.
You don't want your doctor to treat you for hypertension, but you want him to check you for it to catch it early if you have it if you fall into a category that makes it more likely you have hypertension. This does not mean he should ignore the possibility of a disease in a non-high-risk group either.
Equally, black students being statistically speaking worse at math does not mean you should look at a black student and assume he is bad in math. But it can mean that funding for programs targeted at helping minority students going to math tutoring can be better justified.
I will not argue that based on statistics you should make assumptions about people, hell no. This is obviously racist. But assuming statistics (and being aware of them) are first and foremost racist would just be equally wrong.
The phrasings in the meme can be described as racist. But the structural problems that racism created and that lead to these assumptions cannot be fought by ignoring them.
But this ignores the issue of frequency I hint at in the bottom parenthetical.
Let's say for the sake of argument black students are 2x as likely as white students to fail a math class and need to retake it.
Breaking it out by racial cross tabs may well suggest a policy of adding a math support program exclusively for black students.
The problem is that at a frequency basis, (0.616 times X) > (0.121 times 2X). So your well intentioned program just excluded a greater number of students that are going to fail math than the number of students you are going to include.
A better approach would be to identify what students are struggling with math irrespective of their melanin, and ensure adequate resources are tailored to them.
The only way a melanin specific math program makes sense is if the specific factors relating to why a given student is struggling with math is unique to their melanin such that a broader program focused on math won't address those issues.
But even in terms of unique causes or factors, my guess is that the melanin specific crosstab is a poor metric selection, as it simply correlates with multiple other factors which more closely track with performance, such as household income levels, parent availability at home, parent education levels, etc.
So a program that was focused instead on things like "math support for kids who don't have a parent who has high school math level competency at home" is going to be much more successful for many more students than one focused on "students with a lot of melanin who are struggling with math."
It's a shitty metric that persists because it's easy to classify and because for some things it is a causative factor in and of itself (such as criminal injustice).