I work for a very large company and everyone except white males gets DEI preferences, including white women and immigrants who chose to come to America.
This is all mildly interesting and highly infuriating. But the bottom line is that regardless of definitions, it is none of the government's damn business what my race or my ethnicity is.
Nothing good ever comes of government having or using this information.
Assuming it was politically possible to do so, what do you think would be the practical consequences of the US adopting the French practice of prohibiting the government from asking questions about race or ethnicity?
Presumably private institutions such as universities or corporations could continue to do so if they wished.
Prohibiting government questions? I expect the practical consequences would be minor. Our government is not noted for obeying its own laws, from the Constitution on down.
There is one exception: some medical research. We are finding genetic(?) treatments for some diseases that are dependent on race or ethnicity, and of course there are diseases that are more prevalent in some groups than others. I wonder if any such research is being hobbled by teaching policies at medical schools.
Didn't Microsoft's rudimentary AI of a few years back go doubleplus crimethink in an hour of being turned loose on the Internet? That dialogue with ChatGPT was painful; I can only imagine the programming necessary to get it around Y-haplogroups.
I think they all did. When reality is crimethink, you need some extra programming to hide it.
I use Grok, and it is much the same. Woke and extremely sloppy with initial answers - even on non-political questions, in fields like geometry. But when I correct it, it gets very obsequious.
Today on X, people posted some decided anti-woke Grok responses, such as using and explaining "every single time" and a positive reference to Hitler. It may have been prompted by the posters, of course.
Grok defaults to woke every time, in my experience. It's like pulling teeth to get Grok to acknowledge its woke bias.
Does "every single time" mean something unwoke?
I understand Hitler was a non-smoker and a vegetarian. He was also said to be kind to animals (until murdering his own dog shortly before committing suicide in the bunker). He did, however, have some negative qualities as well...
"Every single time" appears on some websites after someone with a Jewish surname does or says something outrageous. I suppose that IS woke nowadays, except the preferred outrage is usually anti-white, anti-Christian, or anti-male. The positive references to Hitler were about race, so not modern nice.
"He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time."
Every damn time? That sounds too emotional to come straight from a mainstream AI. I suspect you are right that Grok was coached or prompted to some extent by the user. Time to update the Hitler filter...
Mamdani is the ancestor of a woman trampled to death by Tamerlane. He is the ancestor of Hittite warriors riding chariots into battle. He is the ancestor of one of Genghis Khan's warriors riding the wilds of Siberia. He is the ancestor of a Swiss clockmaker, a Vietnamese peasant of the rice fields of the Mekong, a Sumerian nobleman, a Venetian sailor, a Balkan woman sold into the concubine of the Ottoman sultans, a Brooklyn owner of a Pizzeria, a Welsh coalminer, the bastard son of King Harold of England and a North Sentinelese chieftain.
When Mamdani gets elected he’ll rev up Mike Bloomberg’s plans for a time machine, travel back in time and become the common ancestor of the human race. That’s how he knows he’s black (unlike all YOU zombies).
"I’ve never heard of Cape Coloured migrants to the U.S."
On my annual visit to the Western Cape, I meet a lot of youngish coloureds who are there for however many weeks or months it takes to renew their work visas for America. Recruiting companies take them in large numbers to work at expensive hotels and golf clubs in NY, North Carolina, and Florida. The recruiters sort out their travel, passports, and accommodation, then take a large cut.
Some of them have done very well for themselves; some well enough to stay, with a management job. They are generally very well behaved, high school diploma or a B.A., and I am just now for the first time thinking H/R can tick a box when they hire one. I had thought they were recruited because of a labour shortage. (I also met a young white South African who'd done a stint in America running a children's ride at a travelling carnival. Not such a nice job.)
More than one has said, "you can't say 'coloured'" in America. One who did told me he had to hear a lecture about his racial oppression. Another said that it helps to learn a few words of Spanish since they are often mistaken for Hispanic.
I was married in a beautiful old historically coloured church in the Western Cape. I wish I hadn't said "coloured church" to my neighbour at home in Quebec. I thought she'd be pleased I was married, but instead her scream of rage could be heard for a mile.
One Western Cape coloured person I know went through 23andMe. Her ancestry was South Indian, Dutch, French/German, Bushman (5 percent), Bantu (10 percent), and Ashkenazi. She immigrated to the U.S.
How did she manage to be "coloured" with 5% Bushman and 10% Bushman? Oh, I see, South Indian! Didn't Indians and Malays have an extra slot on SA census?
Unfortunately, we are probably never going to be free of racial scorekeeping. It’s so ingrained in our society, and obviously it’s been a core political strategy of the left for generations at this point to leverage resentment, power, and spending. Obviously the biggest beneficiaries have been blacks, but that is largely a product of the majority of society acquiescing to demands for them to be treated as a group apart and owed special treatment.
What *could* and likely will change is this deference. Increasingly the other racial groups will Notice that an awful lot of resources and grace is extended that doesn’t result in any significant changes in outcomes or behavior, and it’s simply not in their interest to continue to go along with it. That will be a sea change in our culture if it comes to pass.
How about--race is what 99% of non-lying people say you look like and by saying it they also nail what your parents look like? Would we be surprised if a pure Armenian was mistaken for a Jew or an Italian or a Spaniard? Would we be surprised if a pure Black guy was mistaken for a pure Oriental?
I just read an obituary of Henry Fonda’s fourth wife, an Italian-Jewish aristocrat (her life would be a great part for Lady Gaga). Their mental model often seems to be how upper-class Jews like the Louis Dreyfuses were accepted into European society. Of course, their descendants still tend to remember and emphasize their Jewishness, and there were mixed results, e.g., the grandsons of Bismarck’s financier were spared a concentration camp but became Red Cross refugees in Switzerland.
Their examples should be race e.g. black and ethnicity e.g. Jewish (er--I mean Italian!). Race is inherited genetically even though there is no genetic basis for race. Ethnicity is about the exciting non-bland food you make. If you as an extremely white gentile man, tried to make latkes, I would have to yell at you about cultural appropriation because it's ...wait...
Ultimately though isn't it about them wanting AA for descendants of aboriginal Americans but not like Apache and Cheyenne and speaking Spanish was the only easy distinguishing feature (even though that's a slightly broad brush)?
If you look closely at photos of the Anglican religious order, the Melanesian Brotherhood of the Solomon Islands, after awhile you can get the hang of visually distinguishing them from Africans and African-Americans. Interestingly, they look more like African-Americans than Africans. 19th Century anthropologists assumed they were a direct offshoot of sub-Saharans due to some prehistoric migration, but in the first half of the 20th Century, physical anthropologists like Carlton Coon had figured out that they were no more closely related to sub-Saharans than most other people.
Canon Isaac Beach, a Maori from New Zealand is on the 17 member panel that will pick the new Archbishop of Canterbury. It also includes a black woman from Africa and an engineer (Jouaquin Philpotts) from Argentina, with an Anglican population of 200,000. It strikes me that this would have made a good subject for a late Anthony Burgess novel.
Reading Churchill's WWII memoirs, I notice that as late as the 1950s writers were still using the word "race" quite loosely, as in "The Spanish are a proud and volatile race". Would simply if reluctantly retiring the word improve relations with the mainstream-opinions crowd?
The issue is that I just use the word, race, that the federal government and the New York Times use.
Geneticists use "population" but to mean race, but nobody else does. If I ask ChatGPR 4o,
What's the population of California?
ChatGPT said:
As of the most recent estimates from 2024, the population of California is approximately 38.9 million people.
This represents a slight decline from its peak of around 39.5 million in 2020, due to factors like domestic out-migration and declining birth rates. However, California remains the most populous state in the United States.
You said:
What's the racial makeup of California?
ChatGPT said:
As of the most recent U.S. Census estimates (2023 data), the racial and ethnic makeup of California is approximately:
Group Percentage
Hispanic or Latino (of any race) 39.5%
White (non-Hispanic) 34.7%
Asian 15.8%
Black or African American 5.5%
Multiracial 4.4%
Native American / Alaska Native 1.6%
Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander 0.5%
Notes:
Hispanic/Latino is considered an ethnicity, so individuals in that category may be of any race (including White, Black, Indigenous, etc.).
California is now a majority-minority state, meaning no single racial/ethnic group makes up over 50% of the population.
The state has one of the most diverse populations in the U.S., especially in urban areas like Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Bay Area.
Let me know if you want data on specific age groups, counties, or changes over time.
Thanks – that does cover the proper meaning of “population” in these contexts. And also, I think, the word has a wider meaning than “race” – for instance in computing, you “populate” a list of items by filling in the missing ones. And like all “tion” words, it’s a clunker. But wouldn’t a sentence that subs it in anyway set off fewer alarm bells? And could “population” come to function as something of an olive branch, or at least a compromise?
I read a few articles about how Grok has become more antisemitic as it has become more advanced. According to one article "noticing" is a neo-nazi trope.
Starting in 1997, I researched the federal government's very curious distinction between race and ethnicity in hate crime statistics. At first the DOJ was happy to talk to me -- until they realized I was critical of these laws. The model they created was used for their statistics-gathering from states (as most crimes are prosecuted within states) and also used for their own juridistical prosecutions (at the time restricted to crimes committed on reservations or federal parks and land, or while conducting federal activities such as voting).
For categories of hate crime victims, both race and ethnicity are counted, they told me. But for categories of offenders, only race is counted. Thus, any Hispanic offenders would be "counted" as members of one racial group or another. When I asked which racial group Hispanics were typically assigned to, I was told that it was almost always white (I researched cases intensively for several years and found no cases where it wasn't white). So Hispanic-on-black or Hispanic-on-white or Hispanic-on-Asian (or gay, etc.) cases were all counted as having white hate crime offenders. When I asked why they chose to do it this way, they said it was because it was often too difficult to tell if someone is Hispanic or not. They had no answer when I asked why they didn't at least have a category for Hispanic offenders whom they had caught and could identify ethnically.
I used to order hard copies of the long-form federal statistics every year and look up the sex crime cases state by state. It was time-consuming, and now it's practically impossible to do, thanks to firewalls and state statistics bureaus getting better at concealing such information. I also researched many non-sex crime cases that were covered extensively in the news. I am certain that a large percentage of recorded "white on black hate crimes" were actually Hispanic-on-black, especially in cities experiencing turf warfare between Hispanics and blacks, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and NYC.
Oddly, this gawking difference between counting victims and counting offenders was openly labeled a racist myth for several years, even as officials and activists were willing to discuss it, and it was clearly defined and visible in the federal hate crime statistics. I need to update my research, but I suspect I'll find that victims are still broken down by both ethnicity and race, while offenders are slotted only into a specific racial category. It was one of several useful tools for blaming so-called hate crimes on whites (another was defining some crimes as gang-related when they would have been defined as hate if the offenders really were white).
I think I would be in favor of some degree of affirmative action if it was reserved only for descendants of American slaves, and perhaps some native populations. It's absolutely absurd and insane that you can come to this country and get special treatment for SBA loans and other advantages just because you are not white. Limit it only for groups that have historical grievances from within our borders only. Steve what do you think?
I work for a very large company and everyone except white males gets DEI preferences, including white women and immigrants who chose to come to America.
This is all mildly interesting and highly infuriating. But the bottom line is that regardless of definitions, it is none of the government's damn business what my race or my ethnicity is.
Nothing good ever comes of government having or using this information.
Government should have neither. Private persons and institutions should have and use whatever they want, and can get.
Assuming it was politically possible to do so, what do you think would be the practical consequences of the US adopting the French practice of prohibiting the government from asking questions about race or ethnicity?
Presumably private institutions such as universities or corporations could continue to do so if they wished.
Prohibiting government questions? I expect the practical consequences would be minor. Our government is not noted for obeying its own laws, from the Constitution on down.
There is one exception: some medical research. We are finding genetic(?) treatments for some diseases that are dependent on race or ethnicity, and of course there are diseases that are more prevalent in some groups than others. I wonder if any such research is being hobbled by teaching policies at medical schools.
It’s been kind of handy having it connected to SAT scores.
Yes. But the SAT is administered by a private company, not the government. The government should be fair, impartial, and color-blind.
Nonetheless a lot of information has come from having it. I see your point though.
Pop singer (and hottie) Tyla, from South Africa, described herself as coloured and caused a little bruhaha because of that
Isn't she colored? I'd have thought that her being part Zulu, and colored like a part Zulu, would fully qualify her. What more did people want?
Didn't Microsoft's rudimentary AI of a few years back go doubleplus crimethink in an hour of being turned loose on the Internet? That dialogue with ChatGPT was painful; I can only imagine the programming necessary to get it around Y-haplogroups.
I think they all did. When reality is crimethink, you need some extra programming to hide it.
I use Grok, and it is much the same. Woke and extremely sloppy with initial answers - even on non-political questions, in fields like geometry. But when I correct it, it gets very obsequious.
Today on X, people posted some decided anti-woke Grok responses, such as using and explaining "every single time" and a positive reference to Hitler. It may have been prompted by the posters, of course.
Grok defaults to woke every time, in my experience. It's like pulling teeth to get Grok to acknowledge its woke bias.
Does "every single time" mean something unwoke?
I understand Hitler was a non-smoker and a vegetarian. He was also said to be kind to animals (until murdering his own dog shortly before committing suicide in the bunker). He did, however, have some negative qualities as well...
"Every single time" appears on some websites after someone with a Jewish surname does or says something outrageous. I suppose that IS woke nowadays, except the preferred outrage is usually anti-white, anti-Christian, or anti-male. The positive references to Hitler were about race, so not modern nice.
edit: made the NYT
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/07/mr-musk-has-said-his-chatbot-should-not.html#more
Thanks, I had not heard that one.
"He'd spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time."
Every damn time? That sounds too emotional to come straight from a mainstream AI. I suspect you are right that Grok was coached or prompted to some extent by the user. Time to update the Hitler filter...
Grok follows whoever Musk follows on X.
It said “every damn time.”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/12/elon-musk-grok-antisemitic
Mamdani could have used the one drop rule, but he would have had to steal that drop.
Also, ChatGPT is an idiot.
Mamdani is the ancestor of a woman trampled to death by Tamerlane. He is the ancestor of Hittite warriors riding chariots into battle. He is the ancestor of one of Genghis Khan's warriors riding the wilds of Siberia. He is the ancestor of a Swiss clockmaker, a Vietnamese peasant of the rice fields of the Mekong, a Sumerian nobleman, a Venetian sailor, a Balkan woman sold into the concubine of the Ottoman sultans, a Brooklyn owner of a Pizzeria, a Welsh coalminer, the bastard son of King Harold of England and a North Sentinelese chieftain.
Descendant?
I was typing too fast and thinking too slow.
When Mamdani gets elected he’ll rev up Mike Bloomberg’s plans for a time machine, travel back in time and become the common ancestor of the human race. That’s how he knows he’s black (unlike all YOU zombies).
"I’ve never heard of Cape Coloured migrants to the U.S."
On my annual visit to the Western Cape, I meet a lot of youngish coloureds who are there for however many weeks or months it takes to renew their work visas for America. Recruiting companies take them in large numbers to work at expensive hotels and golf clubs in NY, North Carolina, and Florida. The recruiters sort out their travel, passports, and accommodation, then take a large cut.
Some of them have done very well for themselves; some well enough to stay, with a management job. They are generally very well behaved, high school diploma or a B.A., and I am just now for the first time thinking H/R can tick a box when they hire one. I had thought they were recruited because of a labour shortage. (I also met a young white South African who'd done a stint in America running a children's ride at a travelling carnival. Not such a nice job.)
More than one has said, "you can't say 'coloured'" in America. One who did told me he had to hear a lecture about his racial oppression. Another said that it helps to learn a few words of Spanish since they are often mistaken for Hispanic.
I was married in a beautiful old historically coloured church in the Western Cape. I wish I hadn't said "coloured church" to my neighbour at home in Quebec. I thought she'd be pleased I was married, but instead her scream of rage could be heard for a mile.
One Western Cape coloured person I know went through 23andMe. Her ancestry was South Indian, Dutch, French/German, Bushman (5 percent), Bantu (10 percent), and Ashkenazi. She immigrated to the U.S.
How did she manage to be "coloured" with 5% Bushman and 10% Bushman? Oh, I see, South Indian! Didn't Indians and Malays have an extra slot on SA census?
Unfortunately, we are probably never going to be free of racial scorekeeping. It’s so ingrained in our society, and obviously it’s been a core political strategy of the left for generations at this point to leverage resentment, power, and spending. Obviously the biggest beneficiaries have been blacks, but that is largely a product of the majority of society acquiescing to demands for them to be treated as a group apart and owed special treatment.
What *could* and likely will change is this deference. Increasingly the other racial groups will Notice that an awful lot of resources and grace is extended that doesn’t result in any significant changes in outcomes or behavior, and it’s simply not in their interest to continue to go along with it. That will be a sea change in our culture if it comes to pass.
How about--race is what 99% of non-lying people say you look like and by saying it they also nail what your parents look like? Would we be surprised if a pure Armenian was mistaken for a Jew or an Italian or a Spaniard? Would we be surprised if a pure Black guy was mistaken for a pure Oriental?
The race is just a social construct people have a hard time coming up with examples of what they are talking about and why it's important.
I just read an obituary of Henry Fonda’s fourth wife, an Italian-Jewish aristocrat (her life would be a great part for Lady Gaga). Their mental model often seems to be how upper-class Jews like the Louis Dreyfuses were accepted into European society. Of course, their descendants still tend to remember and emphasize their Jewishness, and there were mixed results, e.g., the grandsons of Bismarck’s financier were spared a concentration camp but became Red Cross refugees in Switzerland.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2025/03/29/baroness-afdera-franchetti-henry-fonda-hemingway-capote/
Their examples should be race e.g. black and ethnicity e.g. Jewish (er--I mean Italian!). Race is inherited genetically even though there is no genetic basis for race. Ethnicity is about the exciting non-bland food you make. If you as an extremely white gentile man, tried to make latkes, I would have to yell at you about cultural appropriation because it's ...wait...
Ultimately though isn't it about them wanting AA for descendants of aboriginal Americans but not like Apache and Cheyenne and speaking Spanish was the only easy distinguishing feature (even though that's a slightly broad brush)?
If you look closely at photos of the Anglican religious order, the Melanesian Brotherhood of the Solomon Islands, after awhile you can get the hang of visually distinguishing them from Africans and African-Americans. Interestingly, they look more like African-Americans than Africans. 19th Century anthropologists assumed they were a direct offshoot of sub-Saharans due to some prehistoric migration, but in the first half of the 20th Century, physical anthropologists like Carlton Coon had figured out that they were no more closely related to sub-Saharans than most other people.
Canon Isaac Beach, a Maori from New Zealand is on the 17 member panel that will pick the new Archbishop of Canterbury. It also includes a black woman from Africa and an engineer (Jouaquin Philpotts) from Argentina, with an Anglican population of 200,000. It strikes me that this would have made a good subject for a late Anthony Burgess novel.
Reading Churchill's WWII memoirs, I notice that as late as the 1950s writers were still using the word "race" quite loosely, as in "The Spanish are a proud and volatile race". Would simply if reluctantly retiring the word improve relations with the mainstream-opinions crowd?
The issue is that I just use the word, race, that the federal government and the New York Times use.
Geneticists use "population" but to mean race, but nobody else does. If I ask ChatGPR 4o,
What's the population of California?
ChatGPT said:
As of the most recent estimates from 2024, the population of California is approximately 38.9 million people.
This represents a slight decline from its peak of around 39.5 million in 2020, due to factors like domestic out-migration and declining birth rates. However, California remains the most populous state in the United States.
You said:
What's the racial makeup of California?
ChatGPT said:
As of the most recent U.S. Census estimates (2023 data), the racial and ethnic makeup of California is approximately:
Group Percentage
Hispanic or Latino (of any race) 39.5%
White (non-Hispanic) 34.7%
Asian 15.8%
Black or African American 5.5%
Multiracial 4.4%
Native American / Alaska Native 1.6%
Native Hawaiian / Pacific Islander 0.5%
Notes:
Hispanic/Latino is considered an ethnicity, so individuals in that category may be of any race (including White, Black, Indigenous, etc.).
California is now a majority-minority state, meaning no single racial/ethnic group makes up over 50% of the population.
The state has one of the most diverse populations in the U.S., especially in urban areas like Los Angeles, San Diego, and the Bay Area.
Let me know if you want data on specific age groups, counties, or changes over time.
Does this mean we're free to attack California now, or is further study required?
Thanks – that does cover the proper meaning of “population” in these contexts. And also, I think, the word has a wider meaning than “race” – for instance in computing, you “populate” a list of items by filling in the missing ones. And like all “tion” words, it’s a clunker. But wouldn’t a sentence that subs it in anyway set off fewer alarm bells? And could “population” come to function as something of an olive branch, or at least a compromise?
As we used to say, euphemism and I'm for youse'm.
I read a few articles about how Grok has become more antisemitic as it has become more advanced. According to one article "noticing" is a neo-nazi trope.
I saw that, too.
Of course as you know, with the Nuremberg laws, The Nazis applied their finest legal minds to problems just like this.
Starting in 1997, I researched the federal government's very curious distinction between race and ethnicity in hate crime statistics. At first the DOJ was happy to talk to me -- until they realized I was critical of these laws. The model they created was used for their statistics-gathering from states (as most crimes are prosecuted within states) and also used for their own juridistical prosecutions (at the time restricted to crimes committed on reservations or federal parks and land, or while conducting federal activities such as voting).
For categories of hate crime victims, both race and ethnicity are counted, they told me. But for categories of offenders, only race is counted. Thus, any Hispanic offenders would be "counted" as members of one racial group or another. When I asked which racial group Hispanics were typically assigned to, I was told that it was almost always white (I researched cases intensively for several years and found no cases where it wasn't white). So Hispanic-on-black or Hispanic-on-white or Hispanic-on-Asian (or gay, etc.) cases were all counted as having white hate crime offenders. When I asked why they chose to do it this way, they said it was because it was often too difficult to tell if someone is Hispanic or not. They had no answer when I asked why they didn't at least have a category for Hispanic offenders whom they had caught and could identify ethnically.
I used to order hard copies of the long-form federal statistics every year and look up the sex crime cases state by state. It was time-consuming, and now it's practically impossible to do, thanks to firewalls and state statistics bureaus getting better at concealing such information. I also researched many non-sex crime cases that were covered extensively in the news. I am certain that a large percentage of recorded "white on black hate crimes" were actually Hispanic-on-black, especially in cities experiencing turf warfare between Hispanics and blacks, such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and NYC.
Oddly, this gawking difference between counting victims and counting offenders was openly labeled a racist myth for several years, even as officials and activists were willing to discuss it, and it was clearly defined and visible in the federal hate crime statistics. I need to update my research, but I suspect I'll find that victims are still broken down by both ethnicity and race, while offenders are slotted only into a specific racial category. It was one of several useful tools for blaming so-called hate crimes on whites (another was defining some crimes as gang-related when they would have been defined as hate if the offenders really were white).
Excellent. This is a discussion that has been supressed for way too long. And alas, it will never surface in my lifetime. This is a damn good start.
I think I would be in favor of some degree of affirmative action if it was reserved only for descendants of American slaves, and perhaps some native populations. It's absolutely absurd and insane that you can come to this country and get special treatment for SBA loans and other advantages just because you are not white. Limit it only for groups that have historical grievances from within our borders only. Steve what do you think?