CHROMAPHONE

A statistical approach to racism...

I was watching Chris Rock "Kill the messenger" last night...

His show his mainly about race, very funny, of course, and not caring about politically correct formulations... For example, he talked about a bunch of african-american who gathered to bury the word niger... He claimed that tonight was spring time and yelled it out loud... lol

Of course, humorists don’t claim to be scientists and may even voluntarily say things they don’t really think are true just to make us think on those things... Just like many writers do!

And, of course, there are many anthropological ways in which I could talk about racism and statistics which have often been used to proove how illogical racial categoriztion are (but then again, statistics often lack the synthesis ability that social sciences can bring and make an argument which doesn’t understand the identification process... anyhow...).

So my point here, to make it quick, is that Chris says that all his black friends had many white friends and that all his white friends had 1 black friend!

So here’s a quick explanation: there are 13.4% of the US population that are african-america. If you were to make a party and invite a 100 people and 13 of them would be black and that each individuals would talk to around 10 people during the night, statistically speaking, blacks would have talked with many whites and white with 1 or 2 blacks.

And add on top of that that alikes gathers naturally (and maybe not because of race but ethnicity (and statistically speaking, ethnies are still racialy alike as well)) and you can understand how it is normal to see that phenomenon of black knowing many white and whites knowing only a few blakcs...

...

Chris eventually says that he doesn’t understand how black people can still be surprised of racism...

Indeed! Being a victim isn’t the solution here and it is really important to understand the scientific fact before jumping to conclusions... It is normal for humans to be superficial but it is also normal to evolve and understand the world and make it a better place by first understanding it from a more rational point of view!