People regularly get treated differently due to their race. Effects happen when applying to jobs and also interactions during traffic stops. From Canadian research for the first [1]:
"Job applicants with English-sounding names have a greater chance of getting interviews than those with Chinese, Pakistani or Indian names, a new study by University of British Columbia researchers suggests. The study found Canadians and landed immigrants with names such as "Jill Wilson" or "John Martin" are 40 per cent more likely to be offered an interview than someone with a name like "Sana Khan" or "Lei Li," given an identical resumé. Applicants with mixed names like "Vivian Zhang" had a 20 per cent better chance to land an interview than job-seekers with non-English names, but still less than the English-only names."
For US research for the second [2]: "Blacks were 63 percent more likely to be stopped even though, as a whole, they drive 16 percent less. Taking into account less time on the road, blacks were about 95 percent more likely to be stopped. Blacks were 115 percent more likely than whites to be searched in a traffic stop (5.05 percent for blacks, 2.35 percent for whites). Contraband was more likely to be found in searches of white drivers."
On HN discussions on racial issues, there is often at least one comment that asserts that people get equal treatment due to race, and any contrary reports are fabricated. My only request is for people to try to practice humility, and at least consider the idea that one's personal experience of life may not be shared by everyone else's (for the rationalist crowd, at least consider that statistical studies should have more weight than beliefs formed from one's personal experience, where n=1).
The only period of time I witnessed open racial hostilities in real life was growing up in a small town. Nearly that entire group of teenagers (at the time) I knew who acted that way ended up struggling with drugs (they were already dabbling in hard drugs when the behavior began, around high school).
I'm not trying to excuse their behavior, I'm saying that in my experience the folks lashing out with racism who I grew up with had serious problems in their home lives that had nothing to do with race. I know every case is different, but anecdotally what I witnessed appeared to be either scapegoating, or learned behavior. Again, I'm only trying to explain what I saw, not excuse the behavior.
My point is that I don't think they actually hated other races (at least at first, I won't pretend to know what goes on in the mind of someone who lives in their own echo chamber for years), because quite frankly their experience with the races they spoke poorly about was extremely limited (I grew up in the frigid north, where most locals are either white or Alaska Native - I don't know why that is, but it is).
When that behavior first started in early high school, I think the few of us who parted ways from that group kind of brushed it off for awhile because... we didn't know what to say, I guess? Folks who by all accounts appeared to be reasonable and entertaining people only a year ago were suddenly dropping racial slurs openly amongst their friend group - which I was peripherally a part of. All of the connections I had to that group either disassociated themselves with those folks like I did, or disappeared because of hard drug use.
>Race virtually never comes up in daily life for the rest of us…
And yet it seems it does in upper class enclaves like Silicon Valley, Seattle, Manhattan... It's an interesting and perhaps telling correlation: the college-educated, privileged elite who believe they are doing the right thing by zeroing in on race as the foundational problem of America.
How naive and perhaps blissful to to be so ignorant at how unjust the world is overall, there are so many perhaps urgent issues with suffering people, and we're worried whether companies with average salaries in the multi-hundred-thousand dollar range are diverse enough.
In a microcosm within a big country where the average savings and health and medical insecurity are very serious.
The focus on race, even if race is on a checklist of problems to resolve, borders on scandalous.
The scandal is the list of people whose lives are ruined because they're poor and either experience an absence of medical care or crippling debt. But it's a class issue and that topic is verboten, perhaps because it's non-existent to the groups mentioned in the first sentence above.
Looking at health inequity should be a priority over who is on the board room or what groups occupy what percentages of things. It would make for a more just society in a big way.
Race virtually never comes up in daily life for the rest of us…