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Douglas Emhoff, husband of Kamala Harris, posted a photo on Twitter celebrating the Jewish American Heritage Month.
I counted, give or take, 155 Jewish Staff Members. There are 474 White House Staff Members in total, meaning that Jews comprise 32% of all staff members. This is a radical over-representation of 1400%, or 14x what should be expected given the population of 2.2%. As everyone pictured is White, presumably this really is a photo with all the Jewish staff members who wanted to participate in the event (otherwise: why no black staffers present?). There may be some not pictured for various work-related or personal reasons, and perhaps some with Jewish spouses pictured. I had difficulty finding the figures on other demographics. According to an authoritative source, 14% of the staff are Black (this just happens to be the same number and is not a typo). I could find nothing on Asian members, but perusing the total list of White House Staff names I calculated give or take 50 with exclusively Asian names; this should be construed as a minimum because of high exogamy rates and names not always being obviously Asian. That puts Asians at 10.5%. Given that Black people sit at 14%, I would go out on a limb and say that the Latino constituents also comprise roughly their makeup in America; let’s peg it at a slightly lower 15% (if someone wants to check from the list of staffers’ names be my guest).
All of this puts the non-Jewish White percent at 28.5%, counting the Turkish and Arab names as White (and ignoring the probably ~2% Native American that Joe slipped in there). And so, among White House staffers, Whites are quite under-represented and Jews are enormously over-represented. This is problematic IMO, because the domestic founding population of a nation shouldn’t be so under-represented, and a single ethnic cluster with a strong activism network and their own influential nation state probably shouldn’t be 14x over-represented among White House staffers without anyone in established media criticizing or noticing. Alas, such topics have been posted frequently, but in previous cases the over-representation was among Cabinet Members and Supreme Court Justices and so on. This shows that even in a large sample size such as 474, the over-representation remains. If I could put my position into as few words as possible, I would steal from a random tweet on the subject: “Half of the White House staff is Jewish, but we get told that ‘White Supremacists’ run America lol.” What pains me is that while the default white Americans are so under-represented, they are the ones who face the most ruthless black propaganda against their demographic. It’s important to educate others on the problem of representation, I suppose.
The idea that any given demographic should have the same number of slots in any given position of power based on their representation in the overall population is dumb, whether you're talking about Jews or blacks.
Jews aren't overrepresented, they're just represented. White people may make up a majority of the USA population, but a big chunk of those are useless or stupid and so don't count. If you look at an AP math class in New York and compare that to the makeup of White House staffers, you'll see a more realistic comparison of Jews to whites.
White people and Jews are not the same kind of race. They're wholly different zoom levels, different layers on the cladistic tree of humanity. If white people are a kingdom then Jews are a genus. Jews have way more in common with the average Jew than whites have with the average whites. Whites include people from all corners of Europe in the same category for some stupid reason, Jews only count a single insular subgroup. If Jews are a race, then Anglo-Americans descended from people who lived in Ulster but aren't descended from Irish stock should also be a race. And if those Anglo-Hibernian Americans are counted as their own race, you will see a truly shocking overrepresentation among US Presidents (shocking if you assume that every European ethnicity should be equally likely to be President, which is a weird assumption).
Groups are different. White House staffers are not recruited by lottery. It is normal for their racial makeup to be biased one way or another by the makeup of the sorts of people who would apply for those positions. Also "white people" are a fever dream invented by racist nutjobs and everyone needs to stop pretending that "white people" exist. They don't.
I agree it's dumb, but if every other group gets to force society to change when they're under represented my group should be able to do the same thing and my group appears to be under represented in a whole lot of areas.
My rules: blind meritocracy is an absolute defense against any bias accusation
Your rules fairly: every group must be within a certain range of it's population share
Your rules unfairly: every group but one must be within a certain range of it's population share.
The whole idea of there being groups is smuggling in so many assumptions, though.
Consider this toy example: The US population is 10% black descended from slaves captured from central Africa and 3% first-generation-immigrant black descended from the coastal warlords who enslaved the previous group (fake numbers I just made up). I, the official making the statistics, invent the concept of "black people" and decide that both the slave-descendents and the warlord-descendents are "black people." Since 13% of the population are "black people," I make sure that Harvard consists of 13% warlord-descended immigrant elites and 0% slave-descended locals. The slave-descended black people now have "representation," but the people representing them are the descendents of the people who enslaved their ancestors. This is supposed to help make up for the fact that their ancestors were enslaved.
Consider this other toy example: Atlantis contains many immigrants from countries around the Atlantic. 20% of the population of Atlantis are "British" Immigrants - 5% Irish, 5% Scottish, 5% Welsh, and 5% English. For the board of directors of my hedge fund, which has 10 members, I decide that 20% should be "British" so that there will be "representation." I choose the English son of the CEO of Lloyd's of London and the English daughter of famous football player David Beckham and famous musician Posh Spice. Are the Welsh, Scottish, and Irish "represented" by these "British" members of the board of directors? Are the English even represented by these two millionaires descended from other millionaires?
I say no. There is no such thing as British people. There is no such thing as black people. There is no such thing as white people. I would argue that there is such a thing as Jews, and in order to get that kind of reality into any of these other groups you need to slice them at least as finely as you slice the Jews. At this zoom level you'll find many groups that are just as overrepresented as Jews are. You'll discover that 1% of highly-connected families have almost all the power, and only some of those 1% of families are Jewish. The rest are "white" (or "Chinese") and smuggle their power in by unfairly grouping themselves with millions of random shmucks with whom they have nothing in common except skin colour.
You make a good case for that.
Are they atheist, reform, conservative, or orthodox? Mizrahi, Sephardi, or Ashkenazi? Beta Israel? (or should we go even finer? it was kinda weird that the Martians were all specifically Hungarian)
It's possible to come up with a definition (and if you don't like it, I have others!), but it's also possible to define "British" similarly well/poorly.
This thread brings to mind one very practical definition of Jewish people ("they're the ones who will get lumped together by anti-semites", which then ironically motivates an internalized identity in self-defense), but you could define "white" ("they're the ones who will get lumped together by modern 'anti'-racists") and at least historically you could have defined "black" (the 'one-drop rule' was meaningful because it was a rule to people who despised them) in a similar way.
Ah yes, hate. The one thing which brings us all together, allows us to ignore details and focus on what really matters.
Unironically yes. For all of evolutionary history, the most pressing matter for our ancestors was the other tribe from the other side on the river crossing the river to smash their skulls with big clubs.
See that "moral equivalents of war", struggles against inanimate threats always turns to struggle against other humans.
You cannot smash virus with your fist, but you can smash these bastards not wearing masks! It is their fault!
The famous poem was not about hating people of color as it is interpreted today, it was about hating the Huns.
(of course, "Saxons" and "Teutons" were at the time seen as two different races, as distinct as angels are distinct from devils, and world's history was seen as tale of their eternal struggle)
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Like I said my preference is pure blind meritocracy and let the chips fall out where ever they go.
But once you start making slices then yes, I want you to make all the slices and treat every subgroup equally.
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It doesn't matter. Those assumptions are made, they are widely agreed upon, and many of them are codified. Being happy with DEI programs but then when someone objects arguing "Well, what ARE races, really?" is just a distraction tactic.
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Do you think it’s important to tell the Jews that their nation and peoplehood is not real? This would reduce their in-group practices considerably. What do you think would be their response if you told them that Jews are not a culture or people or identity?
Do you think it is important to tell White Christian White House staffers that they belong to real and separate White Christian nation, that you are their fellow White Christian, that they should help you instead of calling cops to arrest you for racist hate speech?
As long as everyone follows the standard, I think we could go either way. We should either remind everyone of the sacrifices and oppressions of their forefathers and the unity of their ancestral spirit, of ensure no one believes such a creative fiction. Evil can almost be defined as the violation of a fair standard. An eye for an eye is the oldest law we know, and approximately the spirit of the law today.
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