Discussion about racism archived

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 WaterMonkey 31 Jul 2020

Who the hell is in charge of the moderating on this site?

Seriously, shutting down sensible discussions where I feel we were about to understand the BAME community’s feelings about racism in the outdoor world is pretty poor.

Over moderation will be the death of this forum. I’ve seen it before. 

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 marsbar 31 Jul 2020
In reply to WaterMonkey:

As far as I can see on that thread we had the perspectives a whole load of white blokes 4 of whom know a black climber and 2 who are married to Asian women.  

Some of the white men started squabbling a bit.

The chances of anything useful regarding BAME climbers coming out of that discussion was getting lower by the minute and it was already effectively 0.  

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 Tom Valentine 31 Jul 2020
In reply to marsbar:

Not sure you are both on the same page.

OP WaterMonkey 31 Jul 2020
In reply to marsbar:

The way I saw it there were some white people who weren’t aware racism existed in their sport. They genuinely wanted to understand if it did and what they could do. The discussion being closed has done more harm than good to getting to the bottom of any racism in climbing.

You don’t get many BAME participants in surfing, sailing, windsurfing etc so maybe it’s not that climbing is racist but some other factors. Anyway the mods don’t want us to have a discussion which might actually help the problem so I’m out.

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 marsbar 31 Jul 2020
In reply to WaterMonkey:

The mods don’t want people accusing each other and threatening lawyers.  

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In reply to marsbar:

Guilty as charged and you are spot on in your analysis.  I let myself get drawn into a personal vendetta with another member. Apologies to all concerned.  With regards to threatening lawyers, that's not strictly what happened but I can see why the moderators got nervous at the mere mention of the word.

Al

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 wintertree 31 Jul 2020
In reply to WaterMonkey:

Perhaps if was shunted into the archive because it was a crap thread with no useful content and was just generating more bile?  

Here’s a point to ponder...  A lot of people get in to climbing through university clubs.  Minorities are under-represented in entry to higher education.  So there’s implicit (as a result of the systems, not intentional action) discrimination in the pipeline that feeds climbing.

This is by no means the only causal factor totally unrelated to climbing that goes on to bias participation, just as factors beyond (before) higher education contribute to the biased intake there.

So, in part the answer is that climbing has a racial bias because it’s embedded in a society riven with racial bias.  

As society is interconnected, this applies to almost every part of society; so to me it’s no reason to fail to look for implicit bias in climbing and to ask what can be done to make it more accessible across all off society.  Any part of society can shift the blame to other parts; hence all parts must move together.

Post edited at 20:30
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 Andy Hardy 31 Jul 2020
In reply to WaterMonkey:.

Anyway the mods don’t want us to have a discussion which might actually help the problem so I’m out.

3 posts into your own thread is too early to flounce, surely?

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 marsbar 31 Jul 2020
In reply to Gaston Rubberpants:

I must admit I didn't read it all throughly.  Just glanced through it all.  It wasn't particularly a dig at you, more that I couldn't see the conversation going anywhere.  

 mountainbagger 31 Jul 2020
In reply to marsbar:

> The mods don’t want people accusing each other and threatening lawyers.  

Empty threats. If they'd seen the other thread about solicitors, they'd realise they don't do anything anyway!

 marsbar 31 Jul 2020
In reply to mountainbagger:

Comment of the day

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 bouldery bits 31 Jul 2020
In reply to Andy Hardy:

> .

> Anyway the mods don’t want us to have a discussion which might actually help the problem so I’m out.

Nothing debated here has any impact on the real world. If you want to have an impact, head off to the caravan club forum or something.

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 Timmd 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

That chimes with somebody I know who studied sociology, and now works at a university specifically towards opening up university education to young BAME people from all backgrounds, and working class white people. I think it's true as well, that many things are interconnected in society. 

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 Offwidth 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Some UK ethnic minorities are under-represented in student climbing clubs but not all and overseas students are most certainly not. We had a lot of overseas ethnic minorities in our Uni club: in some cases the first time they saw snow was the first time they used an ice axe. We had tried to join our elitist local city climbing club for months and failed and chose the University club instead, a massively lucky break in diversity and lifelong friendship terms.

Andy Gamisou 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> Perhaps if was shunted into the archive because it was a crap thread with no useful content and was just generating more bile?  

Didn't seem to happen with the gazillion Brexit threads

 Andy Hardy 01 Aug 2020
In reply to bouldery bits:

I must remember to use quotation marks.

 La benya 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

Are they though? 

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-tra...

That says that with a population mix of 3.6% black people are over represented in further education with 6.6% of students.

Similar numbers for Asian. 

I remember a bit in an Andrew Neil show about this. Its not race that is the great divide, its class/ economic background. 

Why did you think the opposite were true?

The whole point of the other thread was some people saying there were 'barriers' to no white participation in the outdoors. Other were asking what they were/ saying it probably isn't true that there are actual barriers rather just perceived barriers. 

 TobyA 01 Aug 2020
In reply to La benya:

> I remember a bit in an Andrew Neil show about this. Its not race that is the great divide, its class/ economic background. 

You seemed to have spent quite a lot of yesterday getting annoyed at Sean for him suggesting you watch another BBC programme to understand the evidence. So don't tell me to watch no effing Andrew squelchy-face Neil! Don't tell me to read a book! I want to know exactly who has told you this! And what they said!

By the way, and more seriously - having just finished reading through the now archived thread - had you read https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/opinions/no_country_for_brown_women-128... a couple of weeks ago? I thought it sort of explained rather well why your wife could have had one experience why Sean's family could have had another.

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 wintertree 01 Aug 2020
In reply to La benya:

> Are they though? 

Assuming you mean "are minorities under-represented in higher education", then yes they are.  They are not so under-represented in undergraduates these days, but BAME is something like 50% under-represented at PhD level and things tend to get worse from there on.

> [...]

> Why did you think the opposite were true?

I did not think the opposite was true.  I was talking about higher education not further education.   They are totally separate things.

> The whole point of the other thread was some people saying there were 'barriers' to no white participation in the outdoors. Other were asking what they were/ saying it probably isn't true that there are actual barriers rather just perceived barriers. 

I gave an example of an actual barrier.  Higher education introduces many people to hill walking, mountaineering, rock climbing and winter climbing through various clubs and societies.  There is BAME under-representation in HE.  Therefore the leaky pipeline of HE likely affects intake in to various outdoor activities.  

Admission to university has become a lot less biased over the last decade, but the last 30 years of HE admissions have fed in to the mix of existing climbers, and there's now a "BAME achievement gap" in HE that will go on to affect how different groups use their university leisure time.

I put this forwards as an example of factors beyond the outdoors that create a barrier to participation, I'm not giving any judgement on how significant a factor it is, but put it out there to hopefully make the point that all sorts of inter-connected social factors affect engagement in any activity (e.g. climbing).

Post edited at 09:26
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 FreshSlate 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> Assuming you mean "are minorities under-represented in higher education", then yes they are.  They are not so under-represented in undergraduates these days, but BAME is something like 50% under-represented at PhD level and things tend to get worse from there on.

> I did not think the opposite was true.  I was talking about higher education not further education.   They are totally separate things.

> I gave an example of an actual barrier.  Higher education introduces many people to hill walking, mountaineering, rock climbing and winter climbing through various clubs and societies.  There is BAME under-representation in HE.  Therefore the leaky pipeline of HE likely affects intake in to various outdoor activities.  

Good job there are statistics for that too: https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-tra...

So... white people are under-represented in both further education *and* higher education.

 wintertree 01 Aug 2020
In reply to FreshSlate:

> So... white people are under-represented in both further education *and* higher education.

That is from state school admissions only which biasses the numbers significantly - especially at the start of your linked dataset compared to the end of it, and is highly biased against white people by the Chinese component, where-as the previous discussion thread I was commenting on was black/white.   Many institutions are still far from removing the racial gap in their intake and/or achievement [1] and the figures get worse at every successive level, for example with about half the fraction of black students going on to PhDs [2] and black people under-represented by a factor of 13x at professor level [3].

[1] https://russellgroup.ac.uk/media/5820/supporting-under-represented-students...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/sep/12/look-at-how-white-the-aca...

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/feb/27/fewer-than-1-of-uk-univer...

I have't found a definitive set of sector wide figures so I can't say when black intake across the sector (as opposed to just from state schools) achieved parity with white.  It has now exceeded it sector wide but to the best of my knowledge sufficiently broken down data is not available to say when this happened-  but that was part of my point, things have improved significantly in the last decade but the effects of admissions in the 1960s and 1970s will have fed through climbing culture then and so on.   On the other hand, black admissions is by no means uniform across the sector, with many institutions having a long way to go.  In 2016 for example, Oxford and Cambridge both under-recruited black students by about 3x.   So until some recent drastic changes in admissions, OUMC was likely to be very biased in its makeup.

What I don't know is the strength of the mountaineering clubs vs the black bias in admissions at the different universities in the UK, but I would note that mountaineering clubs are strong in many Russel Group universities, where things still have some way to go... 

Post edited at 16:33
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 FreshSlate 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> > So... white people are under-represented in both further education *and* higher education.

> That is from state school admissions only which biasses the numbers significantly - especially age the start of your linked dataset compared to the end of it, and is highly biased against white people by the Chinese component, where-as the previous discussion thread I was commenting on was black/white.  

Don't like 93% of people go state school? Surely it's the 7% that go to private schools that somehow deviates from the average and not the other way round. 

You're probably right about PhDs and professors but to be fair you were talking about higher education, and about outdoor clubs which are for the most part fed by undergraduates rather than professors or PhD students.

You've wandered a little off point (and some may say moved the goalposts) but I agree with your digression that whites are not under represented at the higher levels of HE. It's a perfectly fair point and I agree with the rest of your post and sources. 

Post edited at 16:45
 wintertree 01 Aug 2020
In reply to FreshSlate:

> Don't like 93% of people go state school? Surely it's the 7% that go to private schools that somehow deviates from the average and not the other way round. 

Yup, but go back in time 15 years and look at the intake of leading universities and you would find private school intake at some of them was highly disproportionate.  So the bias towards privately educated students means that when the 2006 figures were showing parity of black/white from the state sector, the final mix was different due to the bias inherited from the private sector.  As I said up front, it's got a lot better over the last decade or so - but historically there was a big bias, and that's still evident further down the pipeline (1.5x at PhD through to 13x at Professor) where it takes time for changes to fairly propagate.  Which is why I don't really se mentioning that very early on in my contribution to the thread as moving the goalposts by adding context; but then I would say that if I was moving them wouldn't I... 

With regards state/private, a far bit of widening participation in HE has been about getting parity in admissions from the state sector and from regional areas, not from racial groups.  

From what I have seen the barrier to HE admission from the state sector was largely totally unjustified negativity from some teachers about a student's changes; I was lucky that my state 6th form had a dedicated and highly motivated HE admissions tutor.  

2
 Billhook 01 Aug 2020
In reply to WaterMonkey:

Because everyone and their family is now 'Woke', and they don't like people who are not 'woke' because they don't agree with their views or the idea that everyone else isn't 'woke' and may have an alternative position.

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 JackM92 01 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

It’s just statistically untrue to say minorities are under represented in higher education. 
 

There are of course plenty of sports in which minorities are vastly over represented (Sprinting, Football and Boxing to name a few).

To get more minorities into climbing there might need to be less who participate in other sports..so is it an issue that some people choose to do different sports?

 wintertree 01 Aug 2020
In reply to JackM92:

> It’s just statistically untrue to say minorities are under represented in higher education. 

Historically black people were underrepresented at every level I believe.  Now they are underrepresented at every level except undergraduate, where there is still an attainment gap against their favour.  I shouldn’t have used “minorities” as such a broad term in my first post - the topic for which was “Black people can’t climb?”.  Some other minorities are highly over represented in HE.  As I said to another poster, equality in admissions is by no means equal across the sector even now...

> There are of course plenty of sports in which minorities are vastly over represented (Sprinting, Football and Boxing to name a few).

Indeed.  In general I see the difference mixes in different sports as a product of a society with lots of distinct social/racial devisions but elite sprinting does seem to be nudging in to genetic differences.

Post edited at 17:18
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 La benya 01 Aug 2020
In reply to TobyA:

I dont think I told you to watch Andrew Neil did I? And I set out immediately where I got my information from which formed my opinion and summarised it in a post... Rather than dance around the subject. I realise you were just making a joke but it just goes to show how ridiculous that thread was.

As it has now been pointed out that link refers to further education and not higher as was being discussed. Id still Like to see some evidence as to them being under represented though. 

This one- https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-tra...

Seems to show that 40% of black kids go to higher education whilst less than 30% of white kids do. 

And this one - https://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/8042

Says that kids of ethic minorities are far more likely to go to uni than their white counterparts. 

I'm really not sure where this perception that they are underrepresented comes from... In absolute numbers sure but in every other useful metric apparently not. 

That point aside, I sort of agree that there could be a perception type barrier to entry of outdoor clubs which could hinder participation. But short of being welcoming to absolutely anyone why should the clubs specifically focus on getting a certain demographic involved? If they shouldn't, then why is it a pro lem that there is this underrepresentation? 

I did read that. Didn't think much of it. I don't need explanation as to why a generic person might have had a different experience to another. I wanted to know the specifics that what's-his-chops was talking about. Apparently that was a mental suggestion! 

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 La benya 02 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-tra...

3.4% black entrants to post grad studies. They're over represented. 

Your belief is wrong. 

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 seankenny 02 Aug 2020
In reply to La benya:

> I did read that. Didn't think much of it. I don't need explanation as to why a generic person might have had a different experience to another. I wanted to know the specifics that what's-his-chops was talking about. Apparently that was a mental suggestion! 

The thing is, to me the article Toby posted seemed full of specifics about why ethnic minorities might not visit the outdoors. And I certainly presented you with some specific reasons in the other thread - that you didn’t want to discuss those isn’t really my fault.
 

I used to work as a journalist, which often involved getting people to tell you things that they might not be entirely comfortable talking about. Let me share something I learnt from  those years of prying into people’s lives: if someone tells you something about their family then you have to be somewhat sympathetic to them in order to keep them talking. Writing “blah blah blah” or IN FULL CAPS or resorting to slurs when they don’t tell you exactly what you want to hear (even when it answers your questions) is, quite simply, poor tactics. People don’t aways give you this sort of information neatly laid out on a plate, however much you may want them to. One has to give  at least the impression of sincerity. 
 

I think one is the interesting things to come out of that thread (for me) is the strong need some people have to see these issues in terms of blame: that raising them is equivalent to pointing the finger. And  they often believe the finger is being pointed at them, regardless of whether the “accuser” thinks it’s a personal or a structural issue. This is unfortunate and unhelpful, but sort of underlines why many ethnic minority people don’t like talking to white people about racial issues. 
 

On the structural side, Wintertree makes some good points above, but with the proviso (to my mind) that this may be a stock vs flow issue. Climbing as a whole my be whiter than average because of past problems around university admissions rather than the current situation. Thinking about the issue in this way seems to me like it might be productive - as I intimated in the previous thread, some of this may be outside the power of us as individuals to alter. 

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 wintertree 02 Aug 2020
In reply to La benya:

Again that shows a significant change over the last decade in line with what I’ve been saying.

> 3.4% black entrants to post grad studies. They're over represent

7.3% to my reading.

That is entrants, not UK/EU entrants, and includes foreign students who leave the country after their degree year.  1-year masters degrees (Which this data largely refers to) are heavily targeted at international students.

Important distinction as most undergraduates are UK residents, about 20% of all postgraduate students are non-EU.

So there is already a leaky pipeline into masters level studies.  How much it’s hard to say as once again sufficient data isn’t published.

I have given links to data above showing Black people are highly under represented at PhD (0.5x) and faculty level (0.08x by Professor).

Again I’ll make the point that that postgraduate data is sector level and within the sector there are large variations between institutions.

Here is a UUK report showing the black attainment gap at undergraduate level - figure 3 - https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2019...  

Post edited at 08:01

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 wintertree 02 Aug 2020
In reply to seankenny:

> Climbing as a whole my be whiter than average because of past problems around university admissions rather than the current situation. 

It could be total nonsense but was given as one example to illustrate how past bias in areas totally unrelated to the outdoors can go on to cause bias outdoors participation.  There will have been many others.

I have had the same observation to you about blame and finger pointing; with work looking at barriers to gender equality - our working assumption was that “the system” was, by historic happenstance, set up in a way that favoured males a bit, but some people when asked to think about it almost instantly took it as blame and reacted accordingly...

 leland stamper 02 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

That is entrants, not UK entrants, and includes foreign students who leave the country after their degree year.  1-year masters degrees (Which this data largely refers to) are heavily targeted at international students.

Important distinction as most undergraduates are UK residents, about 20% of all postgraduate students are non-EU.

This seems fairly crucial to discussion about black UK uptake of HE!

 leland stamper 02 Aug 2020
In reply to WaterMonkey:

The archived thread mentioned Trevor Massiah who appears to be the exception to British climbing. His conversation with Hazel Findlay is, I feel, really enlightening as to the barriers he faced and still faces.

https://anchor.fm/curiousclimberpodcast/episodes/Black-in-65---Trevor-Eugin...

It is long(an hour) but it is a real life and real problems. 

 TobyA 02 Aug 2020
In reply to leland stamper:

> The archived thread mentioned Trevor Massiah who appears to be the exception to British climbing. His conversation with Hazel Findlay is, I feel, really enlightening as to the barriers he faced and still faces.

Thanks for that - I either missed it when it came out or perhaps it has only just come out? Anyway, off to listen shortly - cheers.

 off-duty 02 Aug 2020
In reply to seankenny:

I think you raise some interesting points about blame, fingerpointing and people's reactions.

Given that this is just about people's hobby, imagine what it's like when these accusations are levelled at an entire profession...

1
RentonCooke 04 Aug 2020
In reply to wintertree:

> Here is a UUK report showing the black attainment gap at undergraduate level - figure 3 - https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/Documents/2019...  

These graphs become much more informative when they move beyond "black/white/Asian" and instead give "Korean/Chinese/Japanese/Pakistani/Indian/Bangladeshi/Sub-Saharan Africa/North Africa/ME/Afro-Caribbean". In fact, the question and answers changes entirely.


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