LogFAQs > #923638175

darkknight109 posted...

The way I usually explain it is that if life was a video game, privilege is the difficulty setting and "straight white male" is the lowest setting.

darkknight109 posted...

In this particular game, you get a single character file that is auto-generated for you that you don't get to reroll. All of your base stats - strength, charisma, intelligence, fortitude, and a hundred others - all get randomly determined. But not only that, the number of points that go into your stat pool is ALSO random. So you might be lucky and get 10,000 points with a great distribution, or you might have shit luck and get 2000 points with int and cha being your dump stats.

You'll also be assigned 1-2 "parent" NPCs who are responsible for guiding you through the tutorial levels until you're ~Level 18. Unfortunately, their stats - including "wealth", which has disproportionate importance in this game - are also random, so you'd best hope they're good at their job.

So what does the difficulty setting do? Simple - it makes certain quests easier or tweaks their rewards, and improves the default disposition of certain NPCs towards you. On the higher difficulty settings, some NPCs become straight-up hostiles that will attack on sight.

That's it. Some people think the difficulty setting will automatically grant them great stats or complete certain missions for them, but that's not the case. It's also why people get confused when they play on the lower difficulty settings and their life is shit, while they see some other people on the higher difficulty settings doing well. Maybe you just got a bad stat layout or your starting wealth roll was poor. Maybe those other people got a better stat distribution or more stat points to invest or spawned in a better starting area. Maybe those people are just better at playing the game than you are.

You can play a game on the lowest difficulty setting and still lose. You can play a game on the highest difficulty setting and still win. That doesn't mean difficulty doesn't exist, it just shows that it's not the sole determinant of your success or failure in the great game of life.

...and if you roll white, you're far more likely to be born into a true-rural setting where you'll face inescapable poverty, as opposed to non-whites who are more likely to be born around cities where social mobility is possible. In many cases, those rural settings are very nearly the equivalent of a third-world nation, considering in some areas they still have to manually pump water from a well.

But sure, parents play one of the biggest roles. And if you want the greatest opportunity in life, typically that's been associated with having Asian parents. Pretty much every metric favors Asians over whites.

Earning power? Asians out-earn whites:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2018/asian-women-and-men-earned-more-than-their-white-black-and-hispanic-counterparts-in-2017.htm

In fact, white men barely earn more than Asian women, so think about that for your gender gap.

College enrollment? You're more likely to go to college -- and a good school at that -- if you're Asian than if you're white. Whites make up 77% (or 63% if you exclude Hispanic-whites) of the population yet only 54% of college. Asians make up 5.6% of the population but 8.4% of college students.

https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/2018/comm/classroom-diversity.html

Oh, and incarceration rates? Asians make up 1.5% of prisoners (again, vs 5.6% of the general population). Whites make up 58.9%. In short, whites are more likely to go to prison than college, which is also true of blacks.

https://www.bop.gov/about/statistics/statistics_inmate_race.jsp
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