The psychological phenomena / logical fallacy that covers this is known as "The Fundamental Attribution Error." Is a cognitive bias where we explain a person's behavior by attributing to them a moral defect. For example, when we see someone driving too slow, or too fast, we might assume they are a bad driver, or worse, a bad person, rather than assume there is some rational, circumstantial explanation for their behavior. It is one of the most common logical fallacies you will encounter in debates. If our interlocutor disagrees with us it must be because they are stupid or evil.
This is not correct! There's definitely been a flow of fancy WASP types trying to get in on the ground floor there. There is a large African immigrant community that would be larger if it was allowed to be. It's just that China mostly doesn't allow any immigration unless you're Han.
True but the numbers are pretty small, especially when we're talking about permanent residents. The number of naturalized Chinese citizens is less than 2,000, for example in a nation of 1.4 Billion. I'd be very surprised if any of the people Matt mentioned are planning to be among them.
I'm sure none of those people would, immigrants are pretty weird, statistically. But there's a lot going on in China economically, if they allowed immigrants they would totally get them. I'm harping on this because I think Americans tend to catastrophize life in China and talk themselves into a silly and dismissive place. Low crime, lots of visible progress and a sense of things getting better, lots of jobs.
As a progressive American Jew, I can't stand that the Israeli government commits atrocities and then tries to recruit me into defending them. I feel equally critical of many other governments; I just don't feel like any except the U.S. and Israel are telling the world I endorse their actions.
I also heard some people I generally admire say that talking about wet markets--even the phrase "wet markets"--is racist. We have to be able to say that anti-Asian rhetoric is terrible, that blaming all Chinese people for COVID is racist ans stupid, and at the same time have an accurate discussion of one way that zoonotic diseases are spread.
Whether it is anti-semitic to criticize Israel is a very US-centric concern. Lots of Palestinian leaders say that they hate Jews outright. Hamas' charter is explicitly anti-semitic. So I can understand why some Jews find it unconvincing when they hear that American critics of Israel are different and not racist at all.
I mean, a couple of things. One is that obviously criticism of Israel didn't start with Hamas. The second is that you seem to jump the tracks from "some Israelis find it unconvincing" (Israelis living in a context where the most immediate critics of Israel are anti-Semitic and in fact are often launching rockets at them) to "some *Jews* find it unconvincing"—American Jews have plenty of opportunity to tell who's kind of like Hamas and who isn't.
But the larger issue is that "Bad Group X holds Position Y, and now I'm supposed to believe that this other group that holds Position Y is totally different from Bad Group X?" is just impossibly broad, especially when Position Y is "criticizes Israel." Like if I conflated everyone who as a general proposition defends Israel with the Israeli far-right (some of whom, like Avigdor Lieberman, have been in the ruling government!).
The reason "lab leak" is racist is simple: it lacks any concrete evidence, but it anchors on prejudices about Chinese (more generally, Asian) incompetence ("uncreative, follows orders robotically") or malice ("wily Oriental").
??? In what universe is “uncreative, follows orders robotically” consistent with “screwed up safety protocols and let loose a viral pathogen”? In what universe is “wily oriental” consistent with “ruined the entire world economy for a year and a half”? That’s quite the evil genius plan, stunting China’s economic growth with a global pandemic!
Because there is zero evidence of this particular leak, and asserting it is accusing WIV's staff of lying. As for those "West lab leaks" you might want to actually study them and observe that their frequency has dropped hugely with current BSL or similar procedures, and none of the old ones started a pandemic.
I quite like Americans on the whole and America too as a nation. I think that it has through the arc of history been a great force for good and an excellent example of progress. On the other hand I have never confused the Government of the United States with the American people. This is true for every other country in the world as well. I often disagree with specific things countries like Israel do. Or America for that matter.
To me a more question would be to what degree you could conflate the population of a country with the behavior of that country. I am looking at you countries with democratically elected governments.
Even though I generally agree with Matt, really enjoy Slow Boring, and I also would never buy or wear a "Stop Eating Bats" t-shirt, I still would be tempted to wear a "Matt Yglesias Thinks I'm an Asshole" shirt if one existed. Don't ask me why.
Something to keep in mind for when you open the SB gift store.
Good stuff. Okay. No okay hand sign accompanying. I don't use it anymore. Despite the fact that for the vast majority of Americans is still just means okay. But for quite a few bad actors it means more. And that is why white supremacists chose it. It both magnifies their numbers but also has plausible deniability.
So why would the government of China be anxious to involve themselves in American politics with regard to Covid source investigations knowing full well that regardless of how they behave bad actors in American politics will just invent crap regardless. There is literally nothing they could do that would not result in yet further conspiracy theories.
Would Ungar-Sargon be open to the possibility that maybe there's a connection between Zionism insisting that It's every Jew's duty to act as an Israeli agent and some people getting the idea that it's okay to treat every Jew as an Israeli agent?
One interesting thing about this whole debate is that people seem very fixated on the concept that being anti-China translates into anti-Asian American. There certainly may be backlash (plenty of Koreans went to internment camps during WWII), but most Asian countries are super hawkish on China (eg https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/poll-most-south-koreans-are-wary-china-175989 ). Probably because the grandparents that Nina Luo referred to were soldiers in the army (or contemporaries of soldiers in the army) that threatened Korea and other Asian countries in the 50s and 60s.
To the extent I get angry about incorrect discourse, it's when Chinese Americans claim to speak for all Asian Americans...
It's true that the politics of East Asia among East Asian people are actually nearly incomprehensible to the discourse. Then I see my School's few Asian students who are almost entirely Filipino taunted on the school yard over the course of the year when kids think adults aren't listening.
I don't quite know what to do with the fact that it's really quite hard for most people to distinguish between the nation and the state. Once you release those furies it's very hard to make any sense of anything.
yeah totally. I think it's super ironic that a bunch of Koreans were interned because the US was at war with Japan, when Japan was simultaneously committing terrible atrocities in Korea.
But I think the point here is not "pretend that there is no racism against all Asians as a result of anti-China discourse." I think similar to Matt's evergreen point that "don't assume Asian American activists are representative of all Asians," there is also "don't assume that Chinese Americans are representative of all Asian Americans" or, similarly, that an anti-China policy position is inherently anti-Asian.
Anecdotally, Asian Americans joke a lot about how their parents are probably more racist towards other Asian ethnicities than white Americans would ever understand...
or even, if you believe that not all prejudice is racism... for decades my US-residing Korean grandparents refused to buy Japanese cars (and I am sure would have done the same had there been a widely-available Chinese car in the US).
I totally take your point. I was an English teacher in Seoul and Shanghai for years. The name Asian American is weird considering how raw feelings are between pretty much all Asian nations with China and Japan.
Where it bothers me is some of the anti-Chinese stuff doesn't seem to have any clear point but being rude.
yeah absolutely. btw, I don't want any of the above to come across as justifying any kind of prejudice. I don't think it is a good thing that a lot of Koreans really hate Chinese (my wife is Chinese!). I just think one shouldn't react to warrantless OR "warranted" (not the right word, but I think you get the point) discrimination by saying "don't criticize China"
I'm glad you have a picture because otherwise i'd be thoroughly confused by 4 posts in a row that all seem like an Andrew talking with himself. There are two Dan S commentators without pictures on this forum and sometimes they get into discussions with each other; it's confusing.
I live in Vietnam where anti-Chinese sentiment is extremely high. To the point where there are no "Chinese" restaurants. They will go out of their way to say they are a Cantonese restaurant or a Shandong restaurant or even "We serve a variety of Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, and Sichuan food". Anything but "Chinese".
The idea may be that the kind of people who make racist attacks on others just don't know or care about the distinction between people of Chinese background and other Asian-Americans. It's the same kind of thing as casually referring to Hispanic people as "Mexicans" or people from the Middle East as "Arabs".
well, or maybe a better example is the progressive pundits who were shocked that "Latinos" shifted towards Trump, a topic on which Matt has written quite a bit
I think the background issue, and one that Matt has discussed at length before, is the totalizing force of racial concerns in the US. I don't have a tally, but it seems like most issues get sucked into the racism/anti-racism conversation and can never fully escape. Then we have levels and levels of conversations about the conversations.
Thanks once again for a well-informed voice of sanity. I hadn't known about the goofy WHO disease naming rules. Most of the rest is unsurprising if sad; thanks for putting it all together.
Are those rules goofy? I don't know. When I was young, all hurricanes had female names. Then they switched to names from both genders. A bit odd at first, but now it's totally fine.
"COVID" is a perfectly useful name. Why would we insist, or desire, to apply a name that could cause unnecessary difficulties?
(However, being a California resident, don't get me started on wildfire names. "LNU Lighting Complex Fire" "SQF Complex Fire" "Camp Fire" (*Camp* Fire?!?) Sheesh.)
I see from Matt's posting that WHO objects to the universally-used terms "Chagas Disease" and "Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease" despite their virtually universal use among practitioners and researchers. It objects to "Lyme Disease" and "MERS," both of which are in general use, and "Legionnaire's disease" (caused by the Legionella bacterium); are we now to rename the bacterium to humor the WHO?
Meanwhile, the WHO waited until March 11 2020 to declare COVID-19 a pandemic. Indeed there may be some cases where the WHO nomenclature guides might be useful or appropriate, but I'd say the naming rules exemplify an apparent focus on cosmetics over proper execution of their core task. "Goofy" is the word that came to my mind. Perhaps fairer would be to say instead that "likely for political reasons linked to the nature of the WHO, it devotes unreasonable amounts of time and energy on trivial issues while executing its core tasks inefficiently and sometimes poorly."
Letting hurricanes have names from both genders was good because it creates a natural experiment that shows that female hurricanes are deadlier https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8782 (this paper is mostly about the lab experiments though)
The rules aren’t goofy; it doesn’t make any sense to name new diseases based on an early hypothesis about its origins or initial infected cohort since these turn out to be wrong almost every time: the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain, swine flu doesn’t necessarily come directly from pigs, etc. These folk names often spur useless folk practices that compete for people’s attention with real public health recommendation - how many people stopped drinking Corona in 2020?
I don't disagree but I do find it humorous that I haven't seen any fervor the other way over labeling mutations as the "UK variant" or "South African variant". They're not official monikers but they are used in the media all the time.
It’s actually something we’re talking about in the community, a lot of virologists have stressed the loci codes over geographical names, and the WHO’s new guidance is to assign new variants one of a sequence of Greek letters.
I’d heard the opposite, but even if that was an urban legend it’s still proof of the concept: we’re wasting attention on Corona beer for reasons entirely and only due to the coincidental name of the disease.
This article brought up a question for me: does anyone really, truly care what people write on Twitter? Yglesias cited three Tweets in this article. They impress me as rough drafts of fully-formed thoughts.
Yeah, they do. It’s such a powerful force in social/elite discourse that for over a year, scientists who thought the lab leak hypothesis was plausible kept their heads down and didn’t say anything, while social media companies removed posts or labeled them misinformation: https://www.theinsight.org/p/how-the-twittermedia-feedback-loop
Other people on Twitter care, and lots of people on Twitter are also writing in publications with a broader non-Twitter audience. The things being discussed on Twitter often set the agenda for not only the "mainstream media" but also the reactions to mainstream discourse on the right and far left.
Agree generally, but that quote from Apoorva Mandavilli is pretty bad. It makes me think less of the NY Times, that it would hire and tolerate a reporter who publicly says something so antithetical to a mindset of open-minded, follow-the-facts reporting. I thought that was a core tenet of journalistic ethics, but apparently it isn't for at least that NY Times reporter.
Did you catch The Argument episode on Critical Race Theory with John McWhorter and Michelle Goldberg? Midway, Michelle talks about she went looking for concrete examples of CRT and couldn't find any. John then follows up that they both work for the NY Times and Don McNeil, Alison Roman, Bari Weiss, and James Bennet are no longer there. It was hilarious.
As a descriptive matter, yes. Matt had a recent piece on how the mainstream media is unduly influenced by fake Twitter consensus, and I think we can agree that the mainstream media matters.
Matt was once accused of being racist, and this hurt his feelings, so now he is the police for anybody calling anything racist without 100% iron-clad accuracy.
People like Pompeo, Cotton, and Trump say obviously racist stuff all of the time. They are not entitled to some benefit of the doubt when they talk about China.
Pompeo, Cotton, and Trump certainly aren't entitled to any benefit of the doubt, but other people are. The fact that bad, racist people oppose the Chinese regime does not mean that it is bad and racist to oppose the Chinese regime.
I agree with all of this. I'm saying that it's reasonable to dismiss racist people when they say things that sound racist.
Now, when people with credibility start making arguments about China policies, I'll listen. But don't tell me I'm some kind of mega-doosh for not taking Pompeo, Cotton, and Trump seriously.
I'm following you here and mostly agree but here's a question that is relevant to the overall point of MYs article: Do you give Pompeo, Cotton and Trump more benefit of the doubt if they're talking about a European or other mostly "white"? Or other topics that might have much less of a relation to race? I think it's one thing to say those guys aren't credible, so ignore them always, and another thing to say they are racists, so ignore them when they talk about China (or Mexico, Nigeria, etc..) but not necessarily when they talk about other things
i think it must be something like the 2nd because "ignore non-credible people" is so obvious that there wouldn't be much point in saying it.
"Ignore non-credible people" does indeed seem obvious, which is why I don't see why MY writes so many articles scolding us for not taking conservative policy arguments seriously.
In any event, I think this is the best way to answer what I think is your primary question: the conservative movement is primarily motivated by ideas around race and exclusion. When this lines up with good policy, then I think we should try to make use of that. If you think trade protectionism is good policy (I'm agnostic on it), then this would be a good example. But don't be under any illusions that rank-and-file conservatives give a shit about actual trade policy. What they care about is having a government that is generally hostile to brown people.
But when conservatives ask us to make concessions that are unrelated to race, we shouldn't expect those concessions to win us anything. The 2009 stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank are good examples of cases where we turned very good policy into medium-good policy while getting nothing in return.
"What they care about is having a government that is generally hostile to brown people." Do you recognize how wild this statement seems to someone who doesn't already agree with it?
There are plenty of conservatives out there who might make the statement that "progressives care about is having a government that is generally hostile to white people." Do you expect to be taken more seriously than they are?
I recognize that my view is a generally unpopular one, but I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to try to get you to take me seriously.
Plenty of high-profile conservatives (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh) do in fact make the claim that liberals are just reverse-racists. It is an extremely common claim that Beck and Limbaugh made/make a lot of money repeating because their audience agrees with it. It's also a claim that I hear often in the classroom, at the workplace, in the bar, and on the pickup basketball court/soccer field.
People who think Obama was born in Africa, think the son of Mexican immigrants can't be a fair judge, think immigrants commit crime at higher rates than native-born people, think we are in a civilizational struggle against worldwide Islam -- these people represent a serious chunk of America, and we would be naïve to believe that those very popular false beliefs are entirely unmotivated my ideas about race.
You're pretty much just asserting that's what's in his head, and then following up with a genetic fallacy argument. Speaking of benefit of the doubt, it's good to think about a writer's motives, but Matt makes arguments on dozens of topics that he doesn't personally benefit from and is generally pretty fair to his critics. So maybe he deserves some benefit of the doubt on his motives
I'm asserting what's in MY's head because I have read the vast majority of stuff he has written in the last decade, including his essay explaining his departure from Vox (young liberals at the publication wrote a letter saying that he was insensitive to their sense being discriminated) and the several essays he has written on SloBoring about how the anti-racists are the ones messing everything up for everybody else. In other words, my response may have been a little snarky (something MY is often guilty of himself), but it was based on deep engagement with MY's writings.
As to the larger point, as we've discussed before, Wigan, I just don't see the virtue in extending a benefit of the doubt to the leaders of a movement that consistently works toward racism when those leaders say things that sound racist. I think it is entirely rational to ask, "what do racist conservatives get out of this?" any time Pompeo, Cotton, or Trump say anything. People and political movements that tell lots and lots of lies do not deserve to have their statements taken at face value.
I find it extremely counterproductive to carefully parse the arguments of racist and dishonest people for anything that might be useful. I think a much more reasonable mechanism for arriving at useful insights is to read the arguments of people who have credibility (i.e., don't habitually say and do racist things) and arrive at conclusions based on which of those arguments I find most persuasive.
Thanks for the response, we often disagree but I know I benefit from the conversation.
I can understand that your original post was partially snark and I was too literal in my reading of that part about Matt's feelings. And a lot of what you just wrote is very agreeable, I would imagine, to most people here and not just myself. So to some extent we may be talking past each other. There's nothing wrong, imo, with ignoring people you find non-credible.
But I think there are two issues where we do disagree:
1) we seem to have a different sense of how motivating racism is to GOP voters and politicians. I see that as the parable of the 4 blind men and the elephant. It's normal for two people with different experiences to see this differently.
2) The other place is in the harms of seeing racism where it doesn't exist. I saw that as the key point of Matt's post. It's a good thing to identify racist harms, racist language and racist attitudes when they influence politics, society or explain individual's action.
But if an argument is countered by accusing it of racism, when it's not in fact racist - that's not helpful! It can poison the well of the debate and weaken legitimate charges of racism. Even if the person has a pattern of somewhat racist language or intent, unless your intended audience understands and agrees with that point of view, then you may well end up seeming less credible.
I though much of Matt's post brought up these kinds of example, particularly in Israel / Palestine where racism and anti-semitism is used by Americans to dismiss arguments coming from the other side. Whether those arguments are good or bad the core disagreement in Israel / Palestine has nothing to do with race as we use it in the United States, and everything to do with religion and ethnic identity.
Thanks for your thoughtful points here, Wigan. I agree that these seem to be two salient areas of disagreement among us. Please let me explain why my conclusions are different from yours:
1) I'm not sure how much time you have spent reading about the history of the conservative movement or interacting with red state conservatives, but I've done shit-tons of both. My consistent observation is that people who claim to believe in limited government love big gov when it helps white people and/or hurts black and brown people.
I would encourage you to apply this test in the future as you try to figure out why the conservative movement does what it does. "Does this action advance the cause of limited government? Or does this action help white people and/or make life harder on black and brown people?" If you find yourself saying "yes" more often to the first question, then I'm wrong. If you find yourself saying "yes" more often to the second question, then I might be onto something.
2) While I tend to agree with the general boy-who-cried-wolf point, that needs to be weighed against the consequences of silencing legitimate anti-racist discourse. I tend to share Matt's values and appreciate his policy analyses, but when he runs a ton of headlines that combine to say "anti-racists are hurting us" and "take the lying racists more seriously," that combination of messaging is also extremely damaging. It lends credibility to lying racists (meaning it encourages people to take them seriously when they tell lies with racist intent), and it encourages anti-racists to distrust Matt's policy ideas (and more broadly conventional Democratic party ideas).
It's worth noting also that your point #2 implies the assumption that I'm factually wrong about conservatism being largely driven by racism. This dismisses the possibility that I am in fact right. So while I am running the risk of alienating people sensitive to discussions about racism, you are running the risk of silencing legitimate discourse about racism, thus alienating people (like MY's former colleagues at Vox) who should be our political allies.
And, finally, with respect to Israel/Palestine: The core conflict doesn't have much to do with American ideas about race, but _American attitudes toward Arabs and Israelis_ is absolutely dominated by race (or race-adjacent concepts). The American evangelical community sees Israel as our allies in a civilizational struggle against the Islamic world. This is why antisemitism and rabid support for Israel coexist happily in the evangelical movement.
So people who are motivated by opposition to antisemitism would benefit from being aware of the values of Israel's political allies in the US. In other words, applying a race- or ethnic-based analysis does in fact help us arrive at useful knowledge relevant to how American politics and policy should respond to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This idea---that racism is a property of persons that, once discovered, means that the person to which it is attached no longer needs to be listened to---is not only wrong but the opposite of what anti-racist thinkers argue.
The idea that racists try to advance their racism through non-racist sounding language and policies is at the center of contemporary anti-racist thought and scholarship. The best author I have read on this is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, most notably _Racism Without Racists_ and _White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era_.
Yes, but the ideas and arguments they come up with in order to launder their racism might still be right. (As the old canard goes, Hitler hated cigarettes...) If your argument is founded on a racist premise, that doesn't mean it can't be easily reformulated without the racism, and good ideas are scarce enough that we can't throw them out just because they might be tainted with the racism of their source.
I'm going to actually try to read that guys book (well technically listen on Audible). I'm a little scared that it's 11 hours long and it might take a few months to get it, but I added it to my queue.
Hey I have genuine question if you see, Dsep, and have a moment to respond. How do authors like Bonilla-Silva and other prominent writers on race in America see ethnic struggles that are outside of the white-brown-black spectrum through which we usually view race in America?
For example - there are many regions in the world where ethnic or religious tensions against between people who are physically indistinguishable from each other: off the top of my head I can think of Croats vs Serbs vs Bosnians, Hutus and Tutsis, Armenians vs Azeris and Turks, Kurds vs Arabs, Tamils vs Sinhalese, South Africans vs Zimbabwean immigrants, East Malaysians vs Filipino Immigrants, Japanese vs Korean-Japanese, UK natives vs Polish and Romanian immigrants, etc...
All of these examples involve individual and state discrimination, dislike or hatred, some degree of violence, etc... But they don't really fit into the racism discourse in America that I encounter, which to me seems centered around skin color. Do those writers have a name for these other conflicts or relate them to racism in America?
Race scholarship overlaps a lot with postcolonial scholarship and nationalism theory. There are probably people who post here who are better read on those subjects than I am, but I think it's fair to say that scholars within those groups would argue that many of the phenomena you mention are legacies of a series of conquests and/or colonizations that promoted new kinds of ethnic identifications.
Example (again, based on some reading but not deep scholarship on my part): People of South Asia didn't really regard themselves as "Indian" until the British conquered them all and told them they were all Indians. Liberation only came after the colonized groups partly bought into the pan-Indian identity and used it to contest their oppressors, but this was always a useful/partial fiction that papered over longer-standing disputes among people who never considered themselves members of the same nation-state before. When the British yoke was removed, the old divisions started to come back, first with Pakistan splitting off, and now with the rise of old-school ethnic identity politics within India.
Similar arguments can be made about postcolonial Africa. Most African borders were drawn by Europeans. When Europeans went away and left a power vacuum, they weren't replaced by functioning nation-states that all shared a common identity. Instead, power struggles fell along the lines of old ethnic conflicts that predated and were often further perpetuated by European colonialism.
The distinction is based on the known outcomes that a movement works toward.
The obvious example is "states rights." It's certainly possible for somebody to hold a principled commitment to federalism independent of race, but every person who has spent any time reading American history knows that the real world outcome of states rights arguments (resistance to abolition, then to integration) has consistently been racism.
Once somebody is aware of that outcome but remains committed to states rights anyway, then at that point their commitment to federalism is explicitly greater than their respect for the individual rights of black and brown people.
But it seems like you're asking them to look with the conclusion already in hand. That is, once we know Figure X to be a racist, any reading of their work is a forensic exercise to find the racism we know is present.
Once we know that Figure X is a racist and a liar, we should not go to that person for good-faith arguments. We should go to people who are not racists and liars when we look for good-faith arguments.
I honestly don't understand why people dispute this so much.
It's important both (1) to distinguish "Public Figure A is or is not racist" from "Idea B, which Public Figure A happened to mention, is or is not racist," and (2) to recognize that while both questions can be important, the latter is generally more important.
It is also important to recognize (1) Political Movement A (conservatism) consistently works toward racism, and (2) we are under no obligation to pretend to not know this when we hear the rhetoric that seems meant to appeal to that racism.
If so, the correct approach to this set of facts is to say "Idea B may have merit; however, Political Movement is misusing Idea B." The incorrect approach is to say "Political Movement is bad, therefore we should ignore Idea B so we can own Political Movement's members." That will end up just hurting yourself and benefiting no one.
You are equating the cause of anti-racism with "owning conservatives." This is exactly the point that I seek to contest.
We should be aware of who we are negotiating with. They don't care about what is actually good policy. They care about projecting an image of being tough on brown people. When we take their claims about policy seriously, we end up making concessions in exchange for nothing.
The obvious example here is immigration. Conservatives insisted that they love immigrants, but they just don't like the illegal ones. Obama said "ok, I'll win your trust by cracking down hard on border crossings and undocumented immigration," eventually deporting a shit-ton of people. Of course, it didn't work. Conservatives continued to hate Obama and immigrants because conservatives don't care about law and order. They care about being tough on brown people.
So when I want to figure out what makes good policy, I will go to people with credibility on those policies, and I will continue to be extremely skeptical of people and political movements who have done a great deal to destroy their credibility. To do otherwise is to be the worst poker player on the face of the planet.
First of all, you're contradicting yourself. If your political opponents are bad faith actors, then why would you conceive of political engagement with them as a "negotiation"? That would make no sense. You negotiate with good faith opponents. If you have bad faith opponents, you engage instead in a battle with them for the hearts and minds of the unaffiliated. Choose one or the other - either they are bad faith actors or a negotiation metaphor is appropriate - but combining the two to justify the approach you're advocating is nonsensical.
Second, you do not advance "the cause of anti-racism" by simply contradicting whatever your allegedly racist opponents say. You advance the cause of anti-racism by shifting public opinion. If you dismiss a claim by your racist opponents without investigating it, solely on the basis of them being bad people, and then they turn out to be right (or at least arguably right) on the merits, then you've most likely hurt the cause of anti-racism by needlessly making your opponents look more credible than yourself. The root problem here is that the "cause of anti-racism" for you isn't about policy change, but about treating racists badly because that's what they deserve. But in reality, the cause is much better served by the former than the latter. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.
The right way to do it is that if a racist says something that isn't necessarily racist and that doesn't have clear indicia of being false, then you should go investigate it before deciding how you're going to respond. In the meantime you can say stuff like "This is not proven yet and I'm skeptical." That's what "not giving someone the benefit of the doubt" actually looks like. You don't just say "This guy is racist so what he said must be wrong" and then forget about it.
I want to add an anecdote from my DC NGO job perspective. Some think tanks and NGOs are in a mini arms race to copyright language around growing tension with China. Sharp power, corrosive capital, malign influence, etc. They're trying to control the IP and branding for what they see as a long term funding opportunity.
Through my little window, I see management (usually people with some life experience during the cold war) tending to want to use slightly more inflammatory language and frame these terms around china specifically. I also see the younger employees at orgs, often the people who will have to do the bulk of the work on drafting reports etc, using the leverage they have to soften the terms and make them focused of authoritarian governments generally. Management had usually conceded and defined the terms more generally. At least one former colleague quit the industry over this issue though.
It all makes me a bit leery about this sense of building tension and cynical about the small skirmishes over branding. NGOs sense that there's a carrot waiting for them if they start to produce reports that use language that rachets up tension rather than describes reality in clear terms.
None of this is to say that China has played nice, but I'm just feeling angst over the language.
The psychological phenomena / logical fallacy that covers this is known as "The Fundamental Attribution Error." Is a cognitive bias where we explain a person's behavior by attributing to them a moral defect. For example, when we see someone driving too slow, or too fast, we might assume they are a bad driver, or worse, a bad person, rather than assume there is some rational, circumstantial explanation for their behavior. It is one of the most common logical fallacies you will encounter in debates. If our interlocutor disagrees with us it must be because they are stupid or evil.
> Nobody is angling to move to China,
This is not correct! There's definitely been a flow of fancy WASP types trying to get in on the ground floor there. There is a large African immigrant community that would be larger if it was allowed to be. It's just that China mostly doesn't allow any immigration unless you're Han.
True but the numbers are pretty small, especially when we're talking about permanent residents. The number of naturalized Chinese citizens is less than 2,000, for example in a nation of 1.4 Billion. I'd be very surprised if any of the people Matt mentioned are planning to be among them.
I'm sure none of those people would, immigrants are pretty weird, statistically. But there's a lot going on in China economically, if they allowed immigrants they would totally get them. I'm harping on this because I think Americans tend to catastrophize life in China and talk themselves into a silly and dismissive place. Low crime, lots of visible progress and a sense of things getting better, lots of jobs.
As a progressive American Jew, I can't stand that the Israeli government commits atrocities and then tries to recruit me into defending them. I feel equally critical of many other governments; I just don't feel like any except the U.S. and Israel are telling the world I endorse their actions.
I also heard some people I generally admire say that talking about wet markets--even the phrase "wet markets"--is racist. We have to be able to say that anti-Asian rhetoric is terrible, that blaming all Chinese people for COVID is racist ans stupid, and at the same time have an accurate discussion of one way that zoonotic diseases are spread.
Whether it is anti-semitic to criticize Israel is a very US-centric concern. Lots of Palestinian leaders say that they hate Jews outright. Hamas' charter is explicitly anti-semitic. So I can understand why some Jews find it unconvincing when they hear that American critics of Israel are different and not racist at all.
I mean, a couple of things. One is that obviously criticism of Israel didn't start with Hamas. The second is that you seem to jump the tracks from "some Israelis find it unconvincing" (Israelis living in a context where the most immediate critics of Israel are anti-Semitic and in fact are often launching rockets at them) to "some *Jews* find it unconvincing"—American Jews have plenty of opportunity to tell who's kind of like Hamas and who isn't.
But the larger issue is that "Bad Group X holds Position Y, and now I'm supposed to believe that this other group that holds Position Y is totally different from Bad Group X?" is just impossibly broad, especially when Position Y is "criticizes Israel." Like if I conflated everyone who as a general proposition defends Israel with the Israeli far-right (some of whom, like Avigdor Lieberman, have been in the ruling government!).
The reason "lab leak" is racist is simple: it lacks any concrete evidence, but it anchors on prejudices about Chinese (more generally, Asian) incompetence ("uncreative, follows orders robotically") or malice ("wily Oriental").
??? In what universe is “uncreative, follows orders robotically” consistent with “screwed up safety protocols and let loose a viral pathogen”? In what universe is “wily oriental” consistent with “ruined the entire world economy for a year and a half”? That’s quite the evil genius plan, stunting China’s economic growth with a global pandemic!
Your ignorance of the history of anti-Asian prejudice, including its many internal contradictions, is unfortunately not surprising.
no you
Because there is zero evidence of this particular leak, and asserting it is accusing WIV's staff of lying. As for those "West lab leaks" you might want to actually study them and observe that their frequency has dropped hugely with current BSL or similar procedures, and none of the old ones started a pandemic.
Rather than rehashing it all here, please listen to TWiV 760 and 762, with people who actually know about viruses, zoonoses, and WIV.
It is, because a reasonable person would try to actually understand what evidence there is before shooting off the hip showing their prejudice.
I quite like Americans on the whole and America too as a nation. I think that it has through the arc of history been a great force for good and an excellent example of progress. On the other hand I have never confused the Government of the United States with the American people. This is true for every other country in the world as well. I often disagree with specific things countries like Israel do. Or America for that matter.
To me a more question would be to what degree you could conflate the population of a country with the behavior of that country. I am looking at you countries with democratically elected governments.
Even though I generally agree with Matt, really enjoy Slow Boring, and I also would never buy or wear a "Stop Eating Bats" t-shirt, I still would be tempted to wear a "Matt Yglesias Thinks I'm an Asshole" shirt if one existed. Don't ask me why.
Something to keep in mind for when you open the SB gift store.
Good stuff. Okay. No okay hand sign accompanying. I don't use it anymore. Despite the fact that for the vast majority of Americans is still just means okay. But for quite a few bad actors it means more. And that is why white supremacists chose it. It both magnifies their numbers but also has plausible deniability.
So why would the government of China be anxious to involve themselves in American politics with regard to Covid source investigations knowing full well that regardless of how they behave bad actors in American politics will just invent crap regardless. There is literally nothing they could do that would not result in yet further conspiracy theories.
Would Ungar-Sargon be open to the possibility that maybe there's a connection between Zionism insisting that It's every Jew's duty to act as an Israeli agent and some people getting the idea that it's okay to treat every Jew as an Israeli agent?
One interesting thing about this whole debate is that people seem very fixated on the concept that being anti-China translates into anti-Asian American. There certainly may be backlash (plenty of Koreans went to internment camps during WWII), but most Asian countries are super hawkish on China (eg https://nationalinterest.org/blog/korea-watch/poll-most-south-koreans-are-wary-china-175989 ). Probably because the grandparents that Nina Luo referred to were soldiers in the army (or contemporaries of soldiers in the army) that threatened Korea and other Asian countries in the 50s and 60s.
To the extent I get angry about incorrect discourse, it's when Chinese Americans claim to speak for all Asian Americans...
It's true that the politics of East Asia among East Asian people are actually nearly incomprehensible to the discourse. Then I see my School's few Asian students who are almost entirely Filipino taunted on the school yard over the course of the year when kids think adults aren't listening.
I don't quite know what to do with the fact that it's really quite hard for most people to distinguish between the nation and the state. Once you release those furies it's very hard to make any sense of anything.
Where do you teach?
Outside Orlando Florida. My school is only like <10 % Asian and pretty close to zero Chinese.
yeah totally. I think it's super ironic that a bunch of Koreans were interned because the US was at war with Japan, when Japan was simultaneously committing terrible atrocities in Korea.
But I think the point here is not "pretend that there is no racism against all Asians as a result of anti-China discourse." I think similar to Matt's evergreen point that "don't assume Asian American activists are representative of all Asians," there is also "don't assume that Chinese Americans are representative of all Asian Americans" or, similarly, that an anti-China policy position is inherently anti-Asian.
Anecdotally, Asian Americans joke a lot about how their parents are probably more racist towards other Asian ethnicities than white Americans would ever understand...
or even, if you believe that not all prejudice is racism... for decades my US-residing Korean grandparents refused to buy Japanese cars (and I am sure would have done the same had there been a widely-available Chinese car in the US).
I totally take your point. I was an English teacher in Seoul and Shanghai for years. The name Asian American is weird considering how raw feelings are between pretty much all Asian nations with China and Japan.
Where it bothers me is some of the anti-Chinese stuff doesn't seem to have any clear point but being rude.
yeah absolutely. btw, I don't want any of the above to come across as justifying any kind of prejudice. I don't think it is a good thing that a lot of Koreans really hate Chinese (my wife is Chinese!). I just think one shouldn't react to warrantless OR "warranted" (not the right word, but I think you get the point) discrimination by saying "don't criticize China"
I'm glad you have a picture because otherwise i'd be thoroughly confused by 4 posts in a row that all seem like an Andrew talking with himself. There are two Dan S commentators without pictures on this forum and sometimes they get into discussions with each other; it's confusing.
There are 2 Dan Ss? Damn, this explains a few things.
A bit more data on this: both Japan and South Korea are more "unfavorable" (Japan is net negative 77%!!!!) on China than the US. https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2020/10/06/unfavorable-views-of-china-reach-historic-highs-in-many-countries/
I live in Vietnam where anti-Chinese sentiment is extremely high. To the point where there are no "Chinese" restaurants. They will go out of their way to say they are a Cantonese restaurant or a Shandong restaurant or even "We serve a variety of Cantonese, Fujian, Hunan, and Sichuan food". Anything but "Chinese".
The idea may be that the kind of people who make racist attacks on others just don't know or care about the distinction between people of Chinese background and other Asian-Americans. It's the same kind of thing as casually referring to Hispanic people as "Mexicans" or people from the Middle East as "Arabs".
well, or maybe a better example is the progressive pundits who were shocked that "Latinos" shifted towards Trump, a topic on which Matt has written quite a bit
I think the background issue, and one that Matt has discussed at length before, is the totalizing force of racial concerns in the US. I don't have a tally, but it seems like most issues get sucked into the racism/anti-racism conversation and can never fully escape. Then we have levels and levels of conversations about the conversations.
It’s a perfect storm of clickbait and deliberate propaganda
Thanks once again for a well-informed voice of sanity. I hadn't known about the goofy WHO disease naming rules. Most of the rest is unsurprising if sad; thanks for putting it all together.
Are those rules goofy? I don't know. When I was young, all hurricanes had female names. Then they switched to names from both genders. A bit odd at first, but now it's totally fine.
"COVID" is a perfectly useful name. Why would we insist, or desire, to apply a name that could cause unnecessary difficulties?
(However, being a California resident, don't get me started on wildfire names. "LNU Lighting Complex Fire" "SQF Complex Fire" "Camp Fire" (*Camp* Fire?!?) Sheesh.)
I see from Matt's posting that WHO objects to the universally-used terms "Chagas Disease" and "Creutzfeld-Jacob Disease" despite their virtually universal use among practitioners and researchers. It objects to "Lyme Disease" and "MERS," both of which are in general use, and "Legionnaire's disease" (caused by the Legionella bacterium); are we now to rename the bacterium to humor the WHO?
Meanwhile, the WHO waited until March 11 2020 to declare COVID-19 a pandemic. Indeed there may be some cases where the WHO nomenclature guides might be useful or appropriate, but I'd say the naming rules exemplify an apparent focus on cosmetics over proper execution of their core task. "Goofy" is the word that came to my mind. Perhaps fairer would be to say instead that "likely for political reasons linked to the nature of the WHO, it devotes unreasonable amounts of time and energy on trivial issues while executing its core tasks inefficiently and sometimes poorly."
Letting hurricanes have names from both genders was good because it creates a natural experiment that shows that female hurricanes are deadlier https://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8782 (this paper is mostly about the lab experiments though)
...except that the paper you cite is crap: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212094715300517.
(/ht Andrew Gelman: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/04/02/himmicanes-and-hurricanes-update/. If you're going to cite a psych paper, make sure Gelman hasn't already pointed out all the flaws in it first.)
Yeah the paper is crap
The rules aren’t goofy; it doesn’t make any sense to name new diseases based on an early hypothesis about its origins or initial infected cohort since these turn out to be wrong almost every time: the Spanish Flu wasn’t from Spain, swine flu doesn’t necessarily come directly from pigs, etc. These folk names often spur useless folk practices that compete for people’s attention with real public health recommendation - how many people stopped drinking Corona in 2020?
I don't disagree but I do find it humorous that I haven't seen any fervor the other way over labeling mutations as the "UK variant" or "South African variant". They're not official monikers but they are used in the media all the time.
It’s actually something we’re talking about in the community, a lot of virologists have stressed the loci codes over geographical names, and the WHO’s new guidance is to assign new variants one of a sequence of Greek letters.
The NextStrain team wanted to use bird names.
You'll never guess what I saw today on Facebook, posted by a seemingly unhappy Greek person: https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/1/22462774/covid-19-variants-greek-alphabet-alpha-delta-country-names
I can't tell if that last line is a joke. But demand for Corona beer in 2020 was the "strongest it has ever been" according to their CEO.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/no-coronas-beer-sales-did-not-suffer-from-the-coronavirus/
I’d heard the opposite, but even if that was an urban legend it’s still proof of the concept: we’re wasting attention on Corona beer for reasons entirely and only due to the coincidental name of the disease.
This article brought up a question for me: does anyone really, truly care what people write on Twitter? Yglesias cited three Tweets in this article. They impress me as rough drafts of fully-formed thoughts.
Yeah, they do. It’s such a powerful force in social/elite discourse that for over a year, scientists who thought the lab leak hypothesis was plausible kept their heads down and didn’t say anything, while social media companies removed posts or labeled them misinformation: https://www.theinsight.org/p/how-the-twittermedia-feedback-loop
Other people on Twitter care, and lots of people on Twitter are also writing in publications with a broader non-Twitter audience. The things being discussed on Twitter often set the agenda for not only the "mainstream media" but also the reactions to mainstream discourse on the right and far left.
Agree generally, but that quote from Apoorva Mandavilli is pretty bad. It makes me think less of the NY Times, that it would hire and tolerate a reporter who publicly says something so antithetical to a mindset of open-minded, follow-the-facts reporting. I thought that was a core tenet of journalistic ethics, but apparently it isn't for at least that NY Times reporter.
Not just that - she’s the byline on most COVID articles. She’s the “real journalism” voice of the NYT on the subject of COVID.
The fact that she’s demonstrably an utter moron - on this as well as many other COVID-related subjects - is apparently not a problem.
Did you catch The Argument episode on Critical Race Theory with John McWhorter and Michelle Goldberg? Midway, Michelle talks about she went looking for concrete examples of CRT and couldn't find any. John then follows up that they both work for the NY Times and Don McNeil, Alison Roman, Bari Weiss, and James Bennet are no longer there. It was hilarious.
As a descriptive matter, yes. Matt had a recent piece on how the mainstream media is unduly influenced by fake Twitter consensus, and I think we can agree that the mainstream media matters.
Matt was once accused of being racist, and this hurt his feelings, so now he is the police for anybody calling anything racist without 100% iron-clad accuracy.
People like Pompeo, Cotton, and Trump say obviously racist stuff all of the time. They are not entitled to some benefit of the doubt when they talk about China.
extraordinary
Pompeo, Cotton, and Trump certainly aren't entitled to any benefit of the doubt, but other people are. The fact that bad, racist people oppose the Chinese regime does not mean that it is bad and racist to oppose the Chinese regime.
I agree with all of this. I'm saying that it's reasonable to dismiss racist people when they say things that sound racist.
Now, when people with credibility start making arguments about China policies, I'll listen. But don't tell me I'm some kind of mega-doosh for not taking Pompeo, Cotton, and Trump seriously.
I'm following you here and mostly agree but here's a question that is relevant to the overall point of MYs article: Do you give Pompeo, Cotton and Trump more benefit of the doubt if they're talking about a European or other mostly "white"? Or other topics that might have much less of a relation to race? I think it's one thing to say those guys aren't credible, so ignore them always, and another thing to say they are racists, so ignore them when they talk about China (or Mexico, Nigeria, etc..) but not necessarily when they talk about other things
i think it must be something like the 2nd because "ignore non-credible people" is so obvious that there wouldn't be much point in saying it.
"Ignore non-credible people" does indeed seem obvious, which is why I don't see why MY writes so many articles scolding us for not taking conservative policy arguments seriously.
In any event, I think this is the best way to answer what I think is your primary question: the conservative movement is primarily motivated by ideas around race and exclusion. When this lines up with good policy, then I think we should try to make use of that. If you think trade protectionism is good policy (I'm agnostic on it), then this would be a good example. But don't be under any illusions that rank-and-file conservatives give a shit about actual trade policy. What they care about is having a government that is generally hostile to brown people.
But when conservatives ask us to make concessions that are unrelated to race, we shouldn't expect those concessions to win us anything. The 2009 stimulus, Obamacare, and Dodd-Frank are good examples of cases where we turned very good policy into medium-good policy while getting nothing in return.
"What they care about is having a government that is generally hostile to brown people." Do you recognize how wild this statement seems to someone who doesn't already agree with it?
There are plenty of conservatives out there who might make the statement that "progressives care about is having a government that is generally hostile to white people." Do you expect to be taken more seriously than they are?
I recognize that my view is a generally unpopular one, but I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to try to get you to take me seriously.
Plenty of high-profile conservatives (Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh) do in fact make the claim that liberals are just reverse-racists. It is an extremely common claim that Beck and Limbaugh made/make a lot of money repeating because their audience agrees with it. It's also a claim that I hear often in the classroom, at the workplace, in the bar, and on the pickup basketball court/soccer field.
People who think Obama was born in Africa, think the son of Mexican immigrants can't be a fair judge, think immigrants commit crime at higher rates than native-born people, think we are in a civilizational struggle against worldwide Islam -- these people represent a serious chunk of America, and we would be naïve to believe that those very popular false beliefs are entirely unmotivated my ideas about race.
You're pretty much just asserting that's what's in his head, and then following up with a genetic fallacy argument. Speaking of benefit of the doubt, it's good to think about a writer's motives, but Matt makes arguments on dozens of topics that he doesn't personally benefit from and is generally pretty fair to his critics. So maybe he deserves some benefit of the doubt on his motives
Hi, Wigan.
I'm asserting what's in MY's head because I have read the vast majority of stuff he has written in the last decade, including his essay explaining his departure from Vox (young liberals at the publication wrote a letter saying that he was insensitive to their sense being discriminated) and the several essays he has written on SloBoring about how the anti-racists are the ones messing everything up for everybody else. In other words, my response may have been a little snarky (something MY is often guilty of himself), but it was based on deep engagement with MY's writings.
As to the larger point, as we've discussed before, Wigan, I just don't see the virtue in extending a benefit of the doubt to the leaders of a movement that consistently works toward racism when those leaders say things that sound racist. I think it is entirely rational to ask, "what do racist conservatives get out of this?" any time Pompeo, Cotton, or Trump say anything. People and political movements that tell lots and lots of lies do not deserve to have their statements taken at face value.
I find it extremely counterproductive to carefully parse the arguments of racist and dishonest people for anything that might be useful. I think a much more reasonable mechanism for arriving at useful insights is to read the arguments of people who have credibility (i.e., don't habitually say and do racist things) and arrive at conclusions based on which of those arguments I find most persuasive.
In fact, Matt discusses and criticizes racist rhetoric in this very post.
Thanks for the response, we often disagree but I know I benefit from the conversation.
I can understand that your original post was partially snark and I was too literal in my reading of that part about Matt's feelings. And a lot of what you just wrote is very agreeable, I would imagine, to most people here and not just myself. So to some extent we may be talking past each other. There's nothing wrong, imo, with ignoring people you find non-credible.
But I think there are two issues where we do disagree:
1) we seem to have a different sense of how motivating racism is to GOP voters and politicians. I see that as the parable of the 4 blind men and the elephant. It's normal for two people with different experiences to see this differently.
2) The other place is in the harms of seeing racism where it doesn't exist. I saw that as the key point of Matt's post. It's a good thing to identify racist harms, racist language and racist attitudes when they influence politics, society or explain individual's action.
But if an argument is countered by accusing it of racism, when it's not in fact racist - that's not helpful! It can poison the well of the debate and weaken legitimate charges of racism. Even if the person has a pattern of somewhat racist language or intent, unless your intended audience understands and agrees with that point of view, then you may well end up seeming less credible.
I though much of Matt's post brought up these kinds of example, particularly in Israel / Palestine where racism and anti-semitism is used by Americans to dismiss arguments coming from the other side. Whether those arguments are good or bad the core disagreement in Israel / Palestine has nothing to do with race as we use it in the United States, and everything to do with religion and ethnic identity.
Thanks for your thoughtful points here, Wigan. I agree that these seem to be two salient areas of disagreement among us. Please let me explain why my conclusions are different from yours:
1) I'm not sure how much time you have spent reading about the history of the conservative movement or interacting with red state conservatives, but I've done shit-tons of both. My consistent observation is that people who claim to believe in limited government love big gov when it helps white people and/or hurts black and brown people.
I would encourage you to apply this test in the future as you try to figure out why the conservative movement does what it does. "Does this action advance the cause of limited government? Or does this action help white people and/or make life harder on black and brown people?" If you find yourself saying "yes" more often to the first question, then I'm wrong. If you find yourself saying "yes" more often to the second question, then I might be onto something.
2) While I tend to agree with the general boy-who-cried-wolf point, that needs to be weighed against the consequences of silencing legitimate anti-racist discourse. I tend to share Matt's values and appreciate his policy analyses, but when he runs a ton of headlines that combine to say "anti-racists are hurting us" and "take the lying racists more seriously," that combination of messaging is also extremely damaging. It lends credibility to lying racists (meaning it encourages people to take them seriously when they tell lies with racist intent), and it encourages anti-racists to distrust Matt's policy ideas (and more broadly conventional Democratic party ideas).
It's worth noting also that your point #2 implies the assumption that I'm factually wrong about conservatism being largely driven by racism. This dismisses the possibility that I am in fact right. So while I am running the risk of alienating people sensitive to discussions about racism, you are running the risk of silencing legitimate discourse about racism, thus alienating people (like MY's former colleagues at Vox) who should be our political allies.
And, finally, with respect to Israel/Palestine: The core conflict doesn't have much to do with American ideas about race, but _American attitudes toward Arabs and Israelis_ is absolutely dominated by race (or race-adjacent concepts). The American evangelical community sees Israel as our allies in a civilizational struggle against the Islamic world. This is why antisemitism and rabid support for Israel coexist happily in the evangelical movement.
So people who are motivated by opposition to antisemitism would benefit from being aware of the values of Israel's political allies in the US. In other words, applying a race- or ethnic-based analysis does in fact help us arrive at useful knowledge relevant to how American politics and policy should respond to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
This idea---that racism is a property of persons that, once discovered, means that the person to which it is attached no longer needs to be listened to---is not only wrong but the opposite of what anti-racist thinkers argue.
The idea that racists try to advance their racism through non-racist sounding language and policies is at the center of contemporary anti-racist thought and scholarship. The best author I have read on this is Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, most notably _Racism Without Racists_ and _White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era_.
Yes, but the ideas and arguments they come up with in order to launder their racism might still be right. (As the old canard goes, Hitler hated cigarettes...) If your argument is founded on a racist premise, that doesn't mean it can't be easily reformulated without the racism, and good ideas are scarce enough that we can't throw them out just because they might be tainted with the racism of their source.
I'm going to actually try to read that guys book (well technically listen on Audible). I'm a little scared that it's 11 hours long and it might take a few months to get it, but I added it to my queue.
Hey I have genuine question if you see, Dsep, and have a moment to respond. How do authors like Bonilla-Silva and other prominent writers on race in America see ethnic struggles that are outside of the white-brown-black spectrum through which we usually view race in America?
For example - there are many regions in the world where ethnic or religious tensions against between people who are physically indistinguishable from each other: off the top of my head I can think of Croats vs Serbs vs Bosnians, Hutus and Tutsis, Armenians vs Azeris and Turks, Kurds vs Arabs, Tamils vs Sinhalese, South Africans vs Zimbabwean immigrants, East Malaysians vs Filipino Immigrants, Japanese vs Korean-Japanese, UK natives vs Polish and Romanian immigrants, etc...
All of these examples involve individual and state discrimination, dislike or hatred, some degree of violence, etc... But they don't really fit into the racism discourse in America that I encounter, which to me seems centered around skin color. Do those writers have a name for these other conflicts or relate them to racism in America?
Race scholarship overlaps a lot with postcolonial scholarship and nationalism theory. There are probably people who post here who are better read on those subjects than I am, but I think it's fair to say that scholars within those groups would argue that many of the phenomena you mention are legacies of a series of conquests and/or colonizations that promoted new kinds of ethnic identifications.
Example (again, based on some reading but not deep scholarship on my part): People of South Asia didn't really regard themselves as "Indian" until the British conquered them all and told them they were all Indians. Liberation only came after the colonized groups partly bought into the pan-Indian identity and used it to contest their oppressors, but this was always a useful/partial fiction that papered over longer-standing disputes among people who never considered themselves members of the same nation-state before. When the British yoke was removed, the old divisions started to come back, first with Pakistan splitting off, and now with the rise of old-school ethnic identity politics within India.
Similar arguments can be made about postcolonial Africa. Most African borders were drawn by Europeans. When Europeans went away and left a power vacuum, they weren't replaced by functioning nation-states that all shared a common identity. Instead, power struggles fell along the lines of old ethnic conflicts that predated and were often further perpetuated by European colonialism.
“…non-racist sounding language and policies…”
Which is indistinguishable from not being racist.
Diabolical!!
It is distinguishable if you care enough to look. That's what I'm asking people to do.
How can it be distinguished? Do you have any examples?
The distinction is based on the known outcomes that a movement works toward.
The obvious example is "states rights." It's certainly possible for somebody to hold a principled commitment to federalism independent of race, but every person who has spent any time reading American history knows that the real world outcome of states rights arguments (resistance to abolition, then to integration) has consistently been racism.
Once somebody is aware of that outcome but remains committed to states rights anyway, then at that point their commitment to federalism is explicitly greater than their respect for the individual rights of black and brown people.
But it seems like you're asking them to look with the conclusion already in hand. That is, once we know Figure X to be a racist, any reading of their work is a forensic exercise to find the racism we know is present.
Once we know that Figure X is a racist and a liar, we should not go to that person for good-faith arguments. We should go to people who are not racists and liars when we look for good-faith arguments.
I honestly don't understand why people dispute this so much.
It's important both (1) to distinguish "Public Figure A is or is not racist" from "Idea B, which Public Figure A happened to mention, is or is not racist," and (2) to recognize that while both questions can be important, the latter is generally more important.
It is also important to recognize (1) Political Movement A (conservatism) consistently works toward racism, and (2) we are under no obligation to pretend to not know this when we hear the rhetoric that seems meant to appeal to that racism.
If so, the correct approach to this set of facts is to say "Idea B may have merit; however, Political Movement is misusing Idea B." The incorrect approach is to say "Political Movement is bad, therefore we should ignore Idea B so we can own Political Movement's members." That will end up just hurting yourself and benefiting no one.
You are equating the cause of anti-racism with "owning conservatives." This is exactly the point that I seek to contest.
We should be aware of who we are negotiating with. They don't care about what is actually good policy. They care about projecting an image of being tough on brown people. When we take their claims about policy seriously, we end up making concessions in exchange for nothing.
The obvious example here is immigration. Conservatives insisted that they love immigrants, but they just don't like the illegal ones. Obama said "ok, I'll win your trust by cracking down hard on border crossings and undocumented immigration," eventually deporting a shit-ton of people. Of course, it didn't work. Conservatives continued to hate Obama and immigrants because conservatives don't care about law and order. They care about being tough on brown people.
So when I want to figure out what makes good policy, I will go to people with credibility on those policies, and I will continue to be extremely skeptical of people and political movements who have done a great deal to destroy their credibility. To do otherwise is to be the worst poker player on the face of the planet.
First of all, you're contradicting yourself. If your political opponents are bad faith actors, then why would you conceive of political engagement with them as a "negotiation"? That would make no sense. You negotiate with good faith opponents. If you have bad faith opponents, you engage instead in a battle with them for the hearts and minds of the unaffiliated. Choose one or the other - either they are bad faith actors or a negotiation metaphor is appropriate - but combining the two to justify the approach you're advocating is nonsensical.
Second, you do not advance "the cause of anti-racism" by simply contradicting whatever your allegedly racist opponents say. You advance the cause of anti-racism by shifting public opinion. If you dismiss a claim by your racist opponents without investigating it, solely on the basis of them being bad people, and then they turn out to be right (or at least arguably right) on the merits, then you've most likely hurt the cause of anti-racism by needlessly making your opponents look more credible than yourself. The root problem here is that the "cause of anti-racism" for you isn't about policy change, but about treating racists badly because that's what they deserve. But in reality, the cause is much better served by the former than the latter. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.
The right way to do it is that if a racist says something that isn't necessarily racist and that doesn't have clear indicia of being false, then you should go investigate it before deciding how you're going to respond. In the meantime you can say stuff like "This is not proven yet and I'm skeptical." That's what "not giving someone the benefit of the doubt" actually looks like. You don't just say "This guy is racist so what he said must be wrong" and then forget about it.
I want to add an anecdote from my DC NGO job perspective. Some think tanks and NGOs are in a mini arms race to copyright language around growing tension with China. Sharp power, corrosive capital, malign influence, etc. They're trying to control the IP and branding for what they see as a long term funding opportunity.
Through my little window, I see management (usually people with some life experience during the cold war) tending to want to use slightly more inflammatory language and frame these terms around china specifically. I also see the younger employees at orgs, often the people who will have to do the bulk of the work on drafting reports etc, using the leverage they have to soften the terms and make them focused of authoritarian governments generally. Management had usually conceded and defined the terms more generally. At least one former colleague quit the industry over this issue though.
It all makes me a bit leery about this sense of building tension and cynical about the small skirmishes over branding. NGOs sense that there's a carrot waiting for them if they start to produce reports that use language that rachets up tension rather than describes reality in clear terms.
None of this is to say that China has played nice, but I'm just feeling angst over the language.