I've always disliked the choice of the word "privilege" for the opposite of "being discriminated against", and this sentence is why:
"But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence."
I'm sorry, but no. That's not a privilege, that's something everyone should expect as part of their basic humanity. The fact that only some people get that treatment isn't a privilege - an unearned and unfair advantage - but a sign that everyone else is being unjustly discriminated against.
And I'm notoriously one of the most screamingly-woke people in this comments section. If I'm bristling every time I see a reference to the concept of privilege, then I dread to imagine what more centrist or conservative people's reactions are like.
Yes, absolutely on point here. I’m a 58-year-old white male. I was a GenX latchkey kid. Grew up poor in apartments. Dad didn’t pay his child support. Never felt “privileged” in any way. In fact, things like forced desegregation and affirmative action were obstacles to overcome. I didn’t mind. But, a lot of white males my age did. Some are racists, but most are not. True, it would have been harder for me if I were black. But it was still hard. Diminishing people’s hard work and telling them that their success is due to “privilege” is offensive. The bigger problem I see now is there are barriers to advancement in society existing now that weren’t there when I grew up. I was able to work my way through a public university, get a decent job with a four-year degree, and buy a house on my salary. Fix those problems and quit worrying about labels, please!
I'm a 69-year-old very liberal white guy who has stayed away from calling myself progressive just because there have always been too many purity hoops to jump through. My complaint with "privilege" is not the concept itself, since I think it describes my reality pretty well, but with the infuriating failure of the left in the last 50 years to recognize CLASS as a reality in America. I come from the upper-middle class and the advantages I had were powerful. I have had to try to undo an upbringing of unmitigated snobbery (still have traces of it), and the people I was brought up to disdain were not people of color, but lower-class whites. I know full well why a lot of unprivileged white people hate people like me.
Sure, but people can’t necessarily tell class from looking at you. There is a real disadvantage to “_____ while black” that doesn’t exist even for poor whites.
I agree that I don't have the disadvantage of being black, etc. I worked in inner-city Bay Area schools for almost 30 years and was married to a Mexican woman. I'm not a fool! So if it's a competition, yes - black people and native Americans have/have had it the worst, followed by other people of color, etc. (not to mention women - including white women). But do you think that Greg Steiner (above) is wrong about his experience? Is he just one more self-pitying white man who really has nothing to complain about? And, btw, can you always tell a lesbian/gay man just by looking at them? When you can't, does it mean that heterosexual privilege isn't real and doesn't affect them?
Well, I'm not complaining about anything except this bias we have about pre-judging people based on race, sexuality, where you went to school, or whatever. If we feel the need to judge someone, anyone, judge them on whether or not they took best advantage of the opportunities presented to them. Our responsibility as a society (or at least an American society) is to ensure that these opportunities exist for everyone.
Yeah whenever ppl bring up not being discriminated against as “white privilege” my response (that I mostly keep to myself) is always “wow so white privilege is awesome; we should be fighting to extend white privilege to everyone!”
That’s what I always say in all discussions of privilege. Whatever privilege is being talked about is usually a good thing, that we want everyone to have, not a bad thing we should be getting rid of.
And it’s a good thing they chose a positive word, “privilege”, for it!
I didn't mind that mention of privilege. But then I googled the term "privilege", and from some articles I saw, I figure it probably suffers from some severe motte and bailey syndrome: it both points at a legitimate and pretty uncontroversial concept, but is simultaneously used to advance a particular social agenda. And the term is not applied even-handedly to all kinds of privileges one might think of. (For example, "incel" is considered an acceptable insult, even though you could instead imagine a world where "incels" are considered to be suffering from lack of some kind of sex- or relationship-related privilege.)
It would be useful to have a term for unearned (or not-100%-earned) individual advantages: like being young or healthy or smart, being born in a first-world country, growing up with two parents, etc. However, if the term has so much baggage and so many cross-pressured connotations (like separating people into the privileged and the oppressed, as if not every person has *some* kinds of privileges; or making it sound like successful people don't "deserve" their success due to privileges they started with), then I'm not sure it can, or should, be rescued.
I’m not looking to start a fight, but I think the habit of getting worked up about word choice in the absence of substantive disagreement is part of how we ended up in the mess we’re in.
I think framing as privilege has led the discussion astray and alienates the “privileged” without providing any help to those who don’t get the benefit of the doubt by making it seem as if it’s something that should be taken away from some rather than extended to all.
The reason progressives inverted "disadvantaged", which arguably focuses on people who haven't gotten a fair shake into "privilege" which arguably focuses on a kind of condition above the law is simple. If you spend all your time asking the public majority for a fair shake, the public gets to decide the claim at their convenience. We should help the disadvantaged, but how much can be debated carefully.
If on the other hand, the public majority is accused of having a kind of special condition above the law, it forces them to debate the claim and their personal honor immediately. It's not clear to me King would object to an argument that immediately demanded white people to explain their personal honor in the status quo of America. Are they simply walking on by, or are they urging their legislature to pass progressive policy aims? That's the whole point of unpopular activism; to crystalize inaction as taking a side. Privilege discourse in the 2010s was simply the latest version of doing this.
King believed America should fund the military less and pour large resources into big public employment projects. But most Americans think the military plays a critical role advancing US security interests and big public employment projects don't do much good for the economy, especially not for the taxes paid into them. I think Yglesias doesn't discuss why Nixon and Reagan got elected for a reason in this piece. It helps him work out a special position that ultimately is quite compatible with what the "ignore the economists" policy hands in the Democratic party want on higher education and other forms of new expansive spending while insisting on a different rhetorical valence. But it's notable the American people ultimately agreed with King on passing civil rights laws and disagreed with King on greater socialist policy. That's why they elected Nixon and Reagan, who kept civil rights reforms while trying their best to reign in all the expansive spending mid-century Democrats wanted.
I think you are right that people engaged in "unpopular activism" deliberately inverted _disadvantaged_ into _priviledged_ to cattle prod everyday (lethargic, disengaged) people into having to defend their status as the default in society. The question is whether making the majority of Americans feel defensive is an effective way to advance these goals. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? That is an empirical question. Matt is arguing, and I agree, that it is ultimately counterproductive.
Sure - but isn't Matt's project about shifting the public discourse and political process of the country _toward_ a outcomes closers to Kings economic vision? Some of that comes in the for persuasion for the ends, making case that broad prosperity in the frame he envisions is worthwhile in general and specifically valuable for those on the broad left. And second he tries to argue for the formation of a coalitions that can achieve those ends. The means matter, which requires compromise, addressing reality rather than desires both the sense of political reality and analysis of the social sciences and policy impact.
With an abundance agenda though, we should be able to afford that rising tide that lifts all boats.
I don't know - and the whole reframing it to be about the people who are treated fairly rather than those treated unfairly is a useful reframing - but I just want a word that says "this is how people should be treated", not "this is an illegitimate unfair advantage".
I don't think privilege is a bad word in its pre-woke context. It just has been overused to the point where it has kind of been stripped of any meaning.
Depends on context. Saying that you feel privileged is a mark of humility. Depending on tone, calling another person “privileged” is often a synonym for “spoiled brat” and has been for as long as I can remember.
The way I see it is that everyone is privileged in some matters, and oppressed in others--with of course differing proportions of each for each person.
And that’s the entire point of intersectionality, that we should stop trying to say that some groups are more discriminated against and others are less so, and instead just identify the unique mixtures that people have, so we can try to eliminate the negatives for everyone.
Strongly agreed, and that's how I blatantly use the term intersectionality, which I think has far more worth than identifying only some sort of super oppressed subgroups of people.
But in the context of exactly what Matt is saying, it is literally an unfair advantage.
"We stop everyone who speeds, and search their car for guns, but we'll just tell the white teenagers to scram" is the very definition of privilege. The white teenagers get to skip something that everyone else has to endure.
"But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence"
This sentence is about how governments routinely argue for systemic policies that they then exempt the majority population (in our case, usually, white males) from being subject to. This is privilege. It's all well and good to argue that "nobody" should be subject to these things, but that's not what actually happens. We pass broken windows laws, or we give the TSA extra powers, etc, knowing implicitly that the burden will not fall equally on everyone (and no, I am not just talking about demographic math, I mean that we all know that the police and other institutions will use bias in the execution).
That is a privilege. You don't have to feel personally responsible for the existence of the privilege, no one is asking you for your guilt, but it's also not helpful for you to deny the existence of privilege.
The point of intersectionality thinking is to identify privilege and discrimination everywhere, even among people we usually think of as having only one or the other.
The problem with “intersectionality” is that its proponents are generally extremely biased at applying it across categories and contexts because they also have insane foundational beliefs re: biology, power dynamics, economics, etc.
It means “privilege” and “systemic X” are a “heads I win; tails you lose” game where certain characteristics are inherently worse than others in a sacred ranking of oppression.
"You don't have to feel personally responsible for the existence of the privilege, no one is asking you for your guilt"—sadly, I know people who very earnestly expect people to feel guilty for having white privilege, for having male privilege, etc. There is a segment of the activist left who take useful concepts and push them into untenable places, then feel like they're good people because they do.
Certain majority groups having different variations of "privileges" seems pretty endemic in any pluralistic society. But maybe someone could point to another place that does it slightly better--and what their strategy is? (Canada, Australia maybe? I'm all ears!)
I usually try to explain white privilege by referring to it as white benefit of the doubt. Privilege makes people defensive because it sounds like they've been given a helping hand up, which many white people haven't, and even those who have HATE the idea that they didn't earn something by their own hard work.
Benefit of the doubt reframes it as being more neutral in its benefit, but captures that people don't automatically assume white people are up to no good, which often happens to black and hispanic people.
I don't have much of a problem with the word 'privilege' in this context. Basically, it's all relative. I think I get the objection, but from the perspective of, say, a 20 year old Black man in dreadlocks who gets heavily scrutinized every time he steps into a drug store or mall—and who is far more likely to get pulled over by the police when he's behind the wheel—the advantage that *white* 20 year old males have in this area must indeed seem like privilege.
Must human societies have discriminated pretty harshly against some sort of out group— slaves, peasants, foreigners, women. Not falling into any of those buckets (and being born in an era of peace and prosperity) is a privilege. Better to play the natural lottery as a black american in 2024 than a white Briton in 1924
Well, sure, Mr. Gadsden. And the term has generated resentment because it ascribes privilege to facially under-privileged white people in poverty, etc. It means "white advantage," but that phrase has no rhetorical power and things like being given a pass by the cops when speeding are not just advantage--there is a type of in-group behavior involved that "privilege" denotes and advantage doesn't.
It's the nature of of language that words have histories, ambiguities, ranges of emotional expressiveness, greater or lesser rhetorical power, and so forth. Sometimes you can't tell where the balance lies until a phrase spreads. "Defund the police" was used by true abolitionists and also by those who reasonably wanted to shift some funding to social service personnel--turns out that the latter should have used the slogan "reallocate public safety funding," but in the moment that would not have conveyed the political mood.
People are smart enough that they can figure these things out, but they're also smart enough to find the weaknesses in public speech and use those to pursue whatever opposing message they themselves want to convey. I'm unsympathetic with most woke frameworks--I'm a vanilla liberal--but I think "white privilege" was a pretty good coinage. I'm not interested in defending it because the issue is getting people to recognize what what it denotes, not how it denotes it, but I also think those who dislike it should just push the message in whatever terms work for their specific audiences, because the underlying point is valid.
This is a good piece. I see the current situation as arising from a very backward looking, and also somewhat lazy failure to grapple with the realities of modern demographic changes in the US. The case for the kinds of affirmative action and race consciousness that's evolved into modern DEI, etc. was never without flaws. But I think it made a kind of sense immediately after the civil rights movement, when the country was something like 85% 'white', immigration restrictions had rendered nearly everyone in that 'white' category to be pretty assimilated, and virtually every living 'black' person in the country had experienced Jim Crow, either de jure or de facto.
However we are not that country anymore. The question that needs to be asked is what exactly we're trying to achieve in 21st century America and whether these ideas are conducive to it.
Love the Jose yglesias interview snippet. Pretty cool. Agree good and timely article. Liberal friends at large institutions with significant DEI pretty unanimously believe they are either unhelpful or actually counterproductive (why are u asking me how this search for a chair of my department will advance diversity? Do u want me to pick someone of a certain race or gender? Make sure I interview at least one Black candidate? I am not even sure what is expected or appropriate in this situation.). I agree with not judging people based on skin or sexual orientation. I also very much support common sense initiatives to make sure certain groups have the opportunity to succeed on their own merits in areas where they have not thus far for varying reasons. For example the Rooney rule in the nfl required all head coaching positions to include one Black candidate for interview. A lot of people were skeptical when it was instituted but I think it has been a very affective program that allowed Black candidates to shine on their own merits resulting in a lot of subsequent head coaching and assistant coaching positions. Should serve as a model. Pipeline issues in education, leveling up public education in areas in need, making sure executive and subexecutive positions are manageable for people with families, etc. i think there is a lot that could be done in these areas.
I disagree on using the Rooney rule as a model. The NFL is unique in which at least a majority of its players are Black, and since almost all coaches were once players, it's an unusual example as to why there is disproportion there relative only to within the league itself. The Black/White ratio of coaches has also oscillated up and down in recent seasons.
Isn't that kind of the antithesis of today's manifesto? I honestly can't see anything but really cringe reasons for caring about this sort of thing.
I'd also say that any Black person who could afford to buy an NFL team is not going to feel out of place at a country club. NASCAR having a number of non-white team owners doesn't really change anything there, for example.
I'm not sure it's the antithesis. But something I struggle with is that there are obvious issues with the way affirmative action programs or diversity quotas for executive boards are implemented, but I still think it's important to have diversity in elite society.
In this case, yeah it probably wouldn't change anything in the way the NFL owners operate as a collective. But that doesn't change the fact that it'd be nice in a majority Black league to see an owner who is Black too.
The players themselves are quite elite, economically and socially.
Would it follow that it would be nice to see more Black kickers in a majority Black league? Or more White players in a majority white country? Or is it that there isn't a single one that is the problem?
Again, it's hard for me to see how this matters. This isn't the military, where team owners send young men to die and it's important that as much connection as possible is made. This is going to be a group of 32 very rich guys, whatever color their skin is. Do we think they aren't giving Black men the chance to succeed in their organizations? If it's not that, why on earth would you care?
I think teams having individual owners is a flawed paradigm. It gives too much power to people who clearly have more "important" priorities than the team. I think the Green Bay Packers model should be the default, since the "city" owns the team through its "fans," and legally can never move. This means that the long-term interests of the managers and the fans are aligned, and any excess gains flow to the municipality and organization rather than particular people. And I can assure that every resident of Wisconsin is symbolically invested in the team even if they don't live near Green Bay.
There's plenty of Black people in ownership groups--Condi Rice and Lewis Hamilton are with the Broncos now--but it's controlling ownership that really matters. Without that, you're just along for the ride with some added perks.
But in college, especially outside of D1, the racial player disparities are much less pronounced.
Presumably it's a fairly different skillset anyway, combined with the simple fact that motivations are never going to be distributed equally. It's somewhere between difficult and impossible to account for those two factors.
Long-story short, I don't think it's possible to look at % players black and % coaches black and really say much that is meaningful
I agree the Rooney rule is not a good model for broader society (though something like it is kind of implicit in many hiring searches I’ve been involved with) but it’s also not the case that one needs to have played NFL football in order to be a good coach. I agree there’s a big optics issue with how it used to be, with so few black coaches, but insisting that the percentage of black players in the NFL equal the percentage of black coaches seems overly prescriptive.
The Rooney rule is a good model for broader society. If you are in hiring, you should think about opportunities to add someone less typical to you interview pool. It can be a model without being mandated by law.
I don't think anyone played from Shanahan's tree - including now McVay's coaching tree - which are all the dominating offensive gurus. Fun fact Mike Shanahan wasn't even his high school's starting quarterback. It's evidently clear that coaching and playing football are wildly different skills.
lol the fact that the most influential coach in the league is an obvious nepo hire from the beginning is pretty interesting.
It is somewhat unfortunate for meritocracy but I have to wonder if growing up inside the game is helpful. The number of NBA player kids who are doing well is more than a coincidence or that can be explained by genetics. But idk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_second-generation_NBA_players
Kyle played at Texas alongside his good bud Chris Simms.
And just hearing Mike Shanahan's tree triggers me into being extremely angry that he *still* can't get nominated to the Hall Of Fame! It's so ridiculous.
Almost all coaches once played football, but not all coaches played in the NFL. A lot of good NFL coaches lack the talent to play in the league, and a lot of good players don’t end up being good coaches. It’s clear that the “relevant applicant pool” is not just former players, so even if you’re doing a bean-counting analysis, comparing the number of Black head coaches to the number of Black players is the wrong comparator. NFL owners draw from a pool that consists primarily of NFL offensive and defensive coordinators, and to a lesser extent college head coaches and special teams coordinators. (John Harbaugh and Mike Ditka both coached special teams before head coaching.) So who the hell knows the racial composition of the qualified applicant pool. But it’s not the player pool.
The other problem is that there are only 32 head coaching jobs in the NFL. We wouldn’t expect precise statistical parity with such a small number. And honestly -- who cares? It’s 32 jobs. Are Black Americans-- 40 million or so -- really impacted by this?
The Rooney Rule, by the way, is clearly unlawful and would lose in court. No owner is going to challenge it, but it would lose.
Given what Gorsuch said in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC, I've been curious if a coach who knows his career is likely going to be done soon would file suit and argue that the Rooney Rule violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jack Del Rio immediately comes to mind as a plaintiff who'd highly fit the bill.
I used to assume that a coach who launched a lawsuit would be blacklisted from the NFL -- after winning the suit he might not get a job anyway. However, the fact that the Minnesota Vikings hired Brian Flores as Defensive Coordinator after he filed suit against his former employer made me question that.
And, honestly, one problem is who the hell knows who's going to be a winning head coach? Buddy Ryan was a great defensive coordinator, but never really broke through as a head coach. Bill Bellichek was fired and didn't really get seriously considered for another head coaching job, despite six Super Bowls. For the first twenty years of his career, Andy Reid looked like a perennial makes-the-playoffs-and-chokes head coach, like Bud Grant or Marv Levy or Don Coryell, but he's won three of the last five Super Bowls! (I am convinced it would have been four out of five if his idiot son hadn't crashed into that car and badly injured that poor girl.)
Successful NFL coaching really is a weird shot in the dark thing.
I could not agree more. As US continues to diversify, both from immigration population from various parts of the world as well as from interracial marriages, the only group deserving of affirmative action is African American descendants of slaves, which gets increasingly harder to prove. The way to address inequities between different groups is to do so through the political process (congressional representative from a black majority region directing federal funds to their district etc.) and through private means (setting up more colleges similar to Howard University that cater exclusively to black applicants). Everything else should remain color blind even if that is unfair to African Americans and Hispanics. The hope is, over time, these groups will catch up with the other groups.
The same applies for areas such as sports where African Americans and Whites enjoy a huge advantage over Asians, and over time Asians might become more competitive in sports too.
Sorry to pick on these specific examples, but they are both pretty far from a path forward due to specifics:
"congressional representative from a black majority region directing federal funds to their district etc.". There are only 25 or so majority black districts, that number is likely to fall, and most are barely majority. There's virtually no way I could see that they are going to somehow get federal funding their districts over-and-above what any other 25 candidates could do, through appealing to identity politics. The MLK lift-up-all-the-poor idea is the only workable one.
And outside of a few exceptions the HBCUs that exist are mostly struggling to maintain enrollment, or they are diversifying. They made sense 100 years ago, but segregated colleges are not really a path forward for anyone.
Also - there's nothing whatsoever unfair to Hispanics about being colorblind. What other possible and reasonable version of non-colorblindness could be fair to Hispanics?
I actually agree with all your points. My point was that congressional reps trying to get extra funding for their people and/or creating segregated colleges are the only ways left, whether they are effective or not. As you argue convincingly, they are not.
“Let me give you a personal example to explain one minority mindset. Ever since I applied for a scholarship to colleges in the United States 39 years ago, I have almost always left blank the line on forms that ask for my ethnic or racial classification (except when it is legally required, as in the census).
I don’t feel right piggybacking on tragedies that have affected Black people, Native Americans and others who have truly faced discrimination. But most of all, to quote a great American, I have always wanted to be judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin.
The Democratic Party should remember that, for many minorities, our greatest aspiration is simply to be regular Americans – treated no worse, but no better, either.”
But is it required to give your ethnic or racial classification on the Census? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought you could fill in as much or as little to none as you wanted there.
The fetishization of victim status, reliance of grievance, and accusations of harm all are very anti-Christian. There is no room for patience or forgiveness, but rather a series of excuses for people to act on their worst impulses and lash out at others.
I'm aware not everybody here is a Christian and I don't want to imply that only Christians can navigate the race question deftly (millions don't, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation), but I do find that the Christian worldview kind of wraps up the race question nicely. Right now, the Kendist left can't handle racial disparities because it means there must be something wrong with the applied standard. For instance, if White and Black students don't have the exact same average SAT score, the SAT must be racist, full stop. Meanwhile, on the much creepier post-Christian right, if White students do better on the SAT than Black students on average, this proves White people are superior, full stop (embrace your Jewish and Asian overlords then I guess?) I have no problem just embracing MLK's logic and saying that it doesn't matter if group X averages a better score on some metric than group Y because we're all made in the image and likeness of God and of infinite worth. On top of that, the boundaries of these categories are kind of bullshit anyways, and these things can change over time, and oh yeah, we treat people as individuals here, so some collective bit about SAT scores or whatever doesn't rattle my worldview to its core, but we seem to be having a problem with that right now.
One thing I think Christian teaching do is reenforce humility and stress human fallibility. The great sin I see among the left is the level of confidence, pride, and arrogance they express. They are moral, just, and epistemically correct with certainty. Those not in the tribe, are amoral, uneducated, misinformed, and inherently wrong with certainty. There is little interest in knowing or learning, and all this self confidence serves only to alienate us from others.
The epistemic certainty across our politics is driving me insane. People will say "it's ok for me to be an asshole if I'm right" and then not be right.
Among Republicans their epistemological certainty under GWB drove me to the Democrats. Now I am more comfortable expressing my more socially conservative views (I guess normie 2010 Democratic views.) That and the freaking commies invading Ukraine in 2022.
The amount of articles and even real-world anecdotes I hear about people cutting off communication with family for political views is really wild. Especially when they are framed in terms of those views being literal violence.
It happened in my family. That relative has since rejoined the family but it still hasn't been addressed that this person declared all of us beyond the pale and then pretended nothing happened.
There is plenty of epistemelogical certainty among various Christian groups of my acquaintance (primarily right-leaning Evangelical or Catholic groups). Sins of pride everywhere. And no insight that they are not remotely following Jesus (but sure, let's put bibles in schools to make everybody behave better).
Hey, at least a Bible is a book. Kids don't read any books in school now apparently (I am joking about the first bit but not the second bit which is fairly serious.)
I have been calling Evangelicals pagans who worship wealth and power for a long time, and there is a reason they are shrinking relative to other denominations. There are lots of people who belong to religions who don't really consider the tenants of faith.
Something I never appreciated when younger is (1) how historically recent and unusual the concept of "we're all equals in human dignity and should treat each other accordingly" is, and (2) how much of a role Christianity, whatever you may think of its metaphysical claims, had to play in this concept.
A very curious wrinkle of the right wing, up to and including white supremacists, is how comfortable they all are with Asians overperforming whites. Like they'll work up all sorts of absurd theories or conspiracies to explain away any achievements by blacks or hispanics, and love to trot out 150 year old anti-Semitic talking points for Jews.
For Asians on the other hand, their answer is usually something like "yeah, they're really smart" They'll denigrate Asians in other ways but usually have something like a grudging respect for their intelligence.
Very often the answer is just "of course asians living in the West do well, these are a highly selected immigrants and recent descendants of immigrants."
The history of stereotypes about Asians being smart are in justifying discrimination against black people. Asian success is proof that white-black racial disparities are a result of inferiority or lack of effort.
The writer and podcaster Tom Holland (on The Rest Is History) talks a lot about the relationship between Christianity and wokeness. One of his big themes
is that some of the ideas you list are quintessentially Christian, in particular the celebration (I am deliberately using a more positive word than you) of victim status. He views modern day wokeness as an esoteric Godless branch of evangelical Christianity.
It’s true that today’s woke people aren’r so into turning the other cheek, but that is a also true of many Christian political movements historically!
I can sort of relate because I roughly recall being a militant atheist who found Nietzsche quite exciting ~23 years ago as a fifteen-year-old. Maybe this pre-Christianity framing feels particularly viscerally satisfying to some people, at some times? Honestly, I’m rather struggling to put this into words.
I imagine this felt similar to the excitement my friends and I also felt about Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine, for anyone who recalls similar feelings. I also recall my friends not appreciating an over-intellectualization, and that was good feedback in a way I may not have appreciated at the time.
Hopefully, someone finds this comparison useful in understanding how someone with an overly active mind could feel the need to overly complicate their appreciation of rebellious movies or songs.
I read Nietzsche back in 2009 and I kind of lump him in with Aristotle. It is all about controlling one's impulses and when to act. A virtuous person can moderate and avoid overindulgence. Many people must swear off such impulses, because they lack the ability to properly practice agency.
As I have aged I have identified more with Platonism and his notion of being. There is an underlying order to the universe we are divining through mathematics and when we look to the heavens we see massive entities sing with a rhythmic harmony. Catholicism takes a lot from Plato and later Aristotle (who Martin Luther despised). Forgiveness takes humility and frees us from the burdens of resentment. It is a gift to oneself, not a charity to others.
Then again there is young man testosterone making us impulsive.
Yeah, I've since read some as an adult, and that all sounds reasonable now to the extent I recall anything. I even have an audiobook on existentialism that I'm working through, and I'm appreciating the broader themes in the movement.
I also agree that testosterone is a sufficient explanation for my previous interpretation.
You're totally right about the absence of patience and forgiveness, and this is one of the ugliest aspects of contemporary progressivism. But the experience of victimhood is central to Christianity and was a critical part of how it spread.
I'm not here to trash Christianity, but I think it's fair to say that stories about the suffering of martyrs fetishized victimhood. That was a huge factor in its initial popularity and part of the reason it spread first among the lower (despised) classes, which is relevant to understanding the topic today.
The meek shall inherit the earth and centering faith to those least among us in a time of when Pagan venerated and worshiped power was a powerful social invention. Human worth is greater than the chains those above us bind us in.
I think the difference between how Christianity views martyrdom (self sacrifice) and victim status is that it isn't used as a justification for transgressing against others. It highlights the unjustness of violence and the arbitrariness of our places in life.
When I see how the Left uses hierarchies of oppression and grievance politics it seems a vain attempt by privileged people to enhance their status. Why else to high income and highly educated persons contort themselves as somehow disadvantaged or oppressed? Why do they advocate for policies that harm the least among us (e.g. defunding the police)? Why are they often so cruel and quick to lash out?
I have been reading books about some saints, specifically Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Augustine. Their lives are fascinating. My husband and I were discussing whether people like this would merely be considered mentally ill (but look at all they achieved!!) today or whether we are overlooking saints in our midst as being kooks. Or maybe a little of both. I do think we need a little more humility and awareness of sin in our lives today, but taken too far or the wrong way, it can just lead to shame and self-loathing, which is not helpful.
One thing that bothers me is how much educated people express epistemological certainty and lack humility. There is a whole language and discourse denigrating people with less income and educational status. I know I am fallible in the context of the article you link (especially when it comes to economics. I was very slow to accept the salience of the inflation drag on public sentiments.)
It must be a failure of my own ability to imagine, but I have a hard time understanding a good faith criticism of the views Matt articulates about this topic.
Saying this as someone who agrees with Matt's writeup, as well as your general viewpoint as expressed in your comments across the SB posts. I don't really agree with the points below (especially when thinking of second order consequences), but I think they'd be part of the pushback.
1. Systems and legacies. Lots of studies show longterm stickiness of issues of slavery and Black-specific racial discrimination. There was a recent NBER paper that showed variation of slavery exposure played out in meaningful economic outcomes today (the specific paper doesn't matter, if you follow academic twitter you see this genre occur frequently among papers authored by high quality researchers). The argument: you and your friends beat me and then said, "ok, let's all move past the beatings and not dwell on them." There needs to be explicit uneven treatment of the wounds after the beatings, even putting aside the issue of punishment.
2. Neutrality. Equality as a concept is never actually equal and always makes some new form of inequality. One of the deeper "critical" claims is that the race and identity focus also says that people shouldn't have to sacrifice portions of themselves to conform to the predominantly White European migrant culture and mindset in the name of equality. It's less that "judge by the content of your character" is a problem than the criteria for judgement has latent values built into it, values which don't totally align with the historical and cultural particularities of, say, an ADOS Black woman. That is, established criteria of judgement of "judge by the content of your character" forces more sacrifice for some than others.
3. Human groups cannot vary. I've seen on more than one occasion leaders in demography / public health / public policy / epidemiology spaces say that literally all residual variation of health, economic, and social outcomes among groups are by definition racism (or sexism, sexuality discrimination, or immigration discrimination. I've not seen it applied to other meaning systems). From my knowledge of social science statistics I found these statements shocking and conceptually undercooked, but they come from a theoretical orientation that identity groups cannot vary on their means except through ill intent, mistreatment, systems, and/or legacies.
The thing that bothers me most about 3) is the epistemological certainty of what the cause is in the absence of material evidence as to what mechanism is at play. My wife and her friends (physicians) have been called racist for pointing out to patients they should take a test because they are at a higher risk of "X" due to demographics.
There is an episode about this in every medical drama ever. Doc says "Hey, you should take a test for sickle-cell anemia because you are at risk" and patient says "that's racist", and the rest of the episode grapples with it.
Race not merely being skin deep when relating to medical care breaks a lot of brains who religiously believe such categories to be totally arbitrary/appearance-based.
Unfortunately it also breaks the brains of many activists who are enthusiastically devoted to removing all race-based heuristics in healthcare. STAT News, for instance, just ran a big multi-piece campaign centered around the idea that all race-based algorithms in the medical field are inherently invalid and biased, and must therefore be eliminated — potential negative consequences be damned.
Point two pisses me off so much because it’s fundamentally a racist argument. “You can’t expect black women to do well on standardized tests because that’s a Western European way of thinking and their culture is so very different”.
Ok, let’s go with that. How do you explain successful African countries like Kenya vs unsuccessful ones like the DRC? It’s not colonialism!
There were zero white people in the men’s 100 meter final despite the fact that white people have better access to nutrition and training facilities. There were also— and this is where it gets really interesting— zero people from the east african highlands and zero mulattos with light skin. West african genes are good for sprinting, east african highland genes are good for distance running, europeans are holiding on in the middle distances but that may be economic privilege
Why the term “mulatto” instead of “mixed” or “biracial”? You know that it has certain connotations, so why use the more provocative and outdated term instead of the ones most people use to describe people with mixed Black and white ancestry?
It's the kind of talk that makes people understandably wary of people who claim racism is over.
"All this focus on race is unnecessary, what with the blacks and their African genes dominating the sport of running. I find the East African genes reveal those that are best at the distance running, perhaps because their ancestors were chased the furthest by the wildebeests of the highlands in the dark continent. Now as for the mulattos, let me offer some thoughts as to why their representation is below what would be expected..."
I didn't say there's no genetic component for athletic ability. I was addressing how the person I was replying started talking about regional African genes and their effect on running ability apropos of nothing, as the comment *they* were replying to had nothing to do with sports - and then throwing in a hilariously outdated racial term for good measure.
I've just had enough past in-person experience with people bringing up "well the blacks are good at sports" thing in response to discussion of how in many other areas of American life, black people and other minorities have historically gotten the short end of the stick, that I've come to see it as a way of sort of dodging any idea that there's lingering disadvantage to having darker skin in this country. This isn't to say that I disagree with Yglesias' point that a color-blind society is the correct ideal to aspire to - it is.
Saying that black people are better at some sports on average than white people, while perhaps true, isn't really relevant to most discussions of race and related policies, as athletic ability affects the life prospects of a very small number of people. It's like saying "well, men are better than women at most sports, so no need to worry about a widening gap in educational outcomes between boys and girls."
I don't remember the difference, but the only time I have earnestly read either the term mulatto or mestizo was in history books about spanish colonialism.
Look David if you want to be edgy you’re entitled to do so. But you’re a smart guy, and I think you know that you’re trying to provoke a reaction here. Would you use “mulatto” before a judge in one of your cases? I think we both know you wouldn’t.
Dude, no. I strongly dislike DEI and I still know that “mulatto” is an antiquated word that comes across as offensive today. It makes you sound like you time-traveled here from the 1950s. I didn’t learn that at any DEI seminar, I absorbed it from the culture at large.
And my goodness, his absence a week ago made Jameis Winston look like a superstar again, until he inevitably gave us the full Jameis Winston football experience.
I think there's a case than can be made that racial stereotyping is keeping DeJean out of his most effective position, corner. Which is a fairly funny thing to say but won't be funny for him when he's due for a new contract and gets hybrid safety money instead of corner money.
For point one, Matt links to a piece of his about the same evidence (or lack thereof) that exam schools improve outcomes. This kind of argument is screaming out for the same thing. Would reparations (which is effectively what that is arguing for) actually improve outcomes, or would it just be an expensive feel-good measure that did nothing but engender hostility?
“…the criteria for judgement has latent values built into it, values which don't totally align with the historical and cultural particularities…”
What “latent values” do you perceive in the phrase content of character? I think most people would want to know is this man honest, polite, a good son, a good father, a good husband, a reliable worker, etc.?
What cultures do you believe are looking for other things?
Here's one example, not one that maps onto the Black/white divide, but it should be illustrative:
You are in your friend's car while he's driving way over the speed limit. He hits and injures a pedestrian, and is sued for damages. During the trial, you are called on as a witness and are asked, "Was your friend driving over the speed limit?"
As a person of good character, what do you do? Lie to protect your friend? Or tell the truth? Different cultures have different answers to this question. Specifically, WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures differ on this. Yet again, I highly recommend the book "The WEIRDest People in the World" by Joseph Henrich.
I think it's a great piece, but one small criticism I have is that "I think the solution to that concern about discriminatory enforcement is to not do it" is a bit glib. Frankly I don't trust a lot of police forces to avoid discriminatory enforcement and would be very interested in hearing ideas for how to prevent it (while also not destroying morale or hampering the ability of police to do their jobs).
That aligns with my intuitions, although "more resources" is much easier to accomplish and to track than "professionalization" and I worry that many localities will do the former without the latter.
One of the biggest difficulties in police reform is that reformists have no faith that extra funding for police departments will be used for better training, oversight and higher standards instead of machine guns and training seminars on horseshit like excited delirium and fentanyl exposure insta-death.
To change the subject - the same thing happens to moderates in the gun control debate. Most my red-state hunting friends think something akin to a drivers license would be a good step forward, especially the training part. Except that they also think any such proposal would be disingenuous and step toward something like an aussie mandatory buyback.
I work with psych providers all the time, especially ward nurses, and they all say excited delirium is nonsense. It’s telling that I read medical records all day every day and excited delirium only ever shows up in reports written by police officers.
Formal training. Formal standards for review and promotion. Research and investment into improvements, that gets rolled back into the training and standards.
I agree with Matt’s overall prescription here, but I don’t think it should be too hard to imagine good faith disagreement.
Think of a person who has a strong belief that the effects of the Civil Rights Act and other efforts to abate racism in the US are relatively shallow and tenuous. This person suspects that many Americans— and in particular, many white Americans— are quietly much more racist than they would own up to being in public, and will covertly use whatever levers they can to engage in racial discrimination (particularly against black Americans). In this person’s view, incredibly aggressive legal and cultural efforts to tamp down on and mitigate any sort of statement or practice which might be racially discriminatory— even in very non-obvious ways— and also mitigate the effects of discrimination are warranted.
I don’t think this person’s view is correct in 2024, but it also strikes me as not obviously insane. The pervasiveness, depth, and vitriol of racism in the US during the first sixty years of the 20th century was profound, and the pessimistic worldview I describe above was almost certainly correct during most of the four decades immediately following the passage of the CRA. (The pessimistic view is very common among professional historians for precisely this reason.) And, because the worldview involves covert attitudes, it’s quite difficult to convincingly falsify, especially for people who have plenty of life experience weighing against it.
I’d also add that— especially in the 2010-2020 decade— white Americans souring on Obama and embracing somebody as obviously venial and stupid as Trump provided a lot of apparent confirmation for this point of view.
Now that we have a few more election cycles worth of data, I think that a lot of the backlash against Obama was driven by the fact that he was the first-ever PMC liberal intellectual president who didn’t pretend to be something else, but in 2016, racial animus-driven backlash was the most parsimonious explanation by far.
Your second paragraph is surprising: what sort of evidence or thought process led you away from the second explanation to the first?
My view is that the first explanation was always clear, after accounting for some definitional adjustments, and very few people I know today who believed "the more parsimonious explanation" have changed their minds.
I'd say that one's preferred explanation has always been determined by one's priors - which is to say by the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of tiny experiences and updates, not something that can be settled.
I changed my mind largely because of how racial depolarization among lower-information voters played out during the 2020 and 2024 elections. That’s an event which the “racial resentment” hypothesis wouldn’t have predicted.
On a deeper causal explanation level, I have some combination of cognitive traits which makes me unusually willing to change my mind in response to new evidence (probably much more so than what would be optimal for humans in the evolutionary environment). Probably some combination of high-IQ, high-Openness to Experience, and autism spectrum traits.
I think one thing that people sometimes miss is that there is a real danger in declaring victory too early. I was raised in a liberal-ish, affluent-ish, mostly-white suburb in the 90s and I feel like I really do get a lot of the impulses behind the great awokening because it's something that happened very much amongst "my" people (tangent: I think there are kind of two groups of people who have driven a lot of this discourse on the left and many of the most strident are people who were raised in more conservative or religious environment and bring big "no zealot like a convert" energy to their new found liberalism, I'm not talking about those folks here).
Growing up in the feel good 90s, the history and civics that I was taught at school was very much of the "we used to have racism but now we fixed it and that's why we have MLK day" variety that I think was more in vogue back then. I think a lot of the backlash to that was driven by the real experience of millennials growing up and discovering the ways that that narrative was too simplistic and overdone when we still have, e.g., a racial wealth gap, functional housing segregation, disparate policing impacts, etc. etc. This created a sense not just of persistent unfairness in the system, but the sense that *we had been lied to* by the (well meaning) teachers who talked about racism in the past tense in 1993. And people hate being lied to! This will make many people look for the conspiratorial reason for the lying (enter "white supremacy" and associated concepts) and to push back in a way that is more vigorous than if it seems like they're just learning something new.
And now the pendulum is swinging back the other way again because correctives often go too far. But I imagine this particular pendulum will probably swing a few more times in my life, hopefully with diminishing amplitude. But every reaction has within it the seed of the next reaction, and I think the thing to object to in this framing is that we will see the cycle continue for a while before we get it right.
Expanding the child tax credit is a fine idea, but it will hardly eliminate ghettos or racial gaps. If your focus is on eliminating ghettos and racial gaps, Matt’s policies won’t get you there. For Matt’s formula to resonate, you have to be resigned to continuing, large amounts of racial inequality.
But if you ALSO have a higher EITC, a faster growing economy (YIMNY-ism, low deficits, narrowly sculpted trade restrictions, progressive consumption taxation merit based immigration), expanded Medicaid and ACA, Kathleen Webbers lifetime job retraining, better crime deterrence, public education reform, that should get us closer. Anyway, let's try that and then see what else might be done when we see the results.
I'll be eager to see the amount of pushback, if any, Matt gets from this in places I expect, and on Twitter. Or maybe I'll dust off Bluesky to make doubly sure. We'll see if it's down from the peak in 2020, when Matt was getting raked over the coals for observing that BIPOC was linguistic nonsense.
I am sure I have mentioned this here before because the experience has stuck in my mind for the 2 years since it happened, but I was at an event where I was the only white (White?) person and one of the youngest, even though I am in my 50s. Most of the other people in the program and the speakers were Black. The speaker used the term BIPOC. Almost no one besides me knew what it meant, even though it was being used to refer to them. Many thought it was some sort of "new sexual identity term."
I agree with a lot of this piece, but one error I see especially in the comments is people equating “no DEI” with meritocracy. Whereas there is structural bias in favor of white people, eg legacy admissions to elite universities. I agree that police shouldn’t engage in discriminatory enforcement and I’m all for enhanced surveillance state that could enable a more quantitative approach. There are many areas where the measurements of merit are purely subjective (“fit” eg during an interview process) and many examples where disparate outcomes lessen or disappear when people no longer know the race or gender of the person applying (see Claudia Goldin on blind orchestral auditions). Matt does say this but it’s worth being explicit about it - to actually judge people based on merit you still need to actively mitigate biases.
His article is more nuanced than that. He is against cut-throatism in favor of taking into things like broad morality and human dignity. Which is something we already knew - he isn't a libertarian. But that doesn't mean he isn't in favor of merit and standards ... just that we should try to structurally adjust society to limit winner-takes-all situations.
John, I agree with you, but I sure wish we had more obvious diversity of commenters here. Rather like when we guys debate women's issues, I suspect most of the comments are from white people. Not all rich, well-educated or from comfortable backgrounds of course (as some commenters note) but very few from subpopulations that would suffer from the kind of ingrained suspicion that Matt notes about how you are observed when on the sidewalk or entering a store.
Even if there is a basic truth to Matt's MLK-linked philosophy, it would behoove us to have a better gut feeling for the lived experience of people who are not like us.
For any commenters who *have* lived that life, my apologies, and my request for them to educate the rest of us about what that experience is like.
“But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence.”
The idea that all whites enjoy such a privilege is nonsense.
So my read on this is that I fail to understand what value this chapter of the manifesto really adds. I think we can all agree (maybe I’m wrong though!) in principle that it’s a best practice in a perfect world to “not see color” which is, imo, essentially what this article is arguing without the weird right-codedness the term usually carries.
He mentions a counterpoint that racial mistreatment continues to be a real problem and the response is basically hand waving, saying “we shouldn’t be racist” and cites and anecdotal argument about one time he didn’t receive preferential treatment for being white or white passing as a good example for what that looks like.
Prejudice in the law enforcement system is such a pervasive problem that I’m not sure it’s fair to lump in with the rest of the concerns touched on in the article. It’s just such a massive effort to get cops and judges and DAs everywhere to not be racist (whether they are explicitly or unintentionally) and it deserves more than an offhand reference in a manifesto about identity politics and race.
The point of the manifesto is to find areas of policy agreement that work for both moderate faction Dems in blue places and the Dems running in purple/reddish places.
If we find a cop, a judge, or a DA is intentionally discriminating, that’s bad and we should go after that person. They don’t get to say, as a defense, “But it makes sense for me to discriminate in this context, because statistics.” People who say things like that are not Common Sense Democrats.
But also we’re not going to look at what percentage of prisoners are black, use that statistic to conclude the system as a whole is structurally racist, and so conclude that we should abolish the police or whatever. People who do that second thing are also not Common Sense Democrats.
Do you actually know that there’s rampant prejudice in law-enforcement? I have no doubt that racist cops exist, but so many recent studies seem to be subject to, er, activist capture / motivated reasoning and simply point to disparities in numbers of stops (for example) as evidence of prejudice, which is subject to all the confounders that Matt identifies.
Can you share the studies? This Pew Report isn’t trying to discern causality and relies on self reports, but points to a pretty plausible conclusion that law enforcement is unfair.
If a large majority of Black people say that they are or have been treated unfairly, my first instinct would be to believe them in aggregate, even if there are cofounders on the margins (like bad faith respondents or the fact that people’s individual perceptions of like events may differ).
Measuring anything to do with crime and the criminal justice system is quite difficult and I don’t think it should be that controversial to state that simply saying “well to fix racism, cops shouldn’t be racist”. That’s a tautology and isn’t really helpful, which is my original point.
It’s true that measuring bias and intent in criminal justice is very hard. That pew poll mostly just shows that in June of 2020 (not shockingly) most people polled expressed the view that police are biased.
Roland Fryer looked into this in 2016 and found the results to be more nuanced. He found that police in NYC were more likely to use non-lethal force against Black citizens but less likely to use lethal force.
It should be noted that he got excoriated for these findings because they didn’t match the prevailing vibes. There’s a lot of resistance to fact-seeking in this area.
I agree with almost everything but I take some exception to the Youngstown example. There may be no discriminatory intent behind a test that produces racially disparate results but if the test results do not correlate with ability to do the job, then it should not be used.
My wife’s family was basically 100 percent Democrat. They are hard working Chinese and Filipino immigrants that came here with very little and made successful lives.
During the pandemic they saw the chaos and about half of them decided that democrats had lost their damn minds. They are suspicious about republicans but just decided democrats are not serious and don’t care about law and order or the average American family.
They are not hardcore Trump though and could be easily swayed back if democrats would just get some damn sense.
I think the good thing about these type of voters are that they are, in fact, easy to win back. But not if you let them vote GOP multiple cycles in a row.
Yeah, my worry is that Democrats don’t sufficiently deal with the activist class and then some of these voters are gone for a long time. Trumps election wasn’t a conservative revolution but it could become one.
Exactly. A one-time Trump voter is a fluke. A two-time GOP voter is a trend – any more than that and the former Democrat in question is going to start being a lot more comfortable defining themselves as a Republican.
Racism is real. Race is not. If your social justice program relies on the application of some obfuscated version of the one drop test you're not rectifying the harms of a false belief in race you're perpetuating them.
Similarly, the whole "settler colonizer" and "land acknowledgement" discourse is just a repackaging of blood and soil politics. The fact it all stems out of the intellectual justification for genocide in the Algerian War makes it all the more disgusting.
Matt called someone who says “I don’t see race” a doofus.
What’s certainly more foolish than that is saying “race is not real.”
That’s an article of faith combined with word games (“population” vs. “race” is roughly “people of color vs. colored people) that has no basis in reality according to what we know about biology.
Holding two thoughts simultaneously—racial populations are real; governments should almost always use race-neutral policies that treat individuals as individuals—is not easy for most people.
You do have to be a bit of a doofus not to see the things racists are ascribing meaning to. You also have to be a bit of doofus to think the thing the racists believe in is anything more than a delusional mirage.
I’ve frequently seen a policy of colorblindness attacked as something that “sounds just but is ultimately naive.” Matt offered some good examples as to why. But the real question for determining naïveté should be “compared to what?” Specifically, the people who attack colorblindness as naive have a preferred alternative where every racial group is supposed to be proud of themselves and work to promote more numbers of themselves in the name of representation with one BIG exception - white people. Oh, and for many important contexts we are now adding Asians to that status now. Congrats Asians! Setting aside for a moment whether this kind of policy is good or fair, I marvel at the fact that this is supposed to be the LESS naive policy - that white people (and now Asians too) will just continue to go along with it, especially as the % of white people relative to other groups continues to drop, and relative cultural influence decreases (and as Asian political power increases). Has there ever been a case in history (or across cultures today) where a group becoming less dominant becomes MORE magnanimous? I don’t know of any.
"especially as the % of white people relative to other groups continues to drop"
It's not really happening that way, though. White is merging with other identities, and increasingly taking on a meaning of "mainstream America" that is at odds with the way it's used as a census category.
Matt has yet to deal with the root of intersectionality, feminism. It sucks because the well-known people commenting on these things are men, and I know there's a danger in saying it out loud. If you're going to say Dems need to abandon identity, feminism has to be included along with its demands for unequal treatment.
I know feminism means different things to different people, and sadly many batshit insane ideas have come under the umbrella of feminism, including some straight-up misandry. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but to me, feminism simply means "women are real human beings, not a deviant and inferior variant of men, and we deserve equal rights and opportunities."
To make it personal: I am a woman. I am exceedingly grateful that I am able to work outside the home, own property, be able to attend school/college, be able to marry the man I chose instead of some guy my parents and/or the local matchmaker chose for me, use birth control, decide whether/when to have children, and all the other good stuff that comes with feminism. Have a look at Afghanistan and then tell me how bad feminism is.
I take issue with your assertion that feminism in its current form is still necessary. All of what you say you enjoy has been achieved, and women have FAR more cultural power than men. Professional class women have more capital than most men because most men don’t have degrees (like most women, for that matter). I don’t see anything in your analysis about class, and feminism as an ideology totally ignores it and focuses instead on abortion and the advancement of professional women at the expense of everything else. It is no longer relevant because it is about having your cake and eating it too. There is a total lack of recognition that feminism dabbles in double standards, which offends me greatly as a woman. I don’t need a reminder for Afghanistan. As far as I can see, leftist feminists are total apologists for radical Islam.
What remains of the non-radical, feminist project? I know of two items that still seem relevant: 1) reproductive rights and 2) global expansion - your Afghani example
A lot of feminism is consistent with Matt is saying. Some forms of radical feminism might not be, but that doesn't mean Matt's piece is at all antifeminist.
yes, but the point is that people need to call feminism out as the root of identity politics explicitly - it's one thing to point to the race problem and another to point out the entitlement with which feminists throw bombs and destroy people. It's not men leading that charge, but women. And that's damaged the democratic brand more than anything else.
I think this does a decent enough job addressing the "critical theory" problem in feminism with its talk about disparate impact. Basically the same problem.
The other feminism issue is the whole "Gender Identity" quagmire, which I kinda don't expect Matt to delve into deeply.
When you start doing the begats of "The long shadow of disparate impact" critical race theory and critical feminist theory share the same core defective logic. There's not a lot to say about that strain of feminism that is distinct.
they do, but my point is that the feminist root of it isn’t called out nearly enough, particularly because most commentators on this topic are men. Nor are women called out as the progenitors of our political dysfunction.
Oh wait, it took me a few moments to realize you were labeling intersectionality and feminism as bad terms here. Intersectionality is the response to the sort of ranking by disadvantage naïveté you often see in traditional discussions of racism. The point is that you can’t label groups as “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” because everyone has advantages and disadvantages in different contexts, and they often mix in complex ways.
That's the positive definition of it. "Black Women face discrimination that is not just the sum of 'Black' + 'Woman'"
But it feels like(at least online) it has sometimes gotten abused where some groups seem to try to claim victim status by adding as many categories as they can here.
Maybe that's the kind of "concept abuse" that's going to happen with _any_ term and it's not particularly worse here, maybe it is worse, I'm less sure here because 'online Americans' != 'all Americans'.
Yes, this seems to be a common type of content abuse. Any time someone introduces a new concept that is meant to avoid the problematic baggage of an old one, if it becomes widely used, the new concept picks up the same baggage. Just like “structural racism” being used to ascribe intent, when the point was to *not* ascribe intent.
No, because while race is a social construct, being of the female sex is not. Feminism will always be needed to help address the very real ways in which women are biologically different from men -- especially to the extent that men seek to exploit those biological differences for their own advantage (e.g., women can get pregnant, men cannot).
I certainly hope so. I notice that male commentators seem to ignore it. That's either because they know the danger of commenting or don't understand how it's the root of our dysfunction.
We neards occasionally babble about Richard Reeves and how the treatment of men as inherently problematic and systemic denial of disparate challenges to men (education, health, and economic) alienates men from the party. We saw it with how so many Democratic partisans freaked out when Harris floated the idea of going on Joe Rogan.
Speak where you are not heard. Don't let your opponents define you.
My retort to the sexism allegations about Harris losing is that isn’t something we could change without swapping the candidate. (Also only the lie about Harris sleeping her way into CA politics was the only sexist thing that really got traction compared to all the HRC misogyny from the left in 2016.) Policies and priorities and strategy were mutable.
Matt wrote: "disparate impact logic in the absence of any specific evidence of discriminatory intent ... it was reasonable to suspect institutions of trying to find facially neutral ways to accomplish de facto discrimination"
Just FYI, Disparate Impact law presumes that there is no intent. The idea was never "they are probably hiding something with these facially neutral practices. The idea was that the institution was inadvertently introducing impact without meaning to. Intent is more clearly illegal under different laws.
On the one hand, you're correct in the abstract, but on the other hand, you have a lot of people who are pretty explicit in supporting the use of disparate impact tests because they believe there is discriminatory intent, they just can't prove it.
That might be, but Matt wrote about using the past tense, as if the law was first created with that "paranoid" idea in mind, which really isn't the case. The court in the first ruling that used that law ("Griggs vs Duke" I think) was pretty explicit in saying that the case had nothing to do with intent.
You're right about Griggs, but I would also note that Griggs is kinda crazy. The text of the law itself clearly states that ability tests without discriminatory intent are fine. This is clearly laid out in the 4th circuit decision that SCOTUS overruled:
SCOTUS just didn't like what the law said and so they made up the idea that disparate impact is a problem even in the absence of discriminatory intent.
The law was first created with the idea that some employers might try to discriminate by using facially neutral tests as a fig leaf, and says that doing that is illegal. The law says that if you're using a facially neutral test without discriminatory intent, that's legal. Then SCOTUS came in 7 years later and eliminated the second part.
That’s what I was going to say. Matt seems to be presupposing a kind of anti-consequentialism here, that intent is the only thing that could be bad about disparate impact, whereas I think that intent is never the thing that is bad about anything.
I don’t think Matt is saying that intent is what causes the harm. My read of what he’s saying is: interventions aimed at unintentional harm don’t have a great track record, institutions that focus a lot on unintentional harm are dysfunctional, and a political project focused on this stuff is less likely to be successful.
So, I agree with most of what you wrote here, Matt Y, but I feel compelled to object to your description of Governor Walz as a "dud." I like him! I didn't know a single thing about him until he was nominated. But he came across as a good, decent man with a kind of folksy aw-shucks manner that I thought would counter the perception of Democrats as stuck-up pointy-headed out-of-touch elitists. Like during his DNC speech, when he said something like "Back home, we are all neighbors and Americans, and we work together and help each other even if we disagree." Unity! Caring! Neighborliness! Good, wholesome things!
I guaran-freaking-tee you that if Kamala had picked a different VP and then lost, she would have been condemned for that choice too. Shapiro? Why did you pick a Jewish VP, how stupid to poke Arab/Muslim Americans in the eye at the time when Palestinians are being killed in Gaza! Buttigieg? Too Ivy League, also America's not ready for an openly gay VP! Kelly? We need him in the Senate, also he's not photogenic/charismatic enough! Etc., etc.
I'll never forget that moment at the convention when Gus Walz jumped up, tears streaming down his face, and exclaimed, "That's my dad!" Some right-wing a-holes made fun of him on social media. But I thought it was awesome, a spontaneous public display of love and affection from a boy to his dad. It breaks my heart that the kind, decent guy with the loving family lost and the smarmy a-hole sellout who went from "Trump is literally Hitler" to "Trump is the bestest and awesomest, I'm proud to serve him" won (although in fairness to him, he too has a loving family.)
This is maybe a little half-baked, but in my experience there tend to be two ways in which people left of center process immutable, visible characteristics like race and gender.
Group 1 views race and gender as basically wholly definitional. "Everything about my life is influenced by my race and gender." or "Everything about that person's life is influenced by race and gender." Downstream of this can be positives or negatives. Much of the identity politics that began in the 60s and went mainstream later uses race and gender as an organizing principle. The process of turning what is perceived of as a disadvantage (being a woman or a minority) into something to be celebrated has been a positive for a lot of people.
Group 2 views race and gender as an aspect of a person, but not definitional. "Race and gender are just attributes of my existence. They do not define me as a person."
Unfortunately, a lot of Democratic party messaging comes from people who think Group 1 views are motivating to the target audience, whereas I think increasingly Group 2 views are, and Group 1 views feel patronizing.
There's something about thinking that you have more agency than you actually might have in reality that is good for individuals.
I think Group 1 is more motivating the more the group faces actual discrimination.
For instance: Gay Pride marches were very motivating to me when I was younger to feel like I wasn't alone, but now that I basically have all the rights I need/want, I want it to be seen as just an attribute of my existence.
Moving from Group 1 -> Group 2 thinking is _progress_
I think you're right about moving from group 1 to group 2. But, the big issue is the way groups experience discrimination.
With gay rights, we've seen a lot of cultural progress, social acceptance, and policies that help to promote equality. A lot of groups still face a ton of discrimination and media messages that show them as inferior.
This sounds nice, but I think it’s just a way of dodging uncomfortable questions.
Let’s just say hypothetically that it is an established fact that police officers do their jobs better if they did not have a criminal background prior to becoming a police officer. Let’s say a rule against hiring police officers with criminal backgrounds was proposed. And let’s say this has the effect of reducing the number of eligible black officers by a greater number than any other race. Does that make the rule bad? Does that mean there’s a problem with the process? Or could it be that good processes, in a world where different groups have different characteristics, will sometimes yield results that are shaped by those differences?
It is an important question because processes that attempt to select for objective, measurable competence will yield racial gaps. We can tell ourselves that this is just a problem of measurement, but unfortunately it’s not.
The challenge is that there are lots of things considered "established facts" that never really were established. What Wigan pointed out is that the disparate impact test requires that you prove your established fact and its importance and relevance to the job. When these things get challenged it turns out there are not very many that are.
First, I think the abstract point (IF we could know X, then . . . ) is important even if people can quibble about the facts.
Second, I was reviewing the DOJ litigation guide for a subset of disparate impact cases (https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7) , and it seems like there is quite a bit of scrutiny of an entity's rationale for a decision that causes a disparate impact. Having a good reason isn't enough. You've gotta show it's a good reason, that this reason is specifically integral to your entity's mission, and that there's no less discriminatory alternative. It's hard to fathom ever being certain that there are zero less discriminatory ways to go about any major policy decision. And the DOJ can marshal resources for consultants to fight each of these points against a local government without those resources.
The net effect is that government decisionmaking is constrained to avoid legal headaches. AKA the story of American governance since the 70s.
Isn't it though? It's basically just a condition that is required before bringing a case against a hiring or housing practice. The burden of proof is on the plaintiffs to prove that there is a less impactful alternative that should have been considered.
Disparate impact is not *evidence* that something is wrong - it *is* something wrong. Sometimes it can be outweighed if there is a good reason for the activity that is causing the disparate impact, but if you are holding your events at the same time that school gets out, and discover that as a result, parents aren’t able to go to the events, that *is* a problem, regardless of whether or not anyone intended any harm to parents.
I love interventions to make things easier for parents, but I think all this micro disparate impact stuff is to egalitarianism what banning plastic straws is to environmentalism. Each time you push one of these interventions from the top down, you’re risking annoyance and blowback, and even if you get lucky and stay under the radar, the net gains are tiny.
(If the net gains weren’t tiny, why haven’t the parents on the committee already successfully pushed for different meeting times?)
I share the gut feeling to some extent, but then it's a tough question why to care about disparate impact for these racial categories, which are socially constructed and unnatural, and not about disparate impact for other cobbled-together categories. Or categories that are objective, like length of your toes or something.
Ouch, your examples of diversity classification at Vox brought back memories of how I, a mainland-born second generation Puerto Rican, got denied entry into a Hispanic Scholarship Program because of my surname. Damn you, great-great-great Croatian Immigrant grandfather!
And I went to grad school with a white woman who got a minority scholarship on the basis of her Hispanic surname. Which was her married name (and she was by then divorced from the original owner of that name).
Way back when, in those Jimmy Carter years, I was a teaching assistant at a major midwestern university. I was a recently-arrived foreign student from Asia. In my first class (IIRC), one of the young men asked me, "Do you consider yourself white or black?" I was genuinely confounded at the notion that the world was neatly divided between those two categories. I said, "Um, I consider myself brown, actually." He and some other students were not pleased with my response, since to them I was clearly evading the question.
I would add: Progressives are obsessed with identity based diversity, and could not care less about diversity of ideas. They would prefer 100 people, all of whom can claim a different identity of some kind, who all agree in the same Progressive ideas than a far less diverse room, where people have some profound disagreements. But I assure you, if your goal is to get more ideas out of a discussion: you will get more interesting debates between 10 white guys who all voted for different candidates, than 10 women who are all each a different identity, but all voted for Harris.
This is on point and goes with my assertion that insufficient attention is being paid to *feminine* groupthink that has driven the Democrats' brand for too long. This groupthink is recognized but not its source, which keeps us from addressing the problem at the root. This groupthink also drives progressive institutions that Nate Silver has called the indigo blob. I've only seen groupthink among liberal women, and the odd woman who disagrees is socially outcast (hello) and loses friends. THAT is why people hate democrats, including me, despite having been one my whole life. Women are allergic to debate and it immediately turns personal and emotional, as though the person is being attacked rather than the idea.
You’d probably get more traction if you avoided normative statements like “Women are allergic to debate,” as well as curious ones like “I’ve only seen groupthink among liberal women.”
Women are, indeed, allergic to debate writ large. It should be self evident that I’m not referring to every single woman out there. I am fine with my normative statements because they reflect my actual experience out in life. No one is going to study this, your statement can’t be proven as false. However, pattern recognition is a thing. I see the pattern of women being both allergic to debate and likely to fall for groupthink because we have been shown to be highly agreeable according to studies of the big five personality traits.
“No one is going to study this”— I think you are wildly biased here. You’re telling me no one ever has and will not any time soon study whether women are more inclined toward agreement than disagreement? (Seems like a reasonable proxy for what you’re saying.)
I don’t think the blunt and unnuanced phrasing helps anything at all. A well articulated problem, issue, or question has a much higher likelihood of getting a good solution.
And if your personal experience has you only ever seeing groupthink among liberal women, I think you’re just living in a bubble.
"Progressives are obsessed with identity based diversity, and could not care less about diversity of ideas. "
That's not entirely true -- it's usually explicitly claimed in corporate DEI programs (in my experience) that racial/ethnic/gender/etc. diversity promotes diversity of thought.
I've always disliked the choice of the word "privilege" for the opposite of "being discriminated against", and this sentence is why:
"But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence."
I'm sorry, but no. That's not a privilege, that's something everyone should expect as part of their basic humanity. The fact that only some people get that treatment isn't a privilege - an unearned and unfair advantage - but a sign that everyone else is being unjustly discriminated against.
And I'm notoriously one of the most screamingly-woke people in this comments section. If I'm bristling every time I see a reference to the concept of privilege, then I dread to imagine what more centrist or conservative people's reactions are like.
Yes, absolutely on point here. I’m a 58-year-old white male. I was a GenX latchkey kid. Grew up poor in apartments. Dad didn’t pay his child support. Never felt “privileged” in any way. In fact, things like forced desegregation and affirmative action were obstacles to overcome. I didn’t mind. But, a lot of white males my age did. Some are racists, but most are not. True, it would have been harder for me if I were black. But it was still hard. Diminishing people’s hard work and telling them that their success is due to “privilege” is offensive. The bigger problem I see now is there are barriers to advancement in society existing now that weren’t there when I grew up. I was able to work my way through a public university, get a decent job with a four-year degree, and buy a house on my salary. Fix those problems and quit worrying about labels, please!
I'm a 69-year-old very liberal white guy who has stayed away from calling myself progressive just because there have always been too many purity hoops to jump through. My complaint with "privilege" is not the concept itself, since I think it describes my reality pretty well, but with the infuriating failure of the left in the last 50 years to recognize CLASS as a reality in America. I come from the upper-middle class and the advantages I had were powerful. I have had to try to undo an upbringing of unmitigated snobbery (still have traces of it), and the people I was brought up to disdain were not people of color, but lower-class whites. I know full well why a lot of unprivileged white people hate people like me.
Sure, but people can’t necessarily tell class from looking at you. There is a real disadvantage to “_____ while black” that doesn’t exist even for poor whites.
I agree that I don't have the disadvantage of being black, etc. I worked in inner-city Bay Area schools for almost 30 years and was married to a Mexican woman. I'm not a fool! So if it's a competition, yes - black people and native Americans have/have had it the worst, followed by other people of color, etc. (not to mention women - including white women). But do you think that Greg Steiner (above) is wrong about his experience? Is he just one more self-pitying white man who really has nothing to complain about? And, btw, can you always tell a lesbian/gay man just by looking at them? When you can't, does it mean that heterosexual privilege isn't real and doesn't affect them?
Well, I'm not complaining about anything except this bias we have about pre-judging people based on race, sexuality, where you went to school, or whatever. If we feel the need to judge someone, anyone, judge them on whether or not they took best advantage of the opportunities presented to them. Our responsibility as a society (or at least an American society) is to ensure that these opportunities exist for everyone.
Keep trying!
Unfortunately “entitlement,” though more appropriate, has negative connotations as well
Yeah whenever ppl bring up not being discriminated against as “white privilege” my response (that I mostly keep to myself) is always “wow so white privilege is awesome; we should be fighting to extend white privilege to everyone!”
That’s what I always say in all discussions of privilege. Whatever privilege is being talked about is usually a good thing, that we want everyone to have, not a bad thing we should be getting rid of.
And it’s a good thing they chose a positive word, “privilege”, for it!
By definition privilege is a relative term though! If everyone has it, then no one has it.
I didn't mind that mention of privilege. But then I googled the term "privilege", and from some articles I saw, I figure it probably suffers from some severe motte and bailey syndrome: it both points at a legitimate and pretty uncontroversial concept, but is simultaneously used to advance a particular social agenda. And the term is not applied even-handedly to all kinds of privileges one might think of. (For example, "incel" is considered an acceptable insult, even though you could instead imagine a world where "incels" are considered to be suffering from lack of some kind of sex- or relationship-related privilege.)
It would be useful to have a term for unearned (or not-100%-earned) individual advantages: like being young or healthy or smart, being born in a first-world country, growing up with two parents, etc. However, if the term has so much baggage and so many cross-pressured connotations (like separating people into the privileged and the oppressed, as if not every person has *some* kinds of privileges; or making it sound like successful people don't "deserve" their success due to privileges they started with), then I'm not sure it can, or should, be rescued.
I’m not looking to start a fight, but I think the habit of getting worked up about word choice in the absence of substantive disagreement is part of how we ended up in the mess we’re in.
I think framing as privilege has led the discussion astray and alienates the “privileged” without providing any help to those who don’t get the benefit of the doubt by making it seem as if it’s something that should be taken away from some rather than extended to all.
I was literally just about to write this when I scrolled to your comment.
Thank you.
The reason progressives inverted "disadvantaged", which arguably focuses on people who haven't gotten a fair shake into "privilege" which arguably focuses on a kind of condition above the law is simple. If you spend all your time asking the public majority for a fair shake, the public gets to decide the claim at their convenience. We should help the disadvantaged, but how much can be debated carefully.
If on the other hand, the public majority is accused of having a kind of special condition above the law, it forces them to debate the claim and their personal honor immediately. It's not clear to me King would object to an argument that immediately demanded white people to explain their personal honor in the status quo of America. Are they simply walking on by, or are they urging their legislature to pass progressive policy aims? That's the whole point of unpopular activism; to crystalize inaction as taking a side. Privilege discourse in the 2010s was simply the latest version of doing this.
King believed America should fund the military less and pour large resources into big public employment projects. But most Americans think the military plays a critical role advancing US security interests and big public employment projects don't do much good for the economy, especially not for the taxes paid into them. I think Yglesias doesn't discuss why Nixon and Reagan got elected for a reason in this piece. It helps him work out a special position that ultimately is quite compatible with what the "ignore the economists" policy hands in the Democratic party want on higher education and other forms of new expansive spending while insisting on a different rhetorical valence. But it's notable the American people ultimately agreed with King on passing civil rights laws and disagreed with King on greater socialist policy. That's why they elected Nixon and Reagan, who kept civil rights reforms while trying their best to reign in all the expansive spending mid-century Democrats wanted.
Now that you juxtaposed them, it seems to me that the military really is actually also a "big public employment project".
I think you are right that people engaged in "unpopular activism" deliberately inverted _disadvantaged_ into _priviledged_ to cattle prod everyday (lethargic, disengaged) people into having to defend their status as the default in society. The question is whether making the majority of Americans feel defensive is an effective way to advance these goals. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? That is an empirical question. Matt is arguing, and I agree, that it is ultimately counterproductive.
Sure - but isn't Matt's project about shifting the public discourse and political process of the country _toward_ a outcomes closers to Kings economic vision? Some of that comes in the for persuasion for the ends, making case that broad prosperity in the frame he envisions is worthwhile in general and specifically valuable for those on the broad left. And second he tries to argue for the formation of a coalitions that can achieve those ends. The means matter, which requires compromise, addressing reality rather than desires both the sense of political reality and analysis of the social sciences and policy impact.
With an abundance agenda though, we should be able to afford that rising tide that lifts all boats.
Curious what word could substitute for privilege - deference?
I don't know - and the whole reframing it to be about the people who are treated fairly rather than those treated unfairly is a useful reframing - but I just want a word that says "this is how people should be treated", not "this is an illegitimate unfair advantage".
I don't think privilege is a bad word in its pre-woke context. It just has been overused to the point where it has kind of been stripped of any meaning.
Depends on context. Saying that you feel privileged is a mark of humility. Depending on tone, calling another person “privileged” is often a synonym for “spoiled brat” and has been for as long as I can remember.
The way I see it is that everyone is privileged in some matters, and oppressed in others--with of course differing proportions of each for each person.
And that’s the entire point of intersectionality, that we should stop trying to say that some groups are more discriminated against and others are less so, and instead just identify the unique mixtures that people have, so we can try to eliminate the negatives for everyone.
Strongly agreed, and that's how I blatantly use the term intersectionality, which I think has far more worth than identifying only some sort of super oppressed subgroups of people.
But in the context of exactly what Matt is saying, it is literally an unfair advantage.
"We stop everyone who speeds, and search their car for guns, but we'll just tell the white teenagers to scram" is the very definition of privilege. The white teenagers get to skip something that everyone else has to endure.
"But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence"
This sentence is about how governments routinely argue for systemic policies that they then exempt the majority population (in our case, usually, white males) from being subject to. This is privilege. It's all well and good to argue that "nobody" should be subject to these things, but that's not what actually happens. We pass broken windows laws, or we give the TSA extra powers, etc, knowing implicitly that the burden will not fall equally on everyone (and no, I am not just talking about demographic math, I mean that we all know that the police and other institutions will use bias in the execution).
That is a privilege. You don't have to feel personally responsible for the existence of the privilege, no one is asking you for your guilt, but it's also not helpful for you to deny the existence of privilege.
Consider sex instead of race re: crime and your logic falls very flat.
Female privilege is blatant here (as it obviously should be) and yet somehow people always want to talk about white males.
Until stereotype accuracy fails, pretending otherwise is just moral magical thinking.
The point of intersectionality thinking is to identify privilege and discrimination everywhere, even among people we usually think of as having only one or the other.
The problem with “intersectionality” is that its proponents are generally extremely biased at applying it across categories and contexts because they also have insane foundational beliefs re: biology, power dynamics, economics, etc.
It means “privilege” and “systemic X” are a “heads I win; tails you lose” game where certain characteristics are inherently worse than others in a sacred ranking of oppression.
"You don't have to feel personally responsible for the existence of the privilege, no one is asking you for your guilt"—sadly, I know people who very earnestly expect people to feel guilty for having white privilege, for having male privilege, etc. There is a segment of the activist left who take useful concepts and push them into untenable places, then feel like they're good people because they do.
Certain majority groups having different variations of "privileges" seems pretty endemic in any pluralistic society. But maybe someone could point to another place that does it slightly better--and what their strategy is? (Canada, Australia maybe? I'm all ears!)
I usually try to explain white privilege by referring to it as white benefit of the doubt. Privilege makes people defensive because it sounds like they've been given a helping hand up, which many white people haven't, and even those who have HATE the idea that they didn't earn something by their own hard work.
Benefit of the doubt reframes it as being more neutral in its benefit, but captures that people don't automatically assume white people are up to no good, which often happens to black and hispanic people.
Advantaged?
I don't have much of a problem with the word 'privilege' in this context. Basically, it's all relative. I think I get the objection, but from the perspective of, say, a 20 year old Black man in dreadlocks who gets heavily scrutinized every time he steps into a drug store or mall—and who is far more likely to get pulled over by the police when he's behind the wheel—the advantage that *white* 20 year old males have in this area must indeed seem like privilege.
> Curious what word could substitute for privilege - deference?
"Blindness"
I've always thought of it more as "minority handicap" than "white privilege".
+1000
Must human societies have discriminated pretty harshly against some sort of out group— slaves, peasants, foreigners, women. Not falling into any of those buckets (and being born in an era of peace and prosperity) is a privilege. Better to play the natural lottery as a black american in 2024 than a white Briton in 1924
Well, sure, Mr. Gadsden. And the term has generated resentment because it ascribes privilege to facially under-privileged white people in poverty, etc. It means "white advantage," but that phrase has no rhetorical power and things like being given a pass by the cops when speeding are not just advantage--there is a type of in-group behavior involved that "privilege" denotes and advantage doesn't.
It's the nature of of language that words have histories, ambiguities, ranges of emotional expressiveness, greater or lesser rhetorical power, and so forth. Sometimes you can't tell where the balance lies until a phrase spreads. "Defund the police" was used by true abolitionists and also by those who reasonably wanted to shift some funding to social service personnel--turns out that the latter should have used the slogan "reallocate public safety funding," but in the moment that would not have conveyed the political mood.
People are smart enough that they can figure these things out, but they're also smart enough to find the weaknesses in public speech and use those to pursue whatever opposing message they themselves want to convey. I'm unsympathetic with most woke frameworks--I'm a vanilla liberal--but I think "white privilege" was a pretty good coinage. I'm not interested in defending it because the issue is getting people to recognize what what it denotes, not how it denotes it, but I also think those who dislike it should just push the message in whatever terms work for their specific audiences, because the underlying point is valid.
This is a good piece. I see the current situation as arising from a very backward looking, and also somewhat lazy failure to grapple with the realities of modern demographic changes in the US. The case for the kinds of affirmative action and race consciousness that's evolved into modern DEI, etc. was never without flaws. But I think it made a kind of sense immediately after the civil rights movement, when the country was something like 85% 'white', immigration restrictions had rendered nearly everyone in that 'white' category to be pretty assimilated, and virtually every living 'black' person in the country had experienced Jim Crow, either de jure or de facto.
However we are not that country anymore. The question that needs to be asked is what exactly we're trying to achieve in 21st century America and whether these ideas are conducive to it.
Love the Jose yglesias interview snippet. Pretty cool. Agree good and timely article. Liberal friends at large institutions with significant DEI pretty unanimously believe they are either unhelpful or actually counterproductive (why are u asking me how this search for a chair of my department will advance diversity? Do u want me to pick someone of a certain race or gender? Make sure I interview at least one Black candidate? I am not even sure what is expected or appropriate in this situation.). I agree with not judging people based on skin or sexual orientation. I also very much support common sense initiatives to make sure certain groups have the opportunity to succeed on their own merits in areas where they have not thus far for varying reasons. For example the Rooney rule in the nfl required all head coaching positions to include one Black candidate for interview. A lot of people were skeptical when it was instituted but I think it has been a very affective program that allowed Black candidates to shine on their own merits resulting in a lot of subsequent head coaching and assistant coaching positions. Should serve as a model. Pipeline issues in education, leveling up public education in areas in need, making sure executive and subexecutive positions are manageable for people with families, etc. i think there is a lot that could be done in these areas.
I disagree on using the Rooney rule as a model. The NFL is unique in which at least a majority of its players are Black, and since almost all coaches were once players, it's an unusual example as to why there is disproportion there relative only to within the league itself. The Black/White ratio of coaches has also oscillated up and down in recent seasons.
I'd definitely like to see more Black NFL owners. The all white country club vibe could definitely use a shake up.
Isn't that kind of the antithesis of today's manifesto? I honestly can't see anything but really cringe reasons for caring about this sort of thing.
I'd also say that any Black person who could afford to buy an NFL team is not going to feel out of place at a country club. NASCAR having a number of non-white team owners doesn't really change anything there, for example.
I'm not sure it's the antithesis. But something I struggle with is that there are obvious issues with the way affirmative action programs or diversity quotas for executive boards are implemented, but I still think it's important to have diversity in elite society.
In this case, yeah it probably wouldn't change anything in the way the NFL owners operate as a collective. But that doesn't change the fact that it'd be nice in a majority Black league to see an owner who is Black too.
The players themselves are quite elite, economically and socially.
Would it follow that it would be nice to see more Black kickers in a majority Black league? Or more White players in a majority white country? Or is it that there isn't a single one that is the problem?
Again, it's hard for me to see how this matters. This isn't the military, where team owners send young men to die and it's important that as much connection as possible is made. This is going to be a group of 32 very rich guys, whatever color their skin is. Do we think they aren't giving Black men the chance to succeed in their organizations? If it's not that, why on earth would you care?
I think teams having individual owners is a flawed paradigm. It gives too much power to people who clearly have more "important" priorities than the team. I think the Green Bay Packers model should be the default, since the "city" owns the team through its "fans," and legally can never move. This means that the long-term interests of the managers and the fans are aligned, and any excess gains flow to the municipality and organization rather than particular people. And I can assure that every resident of Wisconsin is symbolically invested in the team even if they don't live near Green Bay.
Well, obviously
A propos of another of Matt’s points: is Shahid Khan “white?”
Then you run into a pipeline problem, you need more black billionaires first.
There's a pretty small list of those who could afford it: https://businessday.ng/life-arts/article/meet-americas-richest-black-billionaires-of-2024/
And the richest of them all was pushed to purchase the team that we root for...until this got this exposed: https://nypost.com/2022/07/04/robert-f-smith-haunted-by-tax-scandal-after-losing-race-for-denver-broncos-sources/
Instead, we are now on board with saying that Walmart Is Good, Actually.
Right, I meant more ownership group. I believe Magic Johnson was in discussion for a period of time.
There's plenty of Black people in ownership groups--Condi Rice and Lewis Hamilton are with the Broncos now--but it's controlling ownership that really matters. Without that, you're just along for the ride with some added perks.
He's in the Commanders group:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/magic-johnson-officially-joins-nfls-commanders-co-owner-rcna95341
Only eight NFL head coaches played in the league.
But most played football on at least the college level.
But in college, especially outside of D1, the racial player disparities are much less pronounced.
Presumably it's a fairly different skillset anyway, combined with the simple fact that motivations are never going to be distributed equally. It's somewhere between difficult and impossible to account for those two factors.
Long-story short, I don't think it's possible to look at % players black and % coaches black and really say much that is meaningful
This just makes the Rooney Rule less useful outside of where it used, which is my entire point.
I agree the Rooney rule is not a good model for broader society (though something like it is kind of implicit in many hiring searches I’ve been involved with) but it’s also not the case that one needs to have played NFL football in order to be a good coach. I agree there’s a big optics issue with how it used to be, with so few black coaches, but insisting that the percentage of black players in the NFL equal the percentage of black coaches seems overly prescriptive.
The Rooney rule is a good model for broader society. If you are in hiring, you should think about opportunities to add someone less typical to you interview pool. It can be a model without being mandated by law.
I don't think anyone played from Shanahan's tree - including now McVay's coaching tree - which are all the dominating offensive gurus. Fun fact Mike Shanahan wasn't even his high school's starting quarterback. It's evidently clear that coaching and playing football are wildly different skills.
lol the fact that the most influential coach in the league is an obvious nepo hire from the beginning is pretty interesting.
It is somewhat unfortunate for meritocracy but I have to wonder if growing up inside the game is helpful. The number of NBA player kids who are doing well is more than a coincidence or that can be explained by genetics. But idk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_second-generation_NBA_players
Kyle played at Texas alongside his good bud Chris Simms.
And just hearing Mike Shanahan's tree triggers me into being extremely angry that he *still* can't get nominated to the Hall Of Fame! It's so ridiculous.
Almost all coaches once played football, but not all coaches played in the NFL. A lot of good NFL coaches lack the talent to play in the league, and a lot of good players don’t end up being good coaches. It’s clear that the “relevant applicant pool” is not just former players, so even if you’re doing a bean-counting analysis, comparing the number of Black head coaches to the number of Black players is the wrong comparator. NFL owners draw from a pool that consists primarily of NFL offensive and defensive coordinators, and to a lesser extent college head coaches and special teams coordinators. (John Harbaugh and Mike Ditka both coached special teams before head coaching.) So who the hell knows the racial composition of the qualified applicant pool. But it’s not the player pool.
The other problem is that there are only 32 head coaching jobs in the NFL. We wouldn’t expect precise statistical parity with such a small number. And honestly -- who cares? It’s 32 jobs. Are Black Americans-- 40 million or so -- really impacted by this?
The Rooney Rule, by the way, is clearly unlawful and would lose in court. No owner is going to challenge it, but it would lose.
Given what Gorsuch said in SFFA v. Harvard/UNC, I've been curious if a coach who knows his career is likely going to be done soon would file suit and argue that the Rooney Rule violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Jack Del Rio immediately comes to mind as a plaintiff who'd highly fit the bill.
I used to assume that a coach who launched a lawsuit would be blacklisted from the NFL -- after winning the suit he might not get a job anyway. However, the fact that the Minnesota Vikings hired Brian Flores as Defensive Coordinator after he filed suit against his former employer made me question that.
And, honestly, one problem is who the hell knows who's going to be a winning head coach? Buddy Ryan was a great defensive coordinator, but never really broke through as a head coach. Bill Bellichek was fired and didn't really get seriously considered for another head coaching job, despite six Super Bowls. For the first twenty years of his career, Andy Reid looked like a perennial makes-the-playoffs-and-chokes head coach, like Bud Grant or Marv Levy or Don Coryell, but he's won three of the last five Super Bowls! (I am convinced it would have been four out of five if his idiot son hadn't crashed into that car and badly injured that poor girl.)
Successful NFL coaching really is a weird shot in the dark thing.
Only a minority of head coaches played professionally. I’m not at all sure a majority of college players are black, especially if you look beyond D1
Already discussed downthread--this just makes my point stronger.
I could not agree more. As US continues to diversify, both from immigration population from various parts of the world as well as from interracial marriages, the only group deserving of affirmative action is African American descendants of slaves, which gets increasingly harder to prove. The way to address inequities between different groups is to do so through the political process (congressional representative from a black majority region directing federal funds to their district etc.) and through private means (setting up more colleges similar to Howard University that cater exclusively to black applicants). Everything else should remain color blind even if that is unfair to African Americans and Hispanics. The hope is, over time, these groups will catch up with the other groups.
The same applies for areas such as sports where African Americans and Whites enjoy a huge advantage over Asians, and over time Asians might become more competitive in sports too.
Sorry to pick on these specific examples, but they are both pretty far from a path forward due to specifics:
"congressional representative from a black majority region directing federal funds to their district etc.". There are only 25 or so majority black districts, that number is likely to fall, and most are barely majority. There's virtually no way I could see that they are going to somehow get federal funding their districts over-and-above what any other 25 candidates could do, through appealing to identity politics. The MLK lift-up-all-the-poor idea is the only workable one.
And outside of a few exceptions the HBCUs that exist are mostly struggling to maintain enrollment, or they are diversifying. They made sense 100 years ago, but segregated colleges are not really a path forward for anyone.
Also - there's nothing whatsoever unfair to Hispanics about being colorblind. What other possible and reasonable version of non-colorblindness could be fair to Hispanics?
I actually agree with all your points. My point was that congressional reps trying to get extra funding for their people and/or creating segregated colleges are the only ways left, whether they are effective or not. As you argue convincingly, they are not.
Putting Steve Cohen and Bennie Thompson in charge of all taxing and spending is a solution I can get behind
From our fellow reader and occasional commenter Fareed Zakaria: https://www.dailycamera.com/2020/11/07/opinion-fareed-zakaria-democrats-just-dont-get-minorities/amp/
“Let me give you a personal example to explain one minority mindset. Ever since I applied for a scholarship to colleges in the United States 39 years ago, I have almost always left blank the line on forms that ask for my ethnic or racial classification (except when it is legally required, as in the census).
I don’t feel right piggybacking on tragedies that have affected Black people, Native Americans and others who have truly faced discrimination. But most of all, to quote a great American, I have always wanted to be judged by the content of my character, not the color of my skin.
The Democratic Party should remember that, for many minorities, our greatest aspiration is simply to be regular Americans – treated no worse, but no better, either.”
A GOAT! When did he previously comment?
In one of the threads I posted before I started college about the book I was reading for class
Good quote.
But is it required to give your ethnic or racial classification on the Census? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I thought you could fill in as much or as little to none as you wanted there.
You are correct
The fetishization of victim status, reliance of grievance, and accusations of harm all are very anti-Christian. There is no room for patience or forgiveness, but rather a series of excuses for people to act on their worst impulses and lash out at others.
I'm aware not everybody here is a Christian and I don't want to imply that only Christians can navigate the race question deftly (millions don't, otherwise we wouldn't be having this conversation), but I do find that the Christian worldview kind of wraps up the race question nicely. Right now, the Kendist left can't handle racial disparities because it means there must be something wrong with the applied standard. For instance, if White and Black students don't have the exact same average SAT score, the SAT must be racist, full stop. Meanwhile, on the much creepier post-Christian right, if White students do better on the SAT than Black students on average, this proves White people are superior, full stop (embrace your Jewish and Asian overlords then I guess?) I have no problem just embracing MLK's logic and saying that it doesn't matter if group X averages a better score on some metric than group Y because we're all made in the image and likeness of God and of infinite worth. On top of that, the boundaries of these categories are kind of bullshit anyways, and these things can change over time, and oh yeah, we treat people as individuals here, so some collective bit about SAT scores or whatever doesn't rattle my worldview to its core, but we seem to be having a problem with that right now.
One thing I think Christian teaching do is reenforce humility and stress human fallibility. The great sin I see among the left is the level of confidence, pride, and arrogance they express. They are moral, just, and epistemically correct with certainty. Those not in the tribe, are amoral, uneducated, misinformed, and inherently wrong with certainty. There is little interest in knowing or learning, and all this self confidence serves only to alienate us from others.
The epistemic certainty across our politics is driving me insane. People will say "it's ok for me to be an asshole if I'm right" and then not be right.
Among Republicans their epistemological certainty under GWB drove me to the Democrats. Now I am more comfortable expressing my more socially conservative views (I guess normie 2010 Democratic views.) That and the freaking commies invading Ukraine in 2022.
The "pro-Iraq War, anti-Ukraine" faction is wild. It's like they wake up every day and think "how can I be wrong about everything?"
The amount of articles and even real-world anecdotes I hear about people cutting off communication with family for political views is really wild. Especially when they are framed in terms of those views being literal violence.
It happened in my family. That relative has since rejoined the family but it still hasn't been addressed that this person declared all of us beyond the pale and then pretended nothing happened.
There is plenty of epistemelogical certainty among various Christian groups of my acquaintance (primarily right-leaning Evangelical or Catholic groups). Sins of pride everywhere. And no insight that they are not remotely following Jesus (but sure, let's put bibles in schools to make everybody behave better).
Hey, at least a Bible is a book. Kids don't read any books in school now apparently (I am joking about the first bit but not the second bit which is fairly serious.)
I have been calling Evangelicals pagans who worship wealth and power for a long time, and there is a reason they are shrinking relative to other denominations. There are lots of people who belong to religions who don't really consider the tenants of faith.
Or the tenets of their faith, even.
Agreed about the worship of wealth and power.
Something I never appreciated when younger is (1) how historically recent and unusual the concept of "we're all equals in human dignity and should treat each other accordingly" is, and (2) how much of a role Christianity, whatever you may think of its metaphysical claims, had to play in this concept.
Universal human dignity is a "progressive" idea in the original sense of the word. A step forward for humanity.
A very curious wrinkle of the right wing, up to and including white supremacists, is how comfortable they all are with Asians overperforming whites. Like they'll work up all sorts of absurd theories or conspiracies to explain away any achievements by blacks or hispanics, and love to trot out 150 year old anti-Semitic talking points for Jews.
For Asians on the other hand, their answer is usually something like "yeah, they're really smart" They'll denigrate Asians in other ways but usually have something like a grudging respect for their intelligence.
Very often the answer is just "of course asians living in the West do well, these are a highly selected immigrants and recent descendants of immigrants."
Yes but the same is absolutely true of West Africans and I don't see those guys giving the same due respect to Nigerian immigrants.
Are they even aware of West African immigrants? That's a pretty small group without a lot of visibility.
I mean I think there's some truth to that. We're mostly not getting pure randos from China or India.
The history of stereotypes about Asians being smart are in justifying discrimination against black people. Asian success is proof that white-black racial disparities are a result of inferiority or lack of effort.
The writer and podcaster Tom Holland (on The Rest Is History) talks a lot about the relationship between Christianity and wokeness. One of his big themes
is that some of the ideas you list are quintessentially Christian, in particular the celebration (I am deliberately using a more positive word than you) of victim status. He views modern day wokeness as an esoteric Godless branch of evangelical Christianity.
It’s true that today’s woke people aren’r so into turning the other cheek, but that is a also true of many Christian political movements historically!
I can sort of relate because I roughly recall being a militant atheist who found Nietzsche quite exciting ~23 years ago as a fifteen-year-old. Maybe this pre-Christianity framing feels particularly viscerally satisfying to some people, at some times? Honestly, I’m rather struggling to put this into words.
I imagine this felt similar to the excitement my friends and I also felt about Fight Club and Rage Against the Machine, for anyone who recalls similar feelings. I also recall my friends not appreciating an over-intellectualization, and that was good feedback in a way I may not have appreciated at the time.
Hopefully, someone finds this comparison useful in understanding how someone with an overly active mind could feel the need to overly complicate their appreciation of rebellious movies or songs.
I read Nietzsche back in 2009 and I kind of lump him in with Aristotle. It is all about controlling one's impulses and when to act. A virtuous person can moderate and avoid overindulgence. Many people must swear off such impulses, because they lack the ability to properly practice agency.
As I have aged I have identified more with Platonism and his notion of being. There is an underlying order to the universe we are divining through mathematics and when we look to the heavens we see massive entities sing with a rhythmic harmony. Catholicism takes a lot from Plato and later Aristotle (who Martin Luther despised). Forgiveness takes humility and frees us from the burdens of resentment. It is a gift to oneself, not a charity to others.
Then again there is young man testosterone making us impulsive.
Yeah, I've since read some as an adult, and that all sounds reasonable now to the extent I recall anything. I even have an audiobook on existentialism that I'm working through, and I'm appreciating the broader themes in the movement.
I also agree that testosterone is a sufficient explanation for my previous interpretation.
You're totally right about the absence of patience and forgiveness, and this is one of the ugliest aspects of contemporary progressivism. But the experience of victimhood is central to Christianity and was a critical part of how it spread.
I'm not here to trash Christianity, but I think it's fair to say that stories about the suffering of martyrs fetishized victimhood. That was a huge factor in its initial popularity and part of the reason it spread first among the lower (despised) classes, which is relevant to understanding the topic today.
The meek shall inherit the earth and centering faith to those least among us in a time of when Pagan venerated and worshiped power was a powerful social invention. Human worth is greater than the chains those above us bind us in.
I think the difference between how Christianity views martyrdom (self sacrifice) and victim status is that it isn't used as a justification for transgressing against others. It highlights the unjustness of violence and the arbitrariness of our places in life.
When I see how the Left uses hierarchies of oppression and grievance politics it seems a vain attempt by privileged people to enhance their status. Why else to high income and highly educated persons contort themselves as somehow disadvantaged or oppressed? Why do they advocate for policies that harm the least among us (e.g. defunding the police)? Why are they often so cruel and quick to lash out?
I have been reading books about some saints, specifically Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Siena, and Augustine. Their lives are fascinating. My husband and I were discussing whether people like this would merely be considered mentally ill (but look at all they achieved!!) today or whether we are overlooking saints in our midst as being kooks. Or maybe a little of both. I do think we need a little more humility and awareness of sin in our lives today, but taken too far or the wrong way, it can just lead to shame and self-loathing, which is not helpful.
This bracing essay might be relevant: https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/smart-people-are-especially-prone
One thing that bothers me is how much educated people express epistemological certainty and lack humility. There is a whole language and discourse denigrating people with less income and educational status. I know I am fallible in the context of the article you link (especially when it comes to economics. I was very slow to accept the salience of the inflation drag on public sentiments.)
It must be a failure of my own ability to imagine, but I have a hard time understanding a good faith criticism of the views Matt articulates about this topic.
Saying this as someone who agrees with Matt's writeup, as well as your general viewpoint as expressed in your comments across the SB posts. I don't really agree with the points below (especially when thinking of second order consequences), but I think they'd be part of the pushback.
1. Systems and legacies. Lots of studies show longterm stickiness of issues of slavery and Black-specific racial discrimination. There was a recent NBER paper that showed variation of slavery exposure played out in meaningful economic outcomes today (the specific paper doesn't matter, if you follow academic twitter you see this genre occur frequently among papers authored by high quality researchers). The argument: you and your friends beat me and then said, "ok, let's all move past the beatings and not dwell on them." There needs to be explicit uneven treatment of the wounds after the beatings, even putting aside the issue of punishment.
2. Neutrality. Equality as a concept is never actually equal and always makes some new form of inequality. One of the deeper "critical" claims is that the race and identity focus also says that people shouldn't have to sacrifice portions of themselves to conform to the predominantly White European migrant culture and mindset in the name of equality. It's less that "judge by the content of your character" is a problem than the criteria for judgement has latent values built into it, values which don't totally align with the historical and cultural particularities of, say, an ADOS Black woman. That is, established criteria of judgement of "judge by the content of your character" forces more sacrifice for some than others.
3. Human groups cannot vary. I've seen on more than one occasion leaders in demography / public health / public policy / epidemiology spaces say that literally all residual variation of health, economic, and social outcomes among groups are by definition racism (or sexism, sexuality discrimination, or immigration discrimination. I've not seen it applied to other meaning systems). From my knowledge of social science statistics I found these statements shocking and conceptually undercooked, but they come from a theoretical orientation that identity groups cannot vary on their means except through ill intent, mistreatment, systems, and/or legacies.
Thanks. Very helpful. I find 1 and 2 more persuasive than 3, but can understand the mindset better.
The thing that bothers me most about 3) is the epistemological certainty of what the cause is in the absence of material evidence as to what mechanism is at play. My wife and her friends (physicians) have been called racist for pointing out to patients they should take a test because they are at a higher risk of "X" due to demographics.
There is an episode about this in every medical drama ever. Doc says "Hey, you should take a test for sickle-cell anemia because you are at risk" and patient says "that's racist", and the rest of the episode grapples with it.
Race not merely being skin deep when relating to medical care breaks a lot of brains who religiously believe such categories to be totally arbitrary/appearance-based.
They also assert racial identity is inherent and immutable when constructing their hierarchies.
Strains my two brain cells with the juxtaposition.
Unfortunately it also breaks the brains of many activists who are enthusiastically devoted to removing all race-based heuristics in healthcare. STAT News, for instance, just ran a big multi-piece campaign centered around the idea that all race-based algorithms in the medical field are inherently invalid and biased, and must therefore be eliminated — potential negative consequences be damned.
Point two pisses me off so much because it’s fundamentally a racist argument. “You can’t expect black women to do well on standardized tests because that’s a Western European way of thinking and their culture is so very different”.
Ok, let’s go with that. How do you explain successful African countries like Kenya vs unsuccessful ones like the DRC? It’s not colonialism!
There were zero white people in the men’s 100 meter final despite the fact that white people have better access to nutrition and training facilities. There were also— and this is where it gets really interesting— zero people from the east african highlands and zero mulattos with light skin. West african genes are good for sprinting, east african highland genes are good for distance running, europeans are holiding on in the middle distances but that may be economic privilege
Why the term “mulatto” instead of “mixed” or “biracial”? You know that it has certain connotations, so why use the more provocative and outdated term instead of the ones most people use to describe people with mixed Black and white ancestry?
It's the kind of talk that makes people understandably wary of people who claim racism is over.
"All this focus on race is unnecessary, what with the blacks and their African genes dominating the sport of running. I find the East African genes reveal those that are best at the distance running, perhaps because their ancestors were chased the furthest by the wildebeests of the highlands in the dark continent. Now as for the mulattos, let me offer some thoughts as to why their representation is below what would be expected..."
Pretending there is no genetic component for athletic ability and correlations to racial populations is silly.
If you’re going to focus on racial (or sexual) disparities, then best to be fair and accurate in the analysis across the board, right?
Hell of a double standard otherwise.
I didn't say there's no genetic component for athletic ability. I was addressing how the person I was replying started talking about regional African genes and their effect on running ability apropos of nothing, as the comment *they* were replying to had nothing to do with sports - and then throwing in a hilariously outdated racial term for good measure.
I've just had enough past in-person experience with people bringing up "well the blacks are good at sports" thing in response to discussion of how in many other areas of American life, black people and other minorities have historically gotten the short end of the stick, that I've come to see it as a way of sort of dodging any idea that there's lingering disadvantage to having darker skin in this country. This isn't to say that I disagree with Yglesias' point that a color-blind society is the correct ideal to aspire to - it is.
Saying that black people are better at some sports on average than white people, while perhaps true, isn't really relevant to most discussions of race and related policies, as athletic ability affects the life prospects of a very small number of people. It's like saying "well, men are better than women at most sports, so no need to worry about a widening gap in educational outcomes between boys and girls."
Is that what most people use it for? When I was young that is European/Native population was referred to in Mexico.
Are you sure you're not thinking of "mestizo"?
I don't remember the difference, but the only time I have earnestly read either the term mulatto or mestizo was in history books about spanish colonialism.
That's literally the only place I've ever heard this term so I found the usage very confusing.
I have not attended the same dei seminars as you. Mulatto is a fine term.
Look David if you want to be edgy you’re entitled to do so. But you’re a smart guy, and I think you know that you’re trying to provoke a reaction here. Would you use “mulatto” before a judge in one of your cases? I think we both know you wouldn’t.
I think DA's use of "mulatto" is hilarious because it makes him sound like Grampa Simpson. It's like calling your jeans "dungarees".
"I'm going to wear an extra pair of suspenders to hold up my dungarees -- you can't be too careful with all these mulattos around!"
Dude, no. I strongly dislike DEI and I still know that “mulatto” is an antiquated word that comes across as offensive today. It makes you sound like you time-traveled here from the 1950s. I didn’t learn that at any DEI seminar, I absorbed it from the culture at large.
i didn’t. and this kind of language policing pushes me away
For you and Archer, but for most folks it's up there with negro. Or quadroon.
This got me wondering if there was a term for someone who was 1/16 black, and of course there was, a "quintroon".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadroon
I like quadroon and octaroon because the meaning is specific
Especially since I always confuse mulatto and mestizo
Or white corners in NFL. Finally one this year
Riley Moss!
And my goodness, his absence a week ago made Jameis Winston look like a superstar again, until he inevitably gave us the full Jameis Winston football experience.
Riley Moss AND Cooper DeJean. We're in a white cornerback renassaince!
(yes I know CDJ is playing a hybrid safety role but still)
I think there's a case than can be made that racial stereotyping is keeping DeJean out of his most effective position, corner. Which is a fairly funny thing to say but won't be funny for him when he's due for a new contract and gets hybrid safety money instead of corner money.
Still one of the best combine videos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f920Fe-u1J8
For point one, Matt links to a piece of his about the same evidence (or lack thereof) that exam schools improve outcomes. This kind of argument is screaming out for the same thing. Would reparations (which is effectively what that is arguing for) actually improve outcomes, or would it just be an expensive feel-good measure that did nothing but engender hostility?
“…the criteria for judgement has latent values built into it, values which don't totally align with the historical and cultural particularities…”
What “latent values” do you perceive in the phrase content of character? I think most people would want to know is this man honest, polite, a good son, a good father, a good husband, a reliable worker, etc.?
What cultures do you believe are looking for other things?
Here's one example, not one that maps onto the Black/white divide, but it should be illustrative:
You are in your friend's car while he's driving way over the speed limit. He hits and injures a pedestrian, and is sued for damages. During the trial, you are called on as a witness and are asked, "Was your friend driving over the speed limit?"
As a person of good character, what do you do? Lie to protect your friend? Or tell the truth? Different cultures have different answers to this question. Specifically, WEIRD and non-WEIRD cultures differ on this. Yet again, I highly recommend the book "The WEIRDest People in the World" by Joseph Henrich.
I think the pushback Matt would get is that this piece is largely an exercise in decoupling, while his interlocutors tend to be contextualizers:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7cAsBPGh98pGyrhz9/decoupling-vs-contextualising-norms
Context is overrated. Used to be underrated but it’s now over.
I think it's a great piece, but one small criticism I have is that "I think the solution to that concern about discriminatory enforcement is to not do it" is a bit glib. Frankly I don't trust a lot of police forces to avoid discriminatory enforcement and would be very interested in hearing ideas for how to prevent it (while also not destroying morale or hampering the ability of police to do their jobs).
Based on most of the research I’ve seen, the conclusion is more resources and more professionalization in the police force leads to less racial bias.
That aligns with my intuitions, although "more resources" is much easier to accomplish and to track than "professionalization" and I worry that many localities will do the former without the latter.
One of the biggest difficulties in police reform is that reformists have no faith that extra funding for police departments will be used for better training, oversight and higher standards instead of machine guns and training seminars on horseshit like excited delirium and fentanyl exposure insta-death.
To change the subject - the same thing happens to moderates in the gun control debate. Most my red-state hunting friends think something akin to a drivers license would be a good step forward, especially the training part. Except that they also think any such proposal would be disingenuous and step toward something like an aussie mandatory buyback.
Any psych nurse will tell you excited delirium is very real, it just doesn’t necessitate lethal doses of ketamine
I work with psych providers all the time, especially ward nurses, and they all say excited delirium is nonsense. It’s telling that I read medical records all day every day and excited delirium only ever shows up in reports written by police officers.
What does "more professionalization" mean?
Formal training. Formal standards for review and promotion. Research and investment into improvements, that gets rolled back into the training and standards.
I agree with Matt’s overall prescription here, but I don’t think it should be too hard to imagine good faith disagreement.
Think of a person who has a strong belief that the effects of the Civil Rights Act and other efforts to abate racism in the US are relatively shallow and tenuous. This person suspects that many Americans— and in particular, many white Americans— are quietly much more racist than they would own up to being in public, and will covertly use whatever levers they can to engage in racial discrimination (particularly against black Americans). In this person’s view, incredibly aggressive legal and cultural efforts to tamp down on and mitigate any sort of statement or practice which might be racially discriminatory— even in very non-obvious ways— and also mitigate the effects of discrimination are warranted.
I don’t think this person’s view is correct in 2024, but it also strikes me as not obviously insane. The pervasiveness, depth, and vitriol of racism in the US during the first sixty years of the 20th century was profound, and the pessimistic worldview I describe above was almost certainly correct during most of the four decades immediately following the passage of the CRA. (The pessimistic view is very common among professional historians for precisely this reason.) And, because the worldview involves covert attitudes, it’s quite difficult to convincingly falsify, especially for people who have plenty of life experience weighing against it.
I’d also add that— especially in the 2010-2020 decade— white Americans souring on Obama and embracing somebody as obviously venial and stupid as Trump provided a lot of apparent confirmation for this point of view.
Now that we have a few more election cycles worth of data, I think that a lot of the backlash against Obama was driven by the fact that he was the first-ever PMC liberal intellectual president who didn’t pretend to be something else, but in 2016, racial animus-driven backlash was the most parsimonious explanation by far.
Your second paragraph is surprising: what sort of evidence or thought process led you away from the second explanation to the first?
My view is that the first explanation was always clear, after accounting for some definitional adjustments, and very few people I know today who believed "the more parsimonious explanation" have changed their minds.
I'd say that one's preferred explanation has always been determined by one's priors - which is to say by the accumulation of hundreds or thousands of tiny experiences and updates, not something that can be settled.
I changed my mind largely because of how racial depolarization among lower-information voters played out during the 2020 and 2024 elections. That’s an event which the “racial resentment” hypothesis wouldn’t have predicted.
On a deeper causal explanation level, I have some combination of cognitive traits which makes me unusually willing to change my mind in response to new evidence (probably much more so than what would be optimal for humans in the evolutionary environment). Probably some combination of high-IQ, high-Openness to Experience, and autism spectrum traits.
I think one thing that people sometimes miss is that there is a real danger in declaring victory too early. I was raised in a liberal-ish, affluent-ish, mostly-white suburb in the 90s and I feel like I really do get a lot of the impulses behind the great awokening because it's something that happened very much amongst "my" people (tangent: I think there are kind of two groups of people who have driven a lot of this discourse on the left and many of the most strident are people who were raised in more conservative or religious environment and bring big "no zealot like a convert" energy to their new found liberalism, I'm not talking about those folks here).
Growing up in the feel good 90s, the history and civics that I was taught at school was very much of the "we used to have racism but now we fixed it and that's why we have MLK day" variety that I think was more in vogue back then. I think a lot of the backlash to that was driven by the real experience of millennials growing up and discovering the ways that that narrative was too simplistic and overdone when we still have, e.g., a racial wealth gap, functional housing segregation, disparate policing impacts, etc. etc. This created a sense not just of persistent unfairness in the system, but the sense that *we had been lied to* by the (well meaning) teachers who talked about racism in the past tense in 1993. And people hate being lied to! This will make many people look for the conspiratorial reason for the lying (enter "white supremacy" and associated concepts) and to push back in a way that is more vigorous than if it seems like they're just learning something new.
And now the pendulum is swinging back the other way again because correctives often go too far. But I imagine this particular pendulum will probably swing a few more times in my life, hopefully with diminishing amplitude. But every reaction has within it the seed of the next reaction, and I think the thing to object to in this framing is that we will see the cycle continue for a while before we get it right.
Expanding the child tax credit is a fine idea, but it will hardly eliminate ghettos or racial gaps. If your focus is on eliminating ghettos and racial gaps, Matt’s policies won’t get you there. For Matt’s formula to resonate, you have to be resigned to continuing, large amounts of racial inequality.
But if you ALSO have a higher EITC, a faster growing economy (YIMNY-ism, low deficits, narrowly sculpted trade restrictions, progressive consumption taxation merit based immigration), expanded Medicaid and ACA, Kathleen Webbers lifetime job retraining, better crime deterrence, public education reform, that should get us closer. Anyway, let's try that and then see what else might be done when we see the results.
I’m on board with Matt’s agenda, I’m pointing out its warts.
I'm trying to expand the agenda.
I'll be eager to see the amount of pushback, if any, Matt gets from this in places I expect, and on Twitter. Or maybe I'll dust off Bluesky to make doubly sure. We'll see if it's down from the peak in 2020, when Matt was getting raked over the coals for observing that BIPOC was linguistic nonsense.
You think the degenerates on bluesky will take some time away from their masturbatory fetishization of the UHC murder to screech at MattY?
Also I will say this whenever I see BIPOC. BIPOC was invented for the purpose of marginalizing and erasing Asians as a minority group.
I am sure I have mentioned this here before because the experience has stuck in my mind for the 2 years since it happened, but I was at an event where I was the only white (White?) person and one of the youngest, even though I am in my 50s. Most of the other people in the program and the speakers were Black. The speaker used the term BIPOC. Almost no one besides me knew what it meant, even though it was being used to refer to them. Many thought it was some sort of "new sexual identity term."
It is odd how many new gender identities have emerged that are just cisgender heterosexuals in practice…..
And not just Asians, either. It was sheer Oppression Olympics nonsense.
I agree with a lot of this piece, but one error I see especially in the comments is people equating “no DEI” with meritocracy. Whereas there is structural bias in favor of white people, eg legacy admissions to elite universities. I agree that police shouldn’t engage in discriminatory enforcement and I’m all for enhanced surveillance state that could enable a more quantitative approach. There are many areas where the measurements of merit are purely subjective (“fit” eg during an interview process) and many examples where disparate outcomes lessen or disappear when people no longer know the race or gender of the person applying (see Claudia Goldin on blind orchestral auditions). Matt does say this but it’s worth being explicit about it - to actually judge people based on merit you still need to actively mitigate biases.
“Whereas there is structural bias in favor of white people, eg legacy admissions to elite universities”
That’s not a structural bias in favor of white people, it’s a bias in favor of a tiny subset of white people.
FYI, the Goldin work on blind orchestra auditions doesn't seem to hold up:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2019/05/11/did-blind-orchestra-auditions-really-benefit-women/
Women actually do slightly worse in blinded auditions.
Matt is also on record as saying that meritocracy is bad: https://www.slowboring.com/p/meritocracy-is-bad
My thoughts are that meritocracy is good, given a baseline cradle-to-grave luxury welfare state for everyone
His article is more nuanced than that. He is against cut-throatism in favor of taking into things like broad morality and human dignity. Which is something we already knew - he isn't a libertarian. But that doesn't mean he isn't in favor of merit and standards ... just that we should try to structurally adjust society to limit winner-takes-all situations.
John, I agree with you, but I sure wish we had more obvious diversity of commenters here. Rather like when we guys debate women's issues, I suspect most of the comments are from white people. Not all rich, well-educated or from comfortable backgrounds of course (as some commenters note) but very few from subpopulations that would suffer from the kind of ingrained suspicion that Matt notes about how you are observed when on the sidewalk or entering a store.
Even if there is a basic truth to Matt's MLK-linked philosophy, it would behoove us to have a better gut feeling for the lived experience of people who are not like us.
For any commenters who *have* lived that life, my apologies, and my request for them to educate the rest of us about what that experience is like.
Except for,
“But it clearly is a privilege to go through life without being subject to negative stereotyping about your intellectual ability or your proclivity for violence.”
The idea that all whites enjoy such a privilege is nonsense.
So my read on this is that I fail to understand what value this chapter of the manifesto really adds. I think we can all agree (maybe I’m wrong though!) in principle that it’s a best practice in a perfect world to “not see color” which is, imo, essentially what this article is arguing without the weird right-codedness the term usually carries.
He mentions a counterpoint that racial mistreatment continues to be a real problem and the response is basically hand waving, saying “we shouldn’t be racist” and cites and anecdotal argument about one time he didn’t receive preferential treatment for being white or white passing as a good example for what that looks like.
Prejudice in the law enforcement system is such a pervasive problem that I’m not sure it’s fair to lump in with the rest of the concerns touched on in the article. It’s just such a massive effort to get cops and judges and DAs everywhere to not be racist (whether they are explicitly or unintentionally) and it deserves more than an offhand reference in a manifesto about identity politics and race.
The point of the manifesto is to find areas of policy agreement that work for both moderate faction Dems in blue places and the Dems running in purple/reddish places.
If we find a cop, a judge, or a DA is intentionally discriminating, that’s bad and we should go after that person. They don’t get to say, as a defense, “But it makes sense for me to discriminate in this context, because statistics.” People who say things like that are not Common Sense Democrats.
But also we’re not going to look at what percentage of prisoners are black, use that statistic to conclude the system as a whole is structurally racist, and so conclude that we should abolish the police or whatever. People who do that second thing are also not Common Sense Democrats.
Do you actually know that there’s rampant prejudice in law-enforcement? I have no doubt that racist cops exist, but so many recent studies seem to be subject to, er, activist capture / motivated reasoning and simply point to disparities in numbers of stops (for example) as evidence of prejudice, which is subject to all the confounders that Matt identifies.
You should have Mississippi Today on your list of newspapers to read…
Can you share the studies? This Pew Report isn’t trying to discern causality and relies on self reports, but points to a pretty plausible conclusion that law enforcement is unfair.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2020/06/03/10-things-we-know-about-race-and-policing-in-the-u-s/
If a large majority of Black people say that they are or have been treated unfairly, my first instinct would be to believe them in aggregate, even if there are cofounders on the margins (like bad faith respondents or the fact that people’s individual perceptions of like events may differ).
Measuring anything to do with crime and the criminal justice system is quite difficult and I don’t think it should be that controversial to state that simply saying “well to fix racism, cops shouldn’t be racist”. That’s a tautology and isn’t really helpful, which is my original point.
It’s true that measuring bias and intent in criminal justice is very hard. That pew poll mostly just shows that in June of 2020 (not shockingly) most people polled expressed the view that police are biased.
Roland Fryer looked into this in 2016 and found the results to be more nuanced. He found that police in NYC were more likely to use non-lethal force against Black citizens but less likely to use lethal force.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/12/upshot/surprising-new-evidence-shows-bias-in-police-use-of-force-but-not-in-shootings.html?
It should be noted that he got excoriated for these findings because they didn’t match the prevailing vibes. There’s a lot of resistance to fact-seeking in this area.
I agree with almost everything but I take some exception to the Youngstown example. There may be no discriminatory intent behind a test that produces racially disparate results but if the test results do not correlate with ability to do the job, then it should not be used.
My wife’s family was basically 100 percent Democrat. They are hard working Chinese and Filipino immigrants that came here with very little and made successful lives.
During the pandemic they saw the chaos and about half of them decided that democrats had lost their damn minds. They are suspicious about republicans but just decided democrats are not serious and don’t care about law and order or the average American family.
They are not hardcore Trump though and could be easily swayed back if democrats would just get some damn sense.
I think the good thing about these type of voters are that they are, in fact, easy to win back. But not if you let them vote GOP multiple cycles in a row.
Yeah, my worry is that Democrats don’t sufficiently deal with the activist class and then some of these voters are gone for a long time. Trumps election wasn’t a conservative revolution but it could become one.
Exactly. A one-time Trump voter is a fluke. A two-time GOP voter is a trend – any more than that and the former Democrat in question is going to start being a lot more comfortable defining themselves as a Republican.
Racism is real. Race is not. If your social justice program relies on the application of some obfuscated version of the one drop test you're not rectifying the harms of a false belief in race you're perpetuating them.
Similarly, the whole "settler colonizer" and "land acknowledgement" discourse is just a repackaging of blood and soil politics. The fact it all stems out of the intellectual justification for genocide in the Algerian War makes it all the more disgusting.
I'd love to know more about how this comes out of the Algerian War. Any articles, etc?
Here is a start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frantz_Fanon
You mean Frantz Fanon, right?
Matt called someone who says “I don’t see race” a doofus.
What’s certainly more foolish than that is saying “race is not real.”
That’s an article of faith combined with word games (“population” vs. “race” is roughly “people of color vs. colored people) that has no basis in reality according to what we know about biology.
Holding two thoughts simultaneously—racial populations are real; governments should almost always use race-neutral policies that treat individuals as individuals—is not easy for most people.
You do have to be a bit of a doofus not to see the things racists are ascribing meaning to. You also have to be a bit of doofus to think the thing the racists believe in is anything more than a delusional mirage.
To which “racists” are you referring?
I’ve frequently seen a policy of colorblindness attacked as something that “sounds just but is ultimately naive.” Matt offered some good examples as to why. But the real question for determining naïveté should be “compared to what?” Specifically, the people who attack colorblindness as naive have a preferred alternative where every racial group is supposed to be proud of themselves and work to promote more numbers of themselves in the name of representation with one BIG exception - white people. Oh, and for many important contexts we are now adding Asians to that status now. Congrats Asians! Setting aside for a moment whether this kind of policy is good or fair, I marvel at the fact that this is supposed to be the LESS naive policy - that white people (and now Asians too) will just continue to go along with it, especially as the % of white people relative to other groups continues to drop, and relative cultural influence decreases (and as Asian political power increases). Has there ever been a case in history (or across cultures today) where a group becoming less dominant becomes MORE magnanimous? I don’t know of any.
"especially as the % of white people relative to other groups continues to drop"
It's not really happening that way, though. White is merging with other identities, and increasingly taking on a meaning of "mainstream America" that is at odds with the way it's used as a census category.
Matt has yet to deal with the root of intersectionality, feminism. It sucks because the well-known people commenting on these things are men, and I know there's a danger in saying it out loud. If you're going to say Dems need to abandon identity, feminism has to be included along with its demands for unequal treatment.
No.
I know feminism means different things to different people, and sadly many batshit insane ideas have come under the umbrella of feminism, including some straight-up misandry. Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but to me, feminism simply means "women are real human beings, not a deviant and inferior variant of men, and we deserve equal rights and opportunities."
To make it personal: I am a woman. I am exceedingly grateful that I am able to work outside the home, own property, be able to attend school/college, be able to marry the man I chose instead of some guy my parents and/or the local matchmaker chose for me, use birth control, decide whether/when to have children, and all the other good stuff that comes with feminism. Have a look at Afghanistan and then tell me how bad feminism is.
I take issue with your assertion that feminism in its current form is still necessary. All of what you say you enjoy has been achieved, and women have FAR more cultural power than men. Professional class women have more capital than most men because most men don’t have degrees (like most women, for that matter). I don’t see anything in your analysis about class, and feminism as an ideology totally ignores it and focuses instead on abortion and the advancement of professional women at the expense of everything else. It is no longer relevant because it is about having your cake and eating it too. There is a total lack of recognition that feminism dabbles in double standards, which offends me greatly as a woman. I don’t need a reminder for Afghanistan. As far as I can see, leftist feminists are total apologists for radical Islam.
"As far as I can see, leftist feminists are total apologists for radical Islam."
There are always idiots at the extremes. I'm not sure what that says about the movement and its goals as a whole though.
Have you not been following the Israel/Hamas conflict as it’s playing out in popular culture? These are not extremes.
What remains of the non-radical, feminist project? I know of two items that still seem relevant: 1) reproductive rights and 2) global expansion - your Afghani example
What else? (I ask earnestly)
A lot of feminism is consistent with Matt is saying. Some forms of radical feminism might not be, but that doesn't mean Matt's piece is at all antifeminist.
yes, but the point is that people need to call feminism out as the root of identity politics explicitly - it's one thing to point to the race problem and another to point out the entitlement with which feminists throw bombs and destroy people. It's not men leading that charge, but women. And that's damaged the democratic brand more than anything else.
I think this does a decent enough job addressing the "critical theory" problem in feminism with its talk about disparate impact. Basically the same problem.
The other feminism issue is the whole "Gender Identity" quagmire, which I kinda don't expect Matt to delve into deeply.
I don't see any reference to critical theory or feminism. Did I miss it?
When you start doing the begats of "The long shadow of disparate impact" critical race theory and critical feminist theory share the same core defective logic. There's not a lot to say about that strain of feminism that is distinct.
they do, but my point is that the feminist root of it isn’t called out nearly enough, particularly because most commentators on this topic are men. Nor are women called out as the progenitors of our political dysfunction.
Oh wait, it took me a few moments to realize you were labeling intersectionality and feminism as bad terms here. Intersectionality is the response to the sort of ranking by disadvantage naïveté you often see in traditional discussions of racism. The point is that you can’t label groups as “advantaged” and “disadvantaged” because everyone has advantages and disadvantages in different contexts, and they often mix in complex ways.
That's the positive definition of it. "Black Women face discrimination that is not just the sum of 'Black' + 'Woman'"
But it feels like(at least online) it has sometimes gotten abused where some groups seem to try to claim victim status by adding as many categories as they can here.
Maybe that's the kind of "concept abuse" that's going to happen with _any_ term and it's not particularly worse here, maybe it is worse, I'm less sure here because 'online Americans' != 'all Americans'.
Yes, this seems to be a common type of content abuse. Any time someone introduces a new concept that is meant to avoid the problematic baggage of an old one, if it becomes widely used, the new concept picks up the same baggage. Just like “structural racism” being used to ascribe intent, when the point was to *not* ascribe intent.
No, because while race is a social construct, being of the female sex is not. Feminism will always be needed to help address the very real ways in which women are biologically different from men -- especially to the extent that men seek to exploit those biological differences for their own advantage (e.g., women can get pregnant, men cannot).
That might be coming next week!
I certainly hope so. I notice that male commentators seem to ignore it. That's either because they know the danger of commenting or don't understand how it's the root of our dysfunction.
We neards occasionally babble about Richard Reeves and how the treatment of men as inherently problematic and systemic denial of disparate challenges to men (education, health, and economic) alienates men from the party. We saw it with how so many Democratic partisans freaked out when Harris floated the idea of going on Joe Rogan.
Speak where you are not heard. Don't let your opponents define you.
Right that's exactly what I want to happen. More people need to be loud about it and be willing to handle the inevitable ad hominem.
My retort to the sexism allegations about Harris losing is that isn’t something we could change without swapping the candidate. (Also only the lie about Harris sleeping her way into CA politics was the only sexist thing that really got traction compared to all the HRC misogyny from the left in 2016.) Policies and priorities and strategy were mutable.
It’s almost like they secretly wanted (or at least needed) her to lose for their worldview to have salience.
Matt wrote: "disparate impact logic in the absence of any specific evidence of discriminatory intent ... it was reasonable to suspect institutions of trying to find facially neutral ways to accomplish de facto discrimination"
Just FYI, Disparate Impact law presumes that there is no intent. The idea was never "they are probably hiding something with these facially neutral practices. The idea was that the institution was inadvertently introducing impact without meaning to. Intent is more clearly illegal under different laws.
On the one hand, you're correct in the abstract, but on the other hand, you have a lot of people who are pretty explicit in supporting the use of disparate impact tests because they believe there is discriminatory intent, they just can't prove it.
That might be, but Matt wrote about using the past tense, as if the law was first created with that "paranoid" idea in mind, which really isn't the case. The court in the first ruling that used that law ("Griggs vs Duke" I think) was pretty explicit in saying that the case had nothing to do with intent.
You're right about Griggs, but I would also note that Griggs is kinda crazy. The text of the law itself clearly states that ability tests without discriminatory intent are fine. This is clearly laid out in the 4th circuit decision that SCOTUS overruled:
https://casetext.com/case/griggs-v-duke-power-company-3
SCOTUS just didn't like what the law said and so they made up the idea that disparate impact is a problem even in the absence of discriminatory intent.
The law was first created with the idea that some employers might try to discriminate by using facially neutral tests as a fig leaf, and says that doing that is illegal. The law says that if you're using a facially neutral test without discriminatory intent, that's legal. Then SCOTUS came in 7 years later and eliminated the second part.
There are different legal theories of disparate impact. At least some of them do use disparate impact as evidence to infer discriminatory intent.
That’s what I was going to say. Matt seems to be presupposing a kind of anti-consequentialism here, that intent is the only thing that could be bad about disparate impact, whereas I think that intent is never the thing that is bad about anything.
I don’t think Matt is saying that intent is what causes the harm. My read of what he’s saying is: interventions aimed at unintentional harm don’t have a great track record, institutions that focus a lot on unintentional harm are dysfunctional, and a political project focused on this stuff is less likely to be successful.
So, I agree with most of what you wrote here, Matt Y, but I feel compelled to object to your description of Governor Walz as a "dud." I like him! I didn't know a single thing about him until he was nominated. But he came across as a good, decent man with a kind of folksy aw-shucks manner that I thought would counter the perception of Democrats as stuck-up pointy-headed out-of-touch elitists. Like during his DNC speech, when he said something like "Back home, we are all neighbors and Americans, and we work together and help each other even if we disagree." Unity! Caring! Neighborliness! Good, wholesome things!
I guaran-freaking-tee you that if Kamala had picked a different VP and then lost, she would have been condemned for that choice too. Shapiro? Why did you pick a Jewish VP, how stupid to poke Arab/Muslim Americans in the eye at the time when Palestinians are being killed in Gaza! Buttigieg? Too Ivy League, also America's not ready for an openly gay VP! Kelly? We need him in the Senate, also he's not photogenic/charismatic enough! Etc., etc.
I'll never forget that moment at the convention when Gus Walz jumped up, tears streaming down his face, and exclaimed, "That's my dad!" Some right-wing a-holes made fun of him on social media. But I thought it was awesome, a spontaneous public display of love and affection from a boy to his dad. It breaks my heart that the kind, decent guy with the loving family lost and the smarmy a-hole sellout who went from "Trump is literally Hitler" to "Trump is the bestest and awesomest, I'm proud to serve him" won (although in fairness to him, he too has a loving family.)
This is maybe a little half-baked, but in my experience there tend to be two ways in which people left of center process immutable, visible characteristics like race and gender.
Group 1 views race and gender as basically wholly definitional. "Everything about my life is influenced by my race and gender." or "Everything about that person's life is influenced by race and gender." Downstream of this can be positives or negatives. Much of the identity politics that began in the 60s and went mainstream later uses race and gender as an organizing principle. The process of turning what is perceived of as a disadvantage (being a woman or a minority) into something to be celebrated has been a positive for a lot of people.
Group 2 views race and gender as an aspect of a person, but not definitional. "Race and gender are just attributes of my existence. They do not define me as a person."
Unfortunately, a lot of Democratic party messaging comes from people who think Group 1 views are motivating to the target audience, whereas I think increasingly Group 2 views are, and Group 1 views feel patronizing.
There's something about thinking that you have more agency than you actually might have in reality that is good for individuals.
I think Group 1 is more motivating the more the group faces actual discrimination.
For instance: Gay Pride marches were very motivating to me when I was younger to feel like I wasn't alone, but now that I basically have all the rights I need/want, I want it to be seen as just an attribute of my existence.
Moving from Group 1 -> Group 2 thinking is _progress_
I think you're right about moving from group 1 to group 2. But, the big issue is the way groups experience discrimination.
With gay rights, we've seen a lot of cultural progress, social acceptance, and policies that help to promote equality. A lot of groups still face a ton of discrimination and media messages that show them as inferior.
Disparate impact should be a hypothesis that something is wrong with a selection process, not evidence.
This sounds nice, but I think it’s just a way of dodging uncomfortable questions.
Let’s just say hypothetically that it is an established fact that police officers do their jobs better if they did not have a criminal background prior to becoming a police officer. Let’s say a rule against hiring police officers with criminal backgrounds was proposed. And let’s say this has the effect of reducing the number of eligible black officers by a greater number than any other race. Does that make the rule bad? Does that mean there’s a problem with the process? Or could it be that good processes, in a world where different groups have different characteristics, will sometimes yield results that are shaped by those differences?
It is an important question because processes that attempt to select for objective, measurable competence will yield racial gaps. We can tell ourselves that this is just a problem of measurement, but unfortunately it’s not.
The challenge is that there are lots of things considered "established facts" that never really were established. What Wigan pointed out is that the disparate impact test requires that you prove your established fact and its importance and relevance to the job. When these things get challenged it turns out there are not very many that are.
First, I think the abstract point (IF we could know X, then . . . ) is important even if people can quibble about the facts.
Second, I was reviewing the DOJ litigation guide for a subset of disparate impact cases (https://www.justice.gov/crt/fcs/T6Manual7) , and it seems like there is quite a bit of scrutiny of an entity's rationale for a decision that causes a disparate impact. Having a good reason isn't enough. You've gotta show it's a good reason, that this reason is specifically integral to your entity's mission, and that there's no less discriminatory alternative. It's hard to fathom ever being certain that there are zero less discriminatory ways to go about any major policy decision. And the DOJ can marshal resources for consultants to fight each of these points against a local government without those resources.
The net effect is that government decisionmaking is constrained to avoid legal headaches. AKA the story of American governance since the 70s.
Isn't it though? It's basically just a condition that is required before bringing a case against a hiring or housing practice. The burden of proof is on the plaintiffs to prove that there is a less impactful alternative that should have been considered.
Disparate impact is not *evidence* that something is wrong - it *is* something wrong. Sometimes it can be outweighed if there is a good reason for the activity that is causing the disparate impact, but if you are holding your events at the same time that school gets out, and discover that as a result, parents aren’t able to go to the events, that *is* a problem, regardless of whether or not anyone intended any harm to parents.
I love interventions to make things easier for parents, but I think all this micro disparate impact stuff is to egalitarianism what banning plastic straws is to environmentalism. Each time you push one of these interventions from the top down, you’re risking annoyance and blowback, and even if you get lucky and stay under the radar, the net gains are tiny.
(If the net gains weren’t tiny, why haven’t the parents on the committee already successfully pushed for different meeting times?)
I share the gut feeling to some extent, but then it's a tough question why to care about disparate impact for these racial categories, which are socially constructed and unnatural, and not about disparate impact for other cobbled-together categories. Or categories that are objective, like length of your toes or something.
“something is wrong” does not imply intention, either.
Ouch, your examples of diversity classification at Vox brought back memories of how I, a mainland-born second generation Puerto Rican, got denied entry into a Hispanic Scholarship Program because of my surname. Damn you, great-great-great Croatian Immigrant grandfather!
And I went to grad school with a white woman who got a minority scholarship on the basis of her Hispanic surname. Which was her married name (and she was by then divorced from the original owner of that name).
Luckily she flunked out for other reasons.
Maybe democrats should run on requiring names to be blank on job applications?
I’m not entirely kidding.
Way back when, in those Jimmy Carter years, I was a teaching assistant at a major midwestern university. I was a recently-arrived foreign student from Asia. In my first class (IIRC), one of the young men asked me, "Do you consider yourself white or black?" I was genuinely confounded at the notion that the world was neatly divided between those two categories. I said, "Um, I consider myself brown, actually." He and some other students were not pleased with my response, since to them I was clearly evading the question.
I would add: Progressives are obsessed with identity based diversity, and could not care less about diversity of ideas. They would prefer 100 people, all of whom can claim a different identity of some kind, who all agree in the same Progressive ideas than a far less diverse room, where people have some profound disagreements. But I assure you, if your goal is to get more ideas out of a discussion: you will get more interesting debates between 10 white guys who all voted for different candidates, than 10 women who are all each a different identity, but all voted for Harris.
This is on point and goes with my assertion that insufficient attention is being paid to *feminine* groupthink that has driven the Democrats' brand for too long. This groupthink is recognized but not its source, which keeps us from addressing the problem at the root. This groupthink also drives progressive institutions that Nate Silver has called the indigo blob. I've only seen groupthink among liberal women, and the odd woman who disagrees is socially outcast (hello) and loses friends. THAT is why people hate democrats, including me, despite having been one my whole life. Women are allergic to debate and it immediately turns personal and emotional, as though the person is being attacked rather than the idea.
You’d probably get more traction if you avoided normative statements like “Women are allergic to debate,” as well as curious ones like “I’ve only seen groupthink among liberal women.”
Women are, indeed, allergic to debate writ large. It should be self evident that I’m not referring to every single woman out there. I am fine with my normative statements because they reflect my actual experience out in life. No one is going to study this, your statement can’t be proven as false. However, pattern recognition is a thing. I see the pattern of women being both allergic to debate and likely to fall for groupthink because we have been shown to be highly agreeable according to studies of the big five personality traits.
The more I think about this, the crazier your statement is.
Ratio of high school debaters? 53% female. Hardly supports the idea that even a majority of women are “allergic” to debate. https://www.speechanddebate.org/membership-database/
“No one is going to study this”— I think you are wildly biased here. You’re telling me no one ever has and will not any time soon study whether women are more inclined toward agreement than disagreement? (Seems like a reasonable proxy for what you’re saying.)
I don’t think the blunt and unnuanced phrasing helps anything at all. A well articulated problem, issue, or question has a much higher likelihood of getting a good solution.
And if your personal experience has you only ever seeing groupthink among liberal women, I think you’re just living in a bubble.
"Progressives are obsessed with identity based diversity, and could not care less about diversity of ideas. "
That's not entirely true -- it's usually explicitly claimed in corporate DEI programs (in my experience) that racial/ethnic/gender/etc. diversity promotes diversity of thought.
Yeah every time i see a conservative intellectual they're demanding DEI admissions for their ideologues.