I teach physics and while the overall goal is to ultimately teach my students "the most advanced physics possible". But I would be a bad teacher if I did that by starting with the most advanced physics I know (and then just yelled at them when they got it wrong).
If you want to educate someone, you teach them at the level they are at. It's not setting your standards low or capitulating to ignorance to do that, it's effective pedagogy. If you believe this is a moral imperative to teach something, it's all the more important to do it right.
I like using the term "ignorant about race" to describe people with racists views but who don't think of themselves as racist. It's not a euphemism, it's accurate term. More importantly, it should put us in an educator's mindset.
Racially ignorant people don't know what black (Hispanic, Jewish, Asian) people actually are like and they don't know how much content they consume is misinformation inflected with a racist agenda. But if they knew what progressives know about race, they'd most likely feel deeply ashamed of their ignorance. No one likes being wrong. So we while they doubtlessly have some culpability for their own racial ignorance, we have to find a way to connect them to that version of themselves that would recognize and detest that ignorance. It does no good to just tell them to stop being ignorant, you have to teach them until they are in a position to see their ignorance clearly.
So the more advanced part of a progressive education is actually the "easier" part. In the same way that sufficiently advanced physics classes are made easier by the fact that you are talking to highly motivated graduate students, rather than reluctant undergraduates taking a required course.
>talking about white privilege makes liberal white people less supportive of efforts to help low-income white people.<
Is this from the same Matt who complains about the fact that when you tell people things are improving it makes them less inclined to support progressive policy initiatives aimed at improving things further?
The "Unfortunately for people who don’t like the advice that" part. I get lost. Matt's saying that politicians should pander more, and some people don’t like the advice that politicians should pander more, but he's about to introduce a point that is unfortunate for people who don’t like the advice that politicians should pander more ... my brain = pretzel
It’s good for people to see different views. Their views are being presented in mandatory trainings where speech is chilled under threat of losing your job. A year ago I was concerned that we couldn’t have robust conversations on these issues. I didn’t believe mainstream public intellectuals like Matt would dare push back on people like Kendi. I said as much here. True to the name, Matt has slowly (not too boringly) weighed in. I think this article, written a year or more ago would have gotten Matt significant shit from his liberal journalism buddies.
I feel better that a wider range a views can be aired. I am happy there is Sub-stack. This doesn’t need to be a safe space for Congressman Jeffries and his peeps. Safe places are dumb and truly boring. I like diversity of thought. I would love the diversity community to also embrace it.
There not much racism to fight in the first place.
US approval of interracial marriage has increased from 4% in the 60's, to 94% now.
If you are ok with your son or daughter marrying someone from another race, I would argue that racism is pretty much dead except for a tiny tiny minority of people
I do agree that the left's focus on identity politics is making race a bigger factor than it is, and is causing backlash. This is especially true about all the white privilege
"If you are ok with your son or daughter marrying someone from another race, I would argue that racism is pretty much dead except for a tiny tiny minority of people"
To be clear, that's not what the poll shows. It asks if you "approve of marriage between...". I am very confident that if the question was "Do you approve of your daughter marrying a ..." that the results would be lower.
That said, and this probably ties into the contact discussion MY had in his article. Probably one of the best things we could do for race relations is more interracial children. I suspect people who end up getting interracial grandkids move further to the left on issues of race. Maybe that should be the next thing Dems push?
Agree. Replace the idea of race with wealth. "Do you approve of the wealthy marrying the poor?" Compare to: "Do you approve of your daughter marrying..." I'm sure you will get different results in that poll.
Based on my personal experience I would guess that used to be true, but is much less so today. I know a fair number of multi-racial families (mix of adoption and marriage) who are very put off by the woke left because they see them as divisive
I agree about the backlash, but it’s possible for someone to think “most black people are bad people” and still leave room for the possibility your child could find an exceptional one. I’d still call this racist. It’s certainly progress!!, but it doesn’t mean the job is done. That being said, activists who claim to speak on behalf of “the black community” and then put inflammatory words in their mouths are certainly making this problem worse, not better.
"Studies from dating apps still show that people have strong racial preferences, with white people having the strongest racial preferences."
That's interesting. I had read some data from OkCupid a while back that suggested that Black women were the most discriminated against AND the most likely to discriminate against non Blacks. The latter surprised me, but apparently there is/was stigma about Black women marrying out. Is there new research on this or am I misremembering it from a decade ago?
Pew's 2015 data had intermarriage rates at 11% for White marriages, 18% of Black marriages, 27% for Hispanics and 29% for Asians. The Hispanic and Asian rates were even higher for non-immigrants, at well in the 40%s. The numbers from 1980 were under 5% for all of the above.
They also ask if you would oppose a close relative marrying someone of X race and those numbers have also plummeted. Most recent numbers were 14% of non-Blacks would oppose a relative marrying a Black person, 9% of non-Asians would oppose marrying an Asian, 9% also for non-Hispanics opposing Hispanics, and 4% for non-white opposing someone marrying whites.
Back in 1999 those same numbers were 30% opposing Black, 20% for Hispanic and Asian and 7% for White.
Would be interesting to see if dating app data has changed over a longer time span.
Ok - but if you remove all racism you still have the exact same situation - there will still be groups of people with better networks and similar unearned privileges. You could call those differing groups of people "classes". Or immigrants. Or ugly people or short people or whatever other unfair things make life easier for some individuals and harder for others.
But in any case, I think what you're describing as racism is a racial disparity, given the end result seems to be an equality of outcome.
As a thought experiment - has the class system that many European immigrants were fleeing been conquered? I've seen research that descendants of lower-class white immigrants are still economically behind the descendants of their upper class white immigrant peers of 100+ years ago, even though no one cares whatsoever now if your ancestors were "gentlemen" or peasants.
But interracial relations "in the abstract" is exactly what actual white supremacy was about. The whole power apparatus of the society was aimed at preventing this. That's the racist part. The rest is just personal preferences. Not the same thing at all.
I really don't get this. Are you suggesting that black people would want to change the culture so that white people would not prefer to marry white people, even if black and white people could marry whom they liked? And what kind of "change" in culture would that look like?
I'm with you on a lot of this and I think it's a good comment. But I think you're stretching the point quite a bit to link the cause and effect to Elliot Rogers so tightly, or to suggest that there's been a huge increase in Asian interracial couples based on expanded media roles for Asians that started, as far as I noticed, maybe around a year ago. If there's more Asian interracial couples than there used to be I'd guess it's more about continuing assimilation than anything else.
And not a single one of them is willing to reap the massive profits from hiring undervalued labor? Are black people utterly incapable of making business? Such a scenario is utterly implausible, the equivalent of assuming a ball on a string would continue hanging there if the string were to be removed. In the absence of laws mandating racism, it cannot meaningfully sustain itself.
Below Frigid mentions the Caste system in India, and maybe he's right about how it's panning out economically. But socially it seems almost as strong as ever. Pew's survey's on Indian's social attitudes regarding cast and religion were really shocking to me when I read them: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
>If you say that living standards have risen dramatically over the past 30, 50, or 100 years, you’re somehow an apologist for every feature of the status quo. <
Pushing back a bit against Matt's view on this topic, I think there is a legit concern here that is not so easy to dismiss. When I hear that living standards have improved dramatically it does in fact give me some trust in the status quo and a sense that we are trending in the right direction and I suspect this would hold true for others, if studied.
As such, it does seem reasonable to be concerned that the above message could dampen attempts to improve living standards through new, unproven programs.
Instead of dismissing that concern as irrational, I would suggest that the message could be improved by adding some context to it, noting some specific policies that sped up the advances in living standards, along with some data showing room for even more improvement, and then some policy suggestions for amplifying all of these positive trends and making them even better.
Thanks for the kind words about my study with Josh Kalla. I agree with what you wrote regarding the fact that a) we haven't studied racial prejudice yet and b) this kind of canvassing is far too costly to scale nationwide -- and even if you did, although the effects are large by social science standards, they are not large enough to transform public opinion in any sense. I think the practical upshots of our studies are: a) some insights everyday people can apply in interpersonal conversations (e.g., don't lecture, have a two-way conversation), b) some ideas that might be able to be applied in more scalable mass communication (e.g., tell stories of individual outgroup members!), and c) a tactic that could make sense in small elections (e.g., there were some ballot initiatives on immigration and trans issues in small to mid sized towns where it actually is plausible you could try to canvass the whole electorate).
One theme in the literature on contact is that it really depends on whether the contact is positive-sum or neutral or negative-sum. Even neutral, shallow contact between groups seems to increase prejudice quite often (see Ryan Enos' work). Matt Lowe has a great experiment on the difference between positive-sum and negative-sum contact and as you might expect, positive-sum contact between groups really reduces prejudice but negative-sum contact increases it (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191780). I think the corollary of these kinds of findings is not so much that integration is good per se, but that we have to pay attention to the kind of integration. An example of a win that is nicely consistent with your and my policy preferences: there's a doctor shortage in the US, so we should let doctors from other countries immigrate here and work in rural areas where there is a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment and also a big doctor shortage! That is going to do wonders for people's views towards immigrants -- and in fact, there is some research consistent with that intuition: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/14/e2022634118.short.
Just wanted to say thanks so much for coming in here to add your thoughts. So often academic research gets misused, intentionally or not, so this sort of follow-on contact can be super valuable IMHO. Incredibly cool of you to do; we really appreciate it.
Also great to see some research on the potential benefits of using immigrant doctors to help alleviate the shortage there, though I guess I should be a tad skeptical, if only because it mega confirms my priors!
I think a good article would be a deep dive into "Afro-centricity." That was the 1990s version of CRT and DEI which argued that history was lies and that sub-Saharan Africans built the Egyptian pyramids and even traveled to Meso-America and built Olmec and Mayan architecture. And then the Greeks stole all this knowledge. You can still hear it every now and then. What ever happened to most of this?
Heck, Michael Jackson even did a music video set in Egypt with Eddie Murphy with Murphy playing the Pharoah.
Isn't that the worst kind of "cultural appropriation?" They are literally stealing another civilization.
I know some Middle Kingdom Period DNA taken from a number of mummies. They were closest to people from the Levant and Anatolla. That is Hittites and Summerians. They would have looked like a Lebanese person today.
I'm here for the William Julius Wilson content. If you're frustrated with the current discourse on race, read his books for a more solid form of wisdom. I sure learned a lot while reading them in the 1990s.
I agree with this post and with the SB crowd on most days. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like the tone these days has drifted into outright hostility toward any and all forms of antiracist effort. Matt tagged Hakeem in his tweet of this post today, and Hakeem retweeted it. If Hakeem or his supporters read these comments, I’m pretty sure he’d come away feeling even more self-assured that Matt is just feeding the white racist trolls. Hakeem’s initial tweet was “why don’t the popularists condemn white racism?” It feels like a strawman to me as most people do in fact condemn what they consider to be racism, they just might not agree with Hakeem on what racism *is.* But as this group gets more and more comfortable throwing around inflammatory racial statistics without any caveats, and shows less and less interest in solving real problems, I dunno, it’s starting to feel icky. Is it just me? Can we keep our eyes on the prize which is finding ways to reduce racial animosity and severely adverse racial disparities at the same time?
I mean in a political sense the Republican Party in its current form has to lose and lose big and keep losing or else we will have more racism. Like these posts are a psa that we are not just left vs super left.
(1) The SB comments do feel different. Sharper. Kenny has participated less lately. Maybe he's busy or maybe he's focused elsewhere. But how many times can you re-hash a finite set of topics? Comment exhaustion might be setting in. Matt will probably want to participate more if comment engagement rates taper.
(2) The stakes here seem to be increasing. That's probably amplifying some of the rhetoric. Who knows how representative the VA Gov. race is for the upcoming mid-terms but the school debate seemed central and our (or the Progressive) position seems to be losing. To the extent any racial disparity progress is downstream of winning elections ... the burgeoning anti-antiracism sentiment is a function of the antiracist efforts potentially missing the forest of elections for the bark of purity battles.
I think the VA Gov. race is "representative" of the upcoming midterms, but only in that the President's party is going to have a bad time the way it always has a bad time.
Always feels too strong ... '98 and '02 did happen. The map matters. Republicans are defending more seats in the Senate. I don't subscribe that this is a done deal.
To me, the paradox of anti-racism in practice is that although racism is supposed to be about structures, not about people, it still comes down in practice to “doing the work” - essentially, to change our souls so that we will gladly do the things that anti-racism proponents want us to do. But we will not improve our racial difficulties this way, because our racial difficulties are not caused by white people having bad souls. The soul-changing exercise seems (inevitably) to slide into division and hostility. And I came to think: not by that path.
Instead, I have come to focus on civic justice. I reflect that we live in a continent-sized country with a very complex historical experience with some pretty bad things in it. We are of many cultures, and we do not all like each other or treat each other charitably. But we also have a legacy of freedom and unity from our founding that gives us a path to living together and growing together as citizens in spite of that. It is a powerful and good legacy. We need to hold onto that legacy, not tear it down.
I take a step back from direct action on racism. Black people will uplift themselves in their own interest, if we let them. The state of my soul does not (and should not) matter to them. My work is to truly understand our legacy, to strive to think and speak accurately for myself and my interests, and to participate with honesty in the civic exercise.
This isn’t going to satisfy anyone who is on fire to fix racism now, but I don’t think that's problem that can be fixed that way, simply that it can be set on a path to grow smaller over time.
"racism is supposed to be about structures, not about people"
I very much disagree with that statement. And I believe the vast majority of Americans do so as well.
Racism is about individual feelings and actions. An employer not hiring someone because of the color of their skin is racism.
Not have an equal percentage of people in a particular job that corresponds to their percentage in the population is only racism if the reason for the difference is because of individual racists actions.
I think the thrust of the institutional racism argument is that the reason that Black people didn't get that job is because they didn't get the qualifications, and they didn't get the qualifications because they went to a bad high school and they went to a bad high school because they live in a poorer school district and they live in a poorer school district because their great-grandparents didn't leave their parents an inheritance sufficient to buy a better house, and those great-grandparents didn't do that because they were redlined out of buying one in the 1940s and 1950s.
So, yes, there was an individual racist - the person who did the redlining 70 years ago - but the institutions have taken that racism and preserved it in amber like dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park. Now, it's not easy to fix that, and it's not simply the responsibility of the employer to do so. But it is a real problem. And blaming individuals in that system is wrong - providing, of course, that they actually are doing their best.
There is another version of institutional racism, which is institutions in which a small number of racists get their racism amplified. A classic example of this is hiring systems that involve the subjective opinions of a number of people; if your average hiring decision requires five people to give the OK, then even just 5% of people who are unconsciously racist in your pool of decision makers gets amplified to Black people having only 77% (1-0.95^5, if you want to check my math) of the chance of getting the job as compared to an equivalently-qualified White person.
This one, well, perhaps you can track down the person (or people) who are regularly down-checking black candidates. But, if they aren't expressing racist sentiments ("I'm just not inspired by him", "I don't think he'll be a good fit with the team", etc) then you can only do that retrospectively and on the basis of statistics, at which point how many people have been discriminated against already? Or else can you come up with a fairer way to decide? Like blind auditions for symphony orchestras work, but can you do that for other jobs?
I hesitate to weigh in because what I'm about to say will seem to some an apologia for social injustice. But if we're honest, many of the impediments to success you mention similarly apply to other populations who have nevertheless overcome them, from bad schools to intergenerational poverty to unconscious antipathy on the part of gatekeepers.
Jews and Asian Americans have had to deal with institutional racism in pretty much the same way, and have become and/or are becoming yet another outgroup-to-ingroup American success story, just like the Italians and Irish and so many others before them.
No one who watches how the world operates can deny there are lingering effects of prejudice in people's unconscious, and lingering repercussions of historical prejudice in present conditions. But it is an oversimplification to ascribe inequality today to inequality, even horrific disparate treatment, in the past. There are other factors at work. There are strategies that can help a disadvantaged group succeed. How did Jews go from a despised minority to an almost-fully-accepted part of the American elite? How are Asian Americans seemingly following the same path? Why can't others do the same thing?
These are good questions. We shouldn't exclude the possibility that the answer is "White Americans are a lot more prejudiced against Black Americans than against anyone else", of course. The assumption that the problem is with the Black Americans (which you didn't make, but which other people might make from reading your words) is a racist assumption in itself.
The history of the antebellum slaves and their descendants is sufficiently different from the history of any other group in American history that it's at least plausible that history was driven by and has driven the racism against African-Americans.
It's particularly interesting to compare to recent African immigrants who have done far better in America than African-Americans (notably, not that The Bell Curve needed more refuting, the opposite of what that hypothesis would predict).
There is no doubt in my mind that, as you say, "White Americans are a lot more prejudiced against Black Americans than against anyone else." It's not just Americans, either. My experience of the world and its history shows distinct anti-pigment animus almost everywhere and everytime. To cite just one non-US example, the vaunted egalitarian system in Cuba is, in fact, highly biased against Black Cubans, who do a disproportionate fraction of the low-status jobs in the country, and who are almost unrepresented in the ruling Politburo.
I also take your point that the experience of recent African immigrants refutes the Bell Curve hereditarian IQ explanation for African American difficulties (unless you interpret the disparate experiences as showing that African Americans are burdened with inferior White genes).
But the disparate experiences do show that navigating American society with Black skin and encountering institutional racism is not a sufficient explanation for observed outcomes. Something else must be at work. Hiring managers, school officials, random people don't have deep-seated preferences for children of Nigerians over descendants of Alabama sharecroppers. I doubt many could identify which are which.
Maybe it's transmitted culture within the family and in peer groups. Maybe that culture arose and was perpetuated in reaction to the horrific stimuli of slavery and Jim Crow. I don't know. And culture *is* hard to change. My only point is that it's not impossible. At least, I don't think it is. Shtetl Jews went from insular ghetto life in New York's Lower East Side to elite life in America. Chinese Americans went from coolie labor on the railroads and living in Chinatowns in a few cities to an increasingly large role in the mainstream.
Bottom line, progressives--I consider myself one--can help, but the main effort must be mainly endogenous for any community in the American context. Allies are useful, but can't be saviors. And pessimism of the kind I read from Kendi is corrosive and, I am convinced, stupid. Some things are hard. But most things are not impossible. Making life better for fellow Americans is not impossible.
It's the difference between "institutional racism" and plain old racist-racism though, right?
At some level it all comes down to individuals taking racist actions, sure. But it sounds like you're arguing that unless you can point at a racist hiring manager today, there isn't an element of racism in play. But there clearly is, even if it's just the echo of actions taken long ago.
>"racism is supposed to be about structures, not about people"
I very much disagree with that statement. And I believe the vast majority of Americans do so as well.<
This is a big part of the problem with this conversation. Two people using the same word, "racism," to mean completely different things.
This happens all the time. It is the first thing to check for when having an intractable disagreement. Sometimes there is no disagreement, but just mis-communication.
There very much is an argument on the left which explicitly denies the argument that racism is just about personal feelings. The argument goes like this:
Slavery was not caused by racism, racism was caused by slavery.
It wasn't (originally) racism that dehumanized the other. Sugar plantations started on Cyprus, with the slave workers being Muslims who were captured by raids.
They were enormously profitable, and they gradually worked their way west across the Mediterranean (Rhodes, Crete, Malta) before eventually reaching the Canary Islands and Madeira off the west coast of Africa. After Eanes discovered how to pass Cape Bojador in 1434, sources of non-Christian slaves in West Africa (sometimes Muslim, sometimes local African religions, which the Christians called "pagan") replaced raided Muslims because it was much easier to acquire slaves in West Africa (where they were available for sale) than in North Africa (where they mostly had to be taken by force).
Having black slaves and white masters made it much easier to distinguish them and to identify escaped slaves. Spain (unlike the Cypriots, the Knights of St John and the Venetians who had run the earlier plantations) had a tradition of not trusting converts to Christianity (that's what the Spanish Inquisition was set up for, to ensure they weren't still practising their former religion in secret), and so black people came to be viewed as intrinsically non-Christian and thus "other".
All of this was already in place on a small scale before the Middle Passage got going into the Caribbean and later to the (future) United States.
The argument, as I understand it, is that historically, putting people into categories by the color of their skin came from putting people into categories by their religion, and was mediated through slavery.
If you want a good example of what this looked like in the middle of evolving from religious prejudice into racism, read Othello and remember that he is a Moor (a Muslim from North Africa).
Are the attitudes to him based on an idea that he is intrinsically other? Yes. Is that clearly about race and not religion? Not quite, though it is starting to become racism.
I don't disagree with you. It's a paradox to me that people who start out with the hard-ass premise that feelings don't matter, pretty much spend all their time trying to affect feelings. For conversion purposes.
I feel like your position is one that would allow slavery to go on forever, right? I mean, its the institution that says that blacks are slaves. You didn't decide that. You don't make the laws, but they say you can purchase someone. And you don't beat them unfairly and you feed them appropriately, right. You don't have a racist bone in your body -- and the structure can't be racist. As long as you're good to your slaves -- what more can we ask of you...
Slavery is wrong because it's a violation of your civil rights (no matter what color of your skin, slavery is wrong). In addition, slavery was intentionally racist because it applied based on the color of your skin. Just like hiring, or not hiring somebody because of the color of their skin is wrong (although obviously one is WAY more wrong).
My position is that people everywhere should be treated as individuals. And while population level data can be interesting we should be VERY careful when making assumptions about causality.
I personally feel like all of those sentiments are helpful and respectful. Others expressed here today, not so much. Maybe I am nit-picking or just in a bad mood, but scrolling through the comment section, I find myself cringing more often than usual.
I whole-heartedly agree that addressing extreme wealth inequality is the biggest, most important focus we can have, morally and practically, and that it will lead to a reduction of most of the racial disparities we care about. But that should/can be a space of agreement with the anti-racists, even if they come to the same conclusion from the opposite direction. I think Matt does a good job of trying to argue for that approach, but sometimes the comment thread here just drifts into reflexive caustic anti-wokeness, which eliminates the possibility of a coalition before it can start.
I understand. That sucks. I am really sorry that people are being assholes to you. I am frustrated with the woke extremists too- I think this extremism is taking over too many institutions, creating division, and leading to counter-productive groupthink and wasted resources. I think too many activists have succumbed to the entire gamut of classic cognitive distortions on this topic- black & white thinking, labelling, mind reading, catastrophizing, etc etc. https://www.healthline.com/health/cognitive-distortions Too many people have taken their self-righteous cause of fighting the bad guys as license to be a total asshole. It has to stop, and people need to be called out. I want this push back to be done effectively, because it's important work. I just don't think *mirroring* the hostility and thought distortions is going to be effective. Understandable, but counter-productive.
Certainly you can see the flaw in this plan? “Try to get someone fired? No dice.” You can’t really fight “cancel culture” by canceling the cancelers. We need a common set of behavioral standards we can all stick to. Basic respect, decency, and not judging people (positively or negatively) on the basis of their race seem like a good place to start. But I’m a softy. Also, I was one of “these types” (ok, not as bad as your colleagues, but I turned a blind eye to that stuff bc I thought it was “necessary”) and I was able to snap out of it, so I’ll always hold out hope for others. I highly recommend Chloe Valdary: https://theoryofenchantment.com/
Interestingly, how you frame anti-racism can almost be identically applied to Christianity. Yet there is almost none of the same level of hostility. Christianity seems ineffective in making "better" people. It's offensive to many (worse than offensive if you consider the atrocities carried out in its name). The inaccuracies in the bible make the 1619 project look like the proof of 1+1 in Principia Mathematica. And demanding patronage -- that's like the whole point of it.
I say this to note that the issue with anti-racism isn't in anti-racism in itself. Oddly the same people on this thread that hate it, use its most core tenant (outcome based approach) in attempting to discredit it (and interestingly Kendi himself would acknowledge that if it doesn't produce outcomes, it would not anti-racist -- a result that would please Betrand Russell himself). The issue is purely that anti-racism doesn't really benefit the "right" people.
I think when MT discusses it in this light, it works. Just be blunt. This country won't help black people on its own. But we also won't go out of our way to harm black people, if it also means harming white people. Black people need to realize this. Appeals to righteous principles and such will fall on deaf ears, unless it also benefits white people. And while I wish it weren't so, I think making it clear, is important.
That said, it does put Black in an interesting position. Does it make sense to support the left? Most Blacks tend to be socially conservative, except for issues of race. If we accept that as a country we won't try to help blacks, except as a by-product of helping whites -- should blacks then just vote on every issue except race? If so, does that move Blacks to largely being Republican?
What does all this "helping blacks" / "helping whites" mean? It's the ultimate strawman. There's various packages and reconciliation bills being debated and legislated through congress right now. Despite some "this will help minorities and women" messaging, the laws and budgets, like nearly all laws and budgets that aren't explicitly civil rights oriented, are race-neutral.
If you pass laws or budgets aimed to help those towards the bottom of the SES ladder, you will disproportionately impact Blacks. Laws or budgets aimed at the upper half of the SES will disproportionately impact Whites. I guess you can try to make a Kendi claim that every law / budget is racist / anti-racist but that turns everything into race, always. And it leaves no explanation for why largely 1 "race" countries, like, say Korea or Ireland or Tunisia pass laws.
I'm not sure what you want here - the nation clearly will pass laws to protect minorities from active harms. It will also pass race-neutral laws aimed at helping lower SES residents. But it is generally resistant to equality-of-group-outcome affirmative-action style laws. If you think that's racist, fine, but we disagree on the definition.
How that should impact a black person's vote I don't know, because it depends on that person's views of all the above and their personal economic status at least as much as their ancestry on how they think the government should view ancestries.
Classifying laws as racist/anti-racist/neutral doesn't mean that the intent of the law was race based at all. You can classify anything into anything. For all laws we can view them along male/female, straight/gay/other, upper/middle/lower class, urban/rural, environmental/unenv, futurist/luddite, etc... It could be that most laws are neutral in their impact on most axis one could construct. But understanding this is still important. And more importantly, trends could be very important in understanding where the country is going. This is actually an example of where one would want to use CRT.
"the nation clearly will pass laws to protect minorities from active harms" -- I'm unclear why you believe this? The voting supression laws passed by Republicans just recently give me little confidence that given enough power they wouldn't enact far more harm. I guess I just believe there is 50% of the country that would try to actively harm and 50% that wouldn't. Just depends on who has the votes.
"the nation clearly will pass laws to protect minorities from active harms".
To be more literal and precise I mean the nation has passed laws to protect minorities from active harms and is capable of doing so in the future. Not that it always way in every possible case. I meant it as a response to "This country won't help black people on its own", which doesn't seem accurate to me as I read it.
Which of these recent Republican passed laws are actively targeted at Blacks and not at Democratic votes in general? I realize in some states, particular in the deep south, the two categories of voters are hard to separate. From the little I know, most of these proposed laws will have very little impact and the partisan impact will be muted, or even work against Rs.
I've been flat out told to accept Jesus as my lord and savior more than I've been told to be anti-racist. In fact I've never been told to be anti-racist, even at my work's diversity training (where the term never came up). But I can believe it may vary for each person.
Unsurprisingly, there have been FAR more openly racist people (much less anti-anti-racist) in the highest levels of our society than openly anti-Christian people. In fact, even in 2021, I bet you can win more elections by having your central platform as, "The anti-racism stuff has gone too far" than saying, "Christianity has gone too far".
I think you underrate how impactful it would be to be anti-Christian. Not just Christian agnostic, but openly fight against it in the same way that people openly fight against anti-racism.
I guess we do run in different circles. I live in a country where the last president said and did exactly what you describe and was almost elected again and is the front runner for one of the major political parties in the US. And the guy who took a knee during the anthem basically was fired.
"Christians" are saying that if I help someone get an abortion I can be fined $10,000. "Christians" are requiring that legal tender say "In God We Trust" -- nothing about diversity on any of the money that were forced to print. "Christians" were the ones who fought tooth and nail to keep my good friends from marrying. "Christians" are the ones who claim tax exempt status to then rail politically at the pulpit, often in attempts to disenfranchise minorities.
I believe we are operating with very, very different thresholds for the label "rich". I'm imagining someone with, say, a $1m home* and $200k in liquid assets. The dentistry professor and the radiation oncologist certainly have that, to say nothing of the hot pocket heiress, wilkie farr chairman, and others. Yet they are nowhere near able to donate $10m.
*Yes, I know million-dollar homes can be unremarkable in some metro areas.
Peter Thiel justified what he did to Gawker by saying that "If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system."
Whatever terminology you prefer, there is a level of very rich that can get around the systems and a level of not-quite-as-rich that has to instrumentalise the systems to help themselves.
"They are important. They are a large part of the Democratic party's funding and activist base. They influence its agenda and public image.”
Exactly. Which is why I am very pessimistic about near-term outlook for the Democratic Party in the next decade. Here are some things about the progressive wing of the party that I don’t know how to get around.
- Their policy ideas are bad, unworkable, divisive, and unpopular
- Their messaging causes the party to lose elections
- They can’t mobilize voters without countermobilizing at least as many on the other side
I’m reaching around for desperate ideas like “will I at least get a chance to vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump?” That’s how bad it is.
You’re right that focusing on class makes the most sense but I think you’re being too dismissive of the other side. After all, however useful a housing or child poverty program might be, it doesn’t do much for criminal justice issues or voting rights.
Ok but these can be solved in "neutral" ways too that also help everyone.
Aggressive policing may be _worse_ for minorities, but white people (especially poorer white people) aren't immune. I forget the story but Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had an example of a white male shot outside his hotel room while on the floor trying to comply with confusing police instructions. Would this happen more to a black male? The evidence on that particular interaction is mixed, but either way - reducing police shootings would help.
Reducing pretextual traffic stops would help racial discrimination in policing, but it can also be a good idea outside of that.
If you look at Eight Can't Wait police reform suggestions - all of them seem like good ideas to me that would probably help minorities, but they aren't FRAMED as helping minorities, they're (to me at least) commonsense solutions.
Voting rights - If you need to require an I.D. to appease plenty of worried-about-fraud normies, then make I.D.s for voting easier to get, or make voting easier in general.
To note one place where the academics are doing research to find out what works, UC Berkeley did a deep dive into their academic hiring practices in 2019 with an eye on finding interventions that had a measurable impact on who eventually got hired: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/data-and-initiatives/searching-diverse-faculty
They find a number of things that didn’t seem to matter (interview environment), and a couple that do (framing the position in a wider social justice area, emphasizing the job’s public engagement, pushing into more-diverse specialties). Note, though, that some things no longer count as interventions at Berkeley (when they would elsewhere) because all their recruitments use them as a matter of course.
As someone who has first-hand experience of this, I will say most normie Democrats are completely lost when the subject of DEI comes up. They think it is the "multiculturalism" of the 1990s. Things such as more diverse authors, more focus on contributions of non-whites, etc.
It is not that at all, so most of them are acting in good faith when they can't understand why Non-Foxite people object.
DEI in schools is something like this:
Tests are inherently racist and act to "Center whiteness" and "exclude black and brown bodies" from academic success. So parents, your 8th-grade child taking a vocabulary quiz is enacting "enacting white supremacy."
Grades themselves are racist. No student should fail.
Discipline has its roots in slave culture. So schools have almost all gotten rid of traditional discipline with predictable results.
There is enough anecdotal evidence that this method does nothing to actually advance non-white children's learning and is not even popular with black parents.
I have sat through talks like this.
I really think we need to get the idea that normie Dems are just clueless on this and hence react negatively when you talk about it Matt Y.
"There is enough anecdotal evidence that this method does nothing to actually advance non-white children's learning and is not even popular with black parents."
Yeah, an interesting aspect of all this "wokeness" discourse is that white progressives are in fact more "woke" than black people as a collective are. Sort of separately, if you poll black people about things like gay marriage and trans rights you might be in for a bad surprise.
Which school district is doing this? I haven't seen any school districts get rid of grades (at the high school level -- I've seen it at elementary, but the reasons aren't race related at all).
And I haven't seen schools get rid of discipline either. Although, yes, physical discipline is a thing of the past. Again, not because of race.
Maybe you're confusing DEI with other initiatives that aren't race based?
I haven't seen anything about public high schools getting rid of grades. (I know of some private schools that have no grades, but that's always been the case.) Closest thing I've seen is this article about the Los Angeles School District, which says L.A. is starting to get rid of grade penalties for lateness and behavior. It also seems to be saying that L.A. wants to make it so that if you fail a test, you can retake it and pass it the second time, since you'll still have learned the material - you just learned it after the test. Which sounds to me like a bad idea if I'm understanding it correctly: all you'd have to do is memorize the answers to the test questions, which you'd know in advance. But maybe I'm not understanding it correctly.
Yes, L.A. did that and other school districts around the country that hire these DEI and Ed School hucksters are pushing this.
Deadlines are "White Supremacy Culture" ala Tema Okun because white culture has a "Sense of Urgency."
I should have been clearer, in getting rid of FAILING grades.
I have been in meetings with hundreds of educators where the DEI speaker has said tests are White culture, that BIPOC culture is more "collaborative" and tests should be phased out for group projects.
Honestly, I don't think most normie Dems are hearing what is going on in schools and think it is all ginned up panic from Right-wingers.
Failing grades have been gotten rid of in a number of suburban school districts. I was told as other educators have been told that that "BIPOC students are over-represented among failing students." So the failing grades have become "incompletes."
I don't know why you are bringing up long ago physical discipline.
We have had again the "School to Prison Pipeline." Detentions and suspensions have been curtailed at a large number of schools under the idea that black and Latino students were again over-represented in these punishments.
So to get rid of these accusations school districts have simply all but refused to hand these out.
A school district that I could look into myself would hardly dox you. Unless the school district is so small that there is only one Romulus Augstulus there.
I have heard of failing grades turning in to incompletes for Covid. Again, nothing to do with race. But was a one time measure during the height of the pandemic.
Regarding the suspension/detention thing. I haven't heard of school districts refusing to dole them out generally. That said, there is good research and anecdotal data that suggests that Black students are viewed and likely treated differently. Here's a good controlled study on this: https://edens.berkeley.edu/PDF/2strikes.pdf
And I don't suggest teachers are racist on the whole. But these small differences in treatment compound over time and can lead to drastically different outcomes even for students who, at least at the onset, are behaviorally identical in aggregate.
Pointing to actual school districts that have done this is evidence, not doxxing.
I took my first DEI training at the large multi-national company I work for earlier this month. It was beyond banal. The two scenarios where were supposed to apply DEI principles were more "all I really need to know I learned in kindergarten" than DEI. I don't doubt that some weird stuff is happening in some companies, but it certainly does make me pause when I hear about all the companies implementing DEI training. Based on my sample size of 1, all DEI training is not created equal. And that's the kind of experience that makes me hesitant when a phrase like "a number of suburban school districts" is used.
I have been an educator for decades and am married to one. I have been part of professional organizations. I have heard the same things over and over from collegues.
Also here is a San Fransico based school DEI firm pushing the idea that school discipline is inherently racist:
I don't doubt there are firms pushing it. I'm looking for evidence defining the number of school districts pulling it. I fully expect that number is not zero, but is is 3, or 12, or 900? Without knowing that, it's hard to characterize how school districts are responding to the push.
I think the Education Schools are a magnet for these DEI types. Faddish and low intellectual standards are the norm.
If you were in a business setting and said, "Written memos or emails are white supremacy culture," everyone in the room would think the person is a total idiot.
However, in Education Schools in Universities, this kind of stupidity finds a ready audience
I teach physics and while the overall goal is to ultimately teach my students "the most advanced physics possible". But I would be a bad teacher if I did that by starting with the most advanced physics I know (and then just yelled at them when they got it wrong).
If you want to educate someone, you teach them at the level they are at. It's not setting your standards low or capitulating to ignorance to do that, it's effective pedagogy. If you believe this is a moral imperative to teach something, it's all the more important to do it right.
I like using the term "ignorant about race" to describe people with racists views but who don't think of themselves as racist. It's not a euphemism, it's accurate term. More importantly, it should put us in an educator's mindset.
Racially ignorant people don't know what black (Hispanic, Jewish, Asian) people actually are like and they don't know how much content they consume is misinformation inflected with a racist agenda. But if they knew what progressives know about race, they'd most likely feel deeply ashamed of their ignorance. No one likes being wrong. So we while they doubtlessly have some culpability for their own racial ignorance, we have to find a way to connect them to that version of themselves that would recognize and detest that ignorance. It does no good to just tell them to stop being ignorant, you have to teach them until they are in a position to see their ignorance clearly.
So the more advanced part of a progressive education is actually the "easier" part. In the same way that sufficiently advanced physics classes are made easier by the fact that you are talking to highly motivated graduate students, rather than reluctant undergraduates taking a required course.
>talking about white privilege makes liberal white people less supportive of efforts to help low-income white people.<
Is this from the same Matt who complains about the fact that when you tell people things are improving it makes them less inclined to support progressive policy initiatives aimed at improving things further?
I can't follow all of these double, triple, and quadruple negatives.
Matt calls the assertion that "popularists never seem to entertain the idea that the real problem of our politics is not wokeness" "pretty unfair".
So Matt is saying that popularists DO seem to entertain the idea that the real problem of our politics is not wokeness? Or something? I'm lost.
"Unfortunately for people who don’t like the advice that politicians should pander more..." Help me here. Too much inside baseball.
What part of the "politicians should pander more" statement was too "inside baseball"?
The "Unfortunately for people who don’t like the advice that" part. I get lost. Matt's saying that politicians should pander more, and some people don’t like the advice that politicians should pander more, but he's about to introduce a point that is unfortunate for people who don’t like the advice that politicians should pander more ... my brain = pretzel
It’s good for people to see different views. Their views are being presented in mandatory trainings where speech is chilled under threat of losing your job. A year ago I was concerned that we couldn’t have robust conversations on these issues. I didn’t believe mainstream public intellectuals like Matt would dare push back on people like Kendi. I said as much here. True to the name, Matt has slowly (not too boringly) weighed in. I think this article, written a year or more ago would have gotten Matt significant shit from his liberal journalism buddies.
I feel better that a wider range a views can be aired. I am happy there is Sub-stack. This doesn’t need to be a safe space for Congressman Jeffries and his peeps. Safe places are dumb and truly boring. I like diversity of thought. I would love the diversity community to also embrace it.
Fascinating comment thread. About 50% pro-woke and 50% anti-woke. Will be interesting to see how it all shakes out in the mid-terms.
There not much racism to fight in the first place.
US approval of interracial marriage has increased from 4% in the 60's, to 94% now.
If you are ok with your son or daughter marrying someone from another race, I would argue that racism is pretty much dead except for a tiny tiny minority of people
https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx
I do agree that the left's focus on identity politics is making race a bigger factor than it is, and is causing backlash. This is especially true about all the white privilege
"If you are ok with your son or daughter marrying someone from another race, I would argue that racism is pretty much dead except for a tiny tiny minority of people"
To be clear, that's not what the poll shows. It asks if you "approve of marriage between...". I am very confident that if the question was "Do you approve of your daughter marrying a ..." that the results would be lower.
That said, and this probably ties into the contact discussion MY had in his article. Probably one of the best things we could do for race relations is more interracial children. I suspect people who end up getting interracial grandkids move further to the left on issues of race. Maybe that should be the next thing Dems push?
I have several nieces and nephews that are all mixed race (half white, half Hispanic) but the whole family is VERY anti-woke.
It seems like the only time race is an issue is when the people at school assume they must speak Spanish because they have a Hispanic last name.
Agree. Replace the idea of race with wealth. "Do you approve of the wealthy marrying the poor?" Compare to: "Do you approve of your daughter marrying..." I'm sure you will get different results in that poll.
Based on my personal experience I would guess that used to be true, but is much less so today. I know a fair number of multi-racial families (mix of adoption and marriage) who are very put off by the woke left because they see them as divisive
Weird that they think that as I find them to be the one group that is trying to unite everyone. But I guess different perspectives.
I agree about the backlash, but it’s possible for someone to think “most black people are bad people” and still leave room for the possibility your child could find an exceptional one. I’d still call this racist. It’s certainly progress!!, but it doesn’t mean the job is done. That being said, activists who claim to speak on behalf of “the black community” and then put inflammatory words in their mouths are certainly making this problem worse, not better.
"Studies from dating apps still show that people have strong racial preferences, with white people having the strongest racial preferences."
That's interesting. I had read some data from OkCupid a while back that suggested that Black women were the most discriminated against AND the most likely to discriminate against non Blacks. The latter surprised me, but apparently there is/was stigma about Black women marrying out. Is there new research on this or am I misremembering it from a decade ago?
As far as interracially marrying themselves, the trend is up at what seems like an accelerating rate
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/
Pew's 2015 data had intermarriage rates at 11% for White marriages, 18% of Black marriages, 27% for Hispanics and 29% for Asians. The Hispanic and Asian rates were even higher for non-immigrants, at well in the 40%s. The numbers from 1980 were under 5% for all of the above.
They also ask if you would oppose a close relative marrying someone of X race and those numbers have also plummeted. Most recent numbers were 14% of non-Blacks would oppose a relative marrying a Black person, 9% of non-Asians would oppose marrying an Asian, 9% also for non-Hispanics opposing Hispanics, and 4% for non-white opposing someone marrying whites.
Back in 1999 those same numbers were 30% opposing Black, 20% for Hispanic and Asian and 7% for White.
Would be interesting to see if dating app data has changed over a longer time span.
Ok - but if you remove all racism you still have the exact same situation - there will still be groups of people with better networks and similar unearned privileges. You could call those differing groups of people "classes". Or immigrants. Or ugly people or short people or whatever other unfair things make life easier for some individuals and harder for others.
But in any case, I think what you're describing as racism is a racial disparity, given the end result seems to be an equality of outcome.
As a thought experiment - has the class system that many European immigrants were fleeing been conquered? I've seen research that descendants of lower-class white immigrants are still economically behind the descendants of their upper class white immigrant peers of 100+ years ago, even though no one cares whatsoever now if your ancestors were "gentlemen" or peasants.
But interracial relations "in the abstract" is exactly what actual white supremacy was about. The whole power apparatus of the society was aimed at preventing this. That's the racist part. The rest is just personal preferences. Not the same thing at all.
I really don't get this. Are you suggesting that black people would want to change the culture so that white people would not prefer to marry white people, even if black and white people could marry whom they liked? And what kind of "change" in culture would that look like?
I'm with you on a lot of this and I think it's a good comment. But I think you're stretching the point quite a bit to link the cause and effect to Elliot Rogers so tightly, or to suggest that there's been a huge increase in Asian interracial couples based on expanded media roles for Asians that started, as far as I noticed, maybe around a year ago. If there's more Asian interracial couples than there used to be I'd guess it's more about continuing assimilation than anything else.
And not a single one of them is willing to reap the massive profits from hiring undervalued labor? Are black people utterly incapable of making business? Such a scenario is utterly implausible, the equivalent of assuming a ball on a string would continue hanging there if the string were to be removed. In the absence of laws mandating racism, it cannot meaningfully sustain itself.
Below Frigid mentions the Caste system in India, and maybe he's right about how it's panning out economically. But socially it seems almost as strong as ever. Pew's survey's on Indian's social attitudes regarding cast and religion were really shocking to me when I read them: https://www.pewforum.org/2021/06/29/religion-in-india-tolerance-and-segregation/
>If you say that living standards have risen dramatically over the past 30, 50, or 100 years, you’re somehow an apologist for every feature of the status quo. <
Pushing back a bit against Matt's view on this topic, I think there is a legit concern here that is not so easy to dismiss. When I hear that living standards have improved dramatically it does in fact give me some trust in the status quo and a sense that we are trending in the right direction and I suspect this would hold true for others, if studied.
As such, it does seem reasonable to be concerned that the above message could dampen attempts to improve living standards through new, unproven programs.
Instead of dismissing that concern as irrational, I would suggest that the message could be improved by adding some context to it, noting some specific policies that sped up the advances in living standards, along with some data showing room for even more improvement, and then some policy suggestions for amplifying all of these positive trends and making them even better.
Brilliant piece. I wish everyone on the left could read it.
Thanks for the kind words about my study with Josh Kalla. I agree with what you wrote regarding the fact that a) we haven't studied racial prejudice yet and b) this kind of canvassing is far too costly to scale nationwide -- and even if you did, although the effects are large by social science standards, they are not large enough to transform public opinion in any sense. I think the practical upshots of our studies are: a) some insights everyday people can apply in interpersonal conversations (e.g., don't lecture, have a two-way conversation), b) some ideas that might be able to be applied in more scalable mass communication (e.g., tell stories of individual outgroup members!), and c) a tactic that could make sense in small elections (e.g., there were some ballot initiatives on immigration and trans issues in small to mid sized towns where it actually is plausible you could try to canvass the whole electorate).
One theme in the literature on contact is that it really depends on whether the contact is positive-sum or neutral or negative-sum. Even neutral, shallow contact between groups seems to increase prejudice quite often (see Ryan Enos' work). Matt Lowe has a great experiment on the difference between positive-sum and negative-sum contact and as you might expect, positive-sum contact between groups really reduces prejudice but negative-sum contact increases it (https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20191780). I think the corollary of these kinds of findings is not so much that integration is good per se, but that we have to pay attention to the kind of integration. An example of a win that is nicely consistent with your and my policy preferences: there's a doctor shortage in the US, so we should let doctors from other countries immigrate here and work in rural areas where there is a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment and also a big doctor shortage! That is going to do wonders for people's views towards immigrants -- and in fact, there is some research consistent with that intuition: https://www.pnas.org/content/118/14/e2022634118.short.
Just wanted to say thanks so much for coming in here to add your thoughts. So often academic research gets misused, intentionally or not, so this sort of follow-on contact can be super valuable IMHO. Incredibly cool of you to do; we really appreciate it.
Also great to see some research on the potential benefits of using immigrant doctors to help alleviate the shortage there, though I guess I should be a tad skeptical, if only because it mega confirms my priors!
I think a good article would be a deep dive into "Afro-centricity." That was the 1990s version of CRT and DEI which argued that history was lies and that sub-Saharan Africans built the Egyptian pyramids and even traveled to Meso-America and built Olmec and Mayan architecture. And then the Greeks stole all this knowledge. You can still hear it every now and then. What ever happened to most of this?
Heck, Michael Jackson even did a music video set in Egypt with Eddie Murphy with Murphy playing the Pharoah.
What ever happened to that?
Isn't that the worst kind of "cultural appropriation?" They are literally stealing another civilization.
I know some Middle Kingdom Period DNA taken from a number of mummies. They were closest to people from the Levant and Anatolla. That is Hittites and Summerians. They would have looked like a Lebanese person today.
I'm here for the William Julius Wilson content. If you're frustrated with the current discourse on race, read his books for a more solid form of wisdom. I sure learned a lot while reading them in the 1990s.
I agree with this post and with the SB crowd on most days. Maybe it’s just me, but it feels like the tone these days has drifted into outright hostility toward any and all forms of antiracist effort. Matt tagged Hakeem in his tweet of this post today, and Hakeem retweeted it. If Hakeem or his supporters read these comments, I’m pretty sure he’d come away feeling even more self-assured that Matt is just feeding the white racist trolls. Hakeem’s initial tweet was “why don’t the popularists condemn white racism?” It feels like a strawman to me as most people do in fact condemn what they consider to be racism, they just might not agree with Hakeem on what racism *is.* But as this group gets more and more comfortable throwing around inflammatory racial statistics without any caveats, and shows less and less interest in solving real problems, I dunno, it’s starting to feel icky. Is it just me? Can we keep our eyes on the prize which is finding ways to reduce racial animosity and severely adverse racial disparities at the same time?
Thanks for saying this, Marie. I absolutely agree and have started staying away from the comments on the woke-skeptical posts.
thanks Marie for holding the line here. I have pretty much given up
I mean in a political sense the Republican Party in its current form has to lose and lose big and keep losing or else we will have more racism. Like these posts are a psa that we are not just left vs super left.
Maybe a few things going on here ...
(1) The SB comments do feel different. Sharper. Kenny has participated less lately. Maybe he's busy or maybe he's focused elsewhere. But how many times can you re-hash a finite set of topics? Comment exhaustion might be setting in. Matt will probably want to participate more if comment engagement rates taper.
(2) The stakes here seem to be increasing. That's probably amplifying some of the rhetoric. Who knows how representative the VA Gov. race is for the upcoming mid-terms but the school debate seemed central and our (or the Progressive) position seems to be losing. To the extent any racial disparity progress is downstream of winning elections ... the burgeoning anti-antiracism sentiment is a function of the antiracist efforts potentially missing the forest of elections for the bark of purity battles.
Who's Kenny?
LOL
I think the VA Gov. race is "representative" of the upcoming midterms, but only in that the President's party is going to have a bad time the way it always has a bad time.
Always feels too strong ... '98 and '02 did happen. The map matters. Republicans are defending more seats in the Senate. I don't subscribe that this is a done deal.
To me, the paradox of anti-racism in practice is that although racism is supposed to be about structures, not about people, it still comes down in practice to “doing the work” - essentially, to change our souls so that we will gladly do the things that anti-racism proponents want us to do. But we will not improve our racial difficulties this way, because our racial difficulties are not caused by white people having bad souls. The soul-changing exercise seems (inevitably) to slide into division and hostility. And I came to think: not by that path.
Instead, I have come to focus on civic justice. I reflect that we live in a continent-sized country with a very complex historical experience with some pretty bad things in it. We are of many cultures, and we do not all like each other or treat each other charitably. But we also have a legacy of freedom and unity from our founding that gives us a path to living together and growing together as citizens in spite of that. It is a powerful and good legacy. We need to hold onto that legacy, not tear it down.
I take a step back from direct action on racism. Black people will uplift themselves in their own interest, if we let them. The state of my soul does not (and should not) matter to them. My work is to truly understand our legacy, to strive to think and speak accurately for myself and my interests, and to participate with honesty in the civic exercise.
This isn’t going to satisfy anyone who is on fire to fix racism now, but I don’t think that's problem that can be fixed that way, simply that it can be set on a path to grow smaller over time.
"racism is supposed to be about structures, not about people"
I very much disagree with that statement. And I believe the vast majority of Americans do so as well.
Racism is about individual feelings and actions. An employer not hiring someone because of the color of their skin is racism.
Not have an equal percentage of people in a particular job that corresponds to their percentage in the population is only racism if the reason for the difference is because of individual racists actions.
I think the thrust of the institutional racism argument is that the reason that Black people didn't get that job is because they didn't get the qualifications, and they didn't get the qualifications because they went to a bad high school and they went to a bad high school because they live in a poorer school district and they live in a poorer school district because their great-grandparents didn't leave their parents an inheritance sufficient to buy a better house, and those great-grandparents didn't do that because they were redlined out of buying one in the 1940s and 1950s.
So, yes, there was an individual racist - the person who did the redlining 70 years ago - but the institutions have taken that racism and preserved it in amber like dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park. Now, it's not easy to fix that, and it's not simply the responsibility of the employer to do so. But it is a real problem. And blaming individuals in that system is wrong - providing, of course, that they actually are doing their best.
There is another version of institutional racism, which is institutions in which a small number of racists get their racism amplified. A classic example of this is hiring systems that involve the subjective opinions of a number of people; if your average hiring decision requires five people to give the OK, then even just 5% of people who are unconsciously racist in your pool of decision makers gets amplified to Black people having only 77% (1-0.95^5, if you want to check my math) of the chance of getting the job as compared to an equivalently-qualified White person.
This one, well, perhaps you can track down the person (or people) who are regularly down-checking black candidates. But, if they aren't expressing racist sentiments ("I'm just not inspired by him", "I don't think he'll be a good fit with the team", etc) then you can only do that retrospectively and on the basis of statistics, at which point how many people have been discriminated against already? Or else can you come up with a fairer way to decide? Like blind auditions for symphony orchestras work, but can you do that for other jobs?
I hesitate to weigh in because what I'm about to say will seem to some an apologia for social injustice. But if we're honest, many of the impediments to success you mention similarly apply to other populations who have nevertheless overcome them, from bad schools to intergenerational poverty to unconscious antipathy on the part of gatekeepers.
Jews and Asian Americans have had to deal with institutional racism in pretty much the same way, and have become and/or are becoming yet another outgroup-to-ingroup American success story, just like the Italians and Irish and so many others before them.
No one who watches how the world operates can deny there are lingering effects of prejudice in people's unconscious, and lingering repercussions of historical prejudice in present conditions. But it is an oversimplification to ascribe inequality today to inequality, even horrific disparate treatment, in the past. There are other factors at work. There are strategies that can help a disadvantaged group succeed. How did Jews go from a despised minority to an almost-fully-accepted part of the American elite? How are Asian Americans seemingly following the same path? Why can't others do the same thing?
These are good questions. We shouldn't exclude the possibility that the answer is "White Americans are a lot more prejudiced against Black Americans than against anyone else", of course. The assumption that the problem is with the Black Americans (which you didn't make, but which other people might make from reading your words) is a racist assumption in itself.
The history of the antebellum slaves and their descendants is sufficiently different from the history of any other group in American history that it's at least plausible that history was driven by and has driven the racism against African-Americans.
It's particularly interesting to compare to recent African immigrants who have done far better in America than African-Americans (notably, not that The Bell Curve needed more refuting, the opposite of what that hypothesis would predict).
There is no doubt in my mind that, as you say, "White Americans are a lot more prejudiced against Black Americans than against anyone else." It's not just Americans, either. My experience of the world and its history shows distinct anti-pigment animus almost everywhere and everytime. To cite just one non-US example, the vaunted egalitarian system in Cuba is, in fact, highly biased against Black Cubans, who do a disproportionate fraction of the low-status jobs in the country, and who are almost unrepresented in the ruling Politburo.
I also take your point that the experience of recent African immigrants refutes the Bell Curve hereditarian IQ explanation for African American difficulties (unless you interpret the disparate experiences as showing that African Americans are burdened with inferior White genes).
But the disparate experiences do show that navigating American society with Black skin and encountering institutional racism is not a sufficient explanation for observed outcomes. Something else must be at work. Hiring managers, school officials, random people don't have deep-seated preferences for children of Nigerians over descendants of Alabama sharecroppers. I doubt many could identify which are which.
Maybe it's transmitted culture within the family and in peer groups. Maybe that culture arose and was perpetuated in reaction to the horrific stimuli of slavery and Jim Crow. I don't know. And culture *is* hard to change. My only point is that it's not impossible. At least, I don't think it is. Shtetl Jews went from insular ghetto life in New York's Lower East Side to elite life in America. Chinese Americans went from coolie labor on the railroads and living in Chinatowns in a few cities to an increasingly large role in the mainstream.
Bottom line, progressives--I consider myself one--can help, but the main effort must be mainly endogenous for any community in the American context. Allies are useful, but can't be saviors. And pessimism of the kind I read from Kendi is corrosive and, I am convinced, stupid. Some things are hard. But most things are not impossible. Making life better for fellow Americans is not impossible.
"Like blind auditions for symphony orchestras work..."
Funny you use that example, as some people want to get rid of them now because they think they do not work: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/arts/music/blind-auditions-orchestras-race.html
It's the difference between "institutional racism" and plain old racist-racism though, right?
At some level it all comes down to individuals taking racist actions, sure. But it sounds like you're arguing that unless you can point at a racist hiring manager today, there isn't an element of racism in play. But there clearly is, even if it's just the echo of actions taken long ago.
>"racism is supposed to be about structures, not about people"
I very much disagree with that statement. And I believe the vast majority of Americans do so as well.<
This is a big part of the problem with this conversation. Two people using the same word, "racism," to mean completely different things.
This happens all the time. It is the first thing to check for when having an intractable disagreement. Sometimes there is no disagreement, but just mis-communication.
There very much is an argument on the left which explicitly denies the argument that racism is just about personal feelings. The argument goes like this:
Slavery was not caused by racism, racism was caused by slavery.
Think about it.
"Slavery was not caused by racism, racism was caused by slavery."
I would argue that for slavery to have been allowed it was because of a racism that dehumanized the "other" and thus allowed for it to occur.
It wasn't (originally) racism that dehumanized the other. Sugar plantations started on Cyprus, with the slave workers being Muslims who were captured by raids.
They were enormously profitable, and they gradually worked their way west across the Mediterranean (Rhodes, Crete, Malta) before eventually reaching the Canary Islands and Madeira off the west coast of Africa. After Eanes discovered how to pass Cape Bojador in 1434, sources of non-Christian slaves in West Africa (sometimes Muslim, sometimes local African religions, which the Christians called "pagan") replaced raided Muslims because it was much easier to acquire slaves in West Africa (where they were available for sale) than in North Africa (where they mostly had to be taken by force).
Having black slaves and white masters made it much easier to distinguish them and to identify escaped slaves. Spain (unlike the Cypriots, the Knights of St John and the Venetians who had run the earlier plantations) had a tradition of not trusting converts to Christianity (that's what the Spanish Inquisition was set up for, to ensure they weren't still practising their former religion in secret), and so black people came to be viewed as intrinsically non-Christian and thus "other".
All of this was already in place on a small scale before the Middle Passage got going into the Caribbean and later to the (future) United States.
The argument, as I understand it, is that historically, putting people into categories by the color of their skin came from putting people into categories by their religion, and was mediated through slavery.
Richard -- Very interesting. Would welcome you on a bar trivia team anytime!
If you want a good example of what this looked like in the middle of evolving from religious prejudice into racism, read Othello and remember that he is a Moor (a Muslim from North Africa).
Are the attitudes to him based on an idea that he is intrinsically other? Yes. Is that clearly about race and not religion? Not quite, though it is starting to become racism.
I don't disagree with you. It's a paradox to me that people who start out with the hard-ass premise that feelings don't matter, pretty much spend all their time trying to affect feelings. For conversion purposes.
I feel like your position is one that would allow slavery to go on forever, right? I mean, its the institution that says that blacks are slaves. You didn't decide that. You don't make the laws, but they say you can purchase someone. And you don't beat them unfairly and you feed them appropriately, right. You don't have a racist bone in your body -- and the structure can't be racist. As long as you're good to your slaves -- what more can we ask of you...
Slavery is wrong because it's a violation of your civil rights (no matter what color of your skin, slavery is wrong). In addition, slavery was intentionally racist because it applied based on the color of your skin. Just like hiring, or not hiring somebody because of the color of their skin is wrong (although obviously one is WAY more wrong).
My position is that people everywhere should be treated as individuals. And while population level data can be interesting we should be VERY careful when making assumptions about causality.
You can only retain slaves by continuous action. It is not some autonomous structure, but something made by humans, and changeable by humans.
I personally feel like all of those sentiments are helpful and respectful. Others expressed here today, not so much. Maybe I am nit-picking or just in a bad mood, but scrolling through the comment section, I find myself cringing more often than usual.
Thank you. I generally agree with Matt, and he should keep making his points, but a little humility on this topic seems in order.
I whole-heartedly agree that addressing extreme wealth inequality is the biggest, most important focus we can have, morally and practically, and that it will lead to a reduction of most of the racial disparities we care about. But that should/can be a space of agreement with the anti-racists, even if they come to the same conclusion from the opposite direction. I think Matt does a good job of trying to argue for that approach, but sometimes the comment thread here just drifts into reflexive caustic anti-wokeness, which eliminates the possibility of a coalition before it can start.
I understand. That sucks. I am really sorry that people are being assholes to you. I am frustrated with the woke extremists too- I think this extremism is taking over too many institutions, creating division, and leading to counter-productive groupthink and wasted resources. I think too many activists have succumbed to the entire gamut of classic cognitive distortions on this topic- black & white thinking, labelling, mind reading, catastrophizing, etc etc. https://www.healthline.com/health/cognitive-distortions Too many people have taken their self-righteous cause of fighting the bad guys as license to be a total asshole. It has to stop, and people need to be called out. I want this push back to be done effectively, because it's important work. I just don't think *mirroring* the hostility and thought distortions is going to be effective. Understandable, but counter-productive.
Certainly you can see the flaw in this plan? “Try to get someone fired? No dice.” You can’t really fight “cancel culture” by canceling the cancelers. We need a common set of behavioral standards we can all stick to. Basic respect, decency, and not judging people (positively or negatively) on the basis of their race seem like a good place to start. But I’m a softy. Also, I was one of “these types” (ok, not as bad as your colleagues, but I turned a blind eye to that stuff bc I thought it was “necessary”) and I was able to snap out of it, so I’ll always hold out hope for others. I highly recommend Chloe Valdary: https://theoryofenchantment.com/
Interestingly, how you frame anti-racism can almost be identically applied to Christianity. Yet there is almost none of the same level of hostility. Christianity seems ineffective in making "better" people. It's offensive to many (worse than offensive if you consider the atrocities carried out in its name). The inaccuracies in the bible make the 1619 project look like the proof of 1+1 in Principia Mathematica. And demanding patronage -- that's like the whole point of it.
I say this to note that the issue with anti-racism isn't in anti-racism in itself. Oddly the same people on this thread that hate it, use its most core tenant (outcome based approach) in attempting to discredit it (and interestingly Kendi himself would acknowledge that if it doesn't produce outcomes, it would not anti-racist -- a result that would please Betrand Russell himself). The issue is purely that anti-racism doesn't really benefit the "right" people.
I think when MT discusses it in this light, it works. Just be blunt. This country won't help black people on its own. But we also won't go out of our way to harm black people, if it also means harming white people. Black people need to realize this. Appeals to righteous principles and such will fall on deaf ears, unless it also benefits white people. And while I wish it weren't so, I think making it clear, is important.
That said, it does put Black in an interesting position. Does it make sense to support the left? Most Blacks tend to be socially conservative, except for issues of race. If we accept that as a country we won't try to help blacks, except as a by-product of helping whites -- should blacks then just vote on every issue except race? If so, does that move Blacks to largely being Republican?
What does all this "helping blacks" / "helping whites" mean? It's the ultimate strawman. There's various packages and reconciliation bills being debated and legislated through congress right now. Despite some "this will help minorities and women" messaging, the laws and budgets, like nearly all laws and budgets that aren't explicitly civil rights oriented, are race-neutral.
If you pass laws or budgets aimed to help those towards the bottom of the SES ladder, you will disproportionately impact Blacks. Laws or budgets aimed at the upper half of the SES will disproportionately impact Whites. I guess you can try to make a Kendi claim that every law / budget is racist / anti-racist but that turns everything into race, always. And it leaves no explanation for why largely 1 "race" countries, like, say Korea or Ireland or Tunisia pass laws.
I'm not sure what you want here - the nation clearly will pass laws to protect minorities from active harms. It will also pass race-neutral laws aimed at helping lower SES residents. But it is generally resistant to equality-of-group-outcome affirmative-action style laws. If you think that's racist, fine, but we disagree on the definition.
How that should impact a black person's vote I don't know, because it depends on that person's views of all the above and their personal economic status at least as much as their ancestry on how they think the government should view ancestries.
Classifying laws as racist/anti-racist/neutral doesn't mean that the intent of the law was race based at all. You can classify anything into anything. For all laws we can view them along male/female, straight/gay/other, upper/middle/lower class, urban/rural, environmental/unenv, futurist/luddite, etc... It could be that most laws are neutral in their impact on most axis one could construct. But understanding this is still important. And more importantly, trends could be very important in understanding where the country is going. This is actually an example of where one would want to use CRT.
"the nation clearly will pass laws to protect minorities from active harms" -- I'm unclear why you believe this? The voting supression laws passed by Republicans just recently give me little confidence that given enough power they wouldn't enact far more harm. I guess I just believe there is 50% of the country that would try to actively harm and 50% that wouldn't. Just depends on who has the votes.
"the nation clearly will pass laws to protect minorities from active harms".
To be more literal and precise I mean the nation has passed laws to protect minorities from active harms and is capable of doing so in the future. Not that it always way in every possible case. I meant it as a response to "This country won't help black people on its own", which doesn't seem accurate to me as I read it.
Which of these recent Republican passed laws are actively targeted at Blacks and not at Democratic votes in general? I realize in some states, particular in the deep south, the two categories of voters are hard to separate. From the little I know, most of these proposed laws will have very little impact and the partisan impact will be muted, or even work against Rs.
An example is to limit voting on Sunday afternoons. This was targeted specfically at the Black church coalition. Georgia passed this recently: https://www.ajc.com/politics/georgia-house-to-vote-on-election-restrictions-amid-staunch-opposition/46SNHMIYGZGMZDG5KLGHAB6NQ4/
I've been flat out told to accept Jesus as my lord and savior more than I've been told to be anti-racist. In fact I've never been told to be anti-racist, even at my work's diversity training (where the term never came up). But I can believe it may vary for each person.
Unsurprisingly, there have been FAR more openly racist people (much less anti-anti-racist) in the highest levels of our society than openly anti-Christian people. In fact, even in 2021, I bet you can win more elections by having your central platform as, "The anti-racism stuff has gone too far" than saying, "Christianity has gone too far".
I think you underrate how impactful it would be to be anti-Christian. Not just Christian agnostic, but openly fight against it in the same way that people openly fight against anti-racism.
Being racist will get you booted from society these days. And will most likely cost you your job etc. Being anti-Christian won't.
Depends on where you live and where you work.
And those places probably would fire you from your job if they found out you were anti-Christian.
I guess we do run in different circles. I live in a country where the last president said and did exactly what you describe and was almost elected again and is the front runner for one of the major political parties in the US. And the guy who took a knee during the anthem basically was fired.
"Christians" are saying that if I help someone get an abortion I can be fined $10,000. "Christians" are requiring that legal tender say "In God We Trust" -- nothing about diversity on any of the money that were forced to print. "Christians" were the ones who fought tooth and nail to keep my good friends from marrying. "Christians" are the ones who claim tax exempt status to then rail politically at the pulpit, often in attempts to disenfranchise minorities.
So yeah -- I guess we run in different circles
"Not-quite-rich"? The list of involved parents seems like they're pretty friggin wealthy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_college_admissions_bribery_scandal#Involved_parties_and_organizations
I believe we are operating with very, very different thresholds for the label "rich". I'm imagining someone with, say, a $1m home* and $200k in liquid assets. The dentistry professor and the radiation oncologist certainly have that, to say nothing of the hot pocket heiress, wilkie farr chairman, and others. Yet they are nowhere near able to donate $10m.
*Yes, I know million-dollar homes can be unremarkable in some metro areas.
Peter Thiel justified what he did to Gawker by saying that "If you're a single-digit millionaire like Hulk Hogan, you have no effective access to our legal system."
Whatever terminology you prefer, there is a level of very rich that can get around the systems and a level of not-quite-as-rich that has to instrumentalise the systems to help themselves.
"They are important. They are a large part of the Democratic party's funding and activist base. They influence its agenda and public image.”
Exactly. Which is why I am very pessimistic about near-term outlook for the Democratic Party in the next decade. Here are some things about the progressive wing of the party that I don’t know how to get around.
- Their policy ideas are bad, unworkable, divisive, and unpopular
- Their messaging causes the party to lose elections
- They can’t mobilize voters without countermobilizing at least as many on the other side
I’m reaching around for desperate ideas like “will I at least get a chance to vote for Nikki Haley instead of Trump?” That’s how bad it is.
You’re right that focusing on class makes the most sense but I think you’re being too dismissive of the other side. After all, however useful a housing or child poverty program might be, it doesn’t do much for criminal justice issues or voting rights.
Ok but these can be solved in "neutral" ways too that also help everyone.
Aggressive policing may be _worse_ for minorities, but white people (especially poorer white people) aren't immune. I forget the story but Conor Friedersdorf at the Atlantic had an example of a white male shot outside his hotel room while on the floor trying to comply with confusing police instructions. Would this happen more to a black male? The evidence on that particular interaction is mixed, but either way - reducing police shootings would help.
Reducing pretextual traffic stops would help racial discrimination in policing, but it can also be a good idea outside of that.
If you look at Eight Can't Wait police reform suggestions - all of them seem like good ideas to me that would probably help minorities, but they aren't FRAMED as helping minorities, they're (to me at least) commonsense solutions.
Voting rights - If you need to require an I.D. to appease plenty of worried-about-fraud normies, then make I.D.s for voting easier to get, or make voting easier in general.
To note one place where the academics are doing research to find out what works, UC Berkeley did a deep dive into their academic hiring practices in 2019 with an eye on finding interventions that had a measurable impact on who eventually got hired: https://ofew.berkeley.edu/data-and-initiatives/searching-diverse-faculty
They find a number of things that didn’t seem to matter (interview environment), and a couple that do (framing the position in a wider social justice area, emphasizing the job’s public engagement, pushing into more-diverse specialties). Note, though, that some things no longer count as interventions at Berkeley (when they would elsewhere) because all their recruitments use them as a matter of course.
As someone who has first-hand experience of this, I will say most normie Democrats are completely lost when the subject of DEI comes up. They think it is the "multiculturalism" of the 1990s. Things such as more diverse authors, more focus on contributions of non-whites, etc.
It is not that at all, so most of them are acting in good faith when they can't understand why Non-Foxite people object.
DEI in schools is something like this:
Tests are inherently racist and act to "Center whiteness" and "exclude black and brown bodies" from academic success. So parents, your 8th-grade child taking a vocabulary quiz is enacting "enacting white supremacy."
Grades themselves are racist. No student should fail.
Discipline has its roots in slave culture. So schools have almost all gotten rid of traditional discipline with predictable results.
There is enough anecdotal evidence that this method does nothing to actually advance non-white children's learning and is not even popular with black parents.
I have sat through talks like this.
I really think we need to get the idea that normie Dems are just clueless on this and hence react negatively when you talk about it Matt Y.
"There is enough anecdotal evidence that this method does nothing to actually advance non-white children's learning and is not even popular with black parents."
Yeah, an interesting aspect of all this "wokeness" discourse is that white progressives are in fact more "woke" than black people as a collective are. Sort of separately, if you poll black people about things like gay marriage and trans rights you might be in for a bad surprise.
We live in very strange times.
Which school district is doing this? I haven't seen any school districts get rid of grades (at the high school level -- I've seen it at elementary, but the reasons aren't race related at all).
And I haven't seen schools get rid of discipline either. Although, yes, physical discipline is a thing of the past. Again, not because of race.
Maybe you're confusing DEI with other initiatives that aren't race based?
I haven't seen anything about public high schools getting rid of grades. (I know of some private schools that have no grades, but that's always been the case.) Closest thing I've seen is this article about the Los Angeles School District, which says L.A. is starting to get rid of grade penalties for lateness and behavior. It also seems to be saying that L.A. wants to make it so that if you fail a test, you can retake it and pass it the second time, since you'll still have learned the material - you just learned it after the test. Which sounds to me like a bad idea if I'm understanding it correctly: all you'd have to do is memorize the answers to the test questions, which you'd know in advance. But maybe I'm not understanding it correctly.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-11-08/as-ds-and-fs-soar-schools-ditch-inequitable-grade-systems
Yes, L.A. did that and other school districts around the country that hire these DEI and Ed School hucksters are pushing this.
Deadlines are "White Supremacy Culture" ala Tema Okun because white culture has a "Sense of Urgency."
I should have been clearer, in getting rid of FAILING grades.
I have been in meetings with hundreds of educators where the DEI speaker has said tests are White culture, that BIPOC culture is more "collaborative" and tests should be phased out for group projects.
Honestly, I don't think most normie Dems are hearing what is going on in schools and think it is all ginned up panic from Right-wingers.
I am not going to dox myself.
Failing grades have been gotten rid of in a number of suburban school districts. I was told as other educators have been told that that "BIPOC students are over-represented among failing students." So the failing grades have become "incompletes."
I don't know why you are bringing up long ago physical discipline.
We have had again the "School to Prison Pipeline." Detentions and suspensions have been curtailed at a large number of schools under the idea that black and Latino students were again over-represented in these punishments.
So to get rid of these accusations school districts have simply all but refused to hand these out.
A school district that I could look into myself would hardly dox you. Unless the school district is so small that there is only one Romulus Augstulus there.
I have heard of failing grades turning in to incompletes for Covid. Again, nothing to do with race. But was a one time measure during the height of the pandemic.
Regarding the suspension/detention thing. I haven't heard of school districts refusing to dole them out generally. That said, there is good research and anecdotal data that suggests that Black students are viewed and likely treated differently. Here's a good controlled study on this: https://edens.berkeley.edu/PDF/2strikes.pdf
And I don't suggest teachers are racist on the whole. But these small differences in treatment compound over time and can lead to drastically different outcomes even for students who, at least at the onset, are behaviorally identical in aggregate.
Pointing to actual school districts that have done this is evidence, not doxxing.
I took my first DEI training at the large multi-national company I work for earlier this month. It was beyond banal. The two scenarios where were supposed to apply DEI principles were more "all I really need to know I learned in kindergarten" than DEI. I don't doubt that some weird stuff is happening in some companies, but it certainly does make me pause when I hear about all the companies implementing DEI training. Based on my sample size of 1, all DEI training is not created equal. And that's the kind of experience that makes me hesitant when a phrase like "a number of suburban school districts" is used.
I have been an educator for decades and am married to one. I have been part of professional organizations. I have heard the same things over and over from collegues.
Also here is a San Fransico based school DEI firm pushing the idea that school discipline is inherently racist:
https://culturallyresponsiveleadership.com/suspensions/
I don't doubt there are firms pushing it. I'm looking for evidence defining the number of school districts pulling it. I fully expect that number is not zero, but is is 3, or 12, or 900? Without knowing that, it's hard to characterize how school districts are responding to the push.
That stuff was definitely around in the '90s too, but maybe there's more of it now.
I think the Education Schools are a magnet for these DEI types. Faddish and low intellectual standards are the norm.
If you were in a business setting and said, "Written memos or emails are white supremacy culture," everyone in the room would think the person is a total idiot.
However, in Education Schools in Universities, this kind of stupidity finds a ready audience
Your persistence on this topic is valuable; thank you.