I just don’t think it matters much what King thought. What matters is what America agreed to with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. My impression from school is what we achieved consensus on was “people should be judged based on the content of their character not the color of their skin”, but not any of King’s more radical views. That’s why this quote from King is so powerful, not because it accurately sums up his views on race, but because it accurately sums up America’s new consensus on race.
Even affirmative action IMO overextended past this consensus to the point of actually requiring “judging based on the color of skin”, which is why I don’t like it (and my impression is most Americans agree with me, because the consensus is that judging people on race is bad). That’s why prop 16 failed. That’s why the attempts to redefine “racism” as “power+privilege” or “structural racism” bother me, because they are attempts to take the hard-fought disgust at racism as interpersonal prejudice and transfer it to more contested concepts just by playing word games without doing any real persuasive work.
I would be interested in the actual history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Did the legislators passing that bill think they were authorizing affirmative action? Given that the discriminatory measures in place were racially race-neutral already, what did they think they were banning?
I mean, yes, I think it would be constructive for conservatives to say "unlike Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represents a complete and adequate solution to the problem of racial justice and that's why we're gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 etc. etc. etc."
That would help us have a clearer and more honest dialogue.
I feel like if we're giving MLK a holiday for establishing the civil rights consensus, it's fair for everyone to cite him in support of that consensus, even though it wasn't everything he hoped for, and even if the people citing him are opposing further "progress".
I'm honestly still confused about what bothers you here. Isn't it clear that the price of MLK being widely revered, getting a holiday, being widely taught to young kids, etc. is that most people are only going to know about and agree with his widely-agreed-upon views and not his still-hotly-contested views? It's a great opening for "did you know that this widely revered figure had radical still hotly-contested views?!", as you write in the post. But it doesn't make sense to have a civil religion saint that only socialists are allowed to quote.
I guess you just disagree with me that "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" is a good summary of the post-MLK American consensus on race, or of the goals of the Civil Rights Act? I'd be interested to read a case that in fact America embraced a more substantial form of MLK's vision, but this post doesn't really try to make one.
People are *allowed* to say and think whatever they want about King. But if you're trying to assess the state of racial equality in 2021, it seems like it's worthwhile to examine the philosophy that animated the leading intellectual and moral force behind contemporary civil rights legislation. To argue otherwise is a bit like arguing that the writings of the founding fathers are irrelevant to thinking about the contemporary American republic. ("It doesn't matter what Hamilton, Madison, or Jefferson thought. What matters is that we passed the Constitution.")
But I agree with "It doesn't matter what Hamilton, Madison, or Jefferson thought. What matters is that we passed the Constitution."! The Constitution is rightly far more influential than any founding father's political views that contradict it, even though I'm sure there were many (although actually I don't know what they were, since they weren't influential).
Understanding the compromise that became law seems more important to me than understanding the activism that led to it, especially the parts of that activism that never convinced most people.
King did not pass the Civil Rights Act. The House and the Senate did. So it may be even more worthwhile to examine the intellectual and moral force that behind the thinking of the key actors in that process, and what they thought was right as well as politically expedient.
Obviously it's worthwhile to learn about and understand the motivations of politicians responsible for passing laws, but if you're trying to understand any law in a meaningful way, the agents who don't hold political office often have as much or greater impact than those that do. Like, it would be weird to have a discussion on equality of the sexes and the impact of the 19th Amendment by only reading materials related to the state legislators who debated ratification of the Amendment itself.
Agreed, but only adding that it is a much more complex matter than just "study what Dr. King said" Not least because there was a civil rights movement before there was a Dr. King. I don't think a photograph necessarily says that the key legislative players were behind King's integral vision of solidarity and redistribution, nor does national recommitment to equality under the law require it.
Isn't the argument that MLK believed we could only realize a nation where people are judged by the "content of their character" if we adopted [policies X, Y, Z], which we have not done yet? I always thought this notion was best expressed in his speech at the end of the Selma march (one of his best):
"Today I want to tell the city of Selma, today I want to say to the state of Alabama, today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around.
We are on the move now.
Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now.
The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now. The wanton release of their known murderers would not discourage us. We are on the move now.
Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us.
We are moving to the land of freedom.
Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.
Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. March on poverty until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist. Let us march on poverty until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled, and the idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.
Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
Let us march on ballot boxes until the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence. Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda. Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor."
My selectively quoting King and taking his quotes out of context, one misrepresents what he meant in the moment.
Now, why would a person do that?
Because such a person wants the moral standing of the only American born after the founding of our country with a national holiday named after them to give weight to their own thinking and preferences -- even when they do not match those of the great American.
Look, anyone can take words and phrases out of context and compose a paragraph that says anything they want. Look, I'll do it it you. "People citing him...are confused. Most people...know....and agree with this...hotly contested views." The fact that MLK had a particular sentence that people like to pull out of context in order to present it as something other than it was doesn't actually make it any less dishonest.
Matt is not not being explicit about this, but there really are only two options here. Either these people know that they are misrepresenting MLK's intent, or they are so dismissive of him that they can't even be bothered to read the whole speech. But Matt is pretty clear what he thinks of them, either way.
"Martin Luther King Jr. famously expressed the American ideal of freedom from racial discrimination, "a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Affirmative action violates that dream. It's un-American."
I think its dishonest because there being a large standard of living gap between the average White and Black American is a violation of the MLK dream. Focusing on affirmative action is not WhatKingWouldDo
Your argument rests on the assumption that MLK's 'dream' is already realized and that is simply not true. Affirmative action will be un-American when that dream becomes a reality. Until then, yes, you are misrepresenting MLK.
It depends. Earlier this year, Representative Mary Miller put out a video saying "Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ’Whoever has the youth has the future.’" Why would she think that he is the best figure to include on sharing her viewpoint?
Conservatives can take that position if they want, but I don't see any conservatives on TV arguing that what King thought doesn't matter. They say King shared their principles, which is not true.
I agree that people shouldn't lie on TV! (But I am a little sympathetic, because I imagine it's tough to convey this nuance on TV, and invoking King specifically in his role as saint in the civil religion is rhetorically powerfully but easily bleeds into lying that King actually agreed with the speaker)
Nobody is saying “King shared their principles” writ large. They’re saying “King shared this particular principle with respect to color-blindness.” Which is true!
I have to disagree that "nobody" is saying this. I'm not going to go hunting for quotes, but in general the King-quoting seems to me more about "the spirit" of what King said, his "legacy," etc. The attempt is certainly to say that race-blind, non-redistributive policies are closer to what King would have wanted.
This is a ridiculous way of thinking about quoting anyone. Of course when Tom Cotton says - "as MLK said ..." he's using a shared value of MLK's thoughts on the subject, and MLK's authority on what needed to be done on issues of race in America. His argument is clearly "MLK thought this we should be colorblind, MLK is an authority on race, we should be colorblind and not work on redistribution". In your view the argument is "The consensus is that we should be colorblind, this is the consensus as phrased by MLK, we should be colorblind and not work on redistribution". which is not an argument at all.
Here's a sample of the kind of argument I have in mind:
"Martin Luther King Jr. famously expressed the American ideal of freedom from racial discrimination, "a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Affirmative action violates that dream. It's un-American."
You can see I am citing him as an famous expositor of an "American ideal", but not lying about his views.
Would you limit OTHER legislation to what the legislators could imagine? Would you limit OTHER legislation to what the legislators passing it would agree with?
1) It seems a shame to be limited by the morality and the imagination of our forefathers.
2) There are always disagreements among them, and there will always be those whose thinking we could not know. So, there's no way for such things to be definitive.
3) What was approved was the language in the legislation. That's the nature of legislation. That some might prefer one meaning and others and other meaning is not surprising. This is why everyone is a textualist, now. You seems to be imaging for yourself some consensus which you wish to define that matches your own preferences. That seems a exercise rather low on intellectual integrity.
Yes, we should interpret legislation textually or perhaps by considering what the people passing it thought it did in ambiguous cases. If you want new rules, pass new laws.
The civil rights act outlaws discrimination by race. That's the text. Affirmative action obviously discriminates by race. It's crazy that we have somehow ended up interpreting banning discrimination by race as requiring it.
(I am genuinely confused why everyone agrees California Prop 209 outlaws affirmative action whereas the Civil Rights Act permits or even requires it, given that AFAIK the legislative text is very similar)
1) Odd. I didn't say anything about affirmative action? Why are you so committed to driving everything to this issue.
2) You might not be aware of this, but there are many kinds of affirmative action that have nothing to do with race. So, your objections to affirmative actions seem to be more based in deeper problem you have with it than with actual legal objections.
3) Why or how is affirmative action necessarily discrimination based on race? Why do you assume that anything other than racial blindness constitutes discrimination? Why is it that consideration the challenges that accompany being a part of a particular "race" when evaluating a candidate is necessarily discriminatory? How do you know that FAILING to ever consider such thing necessarily constitutes discrimination?
Look, Mr. Paulson, I am a highly education straight white cis male, the son of two parents with advanced degrees themselves. There is no way that any form of affirmative action would work to my advantage. But I am quite capable of admitting that many others who have achieved what I have achieved have done so due to greater effort, care, diligence and patience. And, therefore, though our achievements may appear equivalent on the surface, any thoughtful consideration would acknowledge that their achievements were actually greater than mine. Doing so does not constitute discrimination, it just acknowledges reality
And the realization that one way to balance the discriminatory thumb on too many scales is to counterweight that on the other side of the apparatus is not disciminatory. It is is the opposite.
1) Affirmative action is just a good example of an issue where people (like me) quote MLK to disagree with him. You're right that the debate over affirmative action itself is somewhat far afield from the post. I think we agree the law should be interpreted textually and not based on what MLK thought?
2) Sure, my objections are both legal and moral, because in this case the law accords with my morals in saying that discrimination by race (and many other things) is wrong.
3) There's a plausible story to tell about how formal discrimation via affirmative action is just counter-balancing informal racism, but affirmative action manifestly is treating people differently based on their race i.e. discriminating by race. Just because you have a reason doesn't mean you're not discriminating.
1) Funny, neither Matt nor myself hear people use that "content of character" quote and disagree with it. Neither do people use that quote and then say, "But I disagree with all the other stuff MLK said." So, no, I do not think that people quote MLK to disagree with him.
2) Your reading of the law accords with your moral view. But we have decades of there reading of the law that does NOT accord with your moral view. Why is YOUR reading the preferred reading?
3) I see what you are saying. But isn't it equally plausible that affirmative action is how we actually treat people the SAME based on their race? You conceded the plausibility of informal racism. So, if we can balance that with targeted anti-racist efforts, can't we just cancel out the disaffirmation and -- just as (-1) + (+1) = 0 -- we end up treating people the same?
4) You seem to think that ANY consideration of race constitutes discrimination, even as you acknowledge that there is informal discrimination already. So, you claim a moral view that discrimination on the ground of race is bad, but refuse to take the simplest anti-discriminatory counterweight, thus insisting the informal discrimination based on race continue unchecked. Really, man, how is THAT a moral position? You've created a contradiction between you stated moral view and the actions you insist upon.
1) I mean people use "content of their character" to argue for a colorblind society, which apparently is not what MLK himself believed in.
2) It's the plain reading. Also most Americans agree with me (for example, prop 16 failed in California, despite California being very liberal and the local politicians supporting it)
3+4) Hypothetical discrimination by other people doesn't make more discrimination legal. It would justify cracking down on that other discrimination though, which is the proper response to it.
This is a good article with respect to King's actual thought - as you rightly say, King was a much more radical figure economically than he is popularly given credit for, and the conservative praise of King tends to wipe that out.
At the same time, I think you fail to give credit for what conservatives - and yes, conservatives like Tom Cotton - genuinely have learned from King's version of the Civil Rights movement, and why the "content of character" part genuinely is important to them, and to America as a whole.
The question is: WHY (as you note) were there no Black Fortune 500 CEOs before 1987, no Black university presidents of notionally integrated universities, no Black foreign service officer before the 1920s etc. etc., when there was no law forbidding it? It can't SOLELY be explained by "structural racism" - that might explain why there were fewer, but not why there were none. And the obvious, blatantly obvious answer as to why there were none, is that the large majority of people in charge of appointments and promotions within those institutions were personally racist, racist in a very simple and obvious and straightforward way. They were racist in the North, just like they were racist in the South, though in the North it didn't tend to express itself in legal segregation. White people simply didn't believe that Blacks were suited to positions of leadership, or capable of taking responsible high-prestige roles.
So when King talked of his dream about people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, that addresses something real, and something that everyone knew to be real - people were daily being judged in exactly that way, and that was a major thing (not the only thing, maybe not the most important thing, but still a major thing) that was holding Blacks back at the time.
And modern conservatives accept that - and, I think, in private as well as in public. And they have been convinced that it was wrong. You simply won't find someone who believes that Blacks are intrinsically unsuited for high office or responsible or prestigious roles in society. That is a huge, vast change from 50 years ago, and King's words in that speech, even if taken out of the context of his thought as a whole, are a major reason why. Those words, and the appeal to justice and common humanity in them, have won the day in modern America.
So it isn't true to say that "The conservative movement, at the time, opposed him in the name of federalism, free markets, and the idea that facially race-neutral laws are all that one can reasonably ask for. And the conservative movement today largely stands by those ideas." That is wrong. The modern conservative movement argues that Blacks asked something much more radical, and moreover that they were right to ask for it. Blacks like King demanded that people change their attitudes towards those of other races, that people recognize that a person's race does not affect their qualifications for a job, or their ability to perform well in any area of society. And that demand for a radical change of attitudes in the name of basic fairness has been accepted by the modern conservative movement.
Now, you're right that that isn't all that King demanded, it's not even perhaps the most important thing that he demanded, and that his thoughts on race and class and economics went well beyond that, into areas that neither the conservatives of his day nor modern conservatives accept. But King convinced conservatives, as he convinced liberals, on that one issue, and (I would argue) it's a really important issue, one which explains the iconic status that King has among conservatives as well as liberals in modern America.
Letting a few, very talented blacks become CEOs or university presidents may have seemed radical in 1960. However, it is much less of an ask than broader equality. The only sacrifice it requires is for a few elite whites to not get the prestige positions— positions 98% of whites can’t even realistically aspire to.
Root and branch equality would require people much further down the good chain to give up economic opportunities— eg, Billy can’t be assistant manager at Walmart because assistant managers have to be racially representative of the broader community.
In 1960 the people appointing Billy to assistant manager at Walmart (or the 1960 equivalent of Walmart) would have been judging him on the color of his skin as well. And the modern conservative movement would argue that that, too, was wrong: that the same radical change in attitudes that would enable suitably talented Blacks to become CEOs or university presidents should ensure that Billy would only receive his position at Walmart on his merits. And indeed, that too has happened: there are Blacks in assistant manager positions now, just as there are Black CEOs. The Black competitors for Billy's job aren't being excluded from consideration simply because they are Black, as they were in 1960.
Now, of COURSE one can argue that isn't nearly enough - and King, as Matt shows, would have agreed with that!! But it required a genuinely radical change in people's attitudes, and I don't think one should diminish that.
It’s complicated. In the Deep South in 1960, stores had very good reasons not to hire black assistant managers. It would have triggered white customers and hurt profits. Furthermore, white people who wanted jobs as assistant managers might have understood that white supremacy made it easier to get those gigs by knocking out the black candidates. None of this requires anyone to believe that blank people were incapable of any aspect of bring an assistant manager other than the “not triggering racist whites” aspect of the job. However, not triggering racist whites was essential to any customer facing job, so there’s a sense in which black candidates really were unsuited to the job.
White supremacy was a constellation of attitudes and cash flows. Some but not all of it survives to this day.
Would it require that much? Like I’m thinking of an earlier MY post that said the racial wealth gap is surprisingly concentrated in the top 1 percent.
Like you’d close the gap pretty substantially by taking all the wealthiest people and either burning it or having a proportional number of black and Latin Google’s/Apples/Chases etc.
The wealth gap is concentrated in the top 1 percent because wealth is concentrated in the top 1 percent. If you want to look at normal people, you need to look at income gaps.
(Now, both wealth and income gaps are complicated and roll a lot of stuff into them. If you just look at topline numbers, you'll see lots of stuff that isn't racial per se rolled into a racial gap.)
Right so who gets a job as a Walmart assistant manager just isn’t going to move the needle very much either way. Billy could be the assistant manager at Walmart but Walmart couldn’t exist as anything like what it is.
It depends on how you measure the racial wealth gap. Are you trying to explain the ownership of dollars or peoples lived experience? Dollars are concentrated in the 1%, but relatively modest differences in wealth (eg $100k to pay for education) can makes huge differences in people’s loves, even if they are only a small piece of national wealth. Transferring $1 trillion from small billionaires to Bezos wouldn’t change much. But transferring $1 trillion to poor minorities in the deep South would change a lot.
When should the first black Fortune 500 CEO have been instated?
Let's create an alternate history. In 1964, Martin Luther King casts a powerful spell that prevents all Americans from literally seeing skin color, or remembering their previous views on race and ethnicity. Everyone is unavoidably judged entirely on the content of their character, it becomes literally impossible to judge people on race or ethnicity.
At the same time, Congress passes some kind of technocratic law of the sort that Matt favors to help poor people, including poor children, and it goes great.
But otherwise, things remain the same. The Fortune 500 companies remain as they were, their executive ranks remain unchanged. There are no black CEOs. The next time a CEO retires, they do a job search and probably get someone who's currently a CEO of a Fortune 1000 company or a VP of a Fortune 500 company, and he's white too.
Black kids start going to selective schools in much greater numbers, since they have money to do so due to technocratic reforms and are not barred by racism since racism is abolished. But, realistically, the children of laborers, even with a lot of economic opportunity, and no racial animus against them, do not go to Harvard in the same numbers that do the children of doctors, lawyers, executives, academics, whose parents put their kids on railroad tracks to that life, who have connections and understand what those universities value, who tutor their children formally and informally and surround them with peers who get the same deal.
In this world, I don't think that there's a black Fortune 500 CEO a ton before 1987. And I think that it'd be probably at least three generations before you couldn't find a statistically significant link between being black and being of lower socioeconomic status. Maybe more that three generations!
Obviously, in the real world, we did not abolish racism in the 60s, and real racism does slow the upward mobility of blacks. And we also don't have great technocratic laws giving everyone a lot of opportunity, and that also means upward mobility is limited.
But I've long understood late 20th and 21st century liberals' racial policies as being about frustration with how long organic upward mobility takes even when it's not really held back by racism or economic opportunity. I think conservatives tend to feel comfortable saying, "if it's getting better, there are natural limits to how fast it can get better and that's okay," while liberals tend to say, "if it hasn't gotten to such and such a point already we need to force it to that point."
Democrats of a certain ideological leaning tend to conflate the fact that material conditions for African Americans are still quite poor with the notion that there's been no improvement at all in their standing and our dealings with racial prejudice.
To almost anyone else, this is plainly and obviously untrue, and it sends huge numbers of people into defensive crouches that are made worse when they get called racist for pointing out that this is untrue and have no real way to fend off the accusation.
The problem is that no sooner had the ink dried on the great civil rights bills of the 1960's than US economic policy started undermining the hell out of the working class, which had and has a disproportionately large number of black families.
The aforementioned liberals look at poverty outcomes since them and see society-wide, systemic racism. Conservatives look at genuine improvements in the form of huge declines in racial prejudices and greatly increased minority cultural clout and representation and see deluded leftists looking for equality of outcomes.
People like me look at all of this and see a world in which almost everyone who was working class in 1968 is worse off than back then regardless of race, which has wildly disproportionately impacted black families because that's where the vast majority of them started at the time.
We have systemic racism, biases in policing, education, housing, and healthcare. None of these are the main cause of racial income and wealth gaps today, which can be explained almost entirely by the decline in bargaining power suffered by the lower-middle class relative to their employers, just like the bottom two quintiles of white families.
The policies that would make a dent in inequality overall are the same ones which would disproportionately benefit poor black families.
(I also understand a lot of the debate between conservative and liberals in this time period to be saying, "How much of the continued economic disadvantage of blacks in America is due to racism and how much is due to the speed limits of natural change?")
There's some merit here, but there's been essentially no convergence in standards of living, so "speed limits" is an odd term to use.
Black families have been squeezed by the same forces that lower-income white families have been, but the result is much more pronounced because most black families were still working class when the "good jobs" dried up in big cities, and most working class white families were able to move to follow them through at least the 1980's.
I think a lot of conservatives get a free pass on racial issues because they claim simultaneously that their guiding principle is laissez-faire •and• that it's equality of opportunity. The two things aren't compatible. The 1964 Civil Rights Act creates equal opportunity by restricting the freedom of private businesses to employ whomever they choose.
Obviously conservatives are free to argue that too much redistribution is bad for efficiency. But when they argue that redistribution is wrong in principle, even though anti-discrimination laws are fine, they're trying to occupy a middle ground that doesn't exist. If you really don't believe property rights should be restricted to reduce market-generated inequalities then you can't.support civil rights laws, because that's just what those laws do.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to point this out, though, because under Trump it seems the GOP is dropping its rhetorical comment to equal opportunity in any case. You never hear conservatives arguing that gay people should have equal opportunity to buy a wedding cake; it's all about the baker's exercise of property rights in accordance with her religious beliefs. They still aren't claiming that anyone has a religious right to refuse service to black people, but I can see it going in that direction. Maybe it was better when they were logically inconsistent.
I think the religious freedom cases get a little odd.
The original conservative view was that non-discrimination laws are bad because they abrogate free markets. They clearly *do* abrogate free markets, that just proved to be a losing argument. So they've pivoted to this religious freedom idea which they can win with in courts. But I think the reason is still the markets thing.
It's worse than the old position! At least Barry Goldwater believed that •every• property owner had the right to discriminate. He didn't claim that having a religious opinion gave you special rights.
I think the reason for the shift is pretty clear actually. Most of today's Republicans don't want to defend legalized discrimination against black people, only against LGBT people. The religion angle provides a convenient way to disconnect LGBT equality from other civil rights issues... although not really, because at some point a Muslim business owner will assert the right not to employ women, or a Catholic baker will refuse to bake wedding cakes for divorced Catholics. Conservative legal activists have been very careful not to bring those kinds of cases, because they can't afford to show the full implications of a maximalist stance on "religious freedom".
The religious freedom cases are legitimate if properly limited. The cake cases are funny because they're about cakes, but I don't think anyone would disagree that it shouldn't be illegal if, say, someone tries to commission a Christian artist to paint a painting about Muhammad (or a Muslim artist to paint a Nativity scene or what have you) and the artist refuses. So there are clearly some cases where a narrow religious freedom exception is appropriate.
I've tried to find a place to settle on this, and I came up with a creativity exemption - that a creative person could not be required to create work that goes against their political / religious beliefs.
And we already have a test in law for what is creative: copyrightability.
So the cake decoration where the baker is presented with a drawing that they just have to replicate is a public accommodation; the one where they are asked to create something that endorses a gay marriage is something they can reject.
I would honestly say that the line should be drawn at any creative endeavour, which includes what might be called artisanal rather than artistic works.
If the wedding cake maker is just refusing to provide an off-the-shelf cake to a gay couple, that's illegal discrimination, but I honestly don't see why they should be obliged to be involved in *creating* something that goes against their beliefs.
Another point is that the refusal has to be based on the content of the product, not the identity of the buyer. In some cases it can be hard to separate those things. But in the cake example, I think this cakemaker would have made a happy birthday cake for the gay couple, and would not have made a gay marriage cake ordered by a straight friend.
When I look at trendlines for, say, gay acceptance and religious adherence, especially among the young, all I can say about social conservatives and these court cases is, let them have their cake; they can eat it too.
These are rearguard actions in a war we're winning in a rout. Just ask the kids of the owners of these bakeries if they agree with their parents. I'm pretty confident the answer is "no."
I agree. “Let the market sort it out” wasn’t the answer for solving public accommodation discrimination in the Jim Crow South. But it’s fine for religious bakers. Ginning up cases against these small number of folks starts to feel like punching down.
Yeah, I've always wondered why conservatives bother fighting one side of these wedding cake cases, rather than simply going to a very liberal artist and then commissioning a painting celebrating Trump or advocating a pro-life position or whatever, then when the artist refuses claiming that *they're* being discriminated against.
Political affiliation is not a protected characteristic, though, so the baker is well within his rights to refuse service regardless one’s view of the cake cases.
You lawyers might know the answer to this. Does it make any difference that the bakery is a shop open to anyone and the act of commissioning a painting proceeds under different circumstances, one in which there’s less confusion about the public nature of an enterprise?
Let me add a clarification: your distinction might matter if the painter isn’t generally offering services to the public. If I reach out to a famous painter of my own accord to attempt to commission a painting, apropos of nothing, she can probably refuse for any reason or none at all.
Let’s keep in mind that SCOTUS kicked the cake case without deciding the merits. That said, I think the answer to your question is no, it probably doesn’t matter. The painter has a better case than the baker, but that’s primarily because painting is clearly expression protected by the First Amendment. A wedding cake, by contrast, is closer to the line: more expressive than, say, a seat at the diner counter and a hamburger, but not exactly high art, either.
Gorsuch, in his concurrence, argued the wedding cake was significantly expressive as an approval of gay marriage that the government could not compel the baker to make it; I believe Sotomayor dissented to the contrary.
If I'm the artist, I accept the commission (with some upfront payment) and then deliver them a painting of a fat, naked Trump with which they will be very very unhappy.
I think you’re overemphasizing the extent to which there are genuinely held “reasons” here, that’s not to say I think they are disingenuous reasons. I just think they are subconscious reasons not held to a standard of rationality. As an aside, talking to a family member a few years ago who is relatively politically engaged (could describe the branches of government, how they work, name all presidents and VPs back 50 years, etc. etc.) absolutely railed about the export import bank to me back when that was in vogue. Yet, he couldn’t describe exactly what it did. Then, a few years later, he cheered Trump’s desire to rip up NAFTA. He used to rail about deficit spending on principle, and yet when Trump signed the bill that sent the checks (notably not to him), he was ambivalent about the effect on deficits. Maybe the through line here is individual interests + xenophobia, but that’s certainly not how he would conceptualize it. My point is not to dunk on the right per se, it’s just to point out that I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to superimpose a requirement of having good and consistent reasons on political ideology.
I think you should go talk to a bunch of Muslims before spouting off about “disingenuous reasons.” The centrality of procreative marriage isn’t something conservatives just made up to piss off Democrats.
Suppose you got 1,000 random people in a room that opposed gay marriage or opposed adoption by gay couples or even just had a deep passion for defending the right of free expression and religious freedom for the wedding cake industry. Now, you asked those 1,000 people "why do you think the centrality of procreative marriage is important?" You would get a lot of blank stares, some confusion, and some responses not articulated along the lines of the principle you just laid out. But I don't doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. Which is actually what I said if you re-read my original comment. I DON'T think people's beliefs are disingenuous. I just don't think its reasonable to expect there is a deep, broadly applicable principle underlying all of them. For example, I would be very surprised if there was a strong correlation between the group of people who believe wedding cake bakers should be able to deny service to gay couples, and those who believe workplaces should make reasonable accommodations to allow Muslim employees to practice mid-day prayer. And I don't think that incongruence would be because of a nuanced conception of positive and negative rights, either.
This sounds purely cynical to me. "Respectable" people in past times, down into the lower middle class, and including my own ancestors, took sexual and family morality very seriously, given that a large number of illegitimate children would have been the result otherwise. So what makes you assert that they were somehow insincere or just making it up?
The original opposition wasn’t based on “free markets” but freedom more fundamentally, in particular freedom of association and conscience. People shouldn’t have to do business with anyone they don’t want to, not as an economic matter but as a matter of individual liberty.
That proved to be a losing argument. But there is nothing “odd” about the pivot to religious freedom. That’s just a narrower ground of the same point. “Even if you don’t believe in an expansive view of freedom of association and conscience, people shouldn’t have to do affirmative acts that are inconsistent with their religious beliefs.”
I don't think it's too hard to draw a distinction between civil rights and redistribution. Civil rights is more like "don't be a jerk" whereas redistribution is more like "give to charity". The former is a basic expectation when interacting with strangers, whereas the latter is nice but not obligatory.
To put it another way "the gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny", whereas redistribution is more clearly zero-sum.
I'm not convinced there's a real difference. Restaurants in the South used to exclude black customers because a lot of white customers found their presence to be offensive, which is the same reason restaurants continue to exclude people who aren't properly dressed or who look as if they sleep in the street. Being born black in America isn't fundamentally different from being born with a physical disability, or with a low IQ. All these things make employers less willing to hire you and (unless the government intervenes) reduce your lifetime earning potential. Either all these things can legitimately be addressed by state action, or else none of them can and they're just unfortunate facts of life.
I guess my point was to address what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the "everyday libertarianism" that pervades a lot of Americans' thinking. Real libertarianism is the belief that *no* outcome is morally illegitimate if it results from voluntary transactions between consenting adults--whether it's living in poverty because you were born with no arms, or being unable to eat in a diner because you were born with the wrong skin color. This is a crank position and hardly anyone actually holds it--but a lot of people *think* they hold it (sometimes they call themselves "moderate libertarians", which I say is a contradiction in terms) and it distorts their political judgment.
The right way to think about it is this. If you don't believe it's wrong for the government to force restaurants to serve black customers, then you don't actually believe property rights are absolute. And if you don't believe property rights are absolute, your thinking about wealth redistribution ought to change. Instead of saying you oppose it because it's morally wrong, you'll want to say that it shouldn't be done (e.g.) in a way that undermines work incentives. That's a completely different position and it would be good if conservatives came around to it.
Just because my property rights aren't absolute doesn't mean the government can do whatever it likes with my property. There's a specific civil rights exception because bigotry is such a bad problem. There's a huge gap between "not absolute" and "non-existent", and you're skipping right over it.
Your argument is like saying: "Do I have the right to do anything I want if I meet you on the street? Do I have the right to punch you in the face? No? Well then, since your meeting-people-on-the-street-rights are not absolute, I should be able to force you to donate to my favorite charity".
Btw, being born black is fundamentally different than being born with a disability or a low IQ, because those things create real problems whereas being black does not create any real problems. If bigotry about all those things vanished from the face of the Earth, disabled or dumb people would still find some things harder to do, but black people would not.
Fair enough, but when you give the government the right to restrict certain uses of private property because they're seriously immoral, you're no longer a libertarian. And if "excluding black people from my diner" is seriously immoral, what about "enjoying great wealth and low taxes while others can't afford health care"? Goldwater believed both these behaviors were things we could tut-tut about, but not things we should use state power to change.
This is the wrong way of discussing the issue in any case, because it assumes a logically incoherent notion of property rights. Thomas Nagel addressed this in his book "The Myth of Ownership". The fundamental mistake of libertarianism is to believe that property rights are natural, not socially constructed. If you agree with Locke that they're natural, then of course taxation looks like a restriction on one's economic rights... but it isn't. Nobody has ever had the right to engage in economic activity without paying taxes (and observing other regulations, like antidiscrimination codes). So the idea that the wealth you've acquired in the real world (not in an imaginary state of nature) came with no strings attached makes no sense.
A world without taxation would also be a world with no law, government or public schools. Most of us would be earning far less in that scenario than we do in real life, assuming we were even alive--so as Nagel puts it a little provocatively, the "tax burden" just doesn't exist. Different choices about tax rules, progressivity, etc. are choices about how to distribute the enormous *benefits* of taxation. Nobody is in a position to claim that his post-tax income consists of an (imaginary) pre-tax income minus a governmental rights violation. There's no such thing as pre-tax income except as an accounting device.
Why should "libertarian" be held to a higher standard than anything else? "If you believe anything not completely consistent with 100% pure libertarianism, then you're not a libertarian"
Heck, we have terms for this for some religions. We have orthodox and, since even orthodox people don't seem to be 100% pure, we have ultra-orthodox (and I bet even many of those elide SOMETHING)
I agree that the government forcing businesses not to discriminate based on ethnicity is both a good thing and not an orthodox libertarian position. That does not mean that I can't be a libertarian - just a less orthodox one. If I place a high weight (but not an exclusive one!) on libertarian principles, then I might be a libertarian first, and then something else second, something else third, etc.
Yes, but in that case the term doesn't mean much and should probably be avoided. If a true libertarian is someone who thinks voluntary private transactions should never be regulated, and a "moderate libertarian" is someone who thinks they should only be regulated when there's a good enough reason, then practically all of us are "moderate libertarians". In fact that term would cover literally everyone who isn't a libertarian absolutist.
No, I don't agree that wealth inequality is immoral in the same way as bigotry. Almost no one does, which is why you don't see anyone donating almost all their money to the poorest people in the world. That's what a real commitment to utilitarianism would require. (I myself am trying to work my way up to being a 10% utilitarian, already a tough goal).
I don't agree with your account of property rights. Property rights came before the state, and one of the purposes of the state is to protect them (of course you are right that in the "state of nature", property rights, like many rights, are not well-protected).
Again, in the interpersonal case, this is obvious. If I buy some wood and build a chair, I own the chair. No one thinks my neighbors have the right to come and take it because they were kind enough not to murder me while I was building it (even if they all voted for doing that).
It's true that the government provides many benefits, but that doesn't mean the government should have infinite power, or that it's impossible to ask whether some particular set of taxes is fair.
But how did the owners of the wood get their property rights over it? This is why Robert Nozick's libertarian account fails: it makes property rights legitimate only if they were freely acquired from other people who *already* had them legitimately. And if you go back far enough, that condition is never satisfied.
Imagine an alternate universe in which nobody walked from Siberia to Alaska before the Bering Strait opened up. When the Pilgrims land in Massachusetts they find a completely uninhabited continent. How does one pilgrim legitimately acquire land in North America under those circumstances? If the first guy down the gangplank yells "All of this is mine, finders keepers" does that work? If not, does he have to do some Lockean thing, like build a fence around a certain area? If that's not enough, does he also have to do other Lockean things like chop down the trees and plow the land?
The only thing that would have made any particular method of land acquisition valid was if the other people on the boat agreed that it was valid. For that you don't necessarily need a full-fledged state but you do need a society of some kind. That's what the social construction of private property means.
How could property rights come before the State (except in the pages of Locke)? They don't even exist without the State. I'm having a hard time imagining otherwise.
I think we need to avoid the argument based on "if we do this thing, then we have to do all these other things."
No, we don't.
We can attack racial injustice without necessarily having to attack wealth inequality. Usually in the real world there's a limit to the number of things you can take on.
(I should add that Nagel is a committed Kantian/Rawlsian and believes that a lot of individual rights really do exist. He just doesn't think property rights are among them--because the idea of legal property existing prior to government in the way that (say) one's religious beliefs might have existed without government is just unintelligible.
Since I got into Nietzsche and Bernard Williams I've come to agree with them that human rights don't exist at all, so the arguments in "The Myth of Ownership" don't seem as crucial to me as they once did. But if you are committed to the idea that people have rights of some sort, the book is definitely worth a read.
A conservative would typically defuse this tension by distinguishing between “negative” rights (ie, a right not to be discriminated against by public or private actors) and “positive” rights (ie, the right to welfare benefits or a government-sponsored job).
That’s not a perfectly clean distinction. You might argue, for example, that the restaurant discrimination example is in fact a positive right — the right to be provided service on the same terms as everyone else. But you still have to •pay• for the food and otherwise respect the rules of the establishment.
It’s fine to argue we should create more positive rights, including those that level the economic playing field and redistribute wealth. I think we should! But it’s not really logically consistent to support the Civil Rights Act and other anti-discrimination laws while simultaneously fighting against expanding the social safety net.
“Real libertarianism is the belief that *no* outcome is morally illegitimate if it results from voluntary transactions between consenting adults…This is a crank position and hardly anyone actually holds it…”
Well, a few people do think that. But not enough to have much influence on American politics. The problem comes from the much larger number of people who say "I just don't believe government should take your hard-earned income and give it to the needy... except for Social Security, of course, we'd never touch that. And public education is fine too..." Et cetera.
Trump's supporters are at least realistic about the issue at hand. They object to wealth redistribution because it reduces the social distance between white and black Americans... and they're fine with non-market policies, like subsidies for coal mining, which don't have that effect. This attitude has always been much, much more prevalent than libertarianism, and the people who hold it are gradually ceasing to pretend that it's libertarianism.
“The problem comes from the much larger number of people who say ‘I just don't believe government should take your hard-earned income and give it to the needy... except for Social Security, of course, we'd never touch that. And public education is fine too...’”
I don’t see why that is a problem. You may disagree with such views but it’s nothing more vexing than people saying, “This far, but no further.” Unless you are a Marxist or other type of loon you must agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere.
“Trump's supporters are at least realistic about the issue at hand. They object to wealth redistribution because it reduces the social distance between white and black Americans”
Oh, right. Because Trump supporters are hardcore racists.
Not all Trump supporters are racists. But it is significant that when a GOP presidential candidate came along who used openly racist rhetoric (no dog whistles about "welfare queens" or what have you) and who •also• rejected the GOP's traditional commitment to small government, the small-government tradition immediately disappeared. I call that suspicious.
"Trump's supporters are at least realistic about the issue at hand. They object to wealth redistribution because it reduces the social distance between white and black Americans." How can you possibly know this? There are many reasons why one might object (with most Americans) to wealth redistribution on grounds of both justice and practice. This sounds like an insult in default of an argument.
That’s how things should be though. Frankly you don’t go far enough - kids should have the exact same freedoms adults do, instead of us being stuck in our present state of exploitation and oppression.
Yes, this is a very good point! It's why I and other Libertarian types have argued that "equality of opportunity" is neither possible nor laudable (since achieving it in truth for everything would require massive violations of rights as we see it). Rather, the relevant sense in which equality is an important social value is "equality before the law" that is, formal legal equality with no special classes or privileges.
I genuinely find it striking how derided micro aggressions are and how they are so often put in opposition to materialist politics.
I am pro like more materialist improvements in people’s lives. I make a good living but the ways in which I have to mask my autistic traits still hurts. The way that I can’t be honest in all dealings with people that I’m bisexual or an atheist still hurts.
I don’t see any conflict in these things. We need both materialist improvements and a more accepting world.
I can kind of speculate a few reasons for this. The first is the name "micro-aggressions". Micro just makes something sound insignificant and trivial. As far as i know it's also a term that came out of academia and is very far from the way quote-unquote "normal" people talk.
The other factor is many things that I picture as micro-aggressions are things that the government isn't normally expected to legislate. If I'm not invited to a party or someone is rude to me at the line in a grocery store (and I suspect it's related to my ethnicity, gender, sexuality) that might ruin my day but I can't think of a way for the government to fix it. Whereas discrimination laws around hiring actually do attempt to mitigate damages, and in a way that's much easier to measure, employment, rather than feelings, which are much harder to quantify and vary so much from one person to another.
There is a concern that the concept of "micro-aggression" allows someone to weaponize their discomfort resulting from interactions with other people if they can unilaterally presume it is the result of their group identity.
I also thinks it encourages people to fixate on the possible prejudiced implications of ordinary interactions in a way that looks like social anxiety to me, and I don’t believe we should be promoting social anxiety as political praxis.
The whole argument about micro-aggressions is that they are below the level that public policy can reasonably be addressed to, and that addressing them is meant to be interpersonal, not a public policy thing.
The problem I have with this is essentially identity stacking has made everything politics. What you do interpersonally is highly tied to who you vote for.
For instance, I have ASD of the kind that used to be called asperger's. The way people react to that is highly linked to my daily ability to feel happy. Even when I'm masking and trying to behave like neurotypical people want I slip sometimes.
It shouldn't be a matter of public policy but if you think mocking me for that is acceptable there's a political party that loves that behavior and another which thinks its bad.
Yeah, I agree that that mocking people is a really shitty thing to do. In my perfect, utopian world there would be no assholes at all.
But I don't really see how this aligns so closely with politics. Asking in earnest, do you think if you moved to a more democratic-voting area you would have less negative daily interactions? and vice versa to a republican voting stronghold? I'd guess those kinds of behaviors align more tightly with class, urbanality and other things more than politics. I'm personally skeptical that political views line up so tightly with personal behavior not least because there are so many non-voters out there. But maybe I'm wrong
I think like even 10 years ago, and certainly 20 years ago not that much.
That education and urbanality=Democrats make it a very partisan leaning thing. Like most people aren’t jerks but a bunch of things stacked so that sensitivity became polarized.
I'm not trying to minimize your experience, but I think we're all socially awkward, we all have these difficult interactions sometimes, and we all put on a mask of sorts to get through them. I won't doubt it if you feel yours are more numerous, but it's not uncommon.
Our politics would be a better place if everyone could focus on behaving themselves in public, without getting into the bad thoughts that one or another person might have.
"I genuinely find it striking how derided micro aggressions are and how they are so often put in opposition to materialist politics."
To me the old FidoNet rules for avoiding flamewars make sense in a pluralistic society, one where people with very different backgrounds and experiences are often interacting with each other: "1. Don't be offensive. 2. Don't be easily offended." Thus I have a very high threshold for getting offended - online, I'll often just ignore the offensive parts of what someone is saying and respond to the substantive parts.
“Equality of opportunity” is a horrible phrase. If a group of 40 million truly enjoyed opportunities equal to those of a group of 190 million, average outcomes for the two groups would be very, very similar. That’s math, specifically the central limit theorem.
If one group systematically has lower wealth and income, shorter life spans, and higher incarceration and illegitimacy rates, it follows that opportunities are unequal.
The problem is it’s hard to formulate any politically or even materially feasible notion of equality. Putting a stiff tax on incomes amplifies the inertial power of wealth. Tax inheritances, and those most able to build wealth in a single lifetime will rise. Eliminate all economic distinctions (far chance) and beauty and charisma would dominate. Mandate that all children attend public schools and children with better genes and/or better parents will get the best grades. As long as people are free to accept and reject intimate partners, some people will have and others will covet.
The overarching goal should be human happiness. The basic problem with massive economic inequality is that it prioritizes the whims of the rich over the basic needs of the poor, the affluence of relatively few over the security of the bottom half or three quarters. Hollow phrases like equality of opportunity or even “equality” lead in incoherent directions.
“Equality of opportunity” doesn’t demand that all humans are the same. It’s something closer to a societal commitment that no one should be automatically excluded or disadvantaged based on certain immutable traits tied to historical discrimination that nevertheless have nothing to do with their competence.
I think we should do a better job of smoothing outcomes between the winners and losers of life’s genetic lottery—be it intelligence, conscientiousness, attractiveness, what have you. But pointing out that smart, gritty, beautiful people tend to do well doesn’t really explode the concept of “equality of opportunity.” Unless you prefer a society where, say, LeBron James is forced to wear as much weight as necessary so I beat him in 1-on-1 half the time.
I never had the opportunity to be an nba star. This was because of an immutable characteristic I have— athletically mediocre genes. I’ve was never the fastest in my elementary school class or jumped the furthest or done the most push-ups. I never got picked first for team sports.
Equality of opportunity is incoherent.
Racial discrimination is easier to define. If a person who is really good at basketball can’t play in the nba because his skin is black, that’s racial discrimination. However, ending that form of discrimination does not bring about equality of opportunity. It means that journeymen white players will be replaced by black players who are better at basketball. If the goal is to have the best basketball
players performing for the fans, then racial discrimination is counterproductive. However, the goal of having the best players on the biggest stage is meritocratic and elitist, not egalitarian.
You absolutely did have the opportunity to be an nba star, because what was stopping you was endogenous, not exogenous.
Pure equality of opportunity, which is generally recognised to be unattainable, but which can be reached more or less closely, is that the only constraints on your achievements are endogenous, not exogenous.
Weird duplication bug happening here, but the answer is that the genes of skin colour are endogenous, but race, as in racism and racial identity is exogenous.
In your NBA example, the “equality” is in the “opportunity”—ie, the chance to prove you are good enough to play professionally. I agree that system prioritizes merit: it discriminates in favor of the best basketball players and doesn’t discriminate based on characteristics like, say, hair color that have nothing to do with basketball ability.
You seem to be arguing that “equality of opportunity” doesn’t exist unless all people are exactly the same. You’ve thus defined a useful term out of existence. If you’d prefer the NBA be fully “egalitarian,” perhaps by selecting its players by lottery, then just say so. I predict viewership will crater, but hey, the NBA is a gross meritocratic and elitist institution, so no big loss!
saying the equality is in “the chance to prove you are good enough” leads in incoherent directions.
a person in a famine area needs food, not the assurance that they have “equal food opportunity” because, prior to conception, “they,” assuming some they existed, had the opportunity to inhabit a body that might have had access to food.
i’m not good enough to play pro sports. i could no more pass as an nba player than a black person could pass as white. sure some hypothetical version of “me” with different genes might play pro ball, but a hypothetical “black” person with white genes could benefit from white supremacy. what’s the difference?
if the equality is in
the opportunity to try out, why do womens’ sports exist? women can try out for the nba just as surely as can non-athletes. indeed, minorities could apply for jobs that required whiteness with the same prospect of success that i would have trying out for pro sports.
i’m sure one could define equal opportunity in a rigorous way, i just don’t think that would square with what people actually want.
the phrase equal opportunity has political appeal because it signals a moderate commitment to reducing inequality, but is squishy enough that it’s proponents aren’t stuck defending hard core equality, which basically requires stunting the privileged
“A person in a famine area needs food, not the assurance they have ‘equal food opportunity.’”
I completely agree! Hell, let’s go further: in a world with as much food and wealth as ours, no one should starve, period, even if they are at least arguably “responsible” for their food insecurity. As I’ve said above many times, we need to do a much better job at smoothing out the inconsistent results of the lottery that is life. We don’t need to completely jettison a commitment to the kind of “equality of opportunity” I’ve been talking about to do that, though; we just need to recognize that equality of opportunity is one goal among others.
“If the equality of opportunity is in the ability to try out, why do women’s sports exist?”
Sex segregation in sports is admittedly tricky. First, women are free to try out for men’s teams, at least in some college sports, and if they’re good enough they should get to play with the men. Given the incredible physical disparities between men and women, which are vast both at the median and the tails, very few women would get to play.
That’s a bad result for a group that’s 51% of the world’s population. And there’s a growing market that wants to watch women’s sports and doesn’t seem to care that a men’s team would kick their ass. But still—the best women, not just any women, play.
The senior PGA tour is another example of segregating by characteristics that usually (but don’t inevitably) correlate with diminished competitive ability—in this case, advancing age. But again, the best seniors play, and again—people want to watch it!
Basically no one wants to watch poor athletes play sports in the name of “equity.” But they’re all free to join a rec league, regardless of their ability, and many do.
Different people mean different things by equality of opportunity, but it's very widely understood that inheritance is not equality of opportunity. Crap parents aren't equality of opportunity.
I agree we should tax inheritances more heavily, primarily because parents will still be encouraged to generate wealth in their lifetimes even if they can’t pass as much of it on to their kids (and of course the kids don’t really •deserve• it in any real sense).
That being said, you have to be careful arguing that “equality of opportunity” doesn’t exist if everyone starts life from different places. People are also born with wildly different abilities, and the genius didn’t •earn” his IQ any more than the trust fund kid •earned• his parents’ millions. Completely leveling the playing field to defuse all unearned privileges (genetic, economic, or otherwise) would require massive tyrannical intervention. We can be more redistributive without complaining that nothing is fair because people are different.
Not trying to be pugilistic, but What are you arguing for, exactly? I offered a workable definition for what’s usually meant by “equality of opportunity,” acknowledged that human beings differ in their gifts and burdens, acknowledged those differences will inevitably drive different outcomes, and suggested we do a better job smoothing out the results of life’s genetic lottery — but without guaranteeing equality of outcome, which seems impossible absent extreme tyranny and undesirable even if technically possible.
Of course the devil’s in the policy details and persuading the voting public to implement it, but are you basically on board with the above? If not, why not?
what I’m arguing for is focusing on measurable outcomes. that doesn’t mean that struct equality should be the goal. greater equality would be nice because our current economy prioritizes the whims of the rich over basic needs of the poor. my end goal is the greatest total human happiness
Understood. I agree we should examine outcome gaps between different groups. The current trend to attribute any and all outcome gaps to racism or sexism, sans more nuanced analysis, is bad social science, that, because it fails to grapple with reality’s complexity, will fail to fully solve the problems it’s meant to address.
Trying to maximize human happiness leads to various problems, no? Like the repugnant conclusion, namely that we should be trying to do everything we can to increase the population regardless of the consequences because more people will lead to more net happiness, regardless of how miserable their lives are. I'm not a philosopher, so I'm just parroting what little I recall reading.
Genetic variation is irrelevant to either inheritance or crap parenting.
One way to look at equality of opportunity is "if these two infants were switched by accident in the hospital at birth, would they have ended up in the same places as they did with their original parents?"
It's still impossible, obviously, but it is something you can measure how closely or otherwise a society has approached.
why is genetic variation a more legitimate source of advantage than above average parenting? both arise organically and would be difficult to reduce that much
I wrote about crap parenting on purpose, because my reading of the evidence is that outside of economic advantage, the difference between average parenting and really good parenting is very small, while the difference between average parenting and really bad parenting is much more substantial - especially when "really bad" descends to "abusive".
I absolutely think we have a long way to go to achieving true equality of opportunity, equality of access, and equality of returns on investment of time & talent between racial groups. But disparities in outcomes can come from things other than just inequality of opportunity. All humans have free will and some groups of people have different interests, traditions, and values than others. These differences do not make one group better or worse than another, but they can contribute to differences in outcomes. If Asian families put more pressure on their children to become doctors and engineers, they will be overrepresented in those fields, and it wasn't necessarily due to extra opportunity. I don't think it's ALL due to lack of opportunity, or ALL due to differences in cultural norms, but denying that both are factors is limiting their understanding of the complexity of human society.
I disagree with you deeply because free will does not exist. The brain is entirely material, it’s thoughts and volition are the unfolding of material processes. Only the actual is possible, the unrealized is purely imaginary.
Not that determinism is much of a political platform, but my aim is to see the world clearly.
William James' theory of soft determinism essentially said that even if we live in a deterministic world, we have to behave and choose as though we don't. Santayana called that "a quagmire of evasion". My conclusions are 1) Santayana was right when he said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and 2) James and Santayana would have been awesome Twitter foes.
The brain is also composed of fundamentally indeterminate quantum material - and it seems likely to me that the deterministic outcome is only evident after the probabilistic wave function collapses.
In "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose argued that quantum indeterminacy could be the source of free will and consciousness. But I think someone else has shown that this isn't possible. Quantum randomness can change the pattern of neural firings in a way that cascades into large effects within the brain, but the timescale on which human beings perceive themselves as making decisions doesn't allow for quantum effects to play a role.
It's the God of gaps all over again. Quantum mechanics is treated as mysterious and (to be fair) is not completely understood, so maybe that's where God - I mean free will - is hiding. But even though individual wavefunction collapses are not predictable, the probabilities rigorously are. If you want to shove free will in there somewhere, well, I would just say if you want to invoke magic, just do it and drop the pretense of it being scientific.
even without all the complexities of quantum effects, there are too many particles and too little computing power for perfect prediction to be possible. prediction demands simplifying heuristics, so it’s always imperfect
Well, fair enough!! I suppose your opinion is an unchangeable result of your brain matter so I'll agree to disagree :) But if there's no free will, I don't see the point in anyone trying to influence the world around them at all....
While the show is flawed in so many ways, Westworld tried to convey that even if free will is an illusion, going through the motions doesn't need to be meaningless.
disagree again. wine, food, good company and justice are all edifying whether or not they are freely chosen. the fact that the wind knocked that knocked the tree over was a deterministic force does not mean the tree is still standing
I completely appreciate that this is a bedrock of your worldview, so I'm not trying to change your mind (though maybe it is pre-determined to happen some day). When it comes to human beings and the degree to which any of us can influence the behavior of each other, I don't see how you have it both ways whereby it makes sense for you to advocate for humans to choose to overhaul our systems to equalize opportunities but also claim that humans don't effectively choose what career to pursue, what neighborhood to live in (out of the ones they can afford--definitely an opportunity-limited choice), who to trust at work, etc. Your initial claim assumes there are no group-level differences in the way people make these choices, or that any group-level differences in choices are dictated entirely by inequality of opportunity (or genetic differences in brain material?? That's an icky, Murray-ian road to go down.)
one. Whether or not I chose to have my current mental and physical condition, those are still characteristics I have. Whether or not the prisoner chose to commit the crime, he is still in prison.
Best to focus on describing outcomes rather than evaluating things through comparisons with arbitrary counterfactuals.
She says one way to deal with this is to imagine your life as a story that is being told. I personally just mostly ignore the lack of free will as it's effectively meaningless for my day-to-day existence (which I was destined to do anyway).
By my own free will, I chose to be the greatest player in NBA history, but the universe prevented that, so free will clearly does not exist.
And yet, I chose to hit "Post" on this comment, even though the entire universe was screaming at me to do the right thing and hit "Cancel" so now I'm totally confused.
I love how math-y this readership is. DA busting out the central limit theorem about equality and another side argument about math/science always breaking
Wonderful post. Your grandfather would be very proud! And this bit below is an elegant and moving summary of the whole:
In the “I Have a Dream Speech,” he refers to the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” on which “America has defaulted … insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” but also that “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
For full social equality we need to abandon the very idea and terminology of "race" which is inescapably tied to archaic 19th century notions of meaningful innate differences between groups of humans. It's linguistically impossible to continue talking about "race" without perpetuating those ideas that are embedded in the very terminology itself.
There's little more cringe-inducing than listening to well-meaning progressive people earnestly try to explain the difference between a "race" and a the more modern idea of "ethnicity" in an attempt to salvage the outdated concept of race into something that isn't offensive yet provides some meaning that isn't provided by the more modern term "ethnicity."
As King recognized, it's easier to move past the idea there are innate differences between groups of people when one group isn't mired in generational poverty, hence the need for uniform economic redistribution to put everyone on some basic common level.
King also recognized that behavior matters a lot when you are demanding to be included. That the way that one dresses, and speaks, and carries himself in public has a profound effect on how others treat you.
Race may be incoherent but the brain is hard wired to detect color and care about it. Most white peoples’ amygdala’s activate when they see black people in different ways than when they see other whites. The amygdala is connected to fear, anxiety and a host of mostly negative emotions. This is one reason why differences between whites and blacks have proven more persistent than differences between whites and other minority groups— the visible difference is greater and it’s difficult for the brain to ignore what it sees.
I really liked this article. The ending paragraph made me think, “Have I ever actually heard a BLM activist lecture lower class white people about how they need to view their class oppression through an intersectional matrix?”
I don’t think so. This lecturing is almost uniformly never directed at lower class white people themselves. Anyone doing such lecturing is most of the time part of a largely upper class white power structure with power and wealth, who is working to re-direct anger towards lower class white people.
Whether or not such anger is totally undeserved, or whether this power structure will actually make a lot of people’s lives better remains to be seen. I’m not ready to go “Dismantle the elites and give power to society’s most radical elements” just yet.
Matt tweeted a few days ago that he thought the constant progressive bashing of "white women" was really misogyny disguised as a concern for racial justice. I think the same can be said of (some) complaints about white working-class racism: it's a cover for class prejudice among the highly educated. I've seen this in a lot of white people, including my parents.
The point is not that women or working-class people can't be racist. Of course they can. But why do these *particular* groups of whites get so much grief, when they actually hold less social power than other whites?
Yeah this is my thinking basically to a T. I find legitimate, tried and true BLM activists are less concerned with the racism of working class white Americans. Such lecturing is more a defense mechanism of the upper classes and can have so many pit-falls such as the potential “Karen-izarion” of women who are advocating for themselves. Some women need to advocate for themselves, and shouldn’t be degraded for doing so unless it crosses some serious lines.
There's a growing disconnect between the ways that the current Democratic coalition is growing more class conscious (policy) and the ways it's not (rhetoric).
It's really quite stupid; it seems that even though upper class professionals in the suburbs are willing to vote for and go along with a wide variety of policies that do/will redistribute wealth from them to others (if only in measured fashion so far), they're still not willing to stop talking down to/about a lot of working class folks who don't hold sufficiently open/libertine beliefs about racial, sexual, and gender issues.
The former actually costs these people money, yet they'll go along with it. The latter only "costs" them a feeling of superiority, but they just can't seem to do it.
The end result is that even if the Democrats were to enact sweeping changes that improved the lives of everyday Americans in a way that was impossible to ignore, they're so damned bad at keeping the "quiet part quiet" and smothering the activist class around election time that they'd still only squeak by in elections.
The more likely outcome is that they'll make genuine improvements that are small enough for them to go unnoticed or be swept under the rug by the other side's focused messaging ecosystem, narrowly lose the next two elections, and see the playing field tilted in a way that will make it impossible to win again for a decade or more as a result.
Don’t underestimate the value of feeling superior. To some it’s more precious than gold—and this prioritization of feelings over dollars is often used by Dems to explain why the white working class voted for Republicans who defund the social safety nets on which they rely.
In a nutshell, according to these coastal liberals, poor whites would rather feel socially superior than climb the economic ladder. I don’t know how true that is, but regardless, the notion that many prefer social capital to actual capital isn’t crazy.
I come from a background that leaves me with a foot in both worlds, and it's always good for my cynicism to see exactly how alike they both are.
On policy, most policy issues anyway, I know damned well which side of the bread is buttered. I want my daughter to enjoy a standard of living like my own, which requires public investment and saving the planetary ecology. I want healthcare reformed, education improved, and I believe in seeing off the threat posed by China by outperforming it at home and abroad.
But both sides-ism has a single point, and that's that there are large factions of each party that just thrive on partisan identification and the feeling of being so much better than the poor, benighted people on the other side, voting against their own interests because they've been brainwashed.
If Democrats can't shunt their own version of those people to the side and clamp a hand over their mouths to win elections, the whole country is in trouble... because stupid rhetoric notwithstanding, there are substantive differences in policy that matter, a lot.
Yes, and it's interesting that in both cases the worst social-media offenders are educated women. When it comes to class prejudice this is just a matter of dissing people who are different from yourself... but white women putting down *other* white women for their alleged racism, when white men are actually in a better position to do something about racism, is just the newest version of a very ancient social phenomenon.
You see the same thing in progressive debates about transgender equality. Opinion polls show exactly what you'd expect, which is that older straight men are more hostile to trans people than any other demographic. But the online mobs spend almost all their time going after "trans-exclusive radical feminists"... and when it isn't the TERFs, it's the very small number of cis gay men, like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, who have criticized some aspects of the transgender movement.
I think Nietzsche understood this. The impulse to attack and denigrate people of lower social status is universal, and Trump voters aren't the only people who manifest it. You see it among left-wing people too, when they don't realize what they're actually doing.
You've never heard someone discuss white privilege on tv, youtube, social media? Poor white people don't have access to the same stuff you do? Connecting the privilege to the whiteness is enlightening in some ways, but also problematic when you take it out into the media as you don't control who sees it. It's one thing in a college classroom where everyone is privileged or an upper middle class sunday school class, but something different on MSNBC or CNN.
This kind of reminds me of a story my last manager told me. His school had a day where they taught about the evils of slavery and colonialism and he used to dread it. H was a white kid in a 90% minority school in a rough part of NYC, and if he didn't cut school on that day he became a target for kids wanting to start fights or find a victim to attack.
I think that's an example of the way a message that's intended to be positive: teaching kids about real, dark parts of American history, but not necessarily received and used as intended by a part of the audience.
What? I don't even follow what this means. Do working class white people watch MSNBC? I'm sure some do, I doubt his million or so viewers are all minority PhD-holders or however you want to define the non-white, non-working class. We're not talking about a tightly defined demographic with tastes so far out of the American mainstream as to be considered exotic here. This is like the lady that works in your dentist office, not an Amish farmer.
My point is just that MSNBC/CNN are not talking about white privilege for the sake of reaching working class white America to lecture them on it. That’s not their core audience.
Fair enough. I didn't understand it that way when I read it but I guess that's correct. Who is their core audience then, though? I'd guess it looks demographically a bit like Biden voters, but skewing even a bit to the older, and therefore white and less educated side.
I think they channel surf the same way progressives watch Fox. Stop for 2 minutes, say their crazy, and then move back to what they were watching. Are they following as well as educated? No, but to suggest they live under a rock is pretty crazy. They've got Facebook!
I think you are missing the appeal of the concept of Privilege. You keep making the strong point that the DEI/privilege approach to issues around race in this country is inferior to a more economic approach. Yes, strong point that I am not going to rehash.
But why don't you steel man the privilege point? WHY is it that it is so appealing to some people?
I think that it is appealing because is a good theory, in the ways that we judge theories. It is simple (i.e., parsimonious) while still having great explanatory power. It seems to be broadly applicable. And there doesn't seem to be much evidence against it.
Obviously, it doesn't profess to be the only issue, so there's room for other things. But it gets us pretty far.
The concept of privilege seems to work well for racial issues. It works well for class. It works well for gender. Sexual orientation. ELL status. Immigrant status. It's a concept that really can be broadly applied
So, it's easy to build (lefty) coalitions around it. It's tempting to talk about because it seems to explain so much of what we see.
Now, I know that you are not suggesting that it is wrong. Rather, you keep pointing out that evangelizing this theory and making it the center of an even broader discourse is not EFFECTIVE, politically. And you make that point well.
But rather than simply yelling/snapping/whining, "Stop doing that," it might be more effective to meet those you presumably wish to convince where they are more carefully (i.e., with care) help them to get where you want them to be (i.e., a place where you think they actually more will progress on their goals -- goals that you generally believe in).
A different way to look at this is: the concept of privilege works very well for those issues because it’s a good vehicle for expressing anger and condemnation. Which makes it very hard for it to be effective politically.
I'm afraid that you've missed my point, and are therefore simply repeating Matt's oft repeated point.
I am not in any way suggesting that this idea of privilege is effective, politically. Nor do I think that Matt needs any help in explaining why it is in not effective, politically.
Rather, I am pointing to what would be effective in convincing people not to use it in political (or potentially political) contexts. Matt makes clear over and over again that his BIG point is that we should do what is effective. And Matt's repeated complaining about in the ineffectiveness of what he seems to term this DEI approach to stuff around race in American is not effective at getting people to stop doing it.
So, in order to reach those people better (I was suggesting), he might consider understanding why it is such an attractive theory.
Now, you can mock these people, call them stupid or pejoratively call them emotional. But I don't think that's going to help, either -- even were it true.
Instead, as I keep saying, try to steel man the argument you disagree with, and then address them on those terms.
Okay, I’ll leave aside the question of effectiveness, and try to say it in another way.
Privilege, in the way we are speaking of it, is to declare something that someone has is, by definition, unmerited. Logically it can (and should) be taken away. In practice this makes no distinction between things that are rights, and things that are not rights. All is stated to be unmerited, by labeling it privilege. This conceptually gives power to the labeler, by nullifying the value of the person who is being so labeled.
I suppose that I am saying that the concept of privilege that we are working with, is *in itself* an expression of anger and hostility. It may be useful or not useful to frame a perception of the world, but that utility will be perceived by the user, in proportion to the need to conceptualize anger. The idea grows from a philosophy whose concern is criticism and power, and so works well for someone who feels the need to criticize and gain power. Which is to say, those who feel themselves to be marginalized or undervalued or disrespected in some way.
In this frame of mind, the question of common goals becomes simply beside the point. The goals are not important, the anger is what is important.
You might agree that a prerequisite of the engagement you are talking about, is for all parties to stop talking about “privilege.” But that would require giving up the entrenched anger that drives this world view. Nobody can make anybody do this. They have to handle their own anger.
I don’t want to sound completely hopeless. People can change their minds and emotions based on what others are saying. It may be that by initiating engagement, I can influence someone in a way that helps them handle their anger. But in the end they have to want that.
No, that is NOT what the concept of Privilege is based upon. That's just not accurate. It is NOT about whether these Privileges are merited. It seems that you are trying to fit some perceptions of anger into this idea, rather than examining the idea on its own...ummm....merits.
1) Yes, some people who talk of Privilege do so from a position of anger, but some do not. Of course, I've seen no breakdown of how many are in which group, but in my experience most are NOT doing so out of anger -- even if it is often out of frustration. Yes, protesters can seem angry, but if you think that all POC or other minorities (or women) point to inequalities simply out of anger....well, you are trodding some dangerous ground. The tropes of "angry black man" and "angry black woman" have been used to fight progress and efforts towards equality for a long time. We have angry feminists and "femminazi" and all that.
Injustice can be met with compassion, frustration and even calm. It does not HAVE to be anger. I really wonder why some people insist otherwise.
2) The concept of Privilege is not about merit, anger or resentment. It's about recognizing important differences in our we are perceived, the opportunities we are afforded and the obstacles we face. Yes, these differences DO make some people angry, but it's the differences that lead to the anger (in this cases), not the anger that leads to the recognition.
The concept of Privilege does NOT say that the Privileged do not merit their Privileges. Rather, it says that *they*do*not*merit*them*more*than*the*unprivileged. Thus, while you may hear that as "And you don't merit that," it is (at least) equally valid to hear it as "and I merit that, too."
And if you really listen to what they are saying, on a particular basis, it usually does NOT say "no one should get that." Rather, it says "everyone should get that."
So, let's look at an example in the news that totally supports my point: swim caps for olympic swimmers. FINA (the international swimming association. swimming in french is something like "nager.") recently said that this floppy swim cap that was designed for black/african hair was not allowable. White people with long hair can wear swim caps that are well suited to them, but those caps don't work well for black people with long hair, even though black people's hair is far more sensitive to water. The decades of appropriate swim caps being available to white people is a Privilege. No one is saying that they shouldn't have them. Rather, people are saying that black people should ALSO have access to appropriate swim caps.
The big systemic privilege stuff is of that nature, more or less. The stuff that applies super broadly is of that nature. Not that the Privileged don't merit it, but rather that the non-Privileged equally merit it and therefore should have it, too.
So, you're wrong on the merit part.
3) No, I would NOT agree that a prerequisite of ANYTHING is that "all parties stop talking about 'privilege.'" I would NOT agree the only way we can ever move forward is for every person on this Earth to make sure that the tender sensibilities of the Privileged never have to consider the idea that they are advantaged by layers of inequities that they -- perhaps unwittingly -- perpetuate. That's a risible notion.
I might agree that SOME parties should stop using the term, yes. I would agree that it is a concept that is going to be better received in some areas than others. As Matt keeps pointing out, Elizabeth Warren can get away with talking about certain ideas because she is in Massachusetts. That might cost her some support in two-way races, but her state is liberal enough that it does not put her any danger. On the other hand, there are politicians and is and activists in other areas for whom her approach is really not advisable.
4) The most powerful force in America these days seems to be some combination of white rage and white fragility. If we are going to talk about anger management, as you seem to want to, we should consider that larger context.
As Matt pointed out, MLK did not achieve his victories by sucking up to white people's insecurities. He did not try to make them comfortable. His direct action, his form of non-violence was not about letting white people off. It was not about making them all comfortable. He was INCREDIBLY hated my large portions of America.
No, I do no think that showing anger is an effective strategy. But being inspired by our anger can help to keep us going. That's a difficult line to walk, no doubt. Handing one's anger, a concept you raised, is a constant challenge for people who defend the status quo and those would change it.
But, again, if you see recognition of inequality as being inevitably and inextricably built of anger? That makes me wonder.
5) Trying to close this circle, why is it that when people say "I want some of that, too," you only hear "You don't deserve that"? Why is it when people say, "I deserve that as much as you," you only hear "you don't deserve that?" I don't hear that.
It seems to me rather pat to to say that the term “privilege” is only about recognizing “important differences.” The idea that selected classifications (and not others) create meaningful distinctions is a deeply political stance that is arguable. If it simply means the unprivileged deserve anything defined as privilege as well, then those are not privileges, they are something else. They might be rights (like being fairly considered for a mortgage) or else they might simply be distinctions (like owning a house). I’d like to see people have an easier time affording their homes, especially working-class people who have a hard time making rent in today’s market. But this doesn’t have anything to do with the idea that a white homeowner is “privileged” because they had a down payment and a mortgage that others don’t.
In plain English, the word privileged is not the same as fortunate or favored. It is not the same as “here but for the grace of God go I.” Someone who went to a fine college because of family influence and graduated without loans because they had a trust fund, is privileged. They didn’t do anything to merit or deserve it, and it’s something meaningful that was handed to them without effort, that few other people have. Someone who gets admission on the same terms as everyone else, and a scholarship in fair competition with everyone else, and who as a result has a college degree when other people don’t, is not privileged. It’s not remotely the same. The latter deserves a degree of respect that the other does not. This is what “privileged” actually means, in plain English, and no amount of (what I would call) Orwellian revisionism is going to change that.
Consider the example you give. In this, there are three parties. A swimmer who needs a certain type of bathing cap. An organization that (perhaps unreasonably) denies her that kind of cap. And another swimmer, who has a legal cap that works for her. When the moral conflict is between the first two parties, why would you choose to centering on the uninvolved third party by tagging her with the term “privilege” simply because there is a racial difference between the two swimmers? If the swimmers were both white, but with different types of hair, would you say that one of them was “privileged”?
To be provocative, I could further point out that many swimmers shave their heads to gain an advantage, and that this is well within the black swimmer’s realm of agency. Doing so might be very effective as a protest. The white swimmer might well join her, out of solidarity, with no idea of “privilege” in mind. The latter adds nothing except guilt, which in my view, is what it is intended to convey. As you know, I feel it is a form of aggression.
I don’t know that you understand how condescending it is to use the phrases “white rage” and “white fragility”. Like the word “privilege”, in practice they replace thought and engagement with dismissal. They convey a pretension of superiority, in refusal to allow what might be really motivating the people you don’t like, to think, say, and do the things they do. It asserts that this can only be for bad and stupid reasons. It’s an irony that, having argued that it’s wrong to discredit black people’s opinions on account of anger and sensitivity to slight (which it is), you then proceed to discredit white people’s opinions and actions on those very same grounds. Can you understand why some might see these phrases as expressions of mere bias, or even bigotry?
1) I don't understand what you think a "right" is. Do you mean a legally enforceable right? Or are you talking about some that lacks any enforcement in any context whatsoever? What makes that a right?
2) Having the downpayment for a house can be a result of a long string of privileges. You seem to want to start the considerations very late in the process. It easier for me and my wife to build up a down payment for our last two homes, for many many reasons. And they resulted from our respective privileges. Unearned, fortunate events, forces and advantage that have helped each of us to accomplish what we have.
3) It's great that you think that language doesn't change or that terms cannot be adapted to new uses that are related to their own. But you insistence that the concept of Privilege that we are talking about should be limited to the old plain meaning of the word is not only obstinate, but is actually without intellectual support. You would need to do quite a lot of research to confirm that YOUR sense of the meaning of the word was matched by all others in order to reasonably insist that this usage of the word is at odds with historical usage of the word. I get that it is a stretch for you, but perhaps you could take part in a mutual effort at communication and understanding what others are trying to say. But, maybe not.
4) Your breakdown of my example shows that you REALLY do not understand the concept of Privilege. No one BLAMES the Privileged for their Privilege. Rather, they are asked to consider its nature and source, and the impact it has on various opposites for others. Let me say that again: asking someone to "check your privilege" is not about blame at all. It's about asking people to be thoughtful and considerate of the circumstances of others, as well as their own. Now, if the Privileged feel guilty for this introspection, that is really a result of they increased awareness of THEIR relationship to society (or whatever institutions maintained that privilege). And that actually is between them and the institutions.
5) Nothing on god's green earth could both demonstrate ignorance of the meaning of Privilege and embody Privilege itself any better than belief that the Privileged should not be cognizant of their Privilege and that their Privilege is really a matter to be hashed out between the institutions and the unPrivileged. Wow, man. Just wow.
6) Please, tell me about all the female swimmers who shave their heads to gain an advantage. The summer olympics are coming up and I will keep my eye out the female medal winning woman with shaved heads.
7) Please tell me more about the obligations the unprivileged to alter their bodies and physical appearances in order to draw attention to blatantly discriminatory decisions by the institutions that control important parts of their lives. And, of course, please explain how that is not just another avenue for Privilege by the Privileged to have everything easier.
8) Why do you think that white rage doesn't exist? Or is it simply that mentioning it is the problem? You are entirely comfortable painting others with this Anger brush, but you don't like the idea that ANY white people exhibit a rage that is tied to their perception of race and their race's place in our society? I said that white rage is powerful, but did not say how prevalent it is or who feels it. But you paint everyone who uses the term "Privilege" as angry. Now, I would never suggest that none of the people who use that term are angry. Rather, I point out that mere use of the term is not a sign of anger and that it does not necessary flow out of anger. I have never, not once in my life, dismissed anyone's arguments by labeling them some result of "white rage" or "white fragility." Nonetheless, you somehow feel that I am condescending simply because I acknowledge that these do exist and have influence? It's is simply amazing how well you prove my point.
9) Last, do you know the term, "Born on third base"? Do you know Molly Ivins expression, "Born on third base and thought he hit a triple"? You say that the scholarship competition is fair, but you ignore all the contributors to and enablers of the high school student's accomplishments that were unearned. You start you consideration so late in the process so that you can claim some outcome that is laundered of a past of privilege. But neonatal environment matters. And everything after that. It doesn't begin simply with the scholarship application.
Lots of really good points here, and I love the choice of subject matter, but I feel like MY is missing key parts of MLK's public arguments.
First, he was willing to take on populism directly, as in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail": "First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice."
Second, while MLK didn't use the term "microaggressions," he talked about things that we would call that. He repeatedly refers to "dignity," as in "Birmingham Jail": "a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality . . . who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses." He connects the use of words with the growth of people's fear: "your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness.""
So while I think all the points about MLK's belief in redistribution are excellent and worth shouting from the rooftops, I do not think it's accurate to suggest that MLK was a believer in pure populism (he took on white moderates explicitly), nor does it seem accurate to say that his major works didn't talk about things that today we would call "microaggressions."
I am still working on learning more about King and his ideas and how they evolved over time, so forgive me if I am under-informed. That quote gets pulled from LFABJ a lot, but ultimately the whole letter is a loving challenge to these white moderates to join him in Christian brotherhood with their actions, not just their words. I don't think he was rejecting populism per se, he was trying to spotlight a moral inconsistency between the stated intentions of his allies and their actions. Ultimately the letter is actually quite hopeful about the potential of interracial collaboration. The longform piece by Jose Yglesias is actually very interesting as it highlights how MLK was willing to go against his more extremist counterparts in the civil rights movement and pull white poor people into the Poor People's Campaign.
“Taking on white moderates” for their “devotion to order instead of justice” =/= critiquing “populism.” To the contrary, I understand his criticism of white moderates to be rooted in their unwillingness to upset the status who by embracing radical populist solutions like wealth redistribution.
I'm not suggesting that he was "critiquing" populism, just showing that MLK didn't apply the populist framing in all circumstances.
There were plenty of times, such as in his most famous text (as opposed to oration), when MLK made arguments based on appeals to morality and justice with no mention of common cause against the elites.
Fair enough, thanks for the clarification. I agree he used a variety of rhetorical frames and this example of challenging white moderates is one of a number in which he didn’t use a “colorblind” approach.
That said, it’s still populist, to some degree, if you view “white moderates” as part of the elite that needed persuading and, failing that, a political push.
It's important to understand that MLK calling them "moderates" doesn't mean they were moderates. Jews, Methodists, and Presbyterians are the liberals in Birminham. 7 of the 8 were decidely liberal on race issues in Alabama. That's why King had to respond to them.
7 of the 8 what? I take your general point, anyway, and it reinforces mine: King criticizes white moderates (by 1960s standards) because they don’t embrace his populist platform for race and economic justice.
Dr King was responding to a letter written by 8 Alabama religious leaders. In my reader, the Episcopal Bishop was less receptive of the civil rights movement than the others. The others would be have been considered very liberal. King responded with criticism because they DID embrace his platform and they had become concerned that a lot of violence was about to occur. It was a letter to his allies that had gotten cold feet.
I mean populism in the sense that MLK did not come to white moderates with "it's you and us against the elites." That would have been the populist argument.
Instead, he came at them with the explicit antiracist/justice argument: "We must accept the current tension in order to move toward justice."
I don't mean to get bogged down in semantics, but it would be very weird for a reverend to try an anti-elite argument with a bunch of other clergy. The clergy are elites! King had a doctorate!
'But if you want to understand why racial justice advocates aren’t satisfied with the “judge by the content of character” nostrum, it’s because King’s version of that dream was the endpoint of a program of massive material redistribution to build a radically more egalitarian society.'
I mean, it's true that racial justice advocates aren't satisfied by that, and it's true that many also favour economic redistribution, but I'm really not sure that's the *reason* they're going in the direction they're going. If so, why not just advocate for a radically more egalitarian society in economic terms?
That's not what they're doing, or I think what they would view themselves as doing.
I think there are actually two strains of "racial justice advocates" these days. Obviously, the world doesn't just fall nicely into buckets but I see it like this:
1.) Corporate Woke (Robin Deangelo, IXK, etc. )
2.) Leftist Woke
(forgive the sloppy use of the word woke but we all know what I'm talking about)
They both exist basically on top of each other, so it makes it hard to point at racial justice activism and say it's this or that. We have one group that pumps out Colin Kaepernick ads for Nike and calls it a big game-changer, and another group that would point out that Nike doesn't exactly have a great track record with labor ethics (mostly affecting brown people on the other side of the world). Both groups however share some slightly out-there ideas about how we should discuss race today... So it's easy for anyone to paint anyone as crazy.
The well-off white yuppie millennials want to feel good about themselves, so there is now a market for stroking their egos with a sort of weird guilt porn (see White Fragiliy, Not My Idea) that is both very provocative and can be called "radicalism" but also doesn't propose anything remotely approaching a solution (see Kendi's Dept. of Antiracism). This is where I'd slot in most of the cancel-culture behavior as well... the market of performative activism whips people into doing mean things (go figure).
Then the actual left is so strangely tied up in all this stuff, that they lose credibility. You get people like the members of the squad, who will be dead on about so many of the issues and have potential solutions, but at the same time lean into the divisive and confusing woke politics. I think this really hurts the brand of the left. But hey, it's not like there's a nice little button to push to get everyone's messaging in line haha...
"If so, why not just advocate for a radically more egalitarian society in economic terms?"
Right here you are hitting on a fundamental issue with the American left. They can't make a political calculation to save their lives! Seems pretty simple when it's written out like that but alas...
I just think as long as people who identify as socialists are reading antiracist baby to their kids.... The right wing will have plenty of anecdotes of otherwise smart/well-intentioned lefties doing dumb/anti-intellectual stuff that will scare people away.
A lot of my general ideas about race and class are formed by Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us, and Matt Taibbi's The Divide.
I think the thing about King's thought which you indirectly note a few times, including in the sub-head, is that it was drawing on a very clear tradition, namely radical Christianity. He was a preacher, a doctor of theology and he drew enormously from that well, in his oratory but also in his thinking. He's very much challenging along the same lines along which Jesus is reported to have challenged: what does it mean, to leave your fellow man in the dust? It seems pretty clear that the biblical Jesus would have as a starting point not focusing on someone's skin colour, but that is very clearly only the beginning of a very long list of increasingly difficult moral demands. And it's very obviously that tradition, that belief that inspired Rev King.
And while it's obvious and reasonable why agnostic (or Jewish, or atheist) leftists gloss over that source and focus on what the impact would be of King's approach, I do wonder why self-proclaimed Christian conservatives (like Tom Cotton) don't want to engage with King's thoughts as Christians, given that's the cornerstone of what King was saying (and as you note, he buttressed it with a *lot* of Scripture)
One move I’ve observed is people agreeing that we need a more material focus and then going to reparations or other race-specific programs as the strategy for doing this. In the economic/material lane you can either push universal redistribution that is still racially leveling in practice (baby bonds some such) or race specific ones like UBI only for black residents or economic development grants for Black/Latino entrepreneurs or reparations for slavery, etc. where would King/Rustin fall on this one? Racially universal but targeted by income/class right?
I just don’t think it matters much what King thought. What matters is what America agreed to with the passage of the Civil Rights Act. My impression from school is what we achieved consensus on was “people should be judged based on the content of their character not the color of their skin”, but not any of King’s more radical views. That’s why this quote from King is so powerful, not because it accurately sums up his views on race, but because it accurately sums up America’s new consensus on race.
Even affirmative action IMO overextended past this consensus to the point of actually requiring “judging based on the color of skin”, which is why I don’t like it (and my impression is most Americans agree with me, because the consensus is that judging people on race is bad). That’s why prop 16 failed. That’s why the attempts to redefine “racism” as “power+privilege” or “structural racism” bother me, because they are attempts to take the hard-fought disgust at racism as interpersonal prejudice and transfer it to more contested concepts just by playing word games without doing any real persuasive work.
I would be interested in the actual history of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Did the legislators passing that bill think they were authorizing affirmative action? Given that the discriminatory measures in place were racially race-neutral already, what did they think they were banning?
I mean, yes, I think it would be constructive for conservatives to say "unlike Martin Luther King, Jr. I believe that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represents a complete and adequate solution to the problem of racial justice and that's why we're gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 etc. etc. etc."
That would help us have a clearer and more honest dialogue.
I feel like if we're giving MLK a holiday for establishing the civil rights consensus, it's fair for everyone to cite him in support of that consensus, even though it wasn't everything he hoped for, and even if the people citing him are opposing further "progress".
I'm honestly still confused about what bothers you here. Isn't it clear that the price of MLK being widely revered, getting a holiday, being widely taught to young kids, etc. is that most people are only going to know about and agree with his widely-agreed-upon views and not his still-hotly-contested views? It's a great opening for "did you know that this widely revered figure had radical still hotly-contested views?!", as you write in the post. But it doesn't make sense to have a civil religion saint that only socialists are allowed to quote.
I guess you just disagree with me that "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character" is a good summary of the post-MLK American consensus on race, or of the goals of the Civil Rights Act? I'd be interested to read a case that in fact America embraced a more substantial form of MLK's vision, but this post doesn't really try to make one.
People are *allowed* to say and think whatever they want about King. But if you're trying to assess the state of racial equality in 2021, it seems like it's worthwhile to examine the philosophy that animated the leading intellectual and moral force behind contemporary civil rights legislation. To argue otherwise is a bit like arguing that the writings of the founding fathers are irrelevant to thinking about the contemporary American republic. ("It doesn't matter what Hamilton, Madison, or Jefferson thought. What matters is that we passed the Constitution.")
But I agree with "It doesn't matter what Hamilton, Madison, or Jefferson thought. What matters is that we passed the Constitution."! The Constitution is rightly far more influential than any founding father's political views that contradict it, even though I'm sure there were many (although actually I don't know what they were, since they weren't influential).
Understanding the compromise that became law seems more important to me than understanding the activism that led to it, especially the parts of that activism that never convinced most people.
King did not pass the Civil Rights Act. The House and the Senate did. So it may be even more worthwhile to examine the intellectual and moral force that behind the thinking of the key actors in that process, and what they thought was right as well as politically expedient.
I'm no political operative, but I'm gonna bet that King's placement in this photo is not accidental: https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/artifact/president-lyndon-b-johnson-signing-civil-rights-act-1964-photograph-cecil
Obviously it's worthwhile to learn about and understand the motivations of politicians responsible for passing laws, but if you're trying to understand any law in a meaningful way, the agents who don't hold political office often have as much or greater impact than those that do. Like, it would be weird to have a discussion on equality of the sexes and the impact of the 19th Amendment by only reading materials related to the state legislators who debated ratification of the Amendment itself.
Agreed, but only adding that it is a much more complex matter than just "study what Dr. King said" Not least because there was a civil rights movement before there was a Dr. King. I don't think a photograph necessarily says that the key legislative players were behind King's integral vision of solidarity and redistribution, nor does national recommitment to equality under the law require it.
Conservatives do actually try that line when it comes to the question of whether Thomas Jefferson's treatment of his slaves is important.
Isn't the argument that MLK believed we could only realize a nation where people are judged by the "content of their character" if we adopted [policies X, Y, Z], which we have not done yet? I always thought this notion was best expressed in his speech at the end of the Selma march (one of his best):
"Today I want to tell the city of Selma, today I want to say to the state of Alabama, today I want to say to the people of America and the nations of the world, that we are not about to turn around.
We are on the move now.
Yes, we are on the move and no wave of racism can stop us. We are on the move now. The burning of our churches will not deter us. The bombing of our homes will not dissuade us. We are on the move now.
The beating and killing of our clergymen and young people will not divert us. We are on the move now. The wanton release of their known murderers would not discourage us. We are on the move now.
Like an idea whose time has come, not even the marching of mighty armies can halt us.
We are moving to the land of freedom.
Let us therefore continue our triumphant march to the realization of the American dream. Let us march on segregated housing until every ghetto or social and economic depression dissolves, and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing. Let us march on segregated schools until every vestige of segregated and inferior education becomes a thing of the past, and Negroes and whites study side-by-side in the socially-healing context of the classroom.
Let us march on poverty until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may eat. March on poverty until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist. Let us march on poverty until wrinkled stomachs in Mississippi are filled, and the idle industries of Appalachia are realized and revitalized, and broken lives in sweltering ghettos are mended and remolded.
Let us march on ballot boxes, march on ballot boxes until race-baiters disappear from the political arena. Let us march on ballot boxes until the salient misdeeds of bloodthirsty mobs will be transformed into the calculated good deeds of orderly citizens.
Let us march on ballot boxes until the Wallaces of our nation tremble away in silence. Let us march on ballot boxes until we send to our city councils, state legislatures, and the United States Congress, men who will not fear to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with thy God.
Let us march on ballot boxes until brotherhood becomes more than a meaningless word in an opening prayer, but the order of the day on every legislative agenda. Let us march on ballot boxes until all over Alabama God's children will be able to walk the earth in decency and honor."
The issue is pretty straightforward.
My selectively quoting King and taking his quotes out of context, one misrepresents what he meant in the moment.
Now, why would a person do that?
Because such a person wants the moral standing of the only American born after the founding of our country with a national holiday named after them to give weight to their own thinking and preferences -- even when they do not match those of the great American.
Look, anyone can take words and phrases out of context and compose a paragraph that says anything they want. Look, I'll do it it you. "People citing him...are confused. Most people...know....and agree with this...hotly contested views." The fact that MLK had a particular sentence that people like to pull out of context in order to present it as something other than it was doesn't actually make it any less dishonest.
Matt is not not being explicit about this, but there really are only two options here. Either these people know that they are misrepresenting MLK's intent, or they are so dismissive of him that they can't even be bothered to read the whole speech. But Matt is pretty clear what he thinks of them, either way.
Consider this paragraph I just wrote:
"Martin Luther King Jr. famously expressed the American ideal of freedom from racial discrimination, "a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Affirmative action violates that dream. It's un-American."
Is this dishonest or misrepresenting MLK?
Yes
I think its dishonest because there being a large standard of living gap between the average White and Black American is a violation of the MLK dream. Focusing on affirmative action is not WhatKingWouldDo
Your argument rests on the assumption that MLK's 'dream' is already realized and that is simply not true. Affirmative action will be un-American when that dream becomes a reality. Until then, yes, you are misrepresenting MLK.
If I agree with Matt on X, is it incumbent on me to point out I disagree with Matt on Y?
It depends. Earlier this year, Representative Mary Miller put out a video saying "Hitler was right on one thing. He said, ’Whoever has the youth has the future.’" Why would she think that he is the best figure to include on sharing her viewpoint?
Did affirmative action initially rise from a court case/cases?
Conservatives can take that position if they want, but I don't see any conservatives on TV arguing that what King thought doesn't matter. They say King shared their principles, which is not true.
I agree that people shouldn't lie on TV! (But I am a little sympathetic, because I imagine it's tough to convey this nuance on TV, and invoking King specifically in his role as saint in the civil religion is rhetorically powerfully but easily bleeds into lying that King actually agreed with the speaker)
Exactly. And that’s without trying to define what color blind policies actually are within any particular context.
Nobody is saying “King shared their principles” writ large. They’re saying “King shared this particular principle with respect to color-blindness.” Which is true!
I have to disagree that "nobody" is saying this. I'm not going to go hunting for quotes, but in general the King-quoting seems to me more about "the spirit" of what King said, his "legacy," etc. The attempt is certainly to say that race-blind, non-redistributive policies are closer to what King would have wanted.
Race blind, yes. But you’re the one inserting “non-redistributive.”
Saying Tom Cotton isn't a fan of redistribution is pretty obvious and non-controversial.
This is a ridiculous way of thinking about quoting anyone. Of course when Tom Cotton says - "as MLK said ..." he's using a shared value of MLK's thoughts on the subject, and MLK's authority on what needed to be done on issues of race in America. His argument is clearly "MLK thought this we should be colorblind, MLK is an authority on race, we should be colorblind and not work on redistribution". In your view the argument is "The consensus is that we should be colorblind, this is the consensus as phrased by MLK, we should be colorblind and not work on redistribution". which is not an argument at all.
Here's a sample of the kind of argument I have in mind:
"Martin Luther King Jr. famously expressed the American ideal of freedom from racial discrimination, "a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character". Affirmative action violates that dream. It's un-American."
You can see I am citing him as an famous expositor of an "American ideal", but not lying about his views.
Would you limit OTHER legislation to what the legislators could imagine? Would you limit OTHER legislation to what the legislators passing it would agree with?
1) It seems a shame to be limited by the morality and the imagination of our forefathers.
2) There are always disagreements among them, and there will always be those whose thinking we could not know. So, there's no way for such things to be definitive.
3) What was approved was the language in the legislation. That's the nature of legislation. That some might prefer one meaning and others and other meaning is not surprising. This is why everyone is a textualist, now. You seems to be imaging for yourself some consensus which you wish to define that matches your own preferences. That seems a exercise rather low on intellectual integrity.
Yes, we should interpret legislation textually or perhaps by considering what the people passing it thought it did in ambiguous cases. If you want new rules, pass new laws.
The civil rights act outlaws discrimination by race. That's the text. Affirmative action obviously discriminates by race. It's crazy that we have somehow ended up interpreting banning discrimination by race as requiring it.
(I am genuinely confused why everyone agrees California Prop 209 outlaws affirmative action whereas the Civil Rights Act permits or even requires it, given that AFAIK the legislative text is very similar)
1) Odd. I didn't say anything about affirmative action? Why are you so committed to driving everything to this issue.
2) You might not be aware of this, but there are many kinds of affirmative action that have nothing to do with race. So, your objections to affirmative actions seem to be more based in deeper problem you have with it than with actual legal objections.
3) Why or how is affirmative action necessarily discrimination based on race? Why do you assume that anything other than racial blindness constitutes discrimination? Why is it that consideration the challenges that accompany being a part of a particular "race" when evaluating a candidate is necessarily discriminatory? How do you know that FAILING to ever consider such thing necessarily constitutes discrimination?
Look, Mr. Paulson, I am a highly education straight white cis male, the son of two parents with advanced degrees themselves. There is no way that any form of affirmative action would work to my advantage. But I am quite capable of admitting that many others who have achieved what I have achieved have done so due to greater effort, care, diligence and patience. And, therefore, though our achievements may appear equivalent on the surface, any thoughtful consideration would acknowledge that their achievements were actually greater than mine. Doing so does not constitute discrimination, it just acknowledges reality
And the realization that one way to balance the discriminatory thumb on too many scales is to counterweight that on the other side of the apparatus is not disciminatory. It is is the opposite.
1) Affirmative action is just a good example of an issue where people (like me) quote MLK to disagree with him. You're right that the debate over affirmative action itself is somewhat far afield from the post. I think we agree the law should be interpreted textually and not based on what MLK thought?
2) Sure, my objections are both legal and moral, because in this case the law accords with my morals in saying that discrimination by race (and many other things) is wrong.
3) There's a plausible story to tell about how formal discrimation via affirmative action is just counter-balancing informal racism, but affirmative action manifestly is treating people differently based on their race i.e. discriminating by race. Just because you have a reason doesn't mean you're not discriminating.
1) Funny, neither Matt nor myself hear people use that "content of character" quote and disagree with it. Neither do people use that quote and then say, "But I disagree with all the other stuff MLK said." So, no, I do not think that people quote MLK to disagree with him.
2) Your reading of the law accords with your moral view. But we have decades of there reading of the law that does NOT accord with your moral view. Why is YOUR reading the preferred reading?
3) I see what you are saying. But isn't it equally plausible that affirmative action is how we actually treat people the SAME based on their race? You conceded the plausibility of informal racism. So, if we can balance that with targeted anti-racist efforts, can't we just cancel out the disaffirmation and -- just as (-1) + (+1) = 0 -- we end up treating people the same?
4) You seem to think that ANY consideration of race constitutes discrimination, even as you acknowledge that there is informal discrimination already. So, you claim a moral view that discrimination on the ground of race is bad, but refuse to take the simplest anti-discriminatory counterweight, thus insisting the informal discrimination based on race continue unchecked. Really, man, how is THAT a moral position? You've created a contradiction between you stated moral view and the actions you insist upon.
1) I mean people use "content of their character" to argue for a colorblind society, which apparently is not what MLK himself believed in.
2) It's the plain reading. Also most Americans agree with me (for example, prop 16 failed in California, despite California being very liberal and the local politicians supporting it)
3+4) Hypothetical discrimination by other people doesn't make more discrimination legal. It would justify cracking down on that other discrimination though, which is the proper response to it.
This is a good article with respect to King's actual thought - as you rightly say, King was a much more radical figure economically than he is popularly given credit for, and the conservative praise of King tends to wipe that out.
At the same time, I think you fail to give credit for what conservatives - and yes, conservatives like Tom Cotton - genuinely have learned from King's version of the Civil Rights movement, and why the "content of character" part genuinely is important to them, and to America as a whole.
The question is: WHY (as you note) were there no Black Fortune 500 CEOs before 1987, no Black university presidents of notionally integrated universities, no Black foreign service officer before the 1920s etc. etc., when there was no law forbidding it? It can't SOLELY be explained by "structural racism" - that might explain why there were fewer, but not why there were none. And the obvious, blatantly obvious answer as to why there were none, is that the large majority of people in charge of appointments and promotions within those institutions were personally racist, racist in a very simple and obvious and straightforward way. They were racist in the North, just like they were racist in the South, though in the North it didn't tend to express itself in legal segregation. White people simply didn't believe that Blacks were suited to positions of leadership, or capable of taking responsible high-prestige roles.
So when King talked of his dream about people being judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, that addresses something real, and something that everyone knew to be real - people were daily being judged in exactly that way, and that was a major thing (not the only thing, maybe not the most important thing, but still a major thing) that was holding Blacks back at the time.
And modern conservatives accept that - and, I think, in private as well as in public. And they have been convinced that it was wrong. You simply won't find someone who believes that Blacks are intrinsically unsuited for high office or responsible or prestigious roles in society. That is a huge, vast change from 50 years ago, and King's words in that speech, even if taken out of the context of his thought as a whole, are a major reason why. Those words, and the appeal to justice and common humanity in them, have won the day in modern America.
So it isn't true to say that "The conservative movement, at the time, opposed him in the name of federalism, free markets, and the idea that facially race-neutral laws are all that one can reasonably ask for. And the conservative movement today largely stands by those ideas." That is wrong. The modern conservative movement argues that Blacks asked something much more radical, and moreover that they were right to ask for it. Blacks like King demanded that people change their attitudes towards those of other races, that people recognize that a person's race does not affect their qualifications for a job, or their ability to perform well in any area of society. And that demand for a radical change of attitudes in the name of basic fairness has been accepted by the modern conservative movement.
Now, you're right that that isn't all that King demanded, it's not even perhaps the most important thing that he demanded, and that his thoughts on race and class and economics went well beyond that, into areas that neither the conservatives of his day nor modern conservatives accept. But King convinced conservatives, as he convinced liberals, on that one issue, and (I would argue) it's a really important issue, one which explains the iconic status that King has among conservatives as well as liberals in modern America.
Letting a few, very talented blacks become CEOs or university presidents may have seemed radical in 1960. However, it is much less of an ask than broader equality. The only sacrifice it requires is for a few elite whites to not get the prestige positions— positions 98% of whites can’t even realistically aspire to.
Root and branch equality would require people much further down the good chain to give up economic opportunities— eg, Billy can’t be assistant manager at Walmart because assistant managers have to be racially representative of the broader community.
In 1960 the people appointing Billy to assistant manager at Walmart (or the 1960 equivalent of Walmart) would have been judging him on the color of his skin as well. And the modern conservative movement would argue that that, too, was wrong: that the same radical change in attitudes that would enable suitably talented Blacks to become CEOs or university presidents should ensure that Billy would only receive his position at Walmart on his merits. And indeed, that too has happened: there are Blacks in assistant manager positions now, just as there are Black CEOs. The Black competitors for Billy's job aren't being excluded from consideration simply because they are Black, as they were in 1960.
Now, of COURSE one can argue that isn't nearly enough - and King, as Matt shows, would have agreed with that!! But it required a genuinely radical change in people's attitudes, and I don't think one should diminish that.
It’s complicated. In the Deep South in 1960, stores had very good reasons not to hire black assistant managers. It would have triggered white customers and hurt profits. Furthermore, white people who wanted jobs as assistant managers might have understood that white supremacy made it easier to get those gigs by knocking out the black candidates. None of this requires anyone to believe that blank people were incapable of any aspect of bring an assistant manager other than the “not triggering racist whites” aspect of the job. However, not triggering racist whites was essential to any customer facing job, so there’s a sense in which black candidates really were unsuited to the job.
White supremacy was a constellation of attitudes and cash flows. Some but not all of it survives to this day.
Would it require that much? Like I’m thinking of an earlier MY post that said the racial wealth gap is surprisingly concentrated in the top 1 percent.
Like you’d close the gap pretty substantially by taking all the wealthiest people and either burning it or having a proportional number of black and Latin Google’s/Apples/Chases etc.
The wealth gap is concentrated in the top 1 percent because wealth is concentrated in the top 1 percent. If you want to look at normal people, you need to look at income gaps.
(Now, both wealth and income gaps are complicated and roll a lot of stuff into them. If you just look at topline numbers, you'll see lots of stuff that isn't racial per se rolled into a racial gap.)
Right so who gets a job as a Walmart assistant manager just isn’t going to move the needle very much either way. Billy could be the assistant manager at Walmart but Walmart couldn’t exist as anything like what it is.
It depends on how you measure the racial wealth gap. Are you trying to explain the ownership of dollars or peoples lived experience? Dollars are concentrated in the 1%, but relatively modest differences in wealth (eg $100k to pay for education) can makes huge differences in people’s loves, even if they are only a small piece of national wealth. Transferring $1 trillion from small billionaires to Bezos wouldn’t change much. But transferring $1 trillion to poor minorities in the deep South would change a lot.
When should the first black Fortune 500 CEO have been instated?
Let's create an alternate history. In 1964, Martin Luther King casts a powerful spell that prevents all Americans from literally seeing skin color, or remembering their previous views on race and ethnicity. Everyone is unavoidably judged entirely on the content of their character, it becomes literally impossible to judge people on race or ethnicity.
At the same time, Congress passes some kind of technocratic law of the sort that Matt favors to help poor people, including poor children, and it goes great.
But otherwise, things remain the same. The Fortune 500 companies remain as they were, their executive ranks remain unchanged. There are no black CEOs. The next time a CEO retires, they do a job search and probably get someone who's currently a CEO of a Fortune 1000 company or a VP of a Fortune 500 company, and he's white too.
Black kids start going to selective schools in much greater numbers, since they have money to do so due to technocratic reforms and are not barred by racism since racism is abolished. But, realistically, the children of laborers, even with a lot of economic opportunity, and no racial animus against them, do not go to Harvard in the same numbers that do the children of doctors, lawyers, executives, academics, whose parents put their kids on railroad tracks to that life, who have connections and understand what those universities value, who tutor their children formally and informally and surround them with peers who get the same deal.
In this world, I don't think that there's a black Fortune 500 CEO a ton before 1987. And I think that it'd be probably at least three generations before you couldn't find a statistically significant link between being black and being of lower socioeconomic status. Maybe more that three generations!
Obviously, in the real world, we did not abolish racism in the 60s, and real racism does slow the upward mobility of blacks. And we also don't have great technocratic laws giving everyone a lot of opportunity, and that also means upward mobility is limited.
But I've long understood late 20th and 21st century liberals' racial policies as being about frustration with how long organic upward mobility takes even when it's not really held back by racism or economic opportunity. I think conservatives tend to feel comfortable saying, "if it's getting better, there are natural limits to how fast it can get better and that's okay," while liberals tend to say, "if it hasn't gotten to such and such a point already we need to force it to that point."
Democrats of a certain ideological leaning tend to conflate the fact that material conditions for African Americans are still quite poor with the notion that there's been no improvement at all in their standing and our dealings with racial prejudice.
To almost anyone else, this is plainly and obviously untrue, and it sends huge numbers of people into defensive crouches that are made worse when they get called racist for pointing out that this is untrue and have no real way to fend off the accusation.
The problem is that no sooner had the ink dried on the great civil rights bills of the 1960's than US economic policy started undermining the hell out of the working class, which had and has a disproportionately large number of black families.
The aforementioned liberals look at poverty outcomes since them and see society-wide, systemic racism. Conservatives look at genuine improvements in the form of huge declines in racial prejudices and greatly increased minority cultural clout and representation and see deluded leftists looking for equality of outcomes.
People like me look at all of this and see a world in which almost everyone who was working class in 1968 is worse off than back then regardless of race, which has wildly disproportionately impacted black families because that's where the vast majority of them started at the time.
We have systemic racism, biases in policing, education, housing, and healthcare. None of these are the main cause of racial income and wealth gaps today, which can be explained almost entirely by the decline in bargaining power suffered by the lower-middle class relative to their employers, just like the bottom two quintiles of white families.
The policies that would make a dent in inequality overall are the same ones which would disproportionately benefit poor black families.
(I also understand a lot of the debate between conservative and liberals in this time period to be saying, "How much of the continued economic disadvantage of blacks in America is due to racism and how much is due to the speed limits of natural change?")
There's some merit here, but there's been essentially no convergence in standards of living, so "speed limits" is an odd term to use.
Black families have been squeezed by the same forces that lower-income white families have been, but the result is much more pronounced because most black families were still working class when the "good jobs" dried up in big cities, and most working class white families were able to move to follow them through at least the 1980's.
I think a lot of conservatives get a free pass on racial issues because they claim simultaneously that their guiding principle is laissez-faire •and• that it's equality of opportunity. The two things aren't compatible. The 1964 Civil Rights Act creates equal opportunity by restricting the freedom of private businesses to employ whomever they choose.
Obviously conservatives are free to argue that too much redistribution is bad for efficiency. But when they argue that redistribution is wrong in principle, even though anti-discrimination laws are fine, they're trying to occupy a middle ground that doesn't exist. If you really don't believe property rights should be restricted to reduce market-generated inequalities then you can't.support civil rights laws, because that's just what those laws do.
I'm not sure how helpful it is to point this out, though, because under Trump it seems the GOP is dropping its rhetorical comment to equal opportunity in any case. You never hear conservatives arguing that gay people should have equal opportunity to buy a wedding cake; it's all about the baker's exercise of property rights in accordance with her religious beliefs. They still aren't claiming that anyone has a religious right to refuse service to black people, but I can see it going in that direction. Maybe it was better when they were logically inconsistent.
I think the religious freedom cases get a little odd.
The original conservative view was that non-discrimination laws are bad because they abrogate free markets. They clearly *do* abrogate free markets, that just proved to be a losing argument. So they've pivoted to this religious freedom idea which they can win with in courts. But I think the reason is still the markets thing.
It's worse than the old position! At least Barry Goldwater believed that •every• property owner had the right to discriminate. He didn't claim that having a religious opinion gave you special rights.
I think the reason for the shift is pretty clear actually. Most of today's Republicans don't want to defend legalized discrimination against black people, only against LGBT people. The religion angle provides a convenient way to disconnect LGBT equality from other civil rights issues... although not really, because at some point a Muslim business owner will assert the right not to employ women, or a Catholic baker will refuse to bake wedding cakes for divorced Catholics. Conservative legal activists have been very careful not to bring those kinds of cases, because they can't afford to show the full implications of a maximalist stance on "religious freedom".
The religious freedom cases are legitimate if properly limited. The cake cases are funny because they're about cakes, but I don't think anyone would disagree that it shouldn't be illegal if, say, someone tries to commission a Christian artist to paint a painting about Muhammad (or a Muslim artist to paint a Nativity scene or what have you) and the artist refuses. So there are clearly some cases where a narrow religious freedom exception is appropriate.
(I realized later that a Muslim wouldn't commission a painting about Muhammad as that's verboten, but let's pretend I used a better example.)
This is how I ended every presentation in my life.
I've tried to find a place to settle on this, and I came up with a creativity exemption - that a creative person could not be required to create work that goes against their political / religious beliefs.
And we already have a test in law for what is creative: copyrightability.
So the cake decoration where the baker is presented with a drawing that they just have to replicate is a public accommodation; the one where they are asked to create something that endorses a gay marriage is something they can reject.
I would honestly say that the line should be drawn at any creative endeavour, which includes what might be called artisanal rather than artistic works.
If the wedding cake maker is just refusing to provide an off-the-shelf cake to a gay couple, that's illegal discrimination, but I honestly don't see why they should be obliged to be involved in *creating* something that goes against their beliefs.
Another point is that the refusal has to be based on the content of the product, not the identity of the buyer. In some cases it can be hard to separate those things. But in the cake example, I think this cakemaker would have made a happy birthday cake for the gay couple, and would not have made a gay marriage cake ordered by a straight friend.
When I look at trendlines for, say, gay acceptance and religious adherence, especially among the young, all I can say about social conservatives and these court cases is, let them have their cake; they can eat it too.
These are rearguard actions in a war we're winning in a rout. Just ask the kids of the owners of these bakeries if they agree with their parents. I'm pretty confident the answer is "no."
I agree. “Let the market sort it out” wasn’t the answer for solving public accommodation discrimination in the Jim Crow South. But it’s fine for religious bakers. Ginning up cases against these small number of folks starts to feel like punching down.
Yeah, I've always wondered why conservatives bother fighting one side of these wedding cake cases, rather than simply going to a very liberal artist and then commissioning a painting celebrating Trump or advocating a pro-life position or whatever, then when the artist refuses claiming that *they're* being discriminated against.
Political affiliation is not a protected characteristic, though, so the baker is well within his rights to refuse service regardless one’s view of the cake cases.
That depends on jurisdiction. In California, for example, public accommodations can't discriminate based on political affiliation: http://volokh.com/2010/05/25/some-strange-consequences-of-public-accommodations-laws/
You lawyers might know the answer to this. Does it make any difference that the bakery is a shop open to anyone and the act of commissioning a painting proceeds under different circumstances, one in which there’s less confusion about the public nature of an enterprise?
Let me add a clarification: your distinction might matter if the painter isn’t generally offering services to the public. If I reach out to a famous painter of my own accord to attempt to commission a painting, apropos of nothing, she can probably refuse for any reason or none at all.
Let’s keep in mind that SCOTUS kicked the cake case without deciding the merits. That said, I think the answer to your question is no, it probably doesn’t matter. The painter has a better case than the baker, but that’s primarily because painting is clearly expression protected by the First Amendment. A wedding cake, by contrast, is closer to the line: more expressive than, say, a seat at the diner counter and a hamburger, but not exactly high art, either.
Gorsuch, in his concurrence, argued the wedding cake was significantly expressive as an approval of gay marriage that the government could not compel the baker to make it; I believe Sotomayor dissented to the contrary.
Honestly, it’s a close call.
If I'm the artist, I accept the commission (with some upfront payment) and then deliver them a painting of a fat, naked Trump with which they will be very very unhappy.
I think you’re overemphasizing the extent to which there are genuinely held “reasons” here, that’s not to say I think they are disingenuous reasons. I just think they are subconscious reasons not held to a standard of rationality. As an aside, talking to a family member a few years ago who is relatively politically engaged (could describe the branches of government, how they work, name all presidents and VPs back 50 years, etc. etc.) absolutely railed about the export import bank to me back when that was in vogue. Yet, he couldn’t describe exactly what it did. Then, a few years later, he cheered Trump’s desire to rip up NAFTA. He used to rail about deficit spending on principle, and yet when Trump signed the bill that sent the checks (notably not to him), he was ambivalent about the effect on deficits. Maybe the through line here is individual interests + xenophobia, but that’s certainly not how he would conceptualize it. My point is not to dunk on the right per se, it’s just to point out that I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to superimpose a requirement of having good and consistent reasons on political ideology.
Amen to that
I think you should go talk to a bunch of Muslims before spouting off about “disingenuous reasons.” The centrality of procreative marriage isn’t something conservatives just made up to piss off Democrats.
Suppose you got 1,000 random people in a room that opposed gay marriage or opposed adoption by gay couples or even just had a deep passion for defending the right of free expression and religious freedom for the wedding cake industry. Now, you asked those 1,000 people "why do you think the centrality of procreative marriage is important?" You would get a lot of blank stares, some confusion, and some responses not articulated along the lines of the principle you just laid out. But I don't doubt the sincerity of their beliefs. Which is actually what I said if you re-read my original comment. I DON'T think people's beliefs are disingenuous. I just don't think its reasonable to expect there is a deep, broadly applicable principle underlying all of them. For example, I would be very surprised if there was a strong correlation between the group of people who believe wedding cake bakers should be able to deny service to gay couples, and those who believe workplaces should make reasonable accommodations to allow Muslim employees to practice mid-day prayer. And I don't think that incongruence would be because of a nuanced conception of positive and negative rights, either.
This sounds purely cynical to me. "Respectable" people in past times, down into the lower middle class, and including my own ancestors, took sexual and family morality very seriously, given that a large number of illegitimate children would have been the result otherwise. So what makes you assert that they were somehow insincere or just making it up?
You don't think the real reason is the bigotry?
The original opposition wasn’t based on “free markets” but freedom more fundamentally, in particular freedom of association and conscience. People shouldn’t have to do business with anyone they don’t want to, not as an economic matter but as a matter of individual liberty.
That proved to be a losing argument. But there is nothing “odd” about the pivot to religious freedom. That’s just a narrower ground of the same point. “Even if you don’t believe in an expansive view of freedom of association and conscience, people shouldn’t have to do affirmative acts that are inconsistent with their religious beliefs.”
I think the original opposition was based on animus towards Black people. Do you not agree?
I don't think it's too hard to draw a distinction between civil rights and redistribution. Civil rights is more like "don't be a jerk" whereas redistribution is more like "give to charity". The former is a basic expectation when interacting with strangers, whereas the latter is nice but not obligatory.
To put it another way "the gains for which the civil-rights movement had fought had not cost anyone a penny", whereas redistribution is more clearly zero-sum.
I'm not convinced there's a real difference. Restaurants in the South used to exclude black customers because a lot of white customers found their presence to be offensive, which is the same reason restaurants continue to exclude people who aren't properly dressed or who look as if they sleep in the street. Being born black in America isn't fundamentally different from being born with a physical disability, or with a low IQ. All these things make employers less willing to hire you and (unless the government intervenes) reduce your lifetime earning potential. Either all these things can legitimately be addressed by state action, or else none of them can and they're just unfortunate facts of life.
I guess my point was to address what the philosopher Thomas Nagel calls the "everyday libertarianism" that pervades a lot of Americans' thinking. Real libertarianism is the belief that *no* outcome is morally illegitimate if it results from voluntary transactions between consenting adults--whether it's living in poverty because you were born with no arms, or being unable to eat in a diner because you were born with the wrong skin color. This is a crank position and hardly anyone actually holds it--but a lot of people *think* they hold it (sometimes they call themselves "moderate libertarians", which I say is a contradiction in terms) and it distorts their political judgment.
The right way to think about it is this. If you don't believe it's wrong for the government to force restaurants to serve black customers, then you don't actually believe property rights are absolute. And if you don't believe property rights are absolute, your thinking about wealth redistribution ought to change. Instead of saying you oppose it because it's morally wrong, you'll want to say that it shouldn't be done (e.g.) in a way that undermines work incentives. That's a completely different position and it would be good if conservatives came around to it.
Just because my property rights aren't absolute doesn't mean the government can do whatever it likes with my property. There's a specific civil rights exception because bigotry is such a bad problem. There's a huge gap between "not absolute" and "non-existent", and you're skipping right over it.
Your argument is like saying: "Do I have the right to do anything I want if I meet you on the street? Do I have the right to punch you in the face? No? Well then, since your meeting-people-on-the-street-rights are not absolute, I should be able to force you to donate to my favorite charity".
Btw, being born black is fundamentally different than being born with a disability or a low IQ, because those things create real problems whereas being black does not create any real problems. If bigotry about all those things vanished from the face of the Earth, disabled or dumb people would still find some things harder to do, but black people would not.
Fair enough, but when you give the government the right to restrict certain uses of private property because they're seriously immoral, you're no longer a libertarian. And if "excluding black people from my diner" is seriously immoral, what about "enjoying great wealth and low taxes while others can't afford health care"? Goldwater believed both these behaviors were things we could tut-tut about, but not things we should use state power to change.
This is the wrong way of discussing the issue in any case, because it assumes a logically incoherent notion of property rights. Thomas Nagel addressed this in his book "The Myth of Ownership". The fundamental mistake of libertarianism is to believe that property rights are natural, not socially constructed. If you agree with Locke that they're natural, then of course taxation looks like a restriction on one's economic rights... but it isn't. Nobody has ever had the right to engage in economic activity without paying taxes (and observing other regulations, like antidiscrimination codes). So the idea that the wealth you've acquired in the real world (not in an imaginary state of nature) came with no strings attached makes no sense.
A world without taxation would also be a world with no law, government or public schools. Most of us would be earning far less in that scenario than we do in real life, assuming we were even alive--so as Nagel puts it a little provocatively, the "tax burden" just doesn't exist. Different choices about tax rules, progressivity, etc. are choices about how to distribute the enormous *benefits* of taxation. Nobody is in a position to claim that his post-tax income consists of an (imaginary) pre-tax income minus a governmental rights violation. There's no such thing as pre-tax income except as an accounting device.
Why should "libertarian" be held to a higher standard than anything else? "If you believe anything not completely consistent with 100% pure libertarianism, then you're not a libertarian"
Heck, we have terms for this for some religions. We have orthodox and, since even orthodox people don't seem to be 100% pure, we have ultra-orthodox (and I bet even many of those elide SOMETHING)
I agree that the government forcing businesses not to discriminate based on ethnicity is both a good thing and not an orthodox libertarian position. That does not mean that I can't be a libertarian - just a less orthodox one. If I place a high weight (but not an exclusive one!) on libertarian principles, then I might be a libertarian first, and then something else second, something else third, etc.
Yes, but in that case the term doesn't mean much and should probably be avoided. If a true libertarian is someone who thinks voluntary private transactions should never be regulated, and a "moderate libertarian" is someone who thinks they should only be regulated when there's a good enough reason, then practically all of us are "moderate libertarians". In fact that term would cover literally everyone who isn't a libertarian absolutist.
No, I don't agree that wealth inequality is immoral in the same way as bigotry. Almost no one does, which is why you don't see anyone donating almost all their money to the poorest people in the world. That's what a real commitment to utilitarianism would require. (I myself am trying to work my way up to being a 10% utilitarian, already a tough goal).
I don't agree with your account of property rights. Property rights came before the state, and one of the purposes of the state is to protect them (of course you are right that in the "state of nature", property rights, like many rights, are not well-protected).
Again, in the interpersonal case, this is obvious. If I buy some wood and build a chair, I own the chair. No one thinks my neighbors have the right to come and take it because they were kind enough not to murder me while I was building it (even if they all voted for doing that).
It's true that the government provides many benefits, but that doesn't mean the government should have infinite power, or that it's impossible to ask whether some particular set of taxes is fair.
But how did the owners of the wood get their property rights over it? This is why Robert Nozick's libertarian account fails: it makes property rights legitimate only if they were freely acquired from other people who *already* had them legitimately. And if you go back far enough, that condition is never satisfied.
Imagine an alternate universe in which nobody walked from Siberia to Alaska before the Bering Strait opened up. When the Pilgrims land in Massachusetts they find a completely uninhabited continent. How does one pilgrim legitimately acquire land in North America under those circumstances? If the first guy down the gangplank yells "All of this is mine, finders keepers" does that work? If not, does he have to do some Lockean thing, like build a fence around a certain area? If that's not enough, does he also have to do other Lockean things like chop down the trees and plow the land?
The only thing that would have made any particular method of land acquisition valid was if the other people on the boat agreed that it was valid. For that you don't necessarily need a full-fledged state but you do need a society of some kind. That's what the social construction of private property means.
How could property rights come before the State (except in the pages of Locke)? They don't even exist without the State. I'm having a hard time imagining otherwise.
I think we need to avoid the argument based on "if we do this thing, then we have to do all these other things."
No, we don't.
We can attack racial injustice without necessarily having to attack wealth inequality. Usually in the real world there's a limit to the number of things you can take on.
(I should add that Nagel is a committed Kantian/Rawlsian and believes that a lot of individual rights really do exist. He just doesn't think property rights are among them--because the idea of legal property existing prior to government in the way that (say) one's religious beliefs might have existed without government is just unintelligible.
Since I got into Nietzsche and Bernard Williams I've come to agree with them that human rights don't exist at all, so the arguments in "The Myth of Ownership" don't seem as crucial to me as they once did. But if you are committed to the idea that people have rights of some sort, the book is definitely worth a read.
If we had no public schools - well, then hallelujah!
"Get rid of public schools" seems like as solid of an argument as "Get rid of the police"
A conservative would typically defuse this tension by distinguishing between “negative” rights (ie, a right not to be discriminated against by public or private actors) and “positive” rights (ie, the right to welfare benefits or a government-sponsored job).
That’s not a perfectly clean distinction. You might argue, for example, that the restaurant discrimination example is in fact a positive right — the right to be provided service on the same terms as everyone else. But you still have to •pay• for the food and otherwise respect the rules of the establishment.
It’s fine to argue we should create more positive rights, including those that level the economic playing field and redistribute wealth. I think we should! But it’s not really logically consistent to support the Civil Rights Act and other anti-discrimination laws while simultaneously fighting against expanding the social safety net.
Important Edit: I meant it’s not logically •in•consistent, which was hopefully obvious from context.
“Real libertarianism is the belief that *no* outcome is morally illegitimate if it results from voluntary transactions between consenting adults…This is a crank position and hardly anyone actually holds it…”
Then in what sense is it “real”?
Well, a few people do think that. But not enough to have much influence on American politics. The problem comes from the much larger number of people who say "I just don't believe government should take your hard-earned income and give it to the needy... except for Social Security, of course, we'd never touch that. And public education is fine too..." Et cetera.
Trump's supporters are at least realistic about the issue at hand. They object to wealth redistribution because it reduces the social distance between white and black Americans... and they're fine with non-market policies, like subsidies for coal mining, which don't have that effect. This attitude has always been much, much more prevalent than libertarianism, and the people who hold it are gradually ceasing to pretend that it's libertarianism.
“The problem comes from the much larger number of people who say ‘I just don't believe government should take your hard-earned income and give it to the needy... except for Social Security, of course, we'd never touch that. And public education is fine too...’”
I don’t see why that is a problem. You may disagree with such views but it’s nothing more vexing than people saying, “This far, but no further.” Unless you are a Marxist or other type of loon you must agree that a line has to be drawn somewhere.
“Trump's supporters are at least realistic about the issue at hand. They object to wealth redistribution because it reduces the social distance between white and black Americans”
Oh, right. Because Trump supporters are hardcore racists.
Not all Trump supporters are racists. But it is significant that when a GOP presidential candidate came along who used openly racist rhetoric (no dog whistles about "welfare queens" or what have you) and who •also• rejected the GOP's traditional commitment to small government, the small-government tradition immediately disappeared. I call that suspicious.
"Trump's supporters are at least realistic about the issue at hand. They object to wealth redistribution because it reduces the social distance between white and black Americans." How can you possibly know this? There are many reasons why one might object (with most Americans) to wealth redistribution on grounds of both justice and practice. This sounds like an insult in default of an argument.
That’s how things should be though. Frankly you don’t go far enough - kids should have the exact same freedoms adults do, instead of us being stuck in our present state of exploitation and oppression.
Yes, this is a very good point! It's why I and other Libertarian types have argued that "equality of opportunity" is neither possible nor laudable (since achieving it in truth for everything would require massive violations of rights as we see it). Rather, the relevant sense in which equality is an important social value is "equality before the law" that is, formal legal equality with no special classes or privileges.
I genuinely find it striking how derided micro aggressions are and how they are so often put in opposition to materialist politics.
I am pro like more materialist improvements in people’s lives. I make a good living but the ways in which I have to mask my autistic traits still hurts. The way that I can’t be honest in all dealings with people that I’m bisexual or an atheist still hurts.
I don’t see any conflict in these things. We need both materialist improvements and a more accepting world.
I can kind of speculate a few reasons for this. The first is the name "micro-aggressions". Micro just makes something sound insignificant and trivial. As far as i know it's also a term that came out of academia and is very far from the way quote-unquote "normal" people talk.
The other factor is many things that I picture as micro-aggressions are things that the government isn't normally expected to legislate. If I'm not invited to a party or someone is rude to me at the line in a grocery store (and I suspect it's related to my ethnicity, gender, sexuality) that might ruin my day but I can't think of a way for the government to fix it. Whereas discrimination laws around hiring actually do attempt to mitigate damages, and in a way that's much easier to measure, employment, rather than feelings, which are much harder to quantify and vary so much from one person to another.
There is a concern that the concept of "micro-aggression" allows someone to weaponize their discomfort resulting from interactions with other people if they can unilaterally presume it is the result of their group identity.
I also thinks it encourages people to fixate on the possible prejudiced implications of ordinary interactions in a way that looks like social anxiety to me, and I don’t believe we should be promoting social anxiety as political praxis.
Many of these "agressions" - like manspreading on the subway - are better described as "thoughtless." The word "agression" changes the moral valence.
And only *some* group identities. That's a factor too.
The whole argument about micro-aggressions is that they are below the level that public policy can reasonably be addressed to, and that addressing them is meant to be interpersonal, not a public policy thing.
The problem I have with this is essentially identity stacking has made everything politics. What you do interpersonally is highly tied to who you vote for.
For instance, I have ASD of the kind that used to be called asperger's. The way people react to that is highly linked to my daily ability to feel happy. Even when I'm masking and trying to behave like neurotypical people want I slip sometimes.
It shouldn't be a matter of public policy but if you think mocking me for that is acceptable there's a political party that loves that behavior and another which thinks its bad.
Yeah, I agree that that mocking people is a really shitty thing to do. In my perfect, utopian world there would be no assholes at all.
But I don't really see how this aligns so closely with politics. Asking in earnest, do you think if you moved to a more democratic-voting area you would have less negative daily interactions? and vice versa to a republican voting stronghold? I'd guess those kinds of behaviors align more tightly with class, urbanality and other things more than politics. I'm personally skeptical that political views line up so tightly with personal behavior not least because there are so many non-voters out there. But maybe I'm wrong
I think like even 10 years ago, and certainly 20 years ago not that much.
That education and urbanality=Democrats make it a very partisan leaning thing. Like most people aren’t jerks but a bunch of things stacked so that sensitivity became polarized.
I'm not trying to minimize your experience, but I think we're all socially awkward, we all have these difficult interactions sometimes, and we all put on a mask of sorts to get through them. I won't doubt it if you feel yours are more numerous, but it's not uncommon.
Do you also have what could be diagnosed as Asperger's? Because that's nothing like what you simplify as difficult social interactions.
No, I don't, but I still feel like crap after reading your response. I'm sorry if I offended you; it wasn't my intention.
Our politics would be a better place if everyone could focus on behaving themselves in public, without getting into the bad thoughts that one or another person might have.
"I genuinely find it striking how derided micro aggressions are and how they are so often put in opposition to materialist politics."
To me the old FidoNet rules for avoiding flamewars make sense in a pluralistic society, one where people with very different backgrounds and experiences are often interacting with each other: "1. Don't be offensive. 2. Don't be easily offended." Thus I have a very high threshold for getting offended - online, I'll often just ignore the offensive parts of what someone is saying and respond to the substantive parts.
Focusing on "micro-aggressions" seems like the exact opposite of this approach. A recent example: https://metatalk.metafilter.com/25860/Do-we-really-need-to-use-the-m-word
“Equality of opportunity” is a horrible phrase. If a group of 40 million truly enjoyed opportunities equal to those of a group of 190 million, average outcomes for the two groups would be very, very similar. That’s math, specifically the central limit theorem.
If one group systematically has lower wealth and income, shorter life spans, and higher incarceration and illegitimacy rates, it follows that opportunities are unequal.
The problem is it’s hard to formulate any politically or even materially feasible notion of equality. Putting a stiff tax on incomes amplifies the inertial power of wealth. Tax inheritances, and those most able to build wealth in a single lifetime will rise. Eliminate all economic distinctions (far chance) and beauty and charisma would dominate. Mandate that all children attend public schools and children with better genes and/or better parents will get the best grades. As long as people are free to accept and reject intimate partners, some people will have and others will covet.
The overarching goal should be human happiness. The basic problem with massive economic inequality is that it prioritizes the whims of the rich over the basic needs of the poor, the affluence of relatively few over the security of the bottom half or three quarters. Hollow phrases like equality of opportunity or even “equality” lead in incoherent directions.
“Equality of opportunity” doesn’t demand that all humans are the same. It’s something closer to a societal commitment that no one should be automatically excluded or disadvantaged based on certain immutable traits tied to historical discrimination that nevertheless have nothing to do with their competence.
I think we should do a better job of smoothing outcomes between the winners and losers of life’s genetic lottery—be it intelligence, conscientiousness, attractiveness, what have you. But pointing out that smart, gritty, beautiful people tend to do well doesn’t really explode the concept of “equality of opportunity.” Unless you prefer a society where, say, LeBron James is forced to wear as much weight as necessary so I beat him in 1-on-1 half the time.
I never had the opportunity to be an nba star. This was because of an immutable characteristic I have— athletically mediocre genes. I’ve was never the fastest in my elementary school class or jumped the furthest or done the most push-ups. I never got picked first for team sports.
Equality of opportunity is incoherent.
Racial discrimination is easier to define. If a person who is really good at basketball can’t play in the nba because his skin is black, that’s racial discrimination. However, ending that form of discrimination does not bring about equality of opportunity. It means that journeymen white players will be replaced by black players who are better at basketball. If the goal is to have the best basketball
players performing for the fans, then racial discrimination is counterproductive. However, the goal of having the best players on the biggest stage is meritocratic and elitist, not egalitarian.
You absolutely did have the opportunity to be an nba star, because what was stopping you was endogenous, not exogenous.
Pure equality of opportunity, which is generally recognised to be unattainable, but which can be reached more or less closely, is that the only constraints on your achievements are endogenous, not exogenous.
isn’t race endogenous?
Weird duplication bug happening here, but the answer is that the genes of skin colour are endogenous, but race, as in racism and racial identity is exogenous.
In your NBA example, the “equality” is in the “opportunity”—ie, the chance to prove you are good enough to play professionally. I agree that system prioritizes merit: it discriminates in favor of the best basketball players and doesn’t discriminate based on characteristics like, say, hair color that have nothing to do with basketball ability.
You seem to be arguing that “equality of opportunity” doesn’t exist unless all people are exactly the same. You’ve thus defined a useful term out of existence. If you’d prefer the NBA be fully “egalitarian,” perhaps by selecting its players by lottery, then just say so. I predict viewership will crater, but hey, the NBA is a gross meritocratic and elitist institution, so no big loss!
saying the equality is in “the chance to prove you are good enough” leads in incoherent directions.
a person in a famine area needs food, not the assurance that they have “equal food opportunity” because, prior to conception, “they,” assuming some they existed, had the opportunity to inhabit a body that might have had access to food.
i’m not good enough to play pro sports. i could no more pass as an nba player than a black person could pass as white. sure some hypothetical version of “me” with different genes might play pro ball, but a hypothetical “black” person with white genes could benefit from white supremacy. what’s the difference?
if the equality is in
the opportunity to try out, why do womens’ sports exist? women can try out for the nba just as surely as can non-athletes. indeed, minorities could apply for jobs that required whiteness with the same prospect of success that i would have trying out for pro sports.
'a person in a famine area needs food, not the assurance that they have “equal food opportunity” '
Agreed. But that's an argument that equality of opportunity is bad (or at least inadequate).
i’m sure one could define equal opportunity in a rigorous way, i just don’t think that would square with what people actually want.
the phrase equal opportunity has political appeal because it signals a moderate commitment to reducing inequality, but is squishy enough that it’s proponents aren’t stuck defending hard core equality, which basically requires stunting the privileged
“A person in a famine area needs food, not the assurance they have ‘equal food opportunity.’”
I completely agree! Hell, let’s go further: in a world with as much food and wealth as ours, no one should starve, period, even if they are at least arguably “responsible” for their food insecurity. As I’ve said above many times, we need to do a much better job at smoothing out the inconsistent results of the lottery that is life. We don’t need to completely jettison a commitment to the kind of “equality of opportunity” I’ve been talking about to do that, though; we just need to recognize that equality of opportunity is one goal among others.
“If the equality of opportunity is in the ability to try out, why do women’s sports exist?”
Sex segregation in sports is admittedly tricky. First, women are free to try out for men’s teams, at least in some college sports, and if they’re good enough they should get to play with the men. Given the incredible physical disparities between men and women, which are vast both at the median and the tails, very few women would get to play.
That’s a bad result for a group that’s 51% of the world’s population. And there’s a growing market that wants to watch women’s sports and doesn’t seem to care that a men’s team would kick their ass. But still—the best women, not just any women, play.
The senior PGA tour is another example of segregating by characteristics that usually (but don’t inevitably) correlate with diminished competitive ability—in this case, advancing age. But again, the best seniors play, and again—people want to watch it!
Basically no one wants to watch poor athletes play sports in the name of “equity.” But they’re all free to join a rec league, regardless of their ability, and many do.
Different people mean different things by equality of opportunity, but it's very widely understood that inheritance is not equality of opportunity. Crap parents aren't equality of opportunity.
I agree we should tax inheritances more heavily, primarily because parents will still be encouraged to generate wealth in their lifetimes even if they can’t pass as much of it on to their kids (and of course the kids don’t really •deserve• it in any real sense).
That being said, you have to be careful arguing that “equality of opportunity” doesn’t exist if everyone starts life from different places. People are also born with wildly different abilities, and the genius didn’t •earn” his IQ any more than the trust fund kid •earned• his parents’ millions. Completely leveling the playing field to defuse all unearned privileges (genetic, economic, or otherwise) would require massive tyrannical intervention. We can be more redistributive without complaining that nothing is fair because people are different.
in which case, equality of opportunity is impossible for any species with genetic variation.
Not trying to be pugilistic, but What are you arguing for, exactly? I offered a workable definition for what’s usually meant by “equality of opportunity,” acknowledged that human beings differ in their gifts and burdens, acknowledged those differences will inevitably drive different outcomes, and suggested we do a better job smoothing out the results of life’s genetic lottery — but without guaranteeing equality of outcome, which seems impossible absent extreme tyranny and undesirable even if technically possible.
Of course the devil’s in the policy details and persuading the voting public to implement it, but are you basically on board with the above? If not, why not?
what I’m arguing for is focusing on measurable outcomes. that doesn’t mean that struct equality should be the goal. greater equality would be nice because our current economy prioritizes the whims of the rich over basic needs of the poor. my end goal is the greatest total human happiness
Understood. I agree we should examine outcome gaps between different groups. The current trend to attribute any and all outcome gaps to racism or sexism, sans more nuanced analysis, is bad social science, that, because it fails to grapple with reality’s complexity, will fail to fully solve the problems it’s meant to address.
Unfortunately Twitter is a nuance-free zone.
"my end goal is the greatest total human happiness" according to what measure?
Trying to maximize human happiness leads to various problems, no? Like the repugnant conclusion, namely that we should be trying to do everything we can to increase the population regardless of the consequences because more people will lead to more net happiness, regardless of how miserable their lives are. I'm not a philosopher, so I'm just parroting what little I recall reading.
Genetic variation is irrelevant to either inheritance or crap parenting.
One way to look at equality of opportunity is "if these two infants were switched by accident in the hospital at birth, would they have ended up in the same places as they did with their original parents?"
It's still impossible, obviously, but it is something you can measure how closely or otherwise a society has approached.
Absent true abuse, genetics matters much, much more than parenting. I recognize that the “absent abuse” is a big qualifier, though.
the income of one’s father is a better predictor of college graduation than sat scores. i think genes and upbringing are roughly equal in importance.
why is genetic variation a more legitimate source of advantage than above average parenting? both arise organically and would be difficult to reduce that much
I wrote about crap parenting on purpose, because my reading of the evidence is that outside of economic advantage, the difference between average parenting and really good parenting is very small, while the difference between average parenting and really bad parenting is much more substantial - especially when "really bad" descends to "abusive".
The entire biological world we live in is based on genetic variation as a source of advantage.
I absolutely think we have a long way to go to achieving true equality of opportunity, equality of access, and equality of returns on investment of time & talent between racial groups. But disparities in outcomes can come from things other than just inequality of opportunity. All humans have free will and some groups of people have different interests, traditions, and values than others. These differences do not make one group better or worse than another, but they can contribute to differences in outcomes. If Asian families put more pressure on their children to become doctors and engineers, they will be overrepresented in those fields, and it wasn't necessarily due to extra opportunity. I don't think it's ALL due to lack of opportunity, or ALL due to differences in cultural norms, but denying that both are factors is limiting their understanding of the complexity of human society.
I disagree with you deeply because free will does not exist. The brain is entirely material, it’s thoughts and volition are the unfolding of material processes. Only the actual is possible, the unrealized is purely imaginary.
Not that determinism is much of a political platform, but my aim is to see the world clearly.
William James' theory of soft determinism essentially said that even if we live in a deterministic world, we have to behave and choose as though we don't. Santayana called that "a quagmire of evasion". My conclusions are 1) Santayana was right when he said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and 2) James and Santayana would have been awesome Twitter foes.
The brain is also composed of fundamentally indeterminate quantum material - and it seems likely to me that the deterministic outcome is only evident after the probabilistic wave function collapses.
In "The Emperor's New Mind", Roger Penrose argued that quantum indeterminacy could be the source of free will and consciousness. But I think someone else has shown that this isn't possible. Quantum randomness can change the pattern of neural firings in a way that cascades into large effects within the brain, but the timescale on which human beings perceive themselves as making decisions doesn't allow for quantum effects to play a role.
there’s no homunculus controlling the quantum effects, so those are just a wrinkle of materialism, not a refutation of it
Right. Even if it could play a role in human decisions, quantum mechanics wouldn't give advocates of "free will" what they're looking for.
It's the God of gaps all over again. Quantum mechanics is treated as mysterious and (to be fair) is not completely understood, so maybe that's where God - I mean free will - is hiding. But even though individual wavefunction collapses are not predictable, the probabilities rigorously are. If you want to shove free will in there somewhere, well, I would just say if you want to invoke magic, just do it and drop the pretense of it being scientific.
I guess you could say I'm sympathetic to Penrose's argument but certainly understand this more philosophical than science.
even without all the complexities of quantum effects, there are too many particles and too little computing power for perfect prediction to be possible. prediction demands simplifying heuristics, so it’s always imperfect
Well, fair enough!! I suppose your opinion is an unchangeable result of your brain matter so I'll agree to disagree :) But if there's no free will, I don't see the point in anyone trying to influence the world around them at all....
While the show is flawed in so many ways, Westworld tried to convey that even if free will is an illusion, going through the motions doesn't need to be meaningless.
disagree again. wine, food, good company and justice are all edifying whether or not they are freely chosen. the fact that the wind knocked that knocked the tree over was a deterministic force does not mean the tree is still standing
I completely appreciate that this is a bedrock of your worldview, so I'm not trying to change your mind (though maybe it is pre-determined to happen some day). When it comes to human beings and the degree to which any of us can influence the behavior of each other, I don't see how you have it both ways whereby it makes sense for you to advocate for humans to choose to overhaul our systems to equalize opportunities but also claim that humans don't effectively choose what career to pursue, what neighborhood to live in (out of the ones they can afford--definitely an opportunity-limited choice), who to trust at work, etc. Your initial claim assumes there are no group-level differences in the way people make these choices, or that any group-level differences in choices are dictated entirely by inequality of opportunity (or genetic differences in brain material?? That's an icky, Murray-ian road to go down.)
"But even those who believe this will, like anyone else, ask you to hand them the salt"
- C.S. Lewis, "Letters to Malcolm"
Whether or not I “chose” to be a lawyer, I am
one. Whether or not I chose to have my current mental and physical condition, those are still characteristics I have. Whether or not the prisoner chose to commit the crime, he is still in prison.
Best to focus on describing outcomes rather than evaluating things through comparisons with arbitrary counterfactuals.
Free will almost certainly doesn't exist, and Sabine Hossenfelder (as she often does) addresses it pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpU_e3jh_FY
She says one way to deal with this is to imagine your life as a story that is being told. I personally just mostly ignore the lack of free will as it's effectively meaningless for my day-to-day existence (which I was destined to do anyway).
By my own free will, I chose to be the greatest player in NBA history, but the universe prevented that, so free will clearly does not exist.
And yet, I chose to hit "Post" on this comment, even though the entire universe was screaming at me to do the right thing and hit "Cancel" so now I'm totally confused.
loved the youtube video
Your aim is irrelevant. Only the actual perception you have is possible. An unrealized improved perception is purely imaginary.
I love how math-y this readership is. DA busting out the central limit theorem about equality and another side argument about math/science always breaking
Wonderful post. Your grandfather would be very proud! And this bit below is an elegant and moving summary of the whole:
In the “I Have a Dream Speech,” he refers to the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” on which “America has defaulted … insofar as her citizens of color are concerned” but also that “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.”
For full social equality we need to abandon the very idea and terminology of "race" which is inescapably tied to archaic 19th century notions of meaningful innate differences between groups of humans. It's linguistically impossible to continue talking about "race" without perpetuating those ideas that are embedded in the very terminology itself.
There's little more cringe-inducing than listening to well-meaning progressive people earnestly try to explain the difference between a "race" and a the more modern idea of "ethnicity" in an attempt to salvage the outdated concept of race into something that isn't offensive yet provides some meaning that isn't provided by the more modern term "ethnicity."
As King recognized, it's easier to move past the idea there are innate differences between groups of people when one group isn't mired in generational poverty, hence the need for uniform economic redistribution to put everyone on some basic common level.
King also recognized that behavior matters a lot when you are demanding to be included. That the way that one dresses, and speaks, and carries himself in public has a profound effect on how others treat you.
Race may be incoherent but the brain is hard wired to detect color and care about it. Most white peoples’ amygdala’s activate when they see black people in different ways than when they see other whites. The amygdala is connected to fear, anxiety and a host of mostly negative emotions. This is one reason why differences between whites and blacks have proven more persistent than differences between whites and other minority groups— the visible difference is greater and it’s difficult for the brain to ignore what it sees.
I really liked this article. The ending paragraph made me think, “Have I ever actually heard a BLM activist lecture lower class white people about how they need to view their class oppression through an intersectional matrix?”
I don’t think so. This lecturing is almost uniformly never directed at lower class white people themselves. Anyone doing such lecturing is most of the time part of a largely upper class white power structure with power and wealth, who is working to re-direct anger towards lower class white people.
Whether or not such anger is totally undeserved, or whether this power structure will actually make a lot of people’s lives better remains to be seen. I’m not ready to go “Dismantle the elites and give power to society’s most radical elements” just yet.
Matt tweeted a few days ago that he thought the constant progressive bashing of "white women" was really misogyny disguised as a concern for racial justice. I think the same can be said of (some) complaints about white working-class racism: it's a cover for class prejudice among the highly educated. I've seen this in a lot of white people, including my parents.
The point is not that women or working-class people can't be racist. Of course they can. But why do these *particular* groups of whites get so much grief, when they actually hold less social power than other whites?
Yeah this is my thinking basically to a T. I find legitimate, tried and true BLM activists are less concerned with the racism of working class white Americans. Such lecturing is more a defense mechanism of the upper classes and can have so many pit-falls such as the potential “Karen-izarion” of women who are advocating for themselves. Some women need to advocate for themselves, and shouldn’t be degraded for doing so unless it crosses some serious lines.
There's a growing disconnect between the ways that the current Democratic coalition is growing more class conscious (policy) and the ways it's not (rhetoric).
It's really quite stupid; it seems that even though upper class professionals in the suburbs are willing to vote for and go along with a wide variety of policies that do/will redistribute wealth from them to others (if only in measured fashion so far), they're still not willing to stop talking down to/about a lot of working class folks who don't hold sufficiently open/libertine beliefs about racial, sexual, and gender issues.
The former actually costs these people money, yet they'll go along with it. The latter only "costs" them a feeling of superiority, but they just can't seem to do it.
The end result is that even if the Democrats were to enact sweeping changes that improved the lives of everyday Americans in a way that was impossible to ignore, they're so damned bad at keeping the "quiet part quiet" and smothering the activist class around election time that they'd still only squeak by in elections.
The more likely outcome is that they'll make genuine improvements that are small enough for them to go unnoticed or be swept under the rug by the other side's focused messaging ecosystem, narrowly lose the next two elections, and see the playing field tilted in a way that will make it impossible to win again for a decade or more as a result.
Don’t underestimate the value of feeling superior. To some it’s more precious than gold—and this prioritization of feelings over dollars is often used by Dems to explain why the white working class voted for Republicans who defund the social safety nets on which they rely.
In a nutshell, according to these coastal liberals, poor whites would rather feel socially superior than climb the economic ladder. I don’t know how true that is, but regardless, the notion that many prefer social capital to actual capital isn’t crazy.
Oh, absolutely.
I come from a background that leaves me with a foot in both worlds, and it's always good for my cynicism to see exactly how alike they both are.
On policy, most policy issues anyway, I know damned well which side of the bread is buttered. I want my daughter to enjoy a standard of living like my own, which requires public investment and saving the planetary ecology. I want healthcare reformed, education improved, and I believe in seeing off the threat posed by China by outperforming it at home and abroad.
But both sides-ism has a single point, and that's that there are large factions of each party that just thrive on partisan identification and the feeling of being so much better than the poor, benighted people on the other side, voting against their own interests because they've been brainwashed.
If Democrats can't shunt their own version of those people to the side and clamp a hand over their mouths to win elections, the whole country is in trouble... because stupid rhetoric notwithstanding, there are substantive differences in policy that matter, a lot.
Yes, and it's interesting that in both cases the worst social-media offenders are educated women. When it comes to class prejudice this is just a matter of dissing people who are different from yourself... but white women putting down *other* white women for their alleged racism, when white men are actually in a better position to do something about racism, is just the newest version of a very ancient social phenomenon.
You see the same thing in progressive debates about transgender equality. Opinion polls show exactly what you'd expect, which is that older straight men are more hostile to trans people than any other demographic. But the online mobs spend almost all their time going after "trans-exclusive radical feminists"... and when it isn't the TERFs, it's the very small number of cis gay men, like Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald, who have criticized some aspects of the transgender movement.
I think Nietzsche understood this. The impulse to attack and denigrate people of lower social status is universal, and Trump voters aren't the only people who manifest it. You see it among left-wing people too, when they don't realize what they're actually doing.
You've never heard someone discuss white privilege on tv, youtube, social media? Poor white people don't have access to the same stuff you do? Connecting the privilege to the whiteness is enlightening in some ways, but also problematic when you take it out into the media as you don't control who sees it. It's one thing in a college classroom where everyone is privileged or an upper middle class sunday school class, but something different on MSNBC or CNN.
We need academics to adopt more obtuse jargon in order to minimize the risk that people understand what they're talking about.
This will likely be the result, but I was hoping maybe we just try to modify the rhetoric a little bit.
This kind of reminds me of a story my last manager told me. His school had a day where they taught about the evils of slavery and colonialism and he used to dread it. H was a white kid in a 90% minority school in a rough part of NYC, and if he didn't cut school on that day he became a target for kids wanting to start fights or find a victim to attack.
I think that's an example of the way a message that's intended to be positive: teaching kids about real, dark parts of American history, but not necessarily received and used as intended by a part of the audience.
I think the point is that it's never *specifically* directed at lower class white people.
Is working class white America making sure dinner is done in time for All In with Chris Hayes?
What? I don't even follow what this means. Do working class white people watch MSNBC? I'm sure some do, I doubt his million or so viewers are all minority PhD-holders or however you want to define the non-white, non-working class. We're not talking about a tightly defined demographic with tastes so far out of the American mainstream as to be considered exotic here. This is like the lady that works in your dentist office, not an Amish farmer.
My point is just that MSNBC/CNN are not talking about white privilege for the sake of reaching working class white America to lecture them on it. That’s not their core audience.
Fair enough. I didn't understand it that way when I read it but I guess that's correct. Who is their core audience then, though? I'd guess it looks demographically a bit like Biden voters, but skewing even a bit to the older, and therefore white and less educated side.
I think they channel surf the same way progressives watch Fox. Stop for 2 minutes, say their crazy, and then move back to what they were watching. Are they following as well as educated? No, but to suggest they live under a rock is pretty crazy. They've got Facebook!
Matt’s argument often boils down to “act like a politician not like an activist”
Matt,
I think you are missing the appeal of the concept of Privilege. You keep making the strong point that the DEI/privilege approach to issues around race in this country is inferior to a more economic approach. Yes, strong point that I am not going to rehash.
But why don't you steel man the privilege point? WHY is it that it is so appealing to some people?
I think that it is appealing because is a good theory, in the ways that we judge theories. It is simple (i.e., parsimonious) while still having great explanatory power. It seems to be broadly applicable. And there doesn't seem to be much evidence against it.
Obviously, it doesn't profess to be the only issue, so there's room for other things. But it gets us pretty far.
The concept of privilege seems to work well for racial issues. It works well for class. It works well for gender. Sexual orientation. ELL status. Immigrant status. It's a concept that really can be broadly applied
So, it's easy to build (lefty) coalitions around it. It's tempting to talk about because it seems to explain so much of what we see.
Now, I know that you are not suggesting that it is wrong. Rather, you keep pointing out that evangelizing this theory and making it the center of an even broader discourse is not EFFECTIVE, politically. And you make that point well.
But rather than simply yelling/snapping/whining, "Stop doing that," it might be more effective to meet those you presumably wish to convince where they are more carefully (i.e., with care) help them to get where you want them to be (i.e., a place where you think they actually more will progress on their goals -- goals that you generally believe in).
A different way to look at this is: the concept of privilege works very well for those issues because it’s a good vehicle for expressing anger and condemnation. Which makes it very hard for it to be effective politically.
I'm afraid that you've missed my point, and are therefore simply repeating Matt's oft repeated point.
I am not in any way suggesting that this idea of privilege is effective, politically. Nor do I think that Matt needs any help in explaining why it is in not effective, politically.
Rather, I am pointing to what would be effective in convincing people not to use it in political (or potentially political) contexts. Matt makes clear over and over again that his BIG point is that we should do what is effective. And Matt's repeated complaining about in the ineffectiveness of what he seems to term this DEI approach to stuff around race in American is not effective at getting people to stop doing it.
So, in order to reach those people better (I was suggesting), he might consider understanding why it is such an attractive theory.
Now, you can mock these people, call them stupid or pejoratively call them emotional. But I don't think that's going to help, either -- even were it true.
Instead, as I keep saying, try to steel man the argument you disagree with, and then address them on those terms.
Okay, I’ll leave aside the question of effectiveness, and try to say it in another way.
Privilege, in the way we are speaking of it, is to declare something that someone has is, by definition, unmerited. Logically it can (and should) be taken away. In practice this makes no distinction between things that are rights, and things that are not rights. All is stated to be unmerited, by labeling it privilege. This conceptually gives power to the labeler, by nullifying the value of the person who is being so labeled.
I suppose that I am saying that the concept of privilege that we are working with, is *in itself* an expression of anger and hostility. It may be useful or not useful to frame a perception of the world, but that utility will be perceived by the user, in proportion to the need to conceptualize anger. The idea grows from a philosophy whose concern is criticism and power, and so works well for someone who feels the need to criticize and gain power. Which is to say, those who feel themselves to be marginalized or undervalued or disrespected in some way.
In this frame of mind, the question of common goals becomes simply beside the point. The goals are not important, the anger is what is important.
You might agree that a prerequisite of the engagement you are talking about, is for all parties to stop talking about “privilege.” But that would require giving up the entrenched anger that drives this world view. Nobody can make anybody do this. They have to handle their own anger.
I don’t want to sound completely hopeless. People can change their minds and emotions based on what others are saying. It may be that by initiating engagement, I can influence someone in a way that helps them handle their anger. But in the end they have to want that.
No, that is NOT what the concept of Privilege is based upon. That's just not accurate. It is NOT about whether these Privileges are merited. It seems that you are trying to fit some perceptions of anger into this idea, rather than examining the idea on its own...ummm....merits.
1) Yes, some people who talk of Privilege do so from a position of anger, but some do not. Of course, I've seen no breakdown of how many are in which group, but in my experience most are NOT doing so out of anger -- even if it is often out of frustration. Yes, protesters can seem angry, but if you think that all POC or other minorities (or women) point to inequalities simply out of anger....well, you are trodding some dangerous ground. The tropes of "angry black man" and "angry black woman" have been used to fight progress and efforts towards equality for a long time. We have angry feminists and "femminazi" and all that.
Injustice can be met with compassion, frustration and even calm. It does not HAVE to be anger. I really wonder why some people insist otherwise.
2) The concept of Privilege is not about merit, anger or resentment. It's about recognizing important differences in our we are perceived, the opportunities we are afforded and the obstacles we face. Yes, these differences DO make some people angry, but it's the differences that lead to the anger (in this cases), not the anger that leads to the recognition.
The concept of Privilege does NOT say that the Privileged do not merit their Privileges. Rather, it says that *they*do*not*merit*them*more*than*the*unprivileged. Thus, while you may hear that as "And you don't merit that," it is (at least) equally valid to hear it as "and I merit that, too."
And if you really listen to what they are saying, on a particular basis, it usually does NOT say "no one should get that." Rather, it says "everyone should get that."
So, let's look at an example in the news that totally supports my point: swim caps for olympic swimmers. FINA (the international swimming association. swimming in french is something like "nager.") recently said that this floppy swim cap that was designed for black/african hair was not allowable. White people with long hair can wear swim caps that are well suited to them, but those caps don't work well for black people with long hair, even though black people's hair is far more sensitive to water. The decades of appropriate swim caps being available to white people is a Privilege. No one is saying that they shouldn't have them. Rather, people are saying that black people should ALSO have access to appropriate swim caps.
The big systemic privilege stuff is of that nature, more or less. The stuff that applies super broadly is of that nature. Not that the Privileged don't merit it, but rather that the non-Privileged equally merit it and therefore should have it, too.
So, you're wrong on the merit part.
3) No, I would NOT agree that a prerequisite of ANYTHING is that "all parties stop talking about 'privilege.'" I would NOT agree the only way we can ever move forward is for every person on this Earth to make sure that the tender sensibilities of the Privileged never have to consider the idea that they are advantaged by layers of inequities that they -- perhaps unwittingly -- perpetuate. That's a risible notion.
I might agree that SOME parties should stop using the term, yes. I would agree that it is a concept that is going to be better received in some areas than others. As Matt keeps pointing out, Elizabeth Warren can get away with talking about certain ideas because she is in Massachusetts. That might cost her some support in two-way races, but her state is liberal enough that it does not put her any danger. On the other hand, there are politicians and is and activists in other areas for whom her approach is really not advisable.
4) The most powerful force in America these days seems to be some combination of white rage and white fragility. If we are going to talk about anger management, as you seem to want to, we should consider that larger context.
As Matt pointed out, MLK did not achieve his victories by sucking up to white people's insecurities. He did not try to make them comfortable. His direct action, his form of non-violence was not about letting white people off. It was not about making them all comfortable. He was INCREDIBLY hated my large portions of America.
No, I do no think that showing anger is an effective strategy. But being inspired by our anger can help to keep us going. That's a difficult line to walk, no doubt. Handing one's anger, a concept you raised, is a constant challenge for people who defend the status quo and those would change it.
But, again, if you see recognition of inequality as being inevitably and inextricably built of anger? That makes me wonder.
5) Trying to close this circle, why is it that when people say "I want some of that, too," you only hear "You don't deserve that"? Why is it when people say, "I deserve that as much as you," you only hear "you don't deserve that?" I don't hear that.
It seems to me rather pat to to say that the term “privilege” is only about recognizing “important differences.” The idea that selected classifications (and not others) create meaningful distinctions is a deeply political stance that is arguable. If it simply means the unprivileged deserve anything defined as privilege as well, then those are not privileges, they are something else. They might be rights (like being fairly considered for a mortgage) or else they might simply be distinctions (like owning a house). I’d like to see people have an easier time affording their homes, especially working-class people who have a hard time making rent in today’s market. But this doesn’t have anything to do with the idea that a white homeowner is “privileged” because they had a down payment and a mortgage that others don’t.
In plain English, the word privileged is not the same as fortunate or favored. It is not the same as “here but for the grace of God go I.” Someone who went to a fine college because of family influence and graduated without loans because they had a trust fund, is privileged. They didn’t do anything to merit or deserve it, and it’s something meaningful that was handed to them without effort, that few other people have. Someone who gets admission on the same terms as everyone else, and a scholarship in fair competition with everyone else, and who as a result has a college degree when other people don’t, is not privileged. It’s not remotely the same. The latter deserves a degree of respect that the other does not. This is what “privileged” actually means, in plain English, and no amount of (what I would call) Orwellian revisionism is going to change that.
Consider the example you give. In this, there are three parties. A swimmer who needs a certain type of bathing cap. An organization that (perhaps unreasonably) denies her that kind of cap. And another swimmer, who has a legal cap that works for her. When the moral conflict is between the first two parties, why would you choose to centering on the uninvolved third party by tagging her with the term “privilege” simply because there is a racial difference between the two swimmers? If the swimmers were both white, but with different types of hair, would you say that one of them was “privileged”?
To be provocative, I could further point out that many swimmers shave their heads to gain an advantage, and that this is well within the black swimmer’s realm of agency. Doing so might be very effective as a protest. The white swimmer might well join her, out of solidarity, with no idea of “privilege” in mind. The latter adds nothing except guilt, which in my view, is what it is intended to convey. As you know, I feel it is a form of aggression.
I don’t know that you understand how condescending it is to use the phrases “white rage” and “white fragility”. Like the word “privilege”, in practice they replace thought and engagement with dismissal. They convey a pretension of superiority, in refusal to allow what might be really motivating the people you don’t like, to think, say, and do the things they do. It asserts that this can only be for bad and stupid reasons. It’s an irony that, having argued that it’s wrong to discredit black people’s opinions on account of anger and sensitivity to slight (which it is), you then proceed to discredit white people’s opinions and actions on those very same grounds. Can you understand why some might see these phrases as expressions of mere bias, or even bigotry?
1) I don't understand what you think a "right" is. Do you mean a legally enforceable right? Or are you talking about some that lacks any enforcement in any context whatsoever? What makes that a right?
2) Having the downpayment for a house can be a result of a long string of privileges. You seem to want to start the considerations very late in the process. It easier for me and my wife to build up a down payment for our last two homes, for many many reasons. And they resulted from our respective privileges. Unearned, fortunate events, forces and advantage that have helped each of us to accomplish what we have.
3) It's great that you think that language doesn't change or that terms cannot be adapted to new uses that are related to their own. But you insistence that the concept of Privilege that we are talking about should be limited to the old plain meaning of the word is not only obstinate, but is actually without intellectual support. You would need to do quite a lot of research to confirm that YOUR sense of the meaning of the word was matched by all others in order to reasonably insist that this usage of the word is at odds with historical usage of the word. I get that it is a stretch for you, but perhaps you could take part in a mutual effort at communication and understanding what others are trying to say. But, maybe not.
4) Your breakdown of my example shows that you REALLY do not understand the concept of Privilege. No one BLAMES the Privileged for their Privilege. Rather, they are asked to consider its nature and source, and the impact it has on various opposites for others. Let me say that again: asking someone to "check your privilege" is not about blame at all. It's about asking people to be thoughtful and considerate of the circumstances of others, as well as their own. Now, if the Privileged feel guilty for this introspection, that is really a result of they increased awareness of THEIR relationship to society (or whatever institutions maintained that privilege). And that actually is between them and the institutions.
5) Nothing on god's green earth could both demonstrate ignorance of the meaning of Privilege and embody Privilege itself any better than belief that the Privileged should not be cognizant of their Privilege and that their Privilege is really a matter to be hashed out between the institutions and the unPrivileged. Wow, man. Just wow.
6) Please, tell me about all the female swimmers who shave their heads to gain an advantage. The summer olympics are coming up and I will keep my eye out the female medal winning woman with shaved heads.
7) Please tell me more about the obligations the unprivileged to alter their bodies and physical appearances in order to draw attention to blatantly discriminatory decisions by the institutions that control important parts of their lives. And, of course, please explain how that is not just another avenue for Privilege by the Privileged to have everything easier.
8) Why do you think that white rage doesn't exist? Or is it simply that mentioning it is the problem? You are entirely comfortable painting others with this Anger brush, but you don't like the idea that ANY white people exhibit a rage that is tied to their perception of race and their race's place in our society? I said that white rage is powerful, but did not say how prevalent it is or who feels it. But you paint everyone who uses the term "Privilege" as angry. Now, I would never suggest that none of the people who use that term are angry. Rather, I point out that mere use of the term is not a sign of anger and that it does not necessary flow out of anger. I have never, not once in my life, dismissed anyone's arguments by labeling them some result of "white rage" or "white fragility." Nonetheless, you somehow feel that I am condescending simply because I acknowledge that these do exist and have influence? It's is simply amazing how well you prove my point.
9) Last, do you know the term, "Born on third base"? Do you know Molly Ivins expression, "Born on third base and thought he hit a triple"? You say that the scholarship competition is fair, but you ignore all the contributors to and enablers of the high school student's accomplishments that were unearned. You start you consideration so late in the process so that you can claim some outcome that is laundered of a past of privilege. But neonatal environment matters. And everything after that. It doesn't begin simply with the scholarship application.
I will say that I feel like your comment thread used to be more interesting.
I take that as a microaggression.
Lots of really good points here, and I love the choice of subject matter, but I feel like MY is missing key parts of MLK's public arguments.
First, he was willing to take on populism directly, as in his "Letter From Birmingham Jail": "First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice."
Second, while MLK didn't use the term "microaggressions," he talked about things that we would call that. He repeatedly refers to "dignity," as in "Birmingham Jail": "a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality . . . who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses." He connects the use of words with the growth of people's fear: "your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness.""
So while I think all the points about MLK's belief in redistribution are excellent and worth shouting from the rooftops, I do not think it's accurate to suggest that MLK was a believer in pure populism (he took on white moderates explicitly), nor does it seem accurate to say that his major works didn't talk about things that today we would call "microaggressions."
I am still working on learning more about King and his ideas and how they evolved over time, so forgive me if I am under-informed. That quote gets pulled from LFABJ a lot, but ultimately the whole letter is a loving challenge to these white moderates to join him in Christian brotherhood with their actions, not just their words. I don't think he was rejecting populism per se, he was trying to spotlight a moral inconsistency between the stated intentions of his allies and their actions. Ultimately the letter is actually quite hopeful about the potential of interracial collaboration. The longform piece by Jose Yglesias is actually very interesting as it highlights how MLK was willing to go against his more extremist counterparts in the civil rights movement and pull white poor people into the Poor People's Campaign.
“Taking on white moderates” for their “devotion to order instead of justice” =/= critiquing “populism.” To the contrary, I understand his criticism of white moderates to be rooted in their unwillingness to upset the status who by embracing radical populist solutions like wealth redistribution.
I'm not suggesting that he was "critiquing" populism, just showing that MLK didn't apply the populist framing in all circumstances.
There were plenty of times, such as in his most famous text (as opposed to oration), when MLK made arguments based on appeals to morality and justice with no mention of common cause against the elites.
Fair enough, thanks for the clarification. I agree he used a variety of rhetorical frames and this example of challenging white moderates is one of a number in which he didn’t use a “colorblind” approach.
That said, it’s still populist, to some degree, if you view “white moderates” as part of the elite that needed persuading and, failing that, a political push.
It's important to understand that MLK calling them "moderates" doesn't mean they were moderates. Jews, Methodists, and Presbyterians are the liberals in Birminham. 7 of the 8 were decidely liberal on race issues in Alabama. That's why King had to respond to them.
7 of the 8 what? I take your general point, anyway, and it reinforces mine: King criticizes white moderates (by 1960s standards) because they don’t embrace his populist platform for race and economic justice.
Dr King was responding to a letter written by 8 Alabama religious leaders. In my reader, the Episcopal Bishop was less receptive of the civil rights movement than the others. The others would be have been considered very liberal. King responded with criticism because they DID embrace his platform and they had become concerned that a lot of violence was about to occur. It was a letter to his allies that had gotten cold feet.
Ah, thanks, I get it now!
Did you mean "popularism" instead of "populism"?
I mean populism in the sense that MLK did not come to white moderates with "it's you and us against the elites." That would have been the populist argument.
Instead, he came at them with the explicit antiracist/justice argument: "We must accept the current tension in order to move toward justice."
I don't mean to get bogged down in semantics, but it would be very weird for a reverend to try an anti-elite argument with a bunch of other clergy. The clergy are elites! King had a doctorate!
Yes, exactly!
Sorry, realizing that I probably shouldn't have used quotes. Meant to paraphrase.
I remember reading Howard Thurman and in one section thinking, oh, that's where they got microaggression.
Matt writes:
'But if you want to understand why racial justice advocates aren’t satisfied with the “judge by the content of character” nostrum, it’s because King’s version of that dream was the endpoint of a program of massive material redistribution to build a radically more egalitarian society.'
I mean, it's true that racial justice advocates aren't satisfied by that, and it's true that many also favour economic redistribution, but I'm really not sure that's the *reason* they're going in the direction they're going. If so, why not just advocate for a radically more egalitarian society in economic terms?
That's not what they're doing, or I think what they would view themselves as doing.
I think there are actually two strains of "racial justice advocates" these days. Obviously, the world doesn't just fall nicely into buckets but I see it like this:
1.) Corporate Woke (Robin Deangelo, IXK, etc. )
2.) Leftist Woke
(forgive the sloppy use of the word woke but we all know what I'm talking about)
They both exist basically on top of each other, so it makes it hard to point at racial justice activism and say it's this or that. We have one group that pumps out Colin Kaepernick ads for Nike and calls it a big game-changer, and another group that would point out that Nike doesn't exactly have a great track record with labor ethics (mostly affecting brown people on the other side of the world). Both groups however share some slightly out-there ideas about how we should discuss race today... So it's easy for anyone to paint anyone as crazy.
The well-off white yuppie millennials want to feel good about themselves, so there is now a market for stroking their egos with a sort of weird guilt porn (see White Fragiliy, Not My Idea) that is both very provocative and can be called "radicalism" but also doesn't propose anything remotely approaching a solution (see Kendi's Dept. of Antiracism). This is where I'd slot in most of the cancel-culture behavior as well... the market of performative activism whips people into doing mean things (go figure).
Then the actual left is so strangely tied up in all this stuff, that they lose credibility. You get people like the members of the squad, who will be dead on about so many of the issues and have potential solutions, but at the same time lean into the divisive and confusing woke politics. I think this really hurts the brand of the left. But hey, it's not like there's a nice little button to push to get everyone's messaging in line haha...
"If so, why not just advocate for a radically more egalitarian society in economic terms?"
Right here you are hitting on a fundamental issue with the American left. They can't make a political calculation to save their lives! Seems pretty simple when it's written out like that but alas...
I just think as long as people who identify as socialists are reading antiracist baby to their kids.... The right wing will have plenty of anecdotes of otherwise smart/well-intentioned lefties doing dumb/anti-intellectual stuff that will scare people away.
A lot of my general ideas about race and class are formed by Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us, and Matt Taibbi's The Divide.
I think the thing about King's thought which you indirectly note a few times, including in the sub-head, is that it was drawing on a very clear tradition, namely radical Christianity. He was a preacher, a doctor of theology and he drew enormously from that well, in his oratory but also in his thinking. He's very much challenging along the same lines along which Jesus is reported to have challenged: what does it mean, to leave your fellow man in the dust? It seems pretty clear that the biblical Jesus would have as a starting point not focusing on someone's skin colour, but that is very clearly only the beginning of a very long list of increasingly difficult moral demands. And it's very obviously that tradition, that belief that inspired Rev King.
And while it's obvious and reasonable why agnostic (or Jewish, or atheist) leftists gloss over that source and focus on what the impact would be of King's approach, I do wonder why self-proclaimed Christian conservatives (like Tom Cotton) don't want to engage with King's thoughts as Christians, given that's the cornerstone of what King was saying (and as you note, he buttressed it with a *lot* of Scripture)
Where in scripture does it say we should elect a government that will redistribute wealth?
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth?
Amos, Chapter 2, NIV --
6 This is what the Lord says:
“For three sins of Israel,
even for four, I will not relent.
They sell the innocent for silver,
and the needy for a pair of sandals.
7 They trample on the heads of the poor
as on the dust of the ground
and deny justice to the oppressed.
That sounds like an admonition not to enslave the poor, not for redistributing income.
One move I’ve observed is people agreeing that we need a more material focus and then going to reparations or other race-specific programs as the strategy for doing this. In the economic/material lane you can either push universal redistribution that is still racially leveling in practice (baby bonds some such) or race specific ones like UBI only for black residents or economic development grants for Black/Latino entrepreneurs or reparations for slavery, etc. where would King/Rustin fall on this one? Racially universal but targeted by income/class right?