Something I have noticed is that when an issue that is a problem with being poor gets raised solely as a racial issue is that poor white people see this as an attack on them - to them, it seems as though the message is "you deserve this, black people don't".
I'm sure that the white Repenters (who are obviously wealthy enough that the problem doesn't apply to them) aren't approaching it this way, but I do think that this is one reason why poor white people have moved towards the Republicans in the last decade or so.
I agree but it is more than that. Democrats rhetoric can land as poor black people are poor because of racism. They have an excuse. You (poor white person) are poor because of your own inadequacy. You have white privilege and still struggle. And to add insult to injury. You’re a bad person because you’re a bigot of some sort...a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe. Oh and you need to educate yourself on the reasons you should be ashamed of your race.
It really is hard to understand why poor whites have shifted to the Republican Party? 🙃
Sorry in advance for the corny earnest/obvious comment but this stuff just enables plutocratic policies from the GOP. There are still a shocking amount of people in this country that hold the old school libertarian belief that poverty is solely the result of laziness or bad decision-making. The answer is compassion for all in poverty. It will take a while but that is how you break through in rural white areas. Stay the course. This is the way.
Scottie, I am not really down with all the liberal calculus that is done. Enabling, platforming, etc. We can’t say what we really think or feel because it may give our political adversaries aid and comfort. I think not engaging or being honest causes more harm in the long run.
Let’s just stick with simple arithmetic of what is right and wrong, what works and doesn’t work, what is true or false, what we really think and feel, etc.
I'm genuinely confused by your reply. I wasn't using "enabling" in the woke way. I meant it in the pure sense that this culture war helps build a willing audience for the belief that "people are poor because they are lazy." I think it's OK to have and express compassion. Republicans do so all the time for the so-called "unborn" and it's been effective for them in the past. Human beings aren't vulcans or robots. My argument is that race-neutral rhetoric focusing on helping combat poverty would be effective. As it was in the New Deal and Great Society eras.
I agree about being honest about targeting poverty qua poverty (and not race), but I think to often we to often talk about reforms as addressing "poverty" when the benefits do and should reach much wider, including, best of all, Pareto optimal reforms. Class consciousness > anti racism but Pareto optimality > class consciousness
Is it just Repenters saying this, though? Kevin WIlliamson made quite a stir back in 2016 with that piece that basically kicked the living shit out of poor whites feeling sorry for themselves, and he is far, far from a squishy liberal.
Williamson and old skool JD Vance hold that white people who do stupid things have indeed done something stupid. Where they differ from Repenters is that they believe the same applies to people of other races.
The subtext of Hillbilly Elegy is also clearly about how, while JD Vance caught some very big breaks on environment via his grandparents, he was also just a *lot* more gifted than his milieu or indeed most folks who don't end up at Yale Law (I saw this take in a review before I actually read the book so it admittedly anchored my thinking but it was also, very clearly, an apt description of the book). Given Vance's incredibly turbulent relationship with his mother (herself likely a victim of unfortunate genetics given what seems to be undiagnosed bipolar disorder) and relationship with serial in-and-out father figures I think that it's a very poor example of either social environment or factors reasonably within people's control[1] trumping genetic endowment.
Wow, a poor white kid who has grand parents who push education is catching “a very big break”? Maybe white folks who talk about white privilege should let that sink in a little? Where is your privilege really coming from?
Yes. Something of that attitude IS around among Liberals/Progressives, maybe particularly those who have no real life experience with poor whites. BUT that attitude is ATTRIBUTED to ALL Liberals/Progressives by right wing media and politicians.
This seems obviously true to me, and the second step where downclass whites who therefore resist that redistribution-for-equity messaging get tagged as “racist” by the Repenters for not getting onboard the political program, further alienating them.
The way this debate tends to go online is that someone will counterargue that yes being poor shouldn't be raised *solely* as a racial issue, but it is nonetheless factually accurate to say that even poor whites are unfairly privileged relative to poor blacks due to systemic racism. And that counterpoint is correct! In the aggregate poor whites really do have unfair privileges relative to otherwise-similarly-situated blacks.
But the implication that one ought to draw from that is that racism is actually less of a big deal than what would be necessary to justify a maximally race-centric worldview. If poor whites are as poor as they are notwithstanding the racial privileges they have access to, then that goes to show that the other problems we have in this country besides racism are really big and deserve a large share of our attention. But instead, a lot of people tend to draw the opposite implication: that since even poor whites benefit from racism, it justifies making racial disparities the predominant topic of discourse.
It's not at all clear to me that poor whiles have a clear advantage in life over poor blacks, holding all else equal but descent and skin color.
If Matt's links are correct, the white person would have an advantage in housing appraisals and police stops. But the black person would have a clear advantage on college admissions and when applying for jobs or promotions anywhere that had any form of affirmative action, and that's not a small number of places. It's possible the black person could be treated more harshly by the criminal justice system, but on the other hand the increasing prominence of anti-racist thought in the legal system means they man encounter DAs or judges that would treat them less harshly.
I guess my point is privilege is complex, hard to measure and even harder to add together and compare. It's not a math problem with a definite answer. It's a subjective question, like "who has it harder, a man or a woman" or "is it better to live in the US or Mexico?"
That appraisal claim seems on thin ice. It probably happens some places (America is a big country after all), but I'd be shocked if it were a widespread phenomenon. After all, I don't think Zillow, which seems to anchor expectations, knows anything about the race of the owners.
When it was brought up last time (can't remember if it was here or on Noah Smith's 'stack), we talked about how appraisals are so dang random in the first place that doing an appraisal twice on the same property and getting differing results is not really all that much evidence of _anything_ except the underlying subjectivity of the appraiser.
I definitely don't want to claim that *no* problems exist anywhere. And the study Kenny cites suggests that I am missing something broader (although the magnitude is not anywhere near the level claimed in the linked story). Maybe it's because I live in a relatively cookie-cutter subdivision in a sea of hundreds that I fail to appreciate that there are areas where valuations can be more subjective.
A single divergent pair of appraisals is not much evidence of anything. But if you've had hundreds of pairs of appraisals done, and the majority of them diverge in the same direction, then you've got stronger evidence.
It sounds like you are comparing poor rural whites to poor urban blacks, which is not "holding all else equal but descent and skin color." Poor rural blacks do not benefit all that much from either college admissions or affirmative action in hiring, but they most certainly are impacted by police stops and overt discrimination.
You're wrong, they do not. Rural college attendance rates are lower across the board, and the types of employers who have robust affirmative action programs (government agencies and big corporations) do not do a lot of hiring in rural areas. The main beneficiaries of these programs are poor urban blacks.
Really, you have to be willfully blind to deny that racial privileges exist at all in this country, and if you're losing me on this issue you're pretty far to the right.
A) you can claim that disagreeing with you makes someone far right, but that doesn't make it so, and you don't get to unilaterally determine that.
B) If rural rates of college attendence are lower across the board, then rural whites and rural blacks are going to be similarly impacted.
C) Any non-tiny business is basically forced to sign on with equal-opportunity employment, which puts pressure to give minorities a leg up in hiring.
D) Something like 80% of the population is considered to live in urban areas, and it probably goes to 90%+ for black folks, so even if you were correct, this is a small issue overall w.r.t. race.
I didn't mean to compare urban to rural if it sounded that way. I don't know that any of the specifics are all that important compared to the larger point, which is that it's sometimes more complicated than white==advantaged, black==disadvantaged.
I really don't know that much about the lives of rural black people, or rural white people for that matter, and I can only make wild guesses on their college admissions or access to affirmative action-style hiring. Maybe it's an example of an area where racial advantages are more clearly one-sided, but that wouldn't discount the overall point. In fact, it might mean that poor urban black people are an advantaged group compared to poor rural black people and so there should be affirmative action between the 2.
I mean, I think it's clearly true that poor urban black people are an advantaged group compared to poor rural black people. I don't think it follows that there should be a policy response to that. For one thing, whether a person is rural or urban partly reflects individual choice, as opposed to being an immutable characteristic. Race, in contrast, is an immutable characteristic.
Now, whether affirmative action is the best policy response to race discrimination is a question that people can debate, but I didn't say anything about that one way or the other. What I said was that race-based privileges exist, and that the counterexamples you gave in your first comment failed to "hold all else equal but descent and skin color." That doesn't "discount the overall point" - it *is* the overall point. I don't know what other "overall point" you're even referring to.
“aggregate poor whites really do have unfair privileges relative to otherwise-similarly-situated blacks.”
Poor whites have unfair privileges? That’s a weird thing to say. It’s one thing to say that blacks have additional disadvantage which seems likely true.
What privileges do poor whites have that should be taken away because they are unfair? How should we be leveling down poor whites?
If poor blacks have unfair disadvantages relative to poor whites, then poor whites have unfair privileges relative to poor blacks. Those are logically identical statements. That privilege should be taken away by eliminating the unfair disadvantages faced by their black cohort.
I disagree with the setup of your logic. Why even think about the unfair privileges some poor people have vs other poor people.
If on your journey of thinking through the struggles of poor people you start thinking about the “unfair privileges” of some group of poor people - then you’ve taken a wrong turn.
Would it not be better to think of the massive privilege all wealthy people have vs all poor people?
I don’t want to spend too much time trying to articulate this better but it strikes me as an odd way of thinking about privilege in the overall context of America.
I have no idea why this is setting you off because I don't think I said anything remotely inflammatory. What I said was that Americans in the aggregate tend to be treated disparately based on race and that's unfair and bad. You can agree or disagree with those statements factually, but my statements would in no way stop you from thinking about the privileges of wealthy people. Go for it, you have my approval.
I'm not sure if Edward shares this thinking - but I think there is a connotation/denotation distinction in how people frame these ideas that leaves people talking past each other.
Consider the example of two people walking down the street, each starting with the same cash on their persons, and contrast these scenarios:
1) Person A finds a $20 bill.
2) Person B gets mugged and loses the $20 they had in their wallet.
In both cases, mathematically, A is $20 better off than B. So you could say, that A is privileged over B.
But intuitively, many people would only consider scenario A privileged. Someone else incurring a loss is not morally the same as me incurring a gain.
I read some of the other stuff you’ve written related to this.
For example: “I mean, I think it's clearly true that poor urban black people are an advantaged group compared to poor rural black people”.
It’s cool, you just have a way of putting things that sounds offbeat to me. No worries. I am sure the way I present ideas is not appealing to some people too.
I suspect that Repenters think that when a white guy does something stupid, he has done something stupid, but when a minority does something stupid, it's racism.
How do things like affirmative action affect wealthy white people compared with poor white people? I think that it will have limited impact on wealthy whites, but will have a much bigger impact on poor whites. Decent unskilled jobs working in public administration are going to be much harder to come by for poor white people.
I don’t understand why some people think that folks hearing “this isn’t your problem” and therefore caring less is a sign of racism. It’s pure self-interest, runs both ways among all people.
Do you think the average poor urban black person gives a damn about Monsanto’s monopoly’s crippling effect on rural communities?
My not being the least bit concerned about monkey pox isn’t because I hate gay people, it’s because my chances of contracting it in a monogamous relationship with a woman are nil.
Also, I find it astonishing that all other manifestations of nationalism are bad to this faction of the left, but on this singular issue, nationalism and collective guilt are A-OK?
I think the proper basis for affirmative actions (by different amounts in different circumstances) is that systemic racism is a thing. The minority person person I am interviewing is probably smarter, more hard working, etc,, than his resume interview answers discloses. Therefore it is both in my own interest AND a matter of redistributive justice (if I have any power to go beyond self interest).
The Malaysian case is fascinating. It's AA for the politically dominant majority! And disparities have declined, but it is hard to tell if the policies have helped or inhibited that.
I agree it’s human nature to care more about one’s own problems than other peoples problems. The thing is, human nature is a bit racist and sometimes very racist.
Being willing to lock up lots of black people so that white people can feel safer on the streets after dark is racist. It’s also understandable, even sensible. The number of black on white murders has long greatly exceeded the number of white on black murders. American culture, in which whites have political majorities and economic dominance, has featured asymmetric violence against whites for decades. This shit is complicated.
"Being willing to lock up lots of black people so that white people can feel safer on the streets after dark is racist. It’s also understandable, even sensible"
The white people wouldn't be the prime beneficiary of this policy, not by a long shot.
Depends on which black people you are locking up. Drug gangs are mainly a threat to one another. They rarely hurt older black people or white people. But robbers/vagrants/and aggressive panhandlers threaten people of all races more or less equally.
Well yes, but the point of being a good citizen and, dare I say it, patriot is to look *beyond* narrow self-interest to what's good for the country. You can choose to say "this Black person isn't like me" or "this Black person and I are alike, because we are both American citizens."
I mean, if I had kids I'd want to teach them the core value that other people's wellbeing matters as much as your own. I realize you're not arguing otherwise, but it sounds to me like you're saying it's naive to be disappointed when people fail to live up to that standard, and I don't think we should accept that as a fact of life. Even if I agree that yelling at people about it isn't going to bring us closer to the world we'd like.
As for whether it's racism to care less when an issue affects people who aren't like you, aren't you yourself using the definition of racism that you said is ridiculous elsewhere in this thread? You're saying it's not necessarily racist to care more about problems that affect people of your own ethnic group, because black people also do that. But isn't that dependent on the argument that black people can't be racist?
I'd say that yeah, it's racist to hear that a problem mostly affects people of a different race from you and therefore bump it down the priority list. I think the orthodox progressive definition of racism is really silly, but racism really is broader than just "hate" – I think most Americans would agree that consciously caring less because a problem affects people of a different race than you counts as racism, even if you bear that race of people good will in theory.
The issue with racial progressivism is it seems like progressives assume everyone agrees we should care *more* when something disproportionately harms people who aren't like you (at least in one direction). But people should weight every person's wellbeing equally!
My point is not that people think hear the rhetoric of disproportionate impact and think “oh, this doesn’t affect white people so it’s fine.” It’s that they hear this rhetoric and think “oh, this doesn’t affect me or my family, so it’s fine.”
As in my earlier analogy, I really don’t give much of a damn about monkeypox not because it barely affects straight people and gay folks are less important, but because I don’t need to be concerned about it harming any of myself, my family, and my closest friends. Only a few more distant friends are gay, and they’re all married.
I don’t see basically anyone aside from a handful of fringe white nationalists who thinks along the former lines.
As for the whole first paragraph, I think it is the dictionary definition of naive to be disappointed when people care first and foremost about themselves. Yes, civic patriotism requires us to care equally about all our fellow citizens, but it’s ridiculous to even think for a millisecond that we can be made to do so to the same extent as we do our closest friends and family. Imagined community goes only so far compared to the real thing.
To expect otherwise is basically expecting communism to work.
I agree with you about valuing egalitarianism and universalism in general.
I think the mistake progressives can make is that they (we) want to use political activity as a vehicle to encourage people to adopt those values, rather than as a way to make policy that embodies those values. However, that doesn't seem to actually work very well, and can often push people away.
So it makes sense to me to say "Yeah, it'd be best it white people had more empathy for Black people, but we can't hold our policy preferences hostage to instilling those attitudes." Thus, as political activity, you fight for policies with broad appeal that will help Black people, and try to build that empathy through other means.
This is a definition of racism that I continue to think is horseshit, so hopelessly adrift from what it means in the minds of most people that you should find a new word for it.
But let’s run with it for a minute: this is a damned good argument for avoiding, at all costs, engaging people’s selfish perceptions of their interests on matters you consider race-related.
Racism is a matter of degree. Getting up in the morning and looking forward to a good lynching is a 10 on the racism scale. Capitalizing the slave trade is a 9. Operating a plantation where slaves are routinely sold down the river and whipped for petty offenses is an 8. Operating a plantation with working conditions better than those in a Lacashire mill is a 6 or a 7. Disfranfranchising southern blacks in the years around 1900 was a 7 or an 8. Nixonian appeals to states rights were a 6 or 7. The Willie Horton add was a 5 or a 6.
So minor update from my DEI Committee work at my somewhat large corporation. I basically spend my time advocating that we as the committee should have the explicit conversations required to identify any areas where we might have real problems concerning discrimination in hiring practices, retention, promotion, communications, etc. From there I always argue that instead of loudly communicating whatever changes we want to make, we should just get approval from corporate leadership and quietly implement those changes. Keep salience low.
When we do want to communicate at company town halls or similar functions, I seek input from employees I know to be conservative, and just let them have their say alongside those more traditionally speaking the language of DEI. The conservative employees given the opportunity to speak will usually offer up the polite, neutral, well-meaning but pablum takes "I value difference of opinion, we should treat everyone fairly" and other such fare. If we must we often let the whitest white guys communicate the hardest DEI stuff, the stuff that sometimes veers in ti DiAngelo territory.
It's starting to work. What we're getting is the ability to make changes to genuinely iffy practices without tripping the backlash by keeping salience low. We hire interns of more diverse backgrounds, but instead of talking about their backgrounds, we just talk about what great students they are and let them get to it.
I had to look up pablum: "bland or insipid intellectual fare, entertainment, etc"
If I'm interpreting that word correctly it sounds like you have little respect for opinions like "I value difference of opinion, we should treat everyone fairly". That may be bland and inoffensive but it's hardly an opinion I'd look down on. It sounds like something an opinion I hope everyone has. Maybe you think their missing the bigger picture?
Like Sam, I'm also really curious about the genuinely iffy practices you're replacing. My previous company was very loud about DEI in hiring practices, but as far as I could tell the main goal was giving statistics the CEO could brag to his tech CEO friends about. Census category diversity was basically the only form of diversity that mattered, and in a place as diverse as a tech company in East Los Angeles, census categories do a poor job mapping to the social constructs people actually care about.
But isn't, "I value difference of opinion, we should treat everyone fairly," exactly that? It is bland and insipid _intellectually_. We all agree that this is true. There is no need for debate about it. Matt Y. needn't write an article weighing its pros and cons.....
You're right it wouldn't make a very good Substack post. But he was talking about a corporate town hall meeting. Most of what employees and management are saying at those things is intellectually bland and insipid. I'd be somewhat amazed if the other employees were slinging around intellectually insightful nuggets of wisdoms.
I took it that Casey's original point was that they were trying to construct effective but inoffensive (intellectually rigorous) analysis of choices they had Made. When they looked to Conservatives for advice what they got was pablum. But that this input was instrumental in their final communication strategy.
I think you are reading more negatives into pablum than it deserves. I would think of it as "boilerplate," in this case. (formulaic but effective)
It could be. It feels like there's something more to it, though. I wish I knew more about the specifics of the situation. We'll never know for sure unless Casey weighs in...
I'm not sure about Casey - but at my BigTechCorp - when there has been discussion about policing language, mico-aggression training and similar there is plenty of eye-rolling and occasional backlash from conservative employees (usually leaving for different reasons) that use the opportunity to speak out. But when the intern hiring programs just selected a broader array of colleges (keeping the same hiring bar) and didn't really talk about it ... we actually had a more diverse group of interns, hopefully leading to more diverse full-time hires.
Silly question : what do you actually mean by (intentionally?) hiring interns “of more diverse backgrounds” and why do you think that serves your corporation’s interests?
This matches up with a terrific symposium NIH did a few years ago about the evidence for improving equity in the work place. Ground discourse in universal values, identify meaningful change with measurable goals, and then keep it low key.
I think injecting race into the issue of traffic cameras is a bit of a stretch. Just because introducing more traffic cameras would likely reduce racial disparities in outcomes doesn't mean that the reason people are against them is that they want to maintain those disparities. People want to speed, and if that means getting a ticket every few years, well, that's just the price of getting places faster. With a ticket based system, you can convince yourself that you can drive seven miles over the limit, because the traffic cop is looking for people going 10+ over. With traffic cameras, you just can't speed.
As a white guy, I've never gotten off with just a warning, and I'm skeptical that most other white people are confident that they could just talk themselves out of a ticket.
Agreed, Chris. Matthew spends much of his column citing studies, but in this section he says "my guess is " . . . and his uncorroborated guess is quite uncharitable -- in a manner that racializes.
Agree with everything you wrote here and also with Sam Caspersen who put my thoughts down better than I could have.
That section's anectode and guess felt especially odd to me because I just read a report from ProPublica on how traffic cameras in Chicago are being fought against on behalf of anti-racists ( the Repenters )
I'm not putting your judgement of the article down, but I actually thought it was poorly reasoned and evidenced. They didn't cover the safety side of things much at all. There are more tickets in Black neighborhoods, but does that mean those same neighborhood are safer as a result of better driving? It didn't tell me.
And the guy they used as an illustrative example is just so unsympathetic. He ran 4 red lights in a year and racked up $700 in total tickets that he couldn't afford to lose! That's very poor and dangerous decision making. If the fines are BS that's one thing, but they don't seem to suggest that.
I've noticed that the Repenters hold an extreme in-group bias (for non-white people) and an extreme sociological theory of behaviour (e.g. systems and societies cause behaviour and humans have no individual agency).
When you combine the two you get the idea that the in-group can't possibly engage in anti-social behaviour, which leads to absurd outcomes like the one you suggest.
“I think injecting race into the issue of traffic cameras is a bit of a stretch”
I think that’s true of almost every issue. I guess that marks me as a Represser, since there’s no way I’m a Repenter and there are only two possible classifications.
To be fair, Bright's paper does say these are not the only groups (he gives the example of people who favour white nationalism as an explicit political goal as another, and seems to suggest there may be more).
Well, to be clear, I do not favor white nationalism in any way. And there absolutely are people who fall in neither category: the huge number of people who simply roll their eyes at the two options offered.
My concerns about traffic cameras are an unease with being photographed while driving about my business. I may still find them worth it, but it's not all about "permission to speed"
I _also_ don't want a ticket(but I want safer drivers), traffic cameras that could 100% only be used for speeding/red-light tickets would at least alleviate the privacy concern(which is probably overblown).
(I have a secondary concern to wonder if red-light cameras cause speeding near yellow lights - that is to beat the light before the camera - but I assume that can be studied/addressed and isn't necessarily a guaranteed feature of the cameras)
Henry you're ignoring the flip side of enforcement in all of these debates, which is public safety.
If I knew traffic cameras worked for safety (I don't) and i was feeling particularly selfish I'd be happy to have them put up only in my neighborhood and taken down everywhere else. I want stronger enforcements against drug dealers, in particular in the neighborhood I live in, not because I care who would be sent to prison (mostly white, a few black) but because I don't want to see kids using drugs that will ruin their lives.
The early evidence is that they do in Chicago. In a time period for which accidents and fatalities spiked vastly everywhere else, the areas with camera enforcement saw them flatten.
I want Philly plastered in them from one end to the other. Especially my own neighborhood. But also the ones I shortcut through and know I’m driving like a dumbass in.
My whole comment is predicated on assuming the enforcement has a public safety benefit. As I said, I genuinely don't know if traffic cameras do, but I think punishing drug dealing probably does.
But we can disagree about the efficacy of specific enforcements and still agree on the larger point: disparities of enforcement are a two-sided coin, and those disparities can be in direct opposition to each other. Punishing criminals of X race or group will result in more of X people, but may also keep the remainder of X race or group safe. The common fallacy nowadays is to ignore that second part.
Of course the tradeoff falls away if the enforcement has no benefit, or if criminals are all from one group X and their victims another group Y, but I think we can agree that many or most enforcements do have some benefit and most criminals harm people of their same race or group who live around them.
"And would you want your own kid to be punished harshly for using drugs?" Drugs that could kill them? Hell yes, and if the legal system won't, I will as long as I'm their legal guardian. Way too many people I went to high school and college with are now dead or complete junkies. It's not like casual party-drug users are going away from decade stretches. People who are going to prison for drug use are in general either being arrested for violence and plea bargaining down to drugs or are moving large quantities.
I'd selfishly hate to see my kids arrested for being drug dealers but I'd also like to not see them be audited if they end up cheating on their taxes. But obviously society can't function if every parent gets special exceptions for their own kid. This isn't Saddam's Iraq.
Your last point isn't necessarily *wrong* but it seems like an ex-ante versus ex-post issue of desiring one's kin to avoid bad outcomes that's fully generalizable (i..e nothing about it is specific to drugs).
If you're in the ex ante world, though, drugs especially (given the potential for addictiveness and even for just habitus) are very much one of those situations where the rational thing to do is to keep pushing the "ounce of prevention" button as hard as you can and do everything in your power to stay out of the situation where you need to ask how good the proverbial pound of cure is.
So, basically, if you set off people's bullshit detectors too many times, they'll start assuming you are full of shit?
My wife reads Le Monde as her main source of news and they'd write up a big story about, say, how rural French voters are caught between the economic impacts of climate change and the economic impacts of Macron's climate policies and how the far-left and far-right try to exploit that tension. The NY Times would write similar story, but then go off on a tangent about colonialism and some nonsensical racial argument that might obliquity apply to Paris, but has not the slightest thing to do with French farmers.
At a certain point I start mistrusting all of their reporting; if they are making ham-handed arguments about equity and racism that have no basis in reality, how can I trust them to inform me about other topics without fudging or omitting details? This same phenomenon plays out in my professional life; our trade magazine suddenly started writing the same old stories about stressed-out grad students and postdocs, but with the LGBTQ, Black and Latinx sprinkled throughout.
For some, it is easier to recognize this coming from the other side, e.g., how MAGA defenders effortlessly reverse their positions (on, say, mishandling classified information) or find some nefarious connection between CRT and the price of cat food. At a certain point you just cannot take people seriously when they foreground their hobbyhorses and try to reverse-engineer coherent explanations based on moral clarity or whatever.
Right, and the fact that it rationalizes whatever position they were presumably going to take anyway devalues the overall concern. There clearly are racial and social disparities ... but how can you cogently address them if they are overlaid on every other policy issue.
In reality, a lot of liberals had an emotional reaction to Trump’s election and started lashing out. Much of our conversation about this in recent years hasn’t been about helping black people as much as it has been about calling people names and pointing fingers. I think it’s fair to say that this hasn’t been good for race relations, or material gains for much of anyone. This is at least what I’ve observed at the ground level.
Among my social circle, basically educated liberals, trump election was a true freak out moment, people trying to figure out how this could possibly have happened, and deciding wow I guess half the country actually is super racist. I think it is a genuinely held view (not just lashing out) that everyone who voted trump and maybe by extension those who are put off by really liberal ways of talking about things either is super racist or doesn’t understand what they’re doing. We had friends we knew voted for trump and we had a lot of conversations about how they clearly were just making an honest mistake or whatever or were just dumb. Told my wife I think it is important NOT to try to make too much sense of the political situation since it seems to make us look down on people who don’t deserve that.
It feels like a lot of this weirdness comes from the fact that for most Black people, material issues are going to be most salient/most important, but for college educated Black people, especially writers and activists, the salience of post-material issues (which don't get me wrong, are still really bad!) is increased. And this is the subset white liberals (like me!) disproportionately have contact with!
It creates some peculiar argument structures, where the material issues are cited to give moral justification to action on post-material issues.
The description of Repressers included the line: "They acknowledge the country’s history of racism as well as our huge racial disparities in outcomes, but they maintain that this is just an odd coincidence." The second part of that does not ring true to me. Outcomes are often different for different groups, and the mainstream "Represser" view is simply that this is not by itself evidence of racial animus. Nobody is arguing that the reason that Asian or Jewish Americans excel in many areas is either a coincidence or the result of some kind of anti-wasp systemic inequities.
Right. The mainstream view here isn't that historical circumstances don't exist or have impacts ... just how much determinism is involved. A common thing I've heard is something like "Well, my great-grandparents were dirt-poor Irish(or insert of group here) immigrants and face a bunch of still discrimination, it took a lot of hard work and multiple generations to get where we are today. Nothing is stopping black families from doing the same (today) even if there were real obstacles facing their grandparents."
I find that view a bit naive, but not incoherent, and not totally wrong. I think the misreading of it is the assumption, "Nothing is stopping black families from doing the same" is a bullshit, willful, misstatement rather than a comparison.
Something I have noticed is that when an issue that is a problem with being poor gets raised solely as a racial issue is that poor white people see this as an attack on them - to them, it seems as though the message is "you deserve this, black people don't".
I'm sure that the white Repenters (who are obviously wealthy enough that the problem doesn't apply to them) aren't approaching it this way, but I do think that this is one reason why poor white people have moved towards the Republicans in the last decade or so.
Yes I agree
I agree but it is more than that. Democrats rhetoric can land as poor black people are poor because of racism. They have an excuse. You (poor white person) are poor because of your own inadequacy. You have white privilege and still struggle. And to add insult to injury. You’re a bad person because you’re a bigot of some sort...a racist, a homophobe, a transphobe. Oh and you need to educate yourself on the reasons you should be ashamed of your race.
It really is hard to understand why poor whites have shifted to the Republican Party? 🙃
Sorry in advance for the corny earnest/obvious comment but this stuff just enables plutocratic policies from the GOP. There are still a shocking amount of people in this country that hold the old school libertarian belief that poverty is solely the result of laziness or bad decision-making. The answer is compassion for all in poverty. It will take a while but that is how you break through in rural white areas. Stay the course. This is the way.
Scottie, I am not really down with all the liberal calculus that is done. Enabling, platforming, etc. We can’t say what we really think or feel because it may give our political adversaries aid and comfort. I think not engaging or being honest causes more harm in the long run.
Let’s just stick with simple arithmetic of what is right and wrong, what works and doesn’t work, what is true or false, what we really think and feel, etc.
I'm genuinely confused by your reply. I wasn't using "enabling" in the woke way. I meant it in the pure sense that this culture war helps build a willing audience for the belief that "people are poor because they are lazy." I think it's OK to have and express compassion. Republicans do so all the time for the so-called "unborn" and it's been effective for them in the past. Human beings aren't vulcans or robots. My argument is that race-neutral rhetoric focusing on helping combat poverty would be effective. As it was in the New Deal and Great Society eras.
My bad, this form of communication is prone to misunderstanding.
No worries. All good!
I agree about being honest about targeting poverty qua poverty (and not race), but I think to often we to often talk about reforms as addressing "poverty" when the benefits do and should reach much wider, including, best of all, Pareto optimal reforms. Class consciousness > anti racism but Pareto optimality > class consciousness
Is it just Repenters saying this, though? Kevin WIlliamson made quite a stir back in 2016 with that piece that basically kicked the living shit out of poor whites feeling sorry for themselves, and he is far, far from a squishy liberal.
Williamson and old skool JD Vance hold that white people who do stupid things have indeed done something stupid. Where they differ from Repenters is that they believe the same applies to people of other races.
It's also the main theme of Hillbilly Elegy!
The subtext of Hillbilly Elegy is also clearly about how, while JD Vance caught some very big breaks on environment via his grandparents, he was also just a *lot* more gifted than his milieu or indeed most folks who don't end up at Yale Law (I saw this take in a review before I actually read the book so it admittedly anchored my thinking but it was also, very clearly, an apt description of the book). Given Vance's incredibly turbulent relationship with his mother (herself likely a victim of unfortunate genetics given what seems to be undiagnosed bipolar disorder) and relationship with serial in-and-out father figures I think that it's a very poor example of either social environment or factors reasonably within people's control[1] trumping genetic endowment.
[1] An admittedly extremely squishy concept.
Wow, a poor white kid who has grand parents who push education is catching “a very big break”? Maybe white folks who talk about white privilege should let that sink in a little? Where is your privilege really coming from?
Yes. Something of that attitude IS around among Liberals/Progressives, maybe particularly those who have no real life experience with poor whites. BUT that attitude is ATTRIBUTED to ALL Liberals/Progressives by right wing media and politicians.
This seems obviously true to me, and the second step where downclass whites who therefore resist that redistribution-for-equity messaging get tagged as “racist” by the Repenters for not getting onboard the political program, further alienating them.
The way this debate tends to go online is that someone will counterargue that yes being poor shouldn't be raised *solely* as a racial issue, but it is nonetheless factually accurate to say that even poor whites are unfairly privileged relative to poor blacks due to systemic racism. And that counterpoint is correct! In the aggregate poor whites really do have unfair privileges relative to otherwise-similarly-situated blacks.
But the implication that one ought to draw from that is that racism is actually less of a big deal than what would be necessary to justify a maximally race-centric worldview. If poor whites are as poor as they are notwithstanding the racial privileges they have access to, then that goes to show that the other problems we have in this country besides racism are really big and deserve a large share of our attention. But instead, a lot of people tend to draw the opposite implication: that since even poor whites benefit from racism, it justifies making racial disparities the predominant topic of discourse.
It's not at all clear to me that poor whiles have a clear advantage in life over poor blacks, holding all else equal but descent and skin color.
If Matt's links are correct, the white person would have an advantage in housing appraisals and police stops. But the black person would have a clear advantage on college admissions and when applying for jobs or promotions anywhere that had any form of affirmative action, and that's not a small number of places. It's possible the black person could be treated more harshly by the criminal justice system, but on the other hand the increasing prominence of anti-racist thought in the legal system means they man encounter DAs or judges that would treat them less harshly.
I guess my point is privilege is complex, hard to measure and even harder to add together and compare. It's not a math problem with a definite answer. It's a subjective question, like "who has it harder, a man or a woman" or "is it better to live in the US or Mexico?"
That appraisal claim seems on thin ice. It probably happens some places (America is a big country after all), but I'd be shocked if it were a widespread phenomenon. After all, I don't think Zillow, which seems to anchor expectations, knows anything about the race of the owners.
When it was brought up last time (can't remember if it was here or on Noah Smith's 'stack), we talked about how appraisals are so dang random in the first place that doing an appraisal twice on the same property and getting differing results is not really all that much evidence of _anything_ except the underlying subjectivity of the appraiser.
What about the "steering" that was documented by Newsday in Long Island? That looked pretty blatant.
Wow, that does look really bad!
I definitely don't want to claim that *no* problems exist anywhere. And the study Kenny cites suggests that I am missing something broader (although the magnitude is not anywhere near the level claimed in the linked story). Maybe it's because I live in a relatively cookie-cutter subdivision in a sea of hundreds that I fail to appreciate that there are areas where valuations can be more subjective.
A single divergent pair of appraisals is not much evidence of anything. But if you've had hundreds of pairs of appraisals done, and the majority of them diverge in the same direction, then you've got stronger evidence.
And has this experiment been done? (Genuinely asking for information. I don't know the answer.)
It sounds like you are comparing poor rural whites to poor urban blacks, which is not "holding all else equal but descent and skin color." Poor rural blacks do not benefit all that much from either college admissions or affirmative action in hiring, but they most certainly are impacted by police stops and overt discrimination.
"Poor rural blacks do not benefit all that much from either college admissions or affirmative action in hiring"
I'm pretty sure they do.
And poor urban whites would still have all the negatives of poor rural whites.
You're wrong, they do not. Rural college attendance rates are lower across the board, and the types of employers who have robust affirmative action programs (government agencies and big corporations) do not do a lot of hiring in rural areas. The main beneficiaries of these programs are poor urban blacks.
Really, you have to be willfully blind to deny that racial privileges exist at all in this country, and if you're losing me on this issue you're pretty far to the right.
A) you can claim that disagreeing with you makes someone far right, but that doesn't make it so, and you don't get to unilaterally determine that.
B) If rural rates of college attendence are lower across the board, then rural whites and rural blacks are going to be similarly impacted.
C) Any non-tiny business is basically forced to sign on with equal-opportunity employment, which puts pressure to give minorities a leg up in hiring.
D) Something like 80% of the population is considered to live in urban areas, and it probably goes to 90%+ for black folks, so even if you were correct, this is a small issue overall w.r.t. race.
I didn't mean to compare urban to rural if it sounded that way. I don't know that any of the specifics are all that important compared to the larger point, which is that it's sometimes more complicated than white==advantaged, black==disadvantaged.
I really don't know that much about the lives of rural black people, or rural white people for that matter, and I can only make wild guesses on their college admissions or access to affirmative action-style hiring. Maybe it's an example of an area where racial advantages are more clearly one-sided, but that wouldn't discount the overall point. In fact, it might mean that poor urban black people are an advantaged group compared to poor rural black people and so there should be affirmative action between the 2.
I mean, I think it's clearly true that poor urban black people are an advantaged group compared to poor rural black people. I don't think it follows that there should be a policy response to that. For one thing, whether a person is rural or urban partly reflects individual choice, as opposed to being an immutable characteristic. Race, in contrast, is an immutable characteristic.
Now, whether affirmative action is the best policy response to race discrimination is a question that people can debate, but I didn't say anything about that one way or the other. What I said was that race-based privileges exist, and that the counterexamples you gave in your first comment failed to "hold all else equal but descent and skin color." That doesn't "discount the overall point" - it *is* the overall point. I don't know what other "overall point" you're even referring to.
At the same time, claiming that poor rural white people are somehow privileged in a meaningful way (on net) is pretty perverse.
A lot of them are in truly crushing poverty. And they don't just magically have good connections and a leg up because they are white.
In fact, I suspect that a lot of 'elites' would help far more scorn on them than they would any other impoverished group in the US.
Who are you saying "claimed that poor rural white people are somehow privileged in a meaningful way on net"?
“aggregate poor whites really do have unfair privileges relative to otherwise-similarly-situated blacks.”
Poor whites have unfair privileges? That’s a weird thing to say. It’s one thing to say that blacks have additional disadvantage which seems likely true.
What privileges do poor whites have that should be taken away because they are unfair? How should we be leveling down poor whites?
If poor blacks have unfair disadvantages relative to poor whites, then poor whites have unfair privileges relative to poor blacks. Those are logically identical statements. That privilege should be taken away by eliminating the unfair disadvantages faced by their black cohort.
I disagree with the setup of your logic. Why even think about the unfair privileges some poor people have vs other poor people.
If on your journey of thinking through the struggles of poor people you start thinking about the “unfair privileges” of some group of poor people - then you’ve taken a wrong turn.
Would it not be better to think of the massive privilege all wealthy people have vs all poor people?
I don’t want to spend too much time trying to articulate this better but it strikes me as an odd way of thinking about privilege in the overall context of America.
I have no idea why this is setting you off because I don't think I said anything remotely inflammatory. What I said was that Americans in the aggregate tend to be treated disparately based on race and that's unfair and bad. You can agree or disagree with those statements factually, but my statements would in no way stop you from thinking about the privileges of wealthy people. Go for it, you have my approval.
I'm not sure if Edward shares this thinking - but I think there is a connotation/denotation distinction in how people frame these ideas that leaves people talking past each other.
Consider the example of two people walking down the street, each starting with the same cash on their persons, and contrast these scenarios:
1) Person A finds a $20 bill.
2) Person B gets mugged and loses the $20 they had in their wallet.
In both cases, mathematically, A is $20 better off than B. So you could say, that A is privileged over B.
But intuitively, many people would only consider scenario A privileged. Someone else incurring a loss is not morally the same as me incurring a gain.
I read some of the other stuff you’ve written related to this.
For example: “I mean, I think it's clearly true that poor urban black people are an advantaged group compared to poor rural black people”.
It’s cool, you just have a way of putting things that sounds offbeat to me. No worries. I am sure the way I present ideas is not appealing to some people too.
Astute.
I do a lot of doorknocking and can confirm
"I'm sure that the white Repenters (who are obviously wealthy enough that the problem doesn't apply to them) aren't approaching it this way"
Do they? An NYT journalist believes this:
https://mobile.twitter.com/hpmacd/status/1565070014587215872
I suspect that Repenters think that when a white guy does something stupid, he has done something stupid, but when a minority does something stupid, it's racism.
How do things like affirmative action affect wealthy white people compared with poor white people? I think that it will have limited impact on wealthy whites, but will have a much bigger impact on poor whites. Decent unskilled jobs working in public administration are going to be much harder to come by for poor white people.
This study shows for social liberals being told about white privilege reduces sympathy for poor whites.
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-22926-001
I don’t understand why some people think that folks hearing “this isn’t your problem” and therefore caring less is a sign of racism. It’s pure self-interest, runs both ways among all people.
Do you think the average poor urban black person gives a damn about Monsanto’s monopoly’s crippling effect on rural communities?
My not being the least bit concerned about monkey pox isn’t because I hate gay people, it’s because my chances of contracting it in a monogamous relationship with a woman are nil.
Also, I find it astonishing that all other manifestations of nationalism are bad to this faction of the left, but on this singular issue, nationalism and collective guilt are A-OK?
Lol. Go be wrong in someone else’s ear, I beg of you.
I think the proper basis for affirmative actions (by different amounts in different circumstances) is that systemic racism is a thing. The minority person person I am interviewing is probably smarter, more hard working, etc,, than his resume interview answers discloses. Therefore it is both in my own interest AND a matter of redistributive justice (if I have any power to go beyond self interest).
The Malaysian case is fascinating. It's AA for the politically dominant majority! And disparities have declined, but it is hard to tell if the policies have helped or inhibited that.
Indonesia's experience with racism is hardly better, though.
I agree it’s human nature to care more about one’s own problems than other peoples problems. The thing is, human nature is a bit racist and sometimes very racist.
Being willing to lock up lots of black people so that white people can feel safer on the streets after dark is racist. It’s also understandable, even sensible. The number of black on white murders has long greatly exceeded the number of white on black murders. American culture, in which whites have political majorities and economic dominance, has featured asymmetric violence against whites for decades. This shit is complicated.
"Being willing to lock up lots of black people so that white people can feel safer on the streets after dark is racist. It’s also understandable, even sensible"
The white people wouldn't be the prime beneficiary of this policy, not by a long shot.
Depends on which black people you are locking up. Drug gangs are mainly a threat to one another. They rarely hurt older black people or white people. But robbers/vagrants/and aggressive panhandlers threaten people of all races more or less equally.
Well yes, but the point of being a good citizen and, dare I say it, patriot is to look *beyond* narrow self-interest to what's good for the country. You can choose to say "this Black person isn't like me" or "this Black person and I are alike, because we are both American citizens."
I missed this earlier but I think my response to Eli is pretty much how I would respond to this as well.
I mean, if I had kids I'd want to teach them the core value that other people's wellbeing matters as much as your own. I realize you're not arguing otherwise, but it sounds to me like you're saying it's naive to be disappointed when people fail to live up to that standard, and I don't think we should accept that as a fact of life. Even if I agree that yelling at people about it isn't going to bring us closer to the world we'd like.
As for whether it's racism to care less when an issue affects people who aren't like you, aren't you yourself using the definition of racism that you said is ridiculous elsewhere in this thread? You're saying it's not necessarily racist to care more about problems that affect people of your own ethnic group, because black people also do that. But isn't that dependent on the argument that black people can't be racist?
I'd say that yeah, it's racist to hear that a problem mostly affects people of a different race from you and therefore bump it down the priority list. I think the orthodox progressive definition of racism is really silly, but racism really is broader than just "hate" – I think most Americans would agree that consciously caring less because a problem affects people of a different race than you counts as racism, even if you bear that race of people good will in theory.
The issue with racial progressivism is it seems like progressives assume everyone agrees we should care *more* when something disproportionately harms people who aren't like you (at least in one direction). But people should weight every person's wellbeing equally!
My point is not that people think hear the rhetoric of disproportionate impact and think “oh, this doesn’t affect white people so it’s fine.” It’s that they hear this rhetoric and think “oh, this doesn’t affect me or my family, so it’s fine.”
As in my earlier analogy, I really don’t give much of a damn about monkeypox not because it barely affects straight people and gay folks are less important, but because I don’t need to be concerned about it harming any of myself, my family, and my closest friends. Only a few more distant friends are gay, and they’re all married.
I don’t see basically anyone aside from a handful of fringe white nationalists who thinks along the former lines.
As for the whole first paragraph, I think it is the dictionary definition of naive to be disappointed when people care first and foremost about themselves. Yes, civic patriotism requires us to care equally about all our fellow citizens, but it’s ridiculous to even think for a millisecond that we can be made to do so to the same extent as we do our closest friends and family. Imagined community goes only so far compared to the real thing.
To expect otherwise is basically expecting communism to work.
I agree with you about valuing egalitarianism and universalism in general.
I think the mistake progressives can make is that they (we) want to use political activity as a vehicle to encourage people to adopt those values, rather than as a way to make policy that embodies those values. However, that doesn't seem to actually work very well, and can often push people away.
So it makes sense to me to say "Yeah, it'd be best it white people had more empathy for Black people, but we can't hold our policy preferences hostage to instilling those attitudes." Thus, as political activity, you fight for policies with broad appeal that will help Black people, and try to build that empathy through other means.
This is a definition of racism that I continue to think is horseshit, so hopelessly adrift from what it means in the minds of most people that you should find a new word for it.
But let’s run with it for a minute: this is a damned good argument for avoiding, at all costs, engaging people’s selfish perceptions of their interests on matters you consider race-related.
Matt thanks you for your support.
Racism is a matter of degree. Getting up in the morning and looking forward to a good lynching is a 10 on the racism scale. Capitalizing the slave trade is a 9. Operating a plantation where slaves are routinely sold down the river and whipped for petty offenses is an 8. Operating a plantation with working conditions better than those in a Lacashire mill is a 6 or a 7. Disfranfranchising southern blacks in the years around 1900 was a 7 or an 8. Nixonian appeals to states rights were a 6 or 7. The Willie Horton add was a 5 or a 6.
I reject any binary definition of racism.
So minor update from my DEI Committee work at my somewhat large corporation. I basically spend my time advocating that we as the committee should have the explicit conversations required to identify any areas where we might have real problems concerning discrimination in hiring practices, retention, promotion, communications, etc. From there I always argue that instead of loudly communicating whatever changes we want to make, we should just get approval from corporate leadership and quietly implement those changes. Keep salience low.
When we do want to communicate at company town halls or similar functions, I seek input from employees I know to be conservative, and just let them have their say alongside those more traditionally speaking the language of DEI. The conservative employees given the opportunity to speak will usually offer up the polite, neutral, well-meaning but pablum takes "I value difference of opinion, we should treat everyone fairly" and other such fare. If we must we often let the whitest white guys communicate the hardest DEI stuff, the stuff that sometimes veers in ti DiAngelo territory.
It's starting to work. What we're getting is the ability to make changes to genuinely iffy practices without tripping the backlash by keeping salience low. We hire interns of more diverse backgrounds, but instead of talking about their backgrounds, we just talk about what great students they are and let them get to it.
I had to look up pablum: "bland or insipid intellectual fare, entertainment, etc"
If I'm interpreting that word correctly it sounds like you have little respect for opinions like "I value difference of opinion, we should treat everyone fairly". That may be bland and inoffensive but it's hardly an opinion I'd look down on. It sounds like something an opinion I hope everyone has. Maybe you think their missing the bigger picture?
Like Sam, I'm also really curious about the genuinely iffy practices you're replacing. My previous company was very loud about DEI in hiring practices, but as far as I could tell the main goal was giving statistics the CEO could brag to his tech CEO friends about. Census category diversity was basically the only form of diversity that mattered, and in a place as diverse as a tech company in East Los Angeles, census categories do a poor job mapping to the social constructs people actually care about.
But isn't, "I value difference of opinion, we should treat everyone fairly," exactly that? It is bland and insipid _intellectually_. We all agree that this is true. There is no need for debate about it. Matt Y. needn't write an article weighing its pros and cons.....
You're right it wouldn't make a very good Substack post. But he was talking about a corporate town hall meeting. Most of what employees and management are saying at those things is intellectually bland and insipid. I'd be somewhat amazed if the other employees were slinging around intellectually insightful nuggets of wisdoms.
I took it that Casey's original point was that they were trying to construct effective but inoffensive (intellectually rigorous) analysis of choices they had Made. When they looked to Conservatives for advice what they got was pablum. But that this input was instrumental in their final communication strategy.
I think you are reading more negatives into pablum than it deserves. I would think of it as "boilerplate," in this case. (formulaic but effective)
It could be. It feels like there's something more to it, though. I wish I knew more about the specifics of the situation. We'll never know for sure unless Casey weighs in...
I'm not sure about Casey - but at my BigTechCorp - when there has been discussion about policing language, mico-aggression training and similar there is plenty of eye-rolling and occasional backlash from conservative employees (usually leaving for different reasons) that use the opportunity to speak out. But when the intern hiring programs just selected a broader array of colleges (keeping the same hiring bar) and didn't really talk about it ... we actually had a more diverse group of interns, hopefully leading to more diverse full-time hires.
Could you please elaborate on the "genuinely iffy practices" that you are endeavoring to address?
Silly question : what do you actually mean by (intentionally?) hiring interns “of more diverse backgrounds” and why do you think that serves your corporation’s interests?
This matches up with a terrific symposium NIH did a few years ago about the evidence for improving equity in the work place. Ground discourse in universal values, identify meaningful change with measurable goals, and then keep it low key.
I think injecting race into the issue of traffic cameras is a bit of a stretch. Just because introducing more traffic cameras would likely reduce racial disparities in outcomes doesn't mean that the reason people are against them is that they want to maintain those disparities. People want to speed, and if that means getting a ticket every few years, well, that's just the price of getting places faster. With a ticket based system, you can convince yourself that you can drive seven miles over the limit, because the traffic cop is looking for people going 10+ over. With traffic cameras, you just can't speed.
As a white guy, I've never gotten off with just a warning, and I'm skeptical that most other white people are confident that they could just talk themselves out of a ticket.
Agreed, Chris. Matthew spends much of his column citing studies, but in this section he says "my guess is " . . . and his uncorroborated guess is quite uncharitable -- in a manner that racializes.
Agree with everything you wrote here and also with Sam Caspersen who put my thoughts down better than I could have.
That section's anectode and guess felt especially odd to me because I just read a report from ProPublica on how traffic cameras in Chicago are being fought against on behalf of anti-racists ( the Repenters )
https://www.propublica.org/article/chicagos-race-neutral-traffic-cameras-ticket-black-and-latino-drivers-the-most
This ProPublica article is good but I can’t stop thinking to myself “so stop speeding!” “stop running red lights!”
Considering the dramatic increase in traffic fatalities, I’m amazed to see this level of pushback.
I'm not putting your judgement of the article down, but I actually thought it was poorly reasoned and evidenced. They didn't cover the safety side of things much at all. There are more tickets in Black neighborhoods, but does that mean those same neighborhood are safer as a result of better driving? It didn't tell me.
And the guy they used as an illustrative example is just so unsympathetic. He ran 4 red lights in a year and racked up $700 in total tickets that he couldn't afford to lose! That's very poor and dangerous decision making. If the fines are BS that's one thing, but they don't seem to suggest that.
Totally, very unsympathetic guy! Running red lights is quite bad.
I've noticed that the Repenters hold an extreme in-group bias (for non-white people) and an extreme sociological theory of behaviour (e.g. systems and societies cause behaviour and humans have no individual agency).
When you combine the two you get the idea that the in-group can't possibly engage in anti-social behaviour, which leads to absurd outcomes like the one you suggest.
“I think injecting race into the issue of traffic cameras is a bit of a stretch”
I think that’s true of almost every issue. I guess that marks me as a Represser, since there’s no way I’m a Repenter and there are only two possible classifications.
'There are only two possible classifications'
To be fair, Bright's paper does say these are not the only groups (he gives the example of people who favour white nationalism as an explicit political goal as another, and seems to suggest there may be more).
Well, to be clear, I do not favor white nationalism in any way. And there absolutely are people who fall in neither category: the huge number of people who simply roll their eyes at the two options offered.
To be clear, I wasn't trying to imply that you do. It's just the example he gives of an additional group in the paper.
My concerns about traffic cameras are an unease with being photographed while driving about my business. I may still find them worth it, but it's not all about "permission to speed"
I _also_ don't want a ticket(but I want safer drivers), traffic cameras that could 100% only be used for speeding/red-light tickets would at least alleviate the privacy concern(which is probably overblown).
(I have a secondary concern to wonder if red-light cameras cause speeding near yellow lights - that is to beat the light before the camera - but I assume that can be studied/addressed and isn't necessarily a guaranteed feature of the cameras)
Henry you're ignoring the flip side of enforcement in all of these debates, which is public safety.
If I knew traffic cameras worked for safety (I don't) and i was feeling particularly selfish I'd be happy to have them put up only in my neighborhood and taken down everywhere else. I want stronger enforcements against drug dealers, in particular in the neighborhood I live in, not because I care who would be sent to prison (mostly white, a few black) but because I don't want to see kids using drugs that will ruin their lives.
The early evidence is that they do in Chicago. In a time period for which accidents and fatalities spiked vastly everywhere else, the areas with camera enforcement saw them flatten.
I want Philly plastered in them from one end to the other. Especially my own neighborhood. But also the ones I shortcut through and know I’m driving like a dumbass in.
My whole comment is predicated on assuming the enforcement has a public safety benefit. As I said, I genuinely don't know if traffic cameras do, but I think punishing drug dealing probably does.
But we can disagree about the efficacy of specific enforcements and still agree on the larger point: disparities of enforcement are a two-sided coin, and those disparities can be in direct opposition to each other. Punishing criminals of X race or group will result in more of X people, but may also keep the remainder of X race or group safe. The common fallacy nowadays is to ignore that second part.
Of course the tradeoff falls away if the enforcement has no benefit, or if criminals are all from one group X and their victims another group Y, but I think we can agree that many or most enforcements do have some benefit and most criminals harm people of their same race or group who live around them.
"And would you want your own kid to be punished harshly for using drugs?" Drugs that could kill them? Hell yes, and if the legal system won't, I will as long as I'm their legal guardian. Way too many people I went to high school and college with are now dead or complete junkies. It's not like casual party-drug users are going away from decade stretches. People who are going to prison for drug use are in general either being arrested for violence and plea bargaining down to drugs or are moving large quantities.
I'd selfishly hate to see my kids arrested for being drug dealers but I'd also like to not see them be audited if they end up cheating on their taxes. But obviously society can't function if every parent gets special exceptions for their own kid. This isn't Saddam's Iraq.
Your last point isn't necessarily *wrong* but it seems like an ex-ante versus ex-post issue of desiring one's kin to avoid bad outcomes that's fully generalizable (i..e nothing about it is specific to drugs).
If you're in the ex ante world, though, drugs especially (given the potential for addictiveness and even for just habitus) are very much one of those situations where the rational thing to do is to keep pushing the "ounce of prevention" button as hard as you can and do everything in your power to stay out of the situation where you need to ask how good the proverbial pound of cure is.
So, basically, if you set off people's bullshit detectors too many times, they'll start assuming you are full of shit?
My wife reads Le Monde as her main source of news and they'd write up a big story about, say, how rural French voters are caught between the economic impacts of climate change and the economic impacts of Macron's climate policies and how the far-left and far-right try to exploit that tension. The NY Times would write similar story, but then go off on a tangent about colonialism and some nonsensical racial argument that might obliquity apply to Paris, but has not the slightest thing to do with French farmers.
At a certain point I start mistrusting all of their reporting; if they are making ham-handed arguments about equity and racism that have no basis in reality, how can I trust them to inform me about other topics without fudging or omitting details? This same phenomenon plays out in my professional life; our trade magazine suddenly started writing the same old stories about stressed-out grad students and postdocs, but with the LGBTQ, Black and Latinx sprinkled throughout.
For some, it is easier to recognize this coming from the other side, e.g., how MAGA defenders effortlessly reverse their positions (on, say, mishandling classified information) or find some nefarious connection between CRT and the price of cat food. At a certain point you just cannot take people seriously when they foreground their hobbyhorses and try to reverse-engineer coherent explanations based on moral clarity or whatever.
Great comment
Right, and the fact that it rationalizes whatever position they were presumably going to take anyway devalues the overall concern. There clearly are racial and social disparities ... but how can you cogently address them if they are overlaid on every other policy issue.
In reality, a lot of liberals had an emotional reaction to Trump’s election and started lashing out. Much of our conversation about this in recent years hasn’t been about helping black people as much as it has been about calling people names and pointing fingers. I think it’s fair to say that this hasn’t been good for race relations, or material gains for much of anyone. This is at least what I’ve observed at the ground level.
Among my social circle, basically educated liberals, trump election was a true freak out moment, people trying to figure out how this could possibly have happened, and deciding wow I guess half the country actually is super racist. I think it is a genuinely held view (not just lashing out) that everyone who voted trump and maybe by extension those who are put off by really liberal ways of talking about things either is super racist or doesn’t understand what they’re doing. We had friends we knew voted for trump and we had a lot of conversations about how they clearly were just making an honest mistake or whatever or were just dumb. Told my wife I think it is important NOT to try to make too much sense of the political situation since it seems to make us look down on people who don’t deserve that.
It feels like a lot of this weirdness comes from the fact that for most Black people, material issues are going to be most salient/most important, but for college educated Black people, especially writers and activists, the salience of post-material issues (which don't get me wrong, are still really bad!) is increased. And this is the subset white liberals (like me!) disproportionately have contact with!
It creates some peculiar argument structures, where the material issues are cited to give moral justification to action on post-material issues.
The description of Repressers included the line: "They acknowledge the country’s history of racism as well as our huge racial disparities in outcomes, but they maintain that this is just an odd coincidence." The second part of that does not ring true to me. Outcomes are often different for different groups, and the mainstream "Represser" view is simply that this is not by itself evidence of racial animus. Nobody is arguing that the reason that Asian or Jewish Americans excel in many areas is either a coincidence or the result of some kind of anti-wasp systemic inequities.
The supposed coincidence is the apartheid system applied to Black people until the 60s, and the worse outcomes for Black people today.
Right. The mainstream view here isn't that historical circumstances don't exist or have impacts ... just how much determinism is involved. A common thing I've heard is something like "Well, my great-grandparents were dirt-poor Irish(or insert of group here) immigrants and face a bunch of still discrimination, it took a lot of hard work and multiple generations to get where we are today. Nothing is stopping black families from doing the same (today) even if there were real obstacles facing their grandparents."
I find that view a bit naive, but not incoherent, and not totally wrong. I think the misreading of it is the assumption, "Nothing is stopping black families from doing the same" is a bullshit, willful, misstatement rather than a comparison.