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.
Bright's paper states that these general archetypes are not exclusive, and that people can fall outside of them. He gives the example of explicit white nationalists, but perhaps another example of a group who would outside of these archetype are people who believe that these differences are all or largely genetically-determined (which I assume is what you're driving at, apologies if I've misunderstood).
I'm not driving at anything. I just objected to the idea that a large share of the population believes in an "odd coincidence" as the explanation for these discrepancies in outcomes.
Lots of people have lots of theories for why Ruby Bridges might have fewer assets today than the people who protested against her attending their school.
Per Matt's summary of Bright, "[Repressers] 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."
Is there *anyone* who would describe racial disparities in outcomes as "just an odd coincidence"? It seems intellectually dishonest to claim so. I personally strongly suspect most "Represessers" view present racial disparities in outcomes as largely or even mostly the consequence of past racial discrimination, they just think removal of active repression is sufficient and that trying to implement efforts to fix past injustices -- especially when we're talking about multi-generational time gaps -- will just create new ones. It's why I would, for example, support some sort of reparations program for people denied loans under redlining programs (if they are still alive) or their first generation heirs (if the original borrowers are deceased), but would oppose reparations for slavery.
Yes, Repressers don't "maintain that this [disparities in outcomes] is just an odd coincidence," they would probably say that it's partly the aftereffects of past discrimination and partly (although they would never say it out loud in company) the effects of culture.
I’ll have to read Bright’s piece. On the whole, I agree—the entire culture war and anti-racism debate is largely an intra-white phenomenon. One thing I think might be missed (or maybe it’s in the full paper, I don’t know) is that both Repenters and Repressers are fixated on whether current-day, individual racist attitudes are to blame for modern disparities. I think it’s a bit uncharitable to say that Repressers shrug and say “disparities must be a coincidence!,” but their biggest sticking point is the suggestion that their attitudes are to blame. Meanwhile Repenters find fault in their own unconscious attitudes even when it’s absurd, and interpret negative Represser attitudes toward them as vile racism (even though it’s intra-white). To your point, subtle (or sometimes egregious!) individual biases in favor of whites over blacks definitely still exist and have impact, but to what extent to they explain the racial disparities we see, compared to parental wealth or educational attainment, cultural biases, political partisanship, etc etc etc? Bringing up racial disparities and then failing to grapple with the rest of the potential contributing factors leaves the, for Repenters, satisfying suggestion that it’s the vile racist attitudes of Repressers (and subtle unconscious bias of the Repenters) to blame; Repenters are sick of being called racists so they automatically oppose whatever is being suggested.
Also, as a recovering Repenter (and aiming-to-be non-aligner), I find black “Represser” voices like Glenn Lowery, Coleman Hughes, etc voices to help educate me about the wide diversity of perspectives among black Americans, after decades of buying into the claims that some people made that they spoke on behalf of “the community“- suggesting that all black Americans (or at least, the ones that counted) all held the same views.
"subtle (or sometimes egregious!) individual biases in favor of whites over blacks definitely still exist and have impact"
Am I crazy to think or say that the sum total of such anti-black biases is not so clearly larger than the sum total of pro-black biases that now exist? I'm less interested in trying to total them up as if it was a math problem, or even coming to some sort of subjective poll question conclusion like "do whites or blacks have more advantage today" because I think that's oversimplified.
It seems like the closer you get to progressive, left-wing spaces, like academia, college admissions, journalism, big city theatre, areas of politics, etc... the more advantages accrue to being a Black individual. I've mostly operated in those spaces though my adult life, so that seems clear to me. How much disadvantage there is to being Black (and how much is the fault of individual white people) in less-left spaces is much less clear to me. But again, my point is to say that it's probably more complex than one person always has it easier.
Just as one semi-random example, I'm not sure there's any advantage to being Black if you're trying to have a career in professional sports. Or there might be a slight positive bias in sports that are already dominated by Black athletes like basketball and football, due to simple, basic, lizard-brain human bias. But I watch Nascar, and maybe 20 years ago it was a disadvantage (wasn't watching then) but I'm quite sure there's at least some little advantage to being Black in that sport today.
I think it’s fair to ask and, as you suggest, a fool’s errand to try to quantify. It’s clear that anti-black bias is considered taboo among most Americans (even repressers, they’re just skeptical that it’s still common), whereas explicit anti-white or pro-black bias is considered also bad/taboo among Repressers but an actual force for good to Repenters. Strange times.
As an example, why are there so few Black coaches in the NFL? If there is an advantage to being Black in sports, why don't we have rough parity in statistics between Black players and Black coaches?
Well I only had in my head playing in the NFL, which is a far greater number of people. My larger point is it can be an advantage in some situations (like perhaps talent scouts give subconscious bonus points to Black Wide Receivers or Cornerbacks? ) and a disadvantage in others (maybe there's negative bias against Black Coaches or Quarterbacks or Kickers?).
I don't know that much about the NFL, tbh, it was just an illustrative example, so maybe you can tell me.
When I googled "How many NFL Coaches are former NFL players?" It says only 25%. So presumably coaches are drawn from the pool of college players which may be far much less than 70%. But otherwise, I don't know? Interest level? Racism? Not everey disparity is racism, otherwise you'd have to argue that we have a pro-Indian American racist system for selecting doctors.
I brought it up because it was a specific example you used, and it sounded wrong to me. I haven't done the full in-depth research to understand the source of the disparity. It is recognized in the NFL as a problem, and why they have the Rooney rule. There have definitely been racist owners in the NFL, but I don't know how that affects the current state. It sounds like you have no data to base your assertions on.
"It sounds like you have no data to base your assertions on."
That's why I'm not making specific assertions. I'm only claiming that there are probably areas in sports where all-else-equal, having a darker skin color could be a positive. It's not really a radical statement or anything.
But since you mention it, I can specifically back it up for Nascar, because, as just one example, when Michael Jordan hired Bubba Wallace as his team's first driver, he literally said he chose him because he was Black. If you're one of the rare people who follow that sport, it's pretty obvious that Bubba gets other legs up because of his race. His driving record is mediocre at best for the top levels of the sport, and yet he is extremely secure in terms of corporate sponsorship and more often than not he's one of the 3 or 4 drivers Nascar uses in its most high profile ad campaigns (the others being former or current champions).
Note I don't begrudge Nascar or Bubba Wallace for this. Nascar is ultimately responding to some combination of sponsor and fan pressure, and I wouldn't do any different if I was them. There's plenty of forms of privilege within sports (especially Nascar) as in life, anyways, and I don't fault Bubba for capitalizing on some privilege at this moment just like I don't fault other drivers for having rich parents or whatever else gives them a leg up.
But it's a real example of privilege running the opposite direction from what people usually imagine.
Why do you think that ~70% of the players are black when they make up less than ~15% of the population? Coaches being ~10% black seems more accurate...?
Coaches are drawn directly from the player population. Players have been majority Black for a pretty long time. What do you think is going on there? It certainly doesn't look to me like an advantage for being Black.
Coaches have some advantage from having been a player, but they are very different skills so there is no need for them to have been a player. Are most coaches in other sports drawn from former professional players?
In terms of why the % are so different from population levels - I would speculate that there are significant advantages in the US to being black in lower levels of basketball that feed into the NBA - specifically in the AAU and such. Both in terms of there being some hazing happening, but mostly because whites are very unused to being a minority in the US and its hard in those kind of spaces. No idea if this is correct, but there might also be some genetic component to it. Basketball defense likes height, but loves wingspan. Many of the best basketball players are not just tall, they have extraordinary wingspan. e.g. Kawhi Leonard is 6'7" with a 7'3" wingspan.
I said it's possible but I don't claim to be sure. I read once in a Malcolm Gladwell book that some older studies showed pro-White / anti-Black bias for the QB position and the reverse for CB and Safety. I don't know how good those studies are but they seem possible.
I'm happy to talk about the coaching but it's not some refutation of my point or reasoning if I tell you I simply meant players.
Watching the current slow implosion of rural (white) areas has always led me to the conclusion, which I think the data supports, that basically the entire disparity between white and black economic outcomes is down to disinvestment, first in the black-majority regions of the South after 1876 handed the whole place over to the Redeemers and then in black-plurality urban areas in the north after WWII kicked off suburbanization.
In which case our current diversion into woke-v-anti-woke bickering, while a wonderful source of entertainment for many and livelihood for a few, is the complete opposite of what needs to be done to fix the fucking problem.
The problem with the transition from police stops to traffic cameras - at least in DC - is that people who want to can just ignore them, don't pay tickets, and nothing seems to happen. Popville highlights this occasionally- cars with tons of tickets that are still on the road. The other problem is that they sometimes are broken, like there's a specific road up in NW where the camera will always say you didn't stop at the stop sign. There are also a whole range of dangerous driving behaviors that there aren't cameras for, so without police stops they're basically optional to follow. Like, you can just hang out in the bike lane in your car, forcing bikers to go into traffic, and no one is going to ticket you basically ever.
So if you're trying to be law abiding, the price of that potentially went up for you because of broken cameras, and meanwhile the road is less safe, particularly for bikers and pedestrians, because people who are not trying to be law abiding are speeding like crazy and ignoring other traffic laws and they're not going to be stopped for it. It's not a good setup.
The problem for me, though I support the cameras but also support that the fine should be sort of small, is that there are really aggressive drivers. I guess they are disproportionately speeding and running lights, but there is some supper bad behavior going on in the highway, and I’d like there to be some way to change that. The way some folks ride others bumpers to get them to move out of the way. Sometimes I see someone weave in a literally insane pattern and then just take the next exit all the way in the right lane. So they were just weaving for sport because it is fun! Let’s say hypothetically that person does not run red lights what do we do? I realize I am the only one who worries about this but still. I am prone to annoy people on the road bc I keep kind of a good distance from car in front during rush hour. This provokes some crazy action behind me sometimes.
No, people tend to universally hate bad, aggressive drivers. It isn't just you! Even the bad-drivers hate OTHER bad-drivers! And there are enough differing opinions on what makes bad driving that everyone can be mad and near everyone else. One thing that really irks me - passing on the right somehow became normal in the past few years.
I have no clue how you solve it though. Marginal increases in enforcement (say doubling the number of highway patrol officers) probably wouldn't make a dent. Maybe self-driving cars will address it in a few decades. Another thing might be safe-driving discounts for insurance from monitoring apps/devices, but I don't think the carrot is sufficient and there are crazy number of uninsured drivers out there (another enforcement problem).
-A traffic stop is more unpleasant than a ticket in the mail which you're going to ignore.
-It's especially unpleasant if you're committing other illegal activity, like carrying an unregistered gun, or if you have an outstanding warrant.
-There are therefore people you dissuade from illegal driving behaviors via police stops that you don't dissuade via traffic cameras, and those are a disproportionate number of the people you really want to dissuade.
-There are whole sets of illegal driving behaviors that if you outsource your enforcement to cameras you're never going to enforce
-As evidenced by this camera which was ticketing everyone for months - there was actually a sign a neighbor put up warning people about it - these things can just be broken without any oversight for huge stretches of time in a way that you'd have to have a whole group of police officers batting 0% on ticket correctness to have the same effect as..
If you have some degree of trust in the police force as civil servants in your community and not an occupying army, you may also have a reasonable reason to dispute the ticket.
I once got a speeding ticket in Nebraska when I was trying to beat an oncoming ice storm to some form of shelter for the night. I thought it was a reasonable excuse. I didn't get out of the ticket (but I sincerely think I should have). Another time I got stopped for "veering out of my lane" in rush hour Oklahoma City. I don't think I was doing that and I somewhat suspect it was a pretext for stopping my car to look it over for drugs as I was moving cross country. That guy let me go, which I also think was reasonable.
Interestingly, both of these great plains area cops were Black.
I don't know. But I don't think that's really the level at which most people are engaging with this or any issue. The streets are clearly more dangerous - traffic fatalities are up. It seems like there's a connection with police making fewer stops. I haven't read the definitive paper on this.
FWIW, traffic fatalities were up 15% in large and medium sized metros from 2019 to 2020, but only 5% in suburbs, rural areas and small metros. The rise clearly started in June of 2020, which leads me to associate it with a pullback in enforcement following George Floyd, although the lockdown situation was evolving quickly at that time, too.
I got that data from the CDC's Wonder Underlying Cause of Death database, which is free to use online and really useful for gathering data.
Yeah, I'm broadly familiar with that argument, although I wasn't aware that there was the split there - that's interesting. The degree to which this is a national issue probably undermines the "it's the traffic cameras" argument, and I acknowledge that. But it feels like DC is able to get the revenue from people who pay their tickets without providing the public safety, and that's frustrating. Even if in the absence of traffic cameras, they might not be enforcing traffic laws regardless.
What bothers me most about viewing everything with a racial lens, it is that it presumes that everybody sees themselves, first and foremost, as a member of their racial group, and is concerned about the group over the individual.
In reality, that way of thinking doesn't really pass the smell test. Everybody wants to be rich, but a poor white person gains nothing from knowing that they share the skin color of most rich people, nor does a poor black person who didn't go to college gain anything from the cancelling of student debt, simply because most of the cancelled debt would go to other black people.
Now, of course, racism does still exist, and people being intentionally held back because of their race should not be tolerated, but using affirmative action to "compensate" for such racial incidents doesn't work because a harm to person A doesn't get erased by a benefit to person B, just because A and B share a common skin color, even if aggregate statistics might seem to suggest so.
There is a satirical Twitter account called "Titania McGrath," an ultra-woke white woman (in reality a male comedian). "Titania" regularly tweets about how something innocuous is racist:
-"Pumpkin spice lattes are racist"
-"Jogging is racist"
-"Chess is racist"
-"Bird names are racist"
etc.
This mimics what a lot of earnest anti-racist activists do, and the problem with that is, when everything is racist, nothing is. Progressive activists have painted themselves into a corner, where racism is simultaneously this horrific, repulsive evil and something that white people do constantly without realizing it. Did you order a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks? Racist!!!
And, of course, this is completely unhelpful for actual poor Black people.
The "psychodramatic" view you criticize can, I think, be characterized as a form of accelerationism: If calling attention to racial disparities causes white people to act more openly racist, then that is a *positive good* because it just exposes what white people are really like, and demonstrates that this problem is so severe that it can only be combatted through revolutionary actions. Conversely, simply tricking whites into acting less racist by depriving them of information and thus provoking them less only puts a band-aid on the problem and allows the root injustice to perpetuate itself indefinitely.
Like all other forms of accelerationism, this is a viewpoint that can only be held by people who are either privileged dilettantes or rage addicts. Radical ideology as a consumption good, as Noah Smith would put it. But even if you convinced them that factually they are only causing vulnerable people to get hurt, that wouldn't necessarily make them stop.
It's weird to me because internationally racial attitudes are often worse. Many of the people we welcome here in a cosmopolitan attitude are more on average more racist. My boss is African, hates the racism here but says the ethnic issues are worse where he was born.
I would argue both that Americans are more racist than they let on, but at a very typical human level. I think we can discuss racial bias and raise awareness without without the white specific framing. I think "rational racism" needs to be confronted; when you interact with a black stranger there are a whole list of things which are more likely to be true based on stats. Black men spend disproportionally more on status indicators (cars and clothing) to offset the low income stereotype. This sort of thing is both rational, self perpetuating and fundamentally evil/racist/classist when acted upon. I feel it's more compelling to understand the logics of racism and rebut them then to burn strawmen
Totally agree. If you spend time in other parts of the world you'll quickly find that the US is one of the most racially egalitarian places on the planet - despite our history and continuing issues and disparities.
It's a reason people want to come here and sometime die trying.
Knew a Swedish person with an adopted African brother raised in Sweden, so he spoke perfect Swedish. I was told her brother basically couldn't get into a nightclub in Sweden to save his life when they were growing up. Maybe it has changed now.
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.
Bright's paper states that these general archetypes are not exclusive, and that people can fall outside of them. He gives the example of explicit white nationalists, but perhaps another example of a group who would outside of these archetype are people who believe that these differences are all or largely genetically-determined (which I assume is what you're driving at, apologies if I've misunderstood).
I'm not driving at anything. I just objected to the idea that a large share of the population believes in an "odd coincidence" as the explanation for these discrepancies in outcomes.
Lots of people have lots of theories for why Ruby Bridges might have fewer assets today than the people who protested against her attending their school.
This stylization "(Black and white)" is the Latinx of people who complain about Latinx.
Per Matt's summary of Bright, "[Repressers] 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."
Is there *anyone* who would describe racial disparities in outcomes as "just an odd coincidence"? It seems intellectually dishonest to claim so. I personally strongly suspect most "Represessers" view present racial disparities in outcomes as largely or even mostly the consequence of past racial discrimination, they just think removal of active repression is sufficient and that trying to implement efforts to fix past injustices -- especially when we're talking about multi-generational time gaps -- will just create new ones. It's why I would, for example, support some sort of reparations program for people denied loans under redlining programs (if they are still alive) or their first generation heirs (if the original borrowers are deceased), but would oppose reparations for slavery.
Yes, Repressers don't "maintain that this [disparities in outcomes] is just an odd coincidence," they would probably say that it's partly the aftereffects of past discrimination and partly (although they would never say it out loud in company) the effects of culture.
I’ll have to read Bright’s piece. On the whole, I agree—the entire culture war and anti-racism debate is largely an intra-white phenomenon. One thing I think might be missed (or maybe it’s in the full paper, I don’t know) is that both Repenters and Repressers are fixated on whether current-day, individual racist attitudes are to blame for modern disparities. I think it’s a bit uncharitable to say that Repressers shrug and say “disparities must be a coincidence!,” but their biggest sticking point is the suggestion that their attitudes are to blame. Meanwhile Repenters find fault in their own unconscious attitudes even when it’s absurd, and interpret negative Represser attitudes toward them as vile racism (even though it’s intra-white). To your point, subtle (or sometimes egregious!) individual biases in favor of whites over blacks definitely still exist and have impact, but to what extent to they explain the racial disparities we see, compared to parental wealth or educational attainment, cultural biases, political partisanship, etc etc etc? Bringing up racial disparities and then failing to grapple with the rest of the potential contributing factors leaves the, for Repenters, satisfying suggestion that it’s the vile racist attitudes of Repressers (and subtle unconscious bias of the Repenters) to blame; Repenters are sick of being called racists so they automatically oppose whatever is being suggested.
Also, as a recovering Repenter (and aiming-to-be non-aligner), I find black “Represser” voices like Glenn Lowery, Coleman Hughes, etc voices to help educate me about the wide diversity of perspectives among black Americans, after decades of buying into the claims that some people made that they spoke on behalf of “the community“- suggesting that all black Americans (or at least, the ones that counted) all held the same views.
"subtle (or sometimes egregious!) individual biases in favor of whites over blacks definitely still exist and have impact"
Am I crazy to think or say that the sum total of such anti-black biases is not so clearly larger than the sum total of pro-black biases that now exist? I'm less interested in trying to total them up as if it was a math problem, or even coming to some sort of subjective poll question conclusion like "do whites or blacks have more advantage today" because I think that's oversimplified.
It seems like the closer you get to progressive, left-wing spaces, like academia, college admissions, journalism, big city theatre, areas of politics, etc... the more advantages accrue to being a Black individual. I've mostly operated in those spaces though my adult life, so that seems clear to me. How much disadvantage there is to being Black (and how much is the fault of individual white people) in less-left spaces is much less clear to me. But again, my point is to say that it's probably more complex than one person always has it easier.
Just as one semi-random example, I'm not sure there's any advantage to being Black if you're trying to have a career in professional sports. Or there might be a slight positive bias in sports that are already dominated by Black athletes like basketball and football, due to simple, basic, lizard-brain human bias. But I watch Nascar, and maybe 20 years ago it was a disadvantage (wasn't watching then) but I'm quite sure there's at least some little advantage to being Black in that sport today.
I think it’s fair to ask and, as you suggest, a fool’s errand to try to quantify. It’s clear that anti-black bias is considered taboo among most Americans (even repressers, they’re just skeptical that it’s still common), whereas explicit anti-white or pro-black bias is considered also bad/taboo among Repressers but an actual force for good to Repenters. Strange times.
As an example, why are there so few Black coaches in the NFL? If there is an advantage to being Black in sports, why don't we have rough parity in statistics between Black players and Black coaches?
Well I only had in my head playing in the NFL, which is a far greater number of people. My larger point is it can be an advantage in some situations (like perhaps talent scouts give subconscious bonus points to Black Wide Receivers or Cornerbacks? ) and a disadvantage in others (maybe there's negative bias against Black Coaches or Quarterbacks or Kickers?).
I don't know that much about the NFL, tbh, it was just an illustrative example, so maybe you can tell me.
When I googled "How many NFL Coaches are former NFL players?" It says only 25%. So presumably coaches are drawn from the pool of college players which may be far much less than 70%. But otherwise, I don't know? Interest level? Racism? Not everey disparity is racism, otherwise you'd have to argue that we have a pro-Indian American racist system for selecting doctors.
I brought it up because it was a specific example you used, and it sounded wrong to me. I haven't done the full in-depth research to understand the source of the disparity. It is recognized in the NFL as a problem, and why they have the Rooney rule. There have definitely been racist owners in the NFL, but I don't know how that affects the current state. It sounds like you have no data to base your assertions on.
"It sounds like you have no data to base your assertions on."
That's why I'm not making specific assertions. I'm only claiming that there are probably areas in sports where all-else-equal, having a darker skin color could be a positive. It's not really a radical statement or anything.
But since you mention it, I can specifically back it up for Nascar, because, as just one example, when Michael Jordan hired Bubba Wallace as his team's first driver, he literally said he chose him because he was Black. If you're one of the rare people who follow that sport, it's pretty obvious that Bubba gets other legs up because of his race. His driving record is mediocre at best for the top levels of the sport, and yet he is extremely secure in terms of corporate sponsorship and more often than not he's one of the 3 or 4 drivers Nascar uses in its most high profile ad campaigns (the others being former or current champions).
Note I don't begrudge Nascar or Bubba Wallace for this. Nascar is ultimately responding to some combination of sponsor and fan pressure, and I wouldn't do any different if I was them. There's plenty of forms of privilege within sports (especially Nascar) as in life, anyways, and I don't fault Bubba for capitalizing on some privilege at this moment just like I don't fault other drivers for having rich parents or whatever else gives them a leg up.
But it's a real example of privilege running the opposite direction from what people usually imagine.
So, 10% of coaches are Black and 70% of players. That seems to argue against your claims of advantage.
Why do you think that ~70% of the players are black when they make up less than ~15% of the population? Coaches being ~10% black seems more accurate...?
Coaches are drawn directly from the player population. Players have been majority Black for a pretty long time. What do you think is going on there? It certainly doesn't look to me like an advantage for being Black.
Coaches have some advantage from having been a player, but they are very different skills so there is no need for them to have been a player. Are most coaches in other sports drawn from former professional players?
In terms of why the % are so different from population levels - I would speculate that there are significant advantages in the US to being black in lower levels of basketball that feed into the NBA - specifically in the AAU and such. Both in terms of there being some hazing happening, but mostly because whites are very unused to being a minority in the US and its hard in those kind of spaces. No idea if this is correct, but there might also be some genetic component to it. Basketball defense likes height, but loves wingspan. Many of the best basketball players are not just tall, they have extraordinary wingspan. e.g. Kawhi Leonard is 6'7" with a 7'3" wingspan.
He said he did not think there was an advantage to being black in sports.
He said there was an advantage to being Black in football. For coaches, who are typically drawn directly from players, that appears to not be true.
I said it's possible but I don't claim to be sure. I read once in a Malcolm Gladwell book that some older studies showed pro-White / anti-Black bias for the QB position and the reverse for CB and Safety. I don't know how good those studies are but they seem possible.
I'm happy to talk about the coaching but it's not some refutation of my point or reasoning if I tell you I simply meant players.
Watching the current slow implosion of rural (white) areas has always led me to the conclusion, which I think the data supports, that basically the entire disparity between white and black economic outcomes is down to disinvestment, first in the black-majority regions of the South after 1876 handed the whole place over to the Redeemers and then in black-plurality urban areas in the north after WWII kicked off suburbanization.
In which case our current diversion into woke-v-anti-woke bickering, while a wonderful source of entertainment for many and livelihood for a few, is the complete opposite of what needs to be done to fix the fucking problem.
The problem with the transition from police stops to traffic cameras - at least in DC - is that people who want to can just ignore them, don't pay tickets, and nothing seems to happen. Popville highlights this occasionally- cars with tons of tickets that are still on the road. The other problem is that they sometimes are broken, like there's a specific road up in NW where the camera will always say you didn't stop at the stop sign. There are also a whole range of dangerous driving behaviors that there aren't cameras for, so without police stops they're basically optional to follow. Like, you can just hang out in the bike lane in your car, forcing bikers to go into traffic, and no one is going to ticket you basically ever.
So if you're trying to be law abiding, the price of that potentially went up for you because of broken cameras, and meanwhile the road is less safe, particularly for bikers and pedestrians, because people who are not trying to be law abiding are speeding like crazy and ignoring other traffic laws and they're not going to be stopped for it. It's not a good setup.
Edit: Also, apparently Maryland drivers really are the biggest problem: https://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/transportation/drivers-owe-dc-nearly-half-a-billion-bucks-in-unpaid-tickets/2842158/
I agree that non-enforcement is a big problem
The problem for me, though I support the cameras but also support that the fine should be sort of small, is that there are really aggressive drivers. I guess they are disproportionately speeding and running lights, but there is some supper bad behavior going on in the highway, and I’d like there to be some way to change that. The way some folks ride others bumpers to get them to move out of the way. Sometimes I see someone weave in a literally insane pattern and then just take the next exit all the way in the right lane. So they were just weaving for sport because it is fun! Let’s say hypothetically that person does not run red lights what do we do? I realize I am the only one who worries about this but still. I am prone to annoy people on the road bc I keep kind of a good distance from car in front during rush hour. This provokes some crazy action behind me sometimes.
No, people tend to universally hate bad, aggressive drivers. It isn't just you! Even the bad-drivers hate OTHER bad-drivers! And there are enough differing opinions on what makes bad driving that everyone can be mad and near everyone else. One thing that really irks me - passing on the right somehow became normal in the past few years.
I have no clue how you solve it though. Marginal increases in enforcement (say doubling the number of highway patrol officers) probably wouldn't make a dent. Maybe self-driving cars will address it in a few decades. Another thing might be safe-driving discounts for insurance from monitoring apps/devices, but I don't think the carrot is sufficient and there are crazy number of uninsured drivers out there (another enforcement problem).
Would that I had a hundred upvotes to give for this comment.
Is there any reason that these problems are worse with traffic cameras than with police stops?
-A traffic stop is more unpleasant than a ticket in the mail which you're going to ignore.
-It's especially unpleasant if you're committing other illegal activity, like carrying an unregistered gun, or if you have an outstanding warrant.
-There are therefore people you dissuade from illegal driving behaviors via police stops that you don't dissuade via traffic cameras, and those are a disproportionate number of the people you really want to dissuade.
-There are whole sets of illegal driving behaviors that if you outsource your enforcement to cameras you're never going to enforce
-As evidenced by this camera which was ticketing everyone for months - there was actually a sign a neighbor put up warning people about it - these things can just be broken without any oversight for huge stretches of time in a way that you'd have to have a whole group of police officers batting 0% on ticket correctness to have the same effect as..
If you have some degree of trust in the police force as civil servants in your community and not an occupying army, you may also have a reasonable reason to dispute the ticket.
I once got a speeding ticket in Nebraska when I was trying to beat an oncoming ice storm to some form of shelter for the night. I thought it was a reasonable excuse. I didn't get out of the ticket (but I sincerely think I should have). Another time I got stopped for "veering out of my lane" in rush hour Oklahoma City. I don't think I was doing that and I somewhat suspect it was a pretext for stopping my car to look it over for drugs as I was moving cross country. That guy let me go, which I also think was reasonable.
Interestingly, both of these great plains area cops were Black.
Have the traffic camera has an affect on reducing traffic fatalities and traffic accidents?
I don't know. But I don't think that's really the level at which most people are engaging with this or any issue. The streets are clearly more dangerous - traffic fatalities are up. It seems like there's a connection with police making fewer stops. I haven't read the definitive paper on this.
FWIW, traffic fatalities were up 15% in large and medium sized metros from 2019 to 2020, but only 5% in suburbs, rural areas and small metros. The rise clearly started in June of 2020, which leads me to associate it with a pullback in enforcement following George Floyd, although the lockdown situation was evolving quickly at that time, too.
I got that data from the CDC's Wonder Underlying Cause of Death database, which is free to use online and really useful for gathering data.
Yeah, I'm broadly familiar with that argument, although I wasn't aware that there was the split there - that's interesting. The degree to which this is a national issue probably undermines the "it's the traffic cameras" argument, and I acknowledge that. But it feels like DC is able to get the revenue from people who pay their tickets without providing the public safety, and that's frustrating. Even if in the absence of traffic cameras, they might not be enforcing traffic laws regardless.
Paging Graham to the thread. Not sure if he still stops by, but he has written about this.
What bothers me most about viewing everything with a racial lens, it is that it presumes that everybody sees themselves, first and foremost, as a member of their racial group, and is concerned about the group over the individual.
In reality, that way of thinking doesn't really pass the smell test. Everybody wants to be rich, but a poor white person gains nothing from knowing that they share the skin color of most rich people, nor does a poor black person who didn't go to college gain anything from the cancelling of student debt, simply because most of the cancelled debt would go to other black people.
Now, of course, racism does still exist, and people being intentionally held back because of their race should not be tolerated, but using affirmative action to "compensate" for such racial incidents doesn't work because a harm to person A doesn't get erased by a benefit to person B, just because A and B share a common skin color, even if aggregate statistics might seem to suggest so.
Excellent article, Matt Y.
There is a satirical Twitter account called "Titania McGrath," an ultra-woke white woman (in reality a male comedian). "Titania" regularly tweets about how something innocuous is racist:
-"Pumpkin spice lattes are racist"
-"Jogging is racist"
-"Chess is racist"
-"Bird names are racist"
etc.
This mimics what a lot of earnest anti-racist activists do, and the problem with that is, when everything is racist, nothing is. Progressive activists have painted themselves into a corner, where racism is simultaneously this horrific, repulsive evil and something that white people do constantly without realizing it. Did you order a pumpkin spice latte at Starbucks? Racist!!!
And, of course, this is completely unhelpful for actual poor Black people.
The "psychodramatic" view you criticize can, I think, be characterized as a form of accelerationism: If calling attention to racial disparities causes white people to act more openly racist, then that is a *positive good* because it just exposes what white people are really like, and demonstrates that this problem is so severe that it can only be combatted through revolutionary actions. Conversely, simply tricking whites into acting less racist by depriving them of information and thus provoking them less only puts a band-aid on the problem and allows the root injustice to perpetuate itself indefinitely.
Like all other forms of accelerationism, this is a viewpoint that can only be held by people who are either privileged dilettantes or rage addicts. Radical ideology as a consumption good, as Noah Smith would put it. But even if you convinced them that factually they are only causing vulnerable people to get hurt, that wouldn't necessarily make them stop.
It's weird to me because internationally racial attitudes are often worse. Many of the people we welcome here in a cosmopolitan attitude are more on average more racist. My boss is African, hates the racism here but says the ethnic issues are worse where he was born.
I would argue both that Americans are more racist than they let on, but at a very typical human level. I think we can discuss racial bias and raise awareness without without the white specific framing. I think "rational racism" needs to be confronted; when you interact with a black stranger there are a whole list of things which are more likely to be true based on stats. Black men spend disproportionally more on status indicators (cars and clothing) to offset the low income stereotype. This sort of thing is both rational, self perpetuating and fundamentally evil/racist/classist when acted upon. I feel it's more compelling to understand the logics of racism and rebut them then to burn strawmen
Totally agree. If you spend time in other parts of the world you'll quickly find that the US is one of the most racially egalitarian places on the planet - despite our history and continuing issues and disparities.
It's a reason people want to come here and sometime die trying.
Knew a Swedish person with an adopted African brother raised in Sweden, so he spoke perfect Swedish. I was told her brother basically couldn't get into a nightclub in Sweden to save his life when they were growing up. Maybe it has changed now.