I think Matt misses some of what's going on here, or... doesn't shine a lot on it, at least.
My view is: in the latter half of the 20th Century, there was this concerted, and largely successful, effort to get people to remove ill-intent towards people of other races from their hearts. That is, to stigmatize and reduce racism in the classic sense. To judge each person by their character or so forth. Of course, it was imperfect and incomplete, but I think there was an overwhelming reduction in the number of people between say 1960 and 2000 who believed that a given person was lesser due to their race.
And so in the dawn of the 21st Century, we looked around and saw that, despite this huge reduction in the amount of racism, black and latino people were still poor and disadvantaged in various ways. And then there was this competition to explain this fact, and a few camps emerged:
1. People who thought that everyone was just as racist as ever, but were better at hiding it.
2. People who thought that essentially the 20th Century project had been successful, but there was some societal inertia where it takes time for changes in attitude to translate to material difference, and we should just stay the course.
3. People who thought that racial gaps were a result of genetic intelligence factors that were biological, not a result of social bias.
4. People who thought that there were institutional problems that were able to propagate themselves and continue inequities despite the fact that nobody anymore had any actual racism in their hearts.
And what happened is that people in group 4 found that their ideas -- though well-founded in a lot of ways -- were bloodless and technocratic compared to the ideas of people in groups 1-3, and they just didn't get a lot of attention compared to the straightforward and attention-grabbing claims of the other groups. So they evolved towards a framing of their ideas that would be more provocative, and ended up with "structural racism," getting on the bandwagon that we had established where "racism" is super bad and emotionally charged, and using that as the lede into their technocratic ideas.
And this was successful. But of course the problem is that having done this sort of rhetorical judo, nothing changed on a substantive level. It remains a boring (in both the sense of not interesting, and in the eponymous sense of this blog), bloodless, technocratic problem to filter through the many, many, many layers of institutions and try to find ways in which they reinforce unequal racial outcomes. But people who use the "structural racism" framing then find that it reduces the emotional charge of "racism" if "racism" means "let's change some not-obviously-important details of zoning ordinances in one city after another," or "how should we change how we pay for schools."
So to defend the territory that their movement has claimed, they have to now pour energy into keeping the rhetorical intensity up, to conflate "structural racism" with "racism." Hence Kendi, or the enthusiasm for Kendi.
You're describing the double-bind that activists face all the time. It's hard to generate attention without saying inflammatory, hyperbolic stuff, which also generates a lot of backlash. Feminists tried the same rhetorical judo with "rape culture." It got people talking, but it also alienated a lot of people.
From that essay: "A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics."
Conversely a lot of Kendi's ideas are really unpopular, which makes publicly declaring your support for them a really strong signalling/ingroup behavior.
(Note my assiduous avoidance of the term "virtue signalling.")
Quoting myself: “Democrats of a certain ideological leaning tend to conflate the fact that material conditions for African Americans are still quite poor with the notion that there's been no improvement at all in their standing and our dealings with racial prejudice.
To almost anyone else, this is plainly and obviously untrue, and it sends huge numbers of people into defensive crouches that are made worse when they get called racist for pointing out that this is untrue and have no real way to fend off the accusation.
The problem is that no sooner had the ink dried on the great civil rights bills of the 1960's than US economic policy started undermining the hell out of the working class, which had and has a disproportionately large number of black families.
The aforementioned liberals look at poverty outcomes since them and see society-wide, systemic racism. Conservatives look at genuine improvements in the form of huge declines in racial prejudices and greatly increased minority cultural clout and representation and see deluded leftists looking for equality of outcomes.
People like me look at all of this and see a world in which almost everyone who was working class in 1968 is worse off than back then regardless of race, which has wildly disproportionately impacted black families because that's where the vast majority of them started at the time.
We have systemic racism, biases in policing, education, housing, and healthcare. None of these are the main cause of racial income and wealth gaps today, which can be explained almost entirely by the decline in bargaining power suffered by the lower-middle class relative to their employers, just like the bottom two quintiles of white families.
The policies that would make a dent in inequality overall are mostly the same ones which would disproportionately benefit poor black families.”
Brilliant comment. I think group 4 is right on the merits (I spend a lot of time organizing around zoning reform) but agree they the rhetorical moves you describe do more to confuse than illuminate in terms of building still for systems change. The prevalence of Black Lives Matter signs in decidedly exclusionary neighborhoods is the physical manifestation of the way "racism bad" is resonating more than ever even as the new definition of "racism" fails to catch on.
Appreciate this comment. I would note two things: 1) Many people like myself who are very concerned with structural racism (in the original, more technocratic sense) don’t believe people don’t have racism in their hearts any more. “Structural racism” captures the notion that there are some racial inequities that have resulted from prior, overtly racist policies and that are perpetuated or even exacerbated by facially race-neutral policies. But I still believe that there are many inequities that are the result of 1, or perhaps a complex hybrid of 1 and 4. - eg the way in which anti welfare state policies are infused, with varying levels of explicitness and consciousness, with the politics of racial resentment. 2) Implicit bias is an important part of the discussion with respect to 1 and 4, and the hybrid of 1 and 4.
Certainly I didn't mean that anyone thought that racism (in the classic, what's-in-your-heart sense) had been entirely abolished. I think that there's a core, important argument that says, "Hey, look, EVEN IF racism is in fact abolished in people's hearts, this institution enforces racial inequities if we just follow its rules."
Do you see a middle ground for Group 4? The synthesis of the column and your comment is that a) Group 4 is amping up the rhetoric to get attention by b) the result of that attention is counterproductive.
I'm sure I'll be in the majority of your readers who agree that Kendi's framing is counterproductive on the whole (for example, you and others have the compelling argument that Defund The Police is a bad slogan and a bad strategy, not that I needed much convincing). So I'll poke the bear a little bit and say that where Kendism has been useful, for me, is thinking about suburbia (or exurbia) through a racial lens. If home ownership was a way for the middle class to build wealth in the 20th century, and that access was explicitly denied to Black people, and federal government policies were explicitly designed to support suburban home building, then yes, suburbia exists on a bedrock of racism (no matter how many BLM signs you or your neighbors have on their lawns). You start talking about equitable school funding or raising property taxes and you see how quickly supposedly woke white suburbanites will show up at town halls demanding things stay the way they are.
Definitely this. The thing that has boggled my mind most (and it really shouldn’t) is how white suburbanites were all on board to defund the police and protest prison construction and end entrance exams and advanced placement courses, yet there was NO discussion of overhauling our antiquated system of public school zoning and funding. If we truly have an appetite for radical ideas, why not let any kid enroll at any public school? Of course it would be a logistical nightmare but it’s workable and seems worth discussing, except that it would destroy property value in the highly desirable school zones (plastered with BLM signs).
This is cynical, but the predicate that seems to predict anti-racism among rich white suburbanites, corporations, etc. is "does this require real sacrifice." If the answer is "yes", allies get quiet.
I suspect you hit the nail on the head. I think this is why back in the late 60s and early 70s, you had a situation where a lot of the same people who were probably quite in favor of the Civil Rights Act and protecting the "right to vote" were suddenly very against bussing kids from mostly Black neighborhoods to come to their child's school.
The other factor is anything involving kids more generally just becomes seriously fraught (and that includes housing as this involves what type of kids your child will interact with). One of the easiest ways to "touch a nerve" is hit on an issue that effects education and kids more generally. It's why QANON is so wrapped up in stories about child trafficking. Or maybe more apt to our current debates, it's why Kendi and CRT has become such a flashpoint last 6 months; because it involves school children. Panics over what's happening to our kids are not new for a reason. Katie Couric essentially built an entire career about scaring mothers about the latest new trends with teenagers. There's a reason why it was a running gag on The Simpsons to have Helen Lovejoy wail "Oh please won't someone think of the children".
I think you're remembering the bussing and desegregation fights in Northern cities a bit wrong.
The biggest flash points were not about black students being bussed to white schools. The much larger pushbacks came when school districts forced white kids to be bussed to majority black schools. I remember that pretty well, at least in my area, because my cousins in the city went to middle and high school fairly far from their houses and their parents really were not too happy about it.
This is my understanding as well - not wanting black kids to be bussed into your school seems to be pretty clearly racist (unless I'm missing something), but not wanting your kids (black or white) bussed to another school could easily just be a reasonable preference not to give your kids a long commute.
Alternatively, not wanting your kids to get bused could be because you didn't want them going to a "shitty" school (based on whichever measure of outcomes/safety/whatever you prefer).
And if that school happened to be majority-black then Kendi-ism would call that position racism, while you could also look at it as an entirely rational thing.
You call it cynical, but I call it banal and normal and... just how the world works. I mean, of course everyone likes stuff that's all benefits and no costs. Of course people are more hesitant to do things that have real costs for themselves.
Everything is like that. Everything! It's not hypocrisy, it's completely natural, and indeed good. People SHOULD consider the costs as well as the benefits of any course of action, and there are costs that are too high for any particular benefit.
Now, if we could find some evidence that people are particularly likely to, I don't know, overstate the importance of racism ("It's the most important issue facing America") while at the same time being very conscious of personal inconvenience, over and above the normal banal stuff, okay, maybe that's evidence of something.
Maybe the part I find surprising is that not even POC activists were promoting this idea, or the white Gen Zers who don’t own property and hate their parents.
Christ. That's pretty sad, because what we have here is, in many sectors, overregulation.
To take several examples from my own field:
I can make a very good case that OSHA regulations for construction sites are designed specifically to be un-followable, such that an inspector will always have some means to trip a contractor up. In past eras that led to rampant corruption, now it leads to politicization of permitting, union or anti-union favoritism and overly high compliance costs with few or no safety benefits.
Likewise, there's little wrong with the building inspection regulations in most areas of the US, except that they're poorly enforced because they're underfunded and too wide-ranging, and the punishments for individual malfeasance is too low.
Environmental impact review, in most of the US, is a nightmare. The process could be a third as long, significantly more straightfoward, and a third as expensive and still achieve roughly the same end. The writing of these regulations has long since been captured by the consultants that other engineering consultants hire to navigate... these regulations.
Then moving beyond engineering, we have, just off the top of my head:
- Semi- and non-skilled occupational licensing
- The tax code
- Professional licensure education requirements
- Zoning laws
- Internal construction/renovation permitting
- Made-in-America regulations for one-off public infrastructure projects
I could go on and on.
Half of the country's regulatory regime is predicated on trying to use regulation to achieve outcomes that can only be achieved by public spending, then whining about how much worse outcomes are than when we started.
I think there's just too much distrust of capitalism. The Yglesias theory is that high housing prices and their impact on homelessness is fundamentally a market failure due to over-regulation. When you say it like that, it sounds like it's out of AEI, so the progressive left discounts the policy based on what it rhymes with.
Yes. And they’re stupid to do so. Markets are a mostly effective means of allocating scarce resources; when the problem is one of supply, rather than one of distribution, we should try to let them do their thing.
AEI’s problem is twofold: they use the word “market” as a dog-whistle for “corporate-run kleptocracy” and they expect “markets” to solve all problems including distribution and accessibility ones that can really only be solved with public expenditures.
Hell, half of our stupid housing policy was a case of trying to use regulation in place of spending to fix problems best solved by the latter.
I liked how this one Black woman involved in local politics/non-profits said she was tired of "white-allies" and instead waned "white co-conspirators" because too often the former wouldn't amount to much other than lip service.
I think that was her point. As long as the systems of racism can remain, those who profit off of it staying in place would see dismantling it as negative. It isn't outlandish to say that actual work that tears down racist power structures needs to be done in a 'co-conspiratorial' type of way.
Sadly, it's all too rational. Here in Los Angeles, we passed Measure HHH in 2016, which funded homeless housing with $1.2 billion, by an overwhelming margin (77% "yes"). Unsurprisingly, though, many richer areas in the city were shocked to discover that this might mean homeless housing would be built in *their* neighborhoods. Resistance ensued. (I'm happy to say that my part of west LA actually welcomed a large homeless housing development, which is now under construction: miracles happen.)
Funnily enough once the homeless get housed they aren't homeless any more. Crazy how that works! I guess then they just don't like certain groups of people. Sounds pretty xenophobic to me!
I think this is one of those wishful beliefs that it is the underfunded schools that are holding back students. While I'm willing to listen to the argument that perhaps tip top achievement is being held back by middling schools (though that isn't really shown in some of the anti-specialized school research), I do not think that school underfunding is the reason for the large levels of relative underachievement.
New York City has a different way of funding public schools, with one of the highest per capita expenditures per student in the country, and their educations results are middling as well. And when you look at students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and/or ethnicities in the same schools, broken out, in NYC, you see achievement gaps.
I think the evidence that ceteris paribus more money leads to better learning outcomes is pretty compelling.
It's just that it doesn't matter *that much* in the scheme of things. I guess an analogy I might make is that a BMW M3 really is faster than my Prius, but in real world conditions the differences in car performance are swamped by driver-specific factors (like how aggressive you are) or by external factors (how's the traffic).
Baltimore city's school system has the 3rd highest spending per student, and, uhh, it isn't working. My understanding is that schools and school spending are something of a "force multiplier" wherein if you have the other stuff that matters then schools can accomplish a lot, but if school spending is all you've got then you're basically throwing money down the drain.
Separately there are issues wherein plenty of baltimore city schools either don't have heating or AC. Which raises the question of whether all that money is even being spent in ways that could theoretically be productive...
For sure. And we should probably stop funding schools through local property taxes - that seems like a very straightforward way of entrenching inequality
The San Francisco public school system used to be a complicated lottery. They recently reformed it to be less that. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the new system since we recently moved outside of city limits.
But it really was the case that basically you had "parents who looked up all the schools and found all the good ones and then signed their kids up for all of those," and you had "parents who just signed their kids up for whatever school was closest," and so you did have a lot of self-segregation.
Now, I think it's reasonable to argue that hey, we can lead a horse to water, but we can't make it drink, and we made it possible for parents who do care to, with high probability of success, get their kids into the schools that overperform, and that's something. But I also think it's reasonable to argue that we maybe are subsidizing those who need it less this way.
NYC is trying that. It has issues. One is that parents who have the resources to find out which schools are the best use those resources to do just that. And parents who do not have those resources…do not have those resources.
Yes… I agree, and it would likely get accused of being a “racist system” much like access to COVID vaccines was early on. Still, seems like it would at least give more kids access to higher performing schools even if their parents can’t afford to move, and might lead to more racial and SES integration? But if it’s failing in NYC that’s worth studying for sure. Def not my area of expertise. All in all though, seems like it’s worth more serious consideration than defunding the police!
I think MN tried to go that way, though still with preference for local residents. This says about 10% of kids hop to another school there: https://education.mn.gov/mde/fam/open/
Yeah, an outcome (rather than intent)-based definition of racism is very useful and, I would argue, necessary to addressing many big, entrenched social problems. But, if you’re concerned about outcomes, the logical thing to focus on would be outcomes over intent. Under a rigorous Kendian view, the person who shows up at every city council meeting to lobby for bus rapid transit lanes but also casually uses the phrase “black-on-black crime” is a better foot soldier than the person who is “doing the work” but has concerns about parking if they build the multifamily apartment building at the end of the street.
So it’s frustrating that the aesthetics of Kendi-ism have masked what are very powerful and potentially impactful substantive claims.
I suspect that Kendians would claim the phrase "black-on-black" crime contributes to the creation and popularity of policies that harm black people, that's how you'd put them in the racist bucket. My understanding is that you have to support "anti-racist" policies *and* not use racist/racist-adjacent terminology.
The *best* ally/movement member would be someone who does all the right things and says all the right things. But the thing I find refreshing about the Kendi view is that it tells us to focus on getting people to do the useful things, whether or not they still say or think problematic stuff at times.
The thing is... the popular interpretation of his work seems to be the exact opposite.
I guess I need to go read his book now to figure out just how badly Twitter has flipped his words on their head.
I've seen enough direct quotes to know I'm not going to agree with him on many or most topics, but perhaps some of the worst excesses are not of his own thinking.
I definitely had the same impression until I heard him on Ezra Klein's podcast last week. It's quite possible that Kendi himself, on particular cases, continues to say the bad thing, but when he is talking in the abstract sense, everything he says suggests the interpretation I give. I think it's hard for people to be thoroughgoing consequentialists in the way he says he endorses.
It's hard for people not to be intellectually lazy as hell.
But that's neither here nor there. The direct quotes I've seen lead me to the conclusion that I'm going to disagree with him about almost all of the actual policy recommendations he has. But the framework of "an ally does useful shit and tries not to do useless shit, and if they slip up in language or sensitivity, don't shoot them"... seems reasonable.
Your metaphor seems rather useless. Because what does it mean as a practical matter today? No one is prevented from moving to the suburbs because of their race.
In greatest Slow Borer tradition, I'm going to try to meet those white suburbanites where they are.
One of the complexities of this is that while there's an elite consensus among racial justice advocates about "suburbia was built on racism", there isn't anything like that consensus on what to do about it.
It's really easy to make the case that by fighting gentrification, or insisting on affordable housing mandates, you're fighting on the side of anti-racism -- and there's not really a consistent set of messages saying that "no, this isn't the right way to do it". It'd be much easier to convince these white suburbanites with BLM signs on their lawn if it was easier to point them to BLM leaders arguing for duplexes and ADUs.
I think it's a bad idea to conflate the need for more density in richer areas and racism. This is a classic case where making the class-based argument also reduces racial inequity. More, better, and less expensive housing benefits *everyone* and not just Blacks. But putting it in racial terms both elides the benefits that would go to all people, and, sadly, tends to activate underlying emotions and possibly unconscious stereotypes among homeowners that only serve to heighten their opposition and sense of being beleaguered. Sell it by saying that less expensive housing will help their kids' schoolteachers, or the police and firefighters who protect their neighborhoods instead. Let the racial amelioration happen; don't harp on it.
One reason the version of racism Kendi is trying to sell is unworkable is it treats today's racial categories as unalterable bedrock facts of society from which all other analysis and distribution of resources must flow - permanently and forever - instead of fluid and changing socially constructed ideas, that arose from discredited beliefs that there are meaningful innate difference between groups of people based on their physical appearance.
That idea was flawed at its root, and perpetuating it by making those categories the central basis of your entire social and economic program is not going to lead anywhere good.
They've lasted close to 400 years in America so far, so I think "fluid and changing" is a bit of a stretch, even if they're not permanently unalterable. A lot of conservatives have a totally unearned level of racial optimism that they're eager to get everyone to adopt, one that basically says that we could stop thinking about race as soon as we attain legal equality.
No they haven’t. They’ve changed here, and they’ve changed in all the formerly colonized and slaveholding nations. Many of these definitions have changed wildly in the last century. Some of these definitions have changed wildly in the last 25 years or are currently in flux.
It's just not true that racial or ethnic categories in America have not changed in 400 years. But it isn't a coincidence that the classifications that have been most persistent are the ones that were formally codified in the law for much of that period and used as a basis for determining economic opportunity and legal rights.
On the other hand, who counts as "black" has displayed a fairly high level of stickiness. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are black politicians, despite each having one nonblack parent. Going backwards, you see things like the one-drop rule.
But on the other other hand, there's an uprecedented amount of black-white racial mixing in family formation, between marriages, adoptions, etc. The neighborhood I grew up in was about 99% white when I was a kid and now it's about 10% black. Whenever I'm back there (which is often), about half the black people I see are with their white spouse / bf / gf or their white siblings or parents, or at hanging out with a group of white friends.
That's not how it was 400 or 100 or even 50 years ago. Things are changing and all data as well as my personal experience suggests the change is accelerating.
As one example, pew research shows 5% of blacks married another group in 1980, but in 2015 that number was up to 18%.
And multi-racial babies from 3% in 1980 to 10% in 2013. Elsewhere (I can't find it, but you probably could if you're interested) they have data on how the frequency of white-black babies identifying as multi-racial, and not black alone, is also increasing rapidly
"Black" seems to be a pretty consistent category, and the black experience seems to be pretty unique from other POC groups. The "otherness" of Hispanic people has ebbed and flowed over time, and conservatives' feelings toward Asian and Hispanic people has done the same, but black people have always been seen as "more American" than other groups, they've almost always been the least wealthy of any ethnic group in the US, etc. I would chalk this up to a combination of slavery and most black people not having roots in 19th/20th century immigration, but I'm not black myself, so take that with a wheelbarrow of salt.
To the extent that 'whiteness' means anything, I suspect that in twenty years or fewer, more Latinos will consider themselves 'white' than 'POC.' Possibly the same for East and South Asians.
I think maybe this helps explain how Kendi's views have been so _distorted_.
Like, if you take Kendi's values at face, my rich white affluent suburb needs to dismantle its zoning laws because they're increasing the racial wealth gap. I think you'd find lots of support or "anti-racism" and no one even considering throwing out zoning. I think well-to-do liberals heard what they wanted to hear? (The introspection part, but not the consequentialist action part.)
I think upper class liberals have not been able to grasp the deeply-conflicted feelings about police in the less well-off Black community. The bias the latter face from police is certainly there (see the interesting recent study on how police -- of *all* races* talk to Black motorists) and yet, unlike upper class liberals, Blacks need a level of police protection that they feel, with some reason, that they aren't getting.
So it's simple for these liberals to pretend to a level of solidarity with Blacks that really just isn't there.
I saw that same study on John McWhorter's Substack and I just want to point out a user named JimInNashville did an extremely good job in pointing out the flaws of that study. I was thoroughly convinced that the studies conclusions are not justified from the work they did. Some of the major points I remembered:
1) The tone of the LE officer was rated as 3.7 when speaking to white motorists and 3.5 with black motorists on a 6 point scale (higher is warmer, lower is cooler). While this was judged to be "statistically significant" it's fair to question whether this meaningful in any non-academic sense.
2) No attempt was made to control for the circumstances that led to the interaction. Were the black motorists pulled over in different neighborhoods, for different reasons, at different times of day? It's also worth mentioning that the motorists' audio was also cut out. We are meant to assume that each group of 100 people would have been speaking to the police in roughly equivalent ways or that a police officer's tone should robotically stay the same regardless of the motorists demeanor.
3) They left out any details on how they sampled several hundred police/motorist interactions down to only 100 of cop-black and 100 of cop-white. A reader may assume the sample was random but as it wasn't in the methodology we shouldn't assume.
4) No effort to control for racial/ethnic interactions, as in no work was done to find out whether the results differed when various combos of ethnicities interacted. Only cop and black motorist vs cop and white motorist
5) Finally, these results, from 200 hand-selected traffic stops in one anonymous city, probably shouldn't be used to extrapolate nationwide.
Sorry for the long post. But I feel that these kinds of studies are at the heart of the replicability crisis that we have in social science and medicine. And they are quite dangerous when the media runs with their very weakly supported conclusions. I'd be interested in what a better-designed study had to say about this issue, but this study isn't it.
Those don't necessarily sound like critical flaws in the study, to me.
But it's really worth noting that one study is never conclusive proof of anything, no matter how well-defined the study is. If we get another 50 studies that are comparably well-designed that show evidence in similar directions, that tells us something meaningful. If on the other hand the next 50 studies show a mess of confusing, contradictory results, that shows us something else.
People get too eager to hyper-parse and either discredit or credit one particular study. All studies have flaws.
I hear you but then I still think it's worth saying that we don't really know what the study is concluding, because we don't have 50 studies confirming that police officers speak differently to black people.
but that said - the difference between a "warmness" of 3.7 and 3.5 out of 6 sounds incredibly trivial to me. So even this studies doesn't really move the needle much in proving things one way or the other
Sure, but the police departments are still going to be disproportionately comprised of white men with blue collars. I know in Baltimore city, for instance, plenty of the cops are actually white guys from either the extremely white suburbs or the near bits of "Pennsyltucky". In PG County maryland (which is a pretty Black suburban area near DC) the police department is much whiter than the county, and police leadership is even moreso whiter than the county.
So like, regardless of how unrepresentative the progressive groups might be, it's easy for them to point plenty of fingers at the cops without looking inwards at all.
This seems simple, and hinted at in Matt's subtitle. We just have two different concepts, both are useful, but we shouldn't try to change the definition of an existing concept.
Racism historically has meant intent-based discrimination or bigotry based on race. It's a very useful word. And its also pretty widely understood and can be very powerful.
Trying to now change the definition/usage of the word, given how well understood it is and how powerful it is just looks like it is going to create all softs of unnecessary problems. We saw the same thing happen with the idea from the 80s that "black people can't be racists, because they hold no power". The problem with this statement is that it required a change in what people thought the word racist meant. The introduction of this concept was valid, but now you no longer had a word to describe an equally important concept, which is the traditional definition of racism.
Kendi's outcome based view of race is interesting and useful. But it should be introduced as its own word/concept. We shouldn't replace the definition of an existing word, especially when the existing definition is useful and important.
The result is we'd spend a lot less time arguing about this. The arguments really aren't about the content of what Kendi is discussing, but rather can we juggle these two different definitions/concepts of "racism" in our mind at the same time (about the same word) -- and that just isn't an interesting or useful use of time.
I feel like I've said this in previous posts, but what I find maddening about the "racist means prejudice plus power" thing is that it's an attempt by academic elites to change the common understanding of a word. Yet the cool kids of the 21st century are universally descriptivists rather than prescriptivists: they believe that language means whatever it's used to mean, and calling a certain usage "wrong" is missing the point of language (and in fact may be discriminatory!). It's just on *this one issue* that they try the prescriptivist gambit of saying "this word which nearly everyone understands to mean X actually means Y, and if you think otherwise, you're wrong."
Yeah, I think this is right. It is endlessly confusing to me when people try to redefine a word instead of just finding a new one for whatever concept they are advancing. I don't understand the urge to do that.
I agree that it's stupid but it's pretty obvious to me why people do it: because the original word has a moral value they are trying to piggyback on.
For instance, I could try to convince you that Medicare is bad for budget reasons. It would probably be an uphill battle. But if I say that Medicare is bad because it disproportionately benefits white people (who, after all, live longer) and is therefore racist, you're in a tough position. Either you have to disprove my statistical facts (which will be difficult because I chose this battleground), or you have to say something to the effect of "just because it's racist doesn't mean it's bad" (a bad debate move if ever I saw one).
I think that a generalized version of this criticism is perhaps applicable to a lot of ideas. An idea like Kendi's has a few issues - first is it useful? Can you make sensible decisions or better understand something due to it? I think Matt showed why you cannot here.
Second, are you losing something by conflating your idea? The conflation of hate speech with violence I can understand the intention behind, but also seems to me to cause damage to useful action by being unable to distinguish things properly.
Third do you lose people by hijacking common terms to make your point? I find the formulation of racism = prejudice plus power to be unhelpful here as most people and indeed the dictionary would just go with racism = prejudice based on race and when the above definition is pulled out it feels less like an insight and more like a gotcha. This turns people off immediately. The formulation above is useful to explain why some racism is more damaging than others, and maybe deserves a different name to correctly identify it, but by re-defining an existing term people think they understand you lose a large number of listeners, and so lose the chance to convince people.
This is what I've never understood. Why couldn't anti-racism advocates have simply said "when Black people are racist it rarely does real harm, because due to centuries of being locked out of opportunity they don't have much ability to actually hurt people when they're racist, so 'reverse racism' is not a social issue anywhere near as big as anti-Black racism" instead of dying on the hill that Black people definitionally cannot be racist, except by internalized racism against other Black people? The former thing seems like a claim I – and maybe the majority of Americans – would actually agree with. Who made the decision to go with the word-redefining strategy?
Even your framing is not a claim I’d agree with. Ever looked at statistics for anti-Asian hate crime?
Poor Asian immigrants made the “mistake” of becoming the lower-middle-to-middle-income small business/petit capitalist class in urban areas, and they now take a ton of shit for it in majority black neighborhoods.
I think the right answer here is to not make any noises about “being understanding towards” violent crime of this sort and treat it as seriously as we do any other sort of violence.
There’s no need to play up the prevalence of anti-Asian and anti-Semitic sentiment among African Americans, but let’s not pretend those sentiments never harm anyone just because the community as a whole isn’t powerful,
So, time to share my most controversial opinion. I suspect the absolute lack of any stigma whatsoever within most black communities against holding racist attitudes about white people is a HUGE part of our modern problems. Baldwin stated that anti-black racism hurt whites down to their souls and ripped at the fabric of society; the same could be argued for blacks. It makes it harder to build trust across racial boundaries and lifts psychological stress exponentially. It stigmatizes assimilation in either direction (labeled “appropriation” when white people do it). At the end of the day, racist attitudes don’t necessarily hurt the subject of those attitudes, they can hurt the holder as well. Not to mention the hypocrisy about it harms the antiracist cause and fuels white nationalism.
I mean, I'm white and upper-middle class, so I can more or less afford not to give a damn if someone with whom I interact hates me for it.
One of the reasons I do generally care deeply about racism among black people is because my wife, child, and in-laws are Asian, and I know exactly how prevalent anti-Asian racism is in the black working class.
I never really thought about it through the same framework as "being racist against black people has repeatedly and measurably harmed American white people."
Obviously the harms are different, but I can believe that they're there.
Do you find that to be true, IRL? I've certainly heard Black people express racist attitudes about White people in standup comedy and such, but actual Black people I've known almost never do.
Yes… A significant amount of content floating in the “antiracism” space is virulently anti-white. Stop by The Root sometime, or Google Rachel Cargle or Ally Henny or Ijeoma Oluo or that NYT piece about teaching one’s kids of color not to trust white people. I am white but for my whole adult life, my closest friends were black and I used to agree with all this wholeheartedly. I thought it was “necessary truths.” But I realized some time last year how toxic and counterproductive it all had become (and started a blog). Several of my lifelong college friends literally cut me out of their life when I said “maybe we’re wrong, maybe all white people/white conservatives aren’t racist.” I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that’s universal but it seems widespread especially (ironically) among the most successful/academically elite black americans, and certainly the white antiracist allies.
What’s funny is that Robin DiAngelo makes money off of writing books that take the very weird ways whites attempt to avoid stereotype threat (signal they’re not racist) and flip it around as further proof of their racism. White people get super weird around black people or avoid them all together for fear of doing/saying the wrong thing. It just makes it exponentially harder to form healthy collaborative relationships with all of this psychological jiu jitsu. Again, I’m not all that worried about how this affects white people. As a group, they’re doing fine. It’s minorities who end up suffering the worst impacts.
You're saying that Ijeoma Oluo is virulently anti-white?? She literally opens her book by talking about her white mom's trepidation and missteps around race, and how she has empathy for that and wants to help make the conversation easier and more forgiving!
Ok, “virulent” might be too strong for her. I read SYWTAR but not Mediocre. But can you imagine how people would react to a book titled “mediocre” complaining about how middling POC are after benefiting from affirmative action? Ok, yes, I can imagine it, I’m sure it exists, and I’m sure most people would consider it racist af.
I do agree with Ben Wheeler below that Kendi doesn’t get enough credit for calling this out a little in his book, but it’s also a point he doesn’t bring up himself at all in media.
Well this post was pretty spot on. Quite frankly the only reason I am commenting is because I'm stuck in Brazil sitting around at a power plant waiting for people.
So many discussions these days about what Racism is, but I'd like to see more discussion about what the solutions are.
With the Kendi and CRT crowd, it comes across, like nothing except quotas and reparations are acceptable, but 1. it isn't going to happen and 2. I am really skeptical about whether it would even work.
On cash reparations: By the time enough white people are convinced to support it (if ever), Hispanic voters will be a significant chunk of the voting population, and won't support it.
I myself, as a Rich person hater (rich being anyone that makes 100K more than I do), really support taxing the F out of rich people, and decreasing income inequality that way. And as Matt said, anything that decreases income equality will also decrease race income inequality.
Regardless, I suspect that the issue of racism and race inequalities is something that will be around and debated when my granddaughter is an adult.
Ok, on a personal note. I might of mentioned before, but I grew up in a racially mixed family. My bother is Asian, sister is black, both adopted as babies while we lived in New Zealand. There is only 4-years apart between us four siblings, so we grew up together. I guess as close to colorblind as you could get. I've spoken to my sister and brother about their experiences, and racism didn't play a huge part of their lives. Perhaps it was the unconditional love in our family, but even in the 80's in Los Angeles, our family was a curiosity more than any big deal (I suspect things would of been different in the South or other parts of the US). My sister said that her worst experiences were actually in High School from other black girls, because she was basically was so "white"... she listed to punk rock/ska, so didn't conform to the stereotype of what black women in LA listed to back then. But it wasn't a huge deal.
Later in life, my sister said she did have an experience with getting pulled over twice for no reason. She lived in Oak Park (upscale part of Ventura County).
Anyways, the whole issue is complex. There is literally nowhere in the world that anyone can point to that has solved the issue. I lived in Europe for 12-years, I work in South America regularly, and racial inequality and racism are present in all places.
I'm not a politician, I'm not a boss, so I guess the only thing I can do is not be an asshole, and treat everyone with respect and openness.
On a side note, the closest I have ever seen to a perfect society on this issue is my time in the USAF. Not perfect, but closer than anyplace in the civilian world.
Have a great day.
Also, unlike my usual posts, this was typed on my computer, so feel free to drag me for grammar and spelling mistakes.
Bizarre relationship with Kendi and DiAngelo. Kind of like Marx. A lot of respect. And lot of back and forth. I read them and I think…
“Wow this is a really interesting diagnosis of the problem. I think there’s value in this diagnosis. I absolutely beyond words hate your proposed solution.”
Then I go for a walk in what is… gosh (probably 98%) white/Asian/straight neighborhood and see more BLM signs than Harlem and more rainbow flags than Castro, and think “Ya know maybe Kendi-ism could actually be beneficial here. If these people are going to flaunt awareness they should take ownership of their role in it.”
Then he tweets something expressing skepticism in interracial adoptions. And… loses me once again.
It's fair that it WOULD be valuable to have some of the "woke White" communities thinking more about actual impact, in the way Kendi co-opts the term "racist"...
I watched the same neighbors who were very pro-BLM also rally to direct city resources into our parks & schools, and I remember thinking "guys... c'mon... you realize who is going to get hosed if you lean on the city to help OUR wealthy neighborhood, right?"
At some point many people became convinced that since it is possible to mask discrimination behind facially colorblind policy, the very notion of colorblindness was discriminatory. This is a huge error, I think.
I thought the interview btw Kendi & Ezra was great. I came away thinking Kendi is mostly trying a simple sleight-of-hand to bring back affirmative action under a better branding.
1. Get everyone to define "racist" empirically, as policies that impact POC negatively
2. Get everyone to agree to be "anti-racist", because of course most people dislike racism
3. Per the first definition, anti-racist policies are ones that POSITIVELY impact POC - basically policies that were previously called affirmative action.
I haven't read Kendi's book, but from what I understand one way of putting his point would be that racism is something you do, not something you are. Whenever a person does something that leads to disparate racial outcomes, they are being racist. In his review, Sanneh states it as, "we should stop thinking of 'racist' as a pejorative, and start thinking of it as a simple description."
I think this is actually pretty useful, partly because it cuts against the current idea that a dumb tweet/tiktok/etc. should result in a lost job, rescinded college admission, or social ostracism. Since racism becomes something that anyone is capable of doing, including accidentally, it would seem to call for a measure of grace and humility.
It would also suggest that we stop considering racism the worse characteristic a human being could have. In-group/out-group dynamics are hard-wired into us, so while we should recognize them as destructive and morally wrong, it's a bit perverse to make racism the cardinal sin.
I don't want to minimize the tremendous harm that racist ideology has inflicted, especially on Black Americans, but I really wonder if we've reached a sort of Godwin's Law for racism. You especially saw this after the election of the former guy; there were all these arguments about whether or not they were racist, when to my mind the correct answer is, "Yeah, they're probably racist, but that doesn't invalidate their votes or exclude them from the polity." The whole "deplorables" thing was really counterproductive and only served to entrench everyone firmly in their own corners.
I very much agree with this but per the comment above, it’s very hard to get people to accept this implication of “redefining” racism, because the rhetorical strategy behind redefining it is to associate certain action, policies, etc with the shameful connotation that attaches to the original understanding of racism. So you often have people saying X person did something racist based on the updated understanding of the term but then relying on the moral judgment associated with the original understanding of the term to berate, shame, and ostracize them.
"Yeah, they're probably racist, but that doesn't invalidate their votes or exclude them from the polity."
I think that's right but . . . I heard people making the analogy of, "if you have a group voting on what to have for dinner and three people vote, 'pizza' and two people vote, 'kill and eat you.'" It's good that "pizza" won, but disturbing that those were the options.
The point that the people who you are (correctly) saying are still members of the polity are taking actions which suggest that they don't feel any concern about respecting other people as members of the polity.
The metaphor has problems, I don't mean to put too much weight on it. I'm just saying that, "we should be able to respect each other as members of a diverse liberal society" is a fairly contested idea right now.
I get what you're saying. It's hard to extend grace to the other side when clearly they see political conflict as an existential struggle that has to end in your destruction.
What I would say is that there's one narrative about politics that is the Good Guys have to defeat the Bad Guys, and there's another narrative that says that we all partake of the same fallen human nature, and that it's up to responsible leaders and citizens to overcome those baser impulse and reach a just and durable settlement through some mix of compromise, suasion, and subterfuge.
Sometimes the first narrative is more true and more useful, and sometimes the second one is, and I think the pendulum has swung recently way too far towards the former. I think Kendi shows us a way of understanding racism that could fit more into the second narrative and it's kind of a shame that anti-racism has instead turned into an auto-da-fe. I sometimes suspect Kendi wants to have it both ways, because if racism were understood as a description of the human heart instead of as the vilest ill plaguing modern society there wouldn't be the urgency to create a Dept of Antiracism.
The main problem with the metaphor is that you can kick the pro-cannibalism members of the dinner party out of the group. You can't kick out/lock up/silence 40% of the American population if they don't consider the other 60% to be worthy of membership in the democracy. It's a problem!
"I think this is actually pretty useful, partly because it cuts against the current idea that a dumb tweet/tiktok/etc. should result in a lost job, rescinded college admission, or social ostracism."
Except that it works precisely the opposite way in practice -- intent is treated as irrelevant, only impact matters, and "impact" then is defined by the reaction of the most hypersensitive, bad faith, ignorant listener.
Of all the internal disagreements among Ds, I worry that Kendi's equity-based pro-discrimination ideas have the most potential to split and sink the D party. Everything I know from following politics for a long time tells me that most people will find this unappealing and that opinion could easily crystalize against it. Maybe I'm too old to get it, or maybe it's just a passing fad, but I could see left centering this issue and insisting on it, and the D party splitting after some very bad losses. Ezra asked Kendi about the potential political downside of his agenda, and Kendi said basically you have to try even if things would be worse if you fail. Well, given the direction Rs are going, I just strongly disagree.
Honestly, the idea seems so unpopular that I don't think it'd get that far. After the 2020 primary, the NYC mayoral election, affirmative action losing in CA, the Virginia primaries, etc, it's hard to see this getting off the ground enough to actually split anyone.
I mostly agree with this, and I'm not saying it's likely, but Ds rely heavily on the Black vote, and if we end up with a lot of lefty Black activists insisting that D candidates endorse equity-based discrimination, it's going to be a problem if they don't, and if they do.
I get kind of frustrated by all this drafting over the definitions of words. The normal definition of racism and the concept of disparate outcomes are both important. Why do Kendi and others feel the need to create a new definition of racism rather than introduce a new term?
Because "racist" is a term that creates the visceral emotional reaction that fuels funding for activist organizations. Creating a new technocratic word/phrase, like "disparate impact", isn't politically motivating. Everyone hates racism and doesn't want to be a racist, so you redefine the term to make sure they act on those impulses.
I think what you're missing, Matt, is how much consequence there is to those "surface neutral, disproportionate negative effects on people of color" policies and institutions. That's surprising, because in addition to the Senate, another favorite topic of yours is housing/YIMBYism, which I think is a clear example of the value of using Kendi's definition of racism. The people with one "IN THIS HOUSE: SCIENCE IS REAL, BLACK LIVES MATTER, WE BELIEVE WOMEN etc." sign and one "OPPOSE THE PROPOSED HIGH RISE TOWER" sign are having a racist effect -- and it's valuable and valid to explain that to them.
You keep referring to people being "racists", in Kendi's definition; but in "How to Be an Anti-Racist", Kendi specifically dismisses that type of labeling, and instead emphasizes that racism is something that all of us engage in at times, which describes actions and policies, not people in any static way. He talks about many times in his own life when he took a racist view on something, and emphasizes that we shouldn't argue about who is and isn't "a" racist, and should instead focus on the impact of decisions and policies. Kalefah Sannah's "ban the box" example isn't a gotcha against Kendi's argument -- it's a perfect example of why Kendi's argument is valuable. Kendi wants us to stop fussing defensively about our intentions, to understand that racism is something to plan for and address, not to deny. In that sense, it's very much like the way our society stigmatizes drunk driving, rather than calling someone who drank and drive once "a drunk driver" forever.
I mean, the title of the book is "How to *be* an Anti-Racist." We can all be forgiven for thinking that maybe Kendi does in fact think that people can be summed up as racist or anti-racist.
I don't know if it is so valuable all the time, though. Like in the housing example, here in LA there are groups like the Tenants' Union that are lower-income, significantly POC-represented, and anti-development, plus homeowners in general (this being LA) consider themselves progressive, anti-racist, etc. I can see how pointing out disproportionate harm NIMBY policies cause to POC can be useful, but is telling them that their policy prescriptions *are racist* going to work? I feel like it's going to cause defensiveness (especially if it's me, a white dude, saying it) and cause a lot of counter-argument ("here's why YIMBYism is actually racist"). Arguing about effects is necessary; attaching a radioactive label to those effects just turns it into a game of hot potato (to mix my metaphor a bit), with everyone trying to pass it off to the other side.
I thought EK's interview was really great in both separating Kendi's ideas from the stuff that orbits him (Ezra points this out when he points out how little systemic change with real consequences happens with e.g. corporate "anti-racist" training) and it puts it clearly in focus as a consequentialist/outcomes based policy.
I think the fundamental problem is this:
1. We've had a long history in the US of doing racist things - on purpose.
2. We have never done anything to "undo" the long term damage this created.
3. Human beings have outcomes based on their circumstances - their communities, their parents, it's inter-generational.
I think Kendi's ideas about weighing current policy based on its affect on the current levels of racial disparity is the inevitable outgrowth of this. To grossly over-simplify, it's sort of a "reparations via policy-bias" approach. For as long as the US hasn't fixed the problems we have made, we have to intentionally bias every policy's outcomes to do that fixing for us.
From that point, there's almost no limit to how much you can warp a policy. If an anti-racist tax code is one that decreases the racial wealth gap, and a racist one is one that increases (or I guess preserves it) then we end up either having to have a tax code that intentionally taxes differently by race, or one that de facto does that while being "race blind" via "statistical discrimination."
(And since that policy would _clearly_ be motivated by trying to engineer an outcome, since that is the way you get an anti-racist policy, everyone would consider its being race blind to be a total fig leaf, like the twenties zoning code.)
I don't have any good ideas about what we should do. When I argue with conservative friends about reparations I say things like "it would be weird if the right amount of reparations for slavery and all of the institutionalized racism that followed it was zero" and even they can't argue with that. There is clearly a moral wrong that has never been repaired.
The discussion with reparations is frustrating to me, because everyone who seriously advances its almost never says what they mean by it. Both TNC at the Atlantic and Kendi in this interview refuse to answer the question when asked "what should the reparations be?"
I think there are two challenges to this:
1) What would be sufficient as a meaningful response to centuries of discrimination?
2) What would be not be enraging if provided to a moderately well off black person that wasn't provided to a recent poor Asian/Hispanic immigrant or poor white person?
I have no idea what would thread the needle between those two things. Which is why so many people like MY end up just wanting to address class issues and have the spillover affect of decreasing racial inequality.
I think the basic problem with race based reparations - and the reason that it feels intuitively unfair to some - is that it assumes that the only government action that has impacted one’s present conditions are the ones that involved anti-black racism. As though all of the poor white people out there are poor because of their own personal moral failings and not because of years of bad government policy. What about reparations for the Supreme Court’s Lochner Era and anti collective bargaining rulings? What about reparations for 80s farm policies or trade agreements or anything else? Once you go down this road, you realize that what we really need are reparations for poor people generally, which means a robust economic equality agenda.
Another issue that grows larger and larger is determining who is part of which category. The more meaningful the reparations, the more important this question is. Does it matter if how many of your ancestors are decedents of slaves or if you're mixed non-black ancestry? What if you a black person adopted by white parents (or vice versa)? What if your ancestors were free blacks at the time of slavery? Or immigrated from Canada during Jim Crow? What if you're Black and rich right now?
These are all edge cases, but most of them are growing proportionally as a percentage of the population.
Right - I'm definitely not making the case that reparations are simple or easy or that there's even a right answer. I'm only saying that Kendi's solution is even _more_ complicated, because it's indirect reparations by intentional policy "bias" (or - targeting reparation-like results as a required outcome for policy - my goal was to describe this as neutrally as possible but I fear that just any term I can think of is loaded in some way that I don't intend).
MY never defines racism. He seems to associate it with stereotyping, but stereotyping is very, very difficult to avoid because it is basically a heuristic for surviving with limited information. Defining racism as racism as “assuming things about people because of their race” is just as problematic as the Kendi definition.
Stereotyping is often quite sensible. If there’s a 99% chance a stranger wants to trade with me, a 1% chance he wants to murder me and a 1% chance he has smallpox, I had better stay away. Sure there’s a 98% chance he’s harmless, but that 2% packs a sting.
Were Aztecs being silly if they saw Spaniards as vectors of disease? Most Spaniards did not have smallpox, yet the few who did wiped out entire cities. Were Sioux Indians prejudiced for fearing white men? Most pioneers never killed an Indian, yet a brain that routinely accepted small chances of death (without some reproductive jackpot to justify it) would not sire many viable offspring.
Racialized fear is literally in our DNA. The amygdala is the brain region most associated with fear. It activates more sharply when it sees faces of other races. People can be taught that members of races are very unlikely to kill them. This type of indoctrination is much easier in peaceful times and places and it can be wiped out by a single negative interaction.
Why is MY worried about anti semitic hate crimes? His odds of being murdered are very low, at least an order of magnitude lower than those of a young black man in Southeast DC. It’s not that MY is prejudiced against non-Jews, it’s that his brain is highly evolved to avoid threats of death and, historically, out group interactions have been much more dangerous than in group interactions.
Yeah, maybe it's hard-wired in to our brains to a degree, but so what?
As a developing teen, my dad used to make these dad-joke-esque comments along the lines of "I brought you into this world, I can take you out", and I used to respond to him that if we had lived 4000 years ago, I would've already crushed his head with a rock while he slept and taken my place at the head of the tribe.
Point being, the are lots of things hard-wired into our brains that we humans have worked to leave behind, with varying degrees of success. The whole point of society, more or less, is to work to leave behind some of our baser impulses and not to just toss our hands up and say, "Ah well. Nevertheless." when confronted with actions that are wholely within human nature, historically, but which we hope to eventually move past with time and effort.
Certainly racial tolerance is worth teaching. My point is that MY seems to want a narrow definition of racism to keep policy debates from degenerating into inane anti-racist purity contests. However, defining racism as “avoiding stereotypes” has the unhelpful effect of making everyone a racist.
My upshot is that racism is a question of degree. Everyone is a little racist but the degree varies tremendously, just like everyone is a little violent, but there are huge individual differences. We don’t stigmatize a small or even average propensity towards violence— you don’t lose your job for having violent thoughts or supporting the military or watching American football. However, the most violent 5 or 10% of young men wind up in prison and the most violent 0.5 or 1% get long sentences.
The secret to preventing racism is to replace race with some other sort of group identity. Human beings are hardwire to form communities. It use to be families/clans... then as the world expanded, it was nations, then it because race, throw in political parties. I personally think patriotism is the best alternative, but unfortunately patriotism has become uncool.
I like that. I also think real assimilation, which to me means at the family level, is the only thing that's proven throughout history to erase ethno-religious prejudice and hate without a trace.
Does anti-Norman or anti-Saxon prejudice in England anymore? or anti-Lombard sentiment in Italy, or anti-Greek feeling in afghanistan, or anti-Babylonian prejudices in Iraq, or anti-Issaurian or anti-galatian feelings in Anatolia?
These sound silly now, but at various points in history these were ethnic tensions that actually existed and had big impacts on people's lives at the time. Up until these people inter-married enough with their neighbors that they assimilated together to form a new people and the old labels were forgotten.
But there are still caste tensions in India, and religious tensions in Syria and Lebanon and most of the middle east, and tensions between Roma and others in Eastern Europe, and Rohingya and the Buddhists of Myanmar and these despite these peoples living closely with their neighbors for hundreds of years - but not intermarrying.
So i think patriotism is good, but inter-marrying is even better, which is why I'm optimistic that these things will get better as the rate of interethnic marriage continues to increase.
I’ve been thinking about your comment all afternoon, and it suddenly dawned on me my response.
You are not talking about group identity, you are talking about group conflict.
There are always several levels of group identification. But there needs to be an overarching group. A group identity so strong that you are willing to sacrifice everything for it. Besides for the obvious of family.
Patriotism is that. I would die for my country (not that I want to).
As a working class guy… I’m am not going to die for an accountant. Well… I would because he is an American. But not because he isn’t wealthy.
A social sanction can be applied on bigoted people. “Don’t be a bigot” can be taught.
“Don’t formulate public policies that may turn out, in retrospect, to have a racially disparate impact” cannot be taught. And can only be sanctioned in retrospect.
Insofar as Kendi stands for something like "don't self-flagellate -- DO something about racial inequities" he stands head and shoulder above most people who write these anti-racism tracts. Sure, he can be a little woo-woo - we live in a somewhat woo-woo society. But DO something, don't wallow.
Is he DOING anything though? I felt like he handwaved a lot of the data analytics required with ... "someone should be doing this like the CBO does economics". Does the Center for Antiracism Research have a data science team? It looks like it's just a data collection project - maybe still early days. A different way he could have answered these questions would have been ... "Here's what we're researching ... Here's what we've found ... ".
I think Matt misses some of what's going on here, or... doesn't shine a lot on it, at least.
My view is: in the latter half of the 20th Century, there was this concerted, and largely successful, effort to get people to remove ill-intent towards people of other races from their hearts. That is, to stigmatize and reduce racism in the classic sense. To judge each person by their character or so forth. Of course, it was imperfect and incomplete, but I think there was an overwhelming reduction in the number of people between say 1960 and 2000 who believed that a given person was lesser due to their race.
And so in the dawn of the 21st Century, we looked around and saw that, despite this huge reduction in the amount of racism, black and latino people were still poor and disadvantaged in various ways. And then there was this competition to explain this fact, and a few camps emerged:
1. People who thought that everyone was just as racist as ever, but were better at hiding it.
2. People who thought that essentially the 20th Century project had been successful, but there was some societal inertia where it takes time for changes in attitude to translate to material difference, and we should just stay the course.
3. People who thought that racial gaps were a result of genetic intelligence factors that were biological, not a result of social bias.
4. People who thought that there were institutional problems that were able to propagate themselves and continue inequities despite the fact that nobody anymore had any actual racism in their hearts.
And what happened is that people in group 4 found that their ideas -- though well-founded in a lot of ways -- were bloodless and technocratic compared to the ideas of people in groups 1-3, and they just didn't get a lot of attention compared to the straightforward and attention-grabbing claims of the other groups. So they evolved towards a framing of their ideas that would be more provocative, and ended up with "structural racism," getting on the bandwagon that we had established where "racism" is super bad and emotionally charged, and using that as the lede into their technocratic ideas.
And this was successful. But of course the problem is that having done this sort of rhetorical judo, nothing changed on a substantive level. It remains a boring (in both the sense of not interesting, and in the eponymous sense of this blog), bloodless, technocratic problem to filter through the many, many, many layers of institutions and try to find ways in which they reinforce unequal racial outcomes. But people who use the "structural racism" framing then find that it reduces the emotional charge of "racism" if "racism" means "let's change some not-obviously-important details of zoning ordinances in one city after another," or "how should we change how we pay for schools."
So to defend the territory that their movement has claimed, they have to now pour energy into keeping the rhetorical intensity up, to conflate "structural racism" with "racism." Hence Kendi, or the enthusiasm for Kendi.
You're describing the double-bind that activists face all the time. It's hard to generate attention without saying inflammatory, hyperbolic stuff, which also generates a lot of backlash. Feminists tried the same rhetorical judo with "rape culture." It got people talking, but it also alienated a lot of people.
As Scott Alexander wrote about: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/
From that essay: "A moral action that can be taken just as well by an outgroup member as an ingroup member is crappy signaling and crappy identity politics."
Conversely a lot of Kendi's ideas are really unpopular, which makes publicly declaring your support for them a really strong signalling/ingroup behavior.
(Note my assiduous avoidance of the term "virtue signalling.")
I mean, I agree. But I think that the problem is particularly acute if your focus is on lots of detailed, empirically difficult, small changes.
Quoting myself: “Democrats of a certain ideological leaning tend to conflate the fact that material conditions for African Americans are still quite poor with the notion that there's been no improvement at all in their standing and our dealings with racial prejudice.
To almost anyone else, this is plainly and obviously untrue, and it sends huge numbers of people into defensive crouches that are made worse when they get called racist for pointing out that this is untrue and have no real way to fend off the accusation.
The problem is that no sooner had the ink dried on the great civil rights bills of the 1960's than US economic policy started undermining the hell out of the working class, which had and has a disproportionately large number of black families.
The aforementioned liberals look at poverty outcomes since them and see society-wide, systemic racism. Conservatives look at genuine improvements in the form of huge declines in racial prejudices and greatly increased minority cultural clout and representation and see deluded leftists looking for equality of outcomes.
People like me look at all of this and see a world in which almost everyone who was working class in 1968 is worse off than back then regardless of race, which has wildly disproportionately impacted black families because that's where the vast majority of them started at the time.
We have systemic racism, biases in policing, education, housing, and healthcare. None of these are the main cause of racial income and wealth gaps today, which can be explained almost entirely by the decline in bargaining power suffered by the lower-middle class relative to their employers, just like the bottom two quintiles of white families.
The policies that would make a dent in inequality overall are mostly the same ones which would disproportionately benefit poor black families.”
Brilliant comment. I think group 4 is right on the merits (I spend a lot of time organizing around zoning reform) but agree they the rhetorical moves you describe do more to confuse than illuminate in terms of building still for systems change. The prevalence of Black Lives Matter signs in decidedly exclusionary neighborhoods is the physical manifestation of the way "racism bad" is resonating more than ever even as the new definition of "racism" fails to catch on.
Would love to hear more about organizing around zoning reform!
Appreciate this comment. I would note two things: 1) Many people like myself who are very concerned with structural racism (in the original, more technocratic sense) don’t believe people don’t have racism in their hearts any more. “Structural racism” captures the notion that there are some racial inequities that have resulted from prior, overtly racist policies and that are perpetuated or even exacerbated by facially race-neutral policies. But I still believe that there are many inequities that are the result of 1, or perhaps a complex hybrid of 1 and 4. - eg the way in which anti welfare state policies are infused, with varying levels of explicitness and consciousness, with the politics of racial resentment. 2) Implicit bias is an important part of the discussion with respect to 1 and 4, and the hybrid of 1 and 4.
Certainly I didn't mean that anyone thought that racism (in the classic, what's-in-your-heart sense) had been entirely abolished. I think that there's a core, important argument that says, "Hey, look, EVEN IF racism is in fact abolished in people's hearts, this institution enforces racial inequities if we just follow its rules."
I think it's more 1 and 2 than 4. Not sure what 4 really means, actually.
Tremendous comment. You should start a substack!
Do you see a middle ground for Group 4? The synthesis of the column and your comment is that a) Group 4 is amping up the rhetoric to get attention by b) the result of that attention is counterproductive.
I'm sure I'll be in the majority of your readers who agree that Kendi's framing is counterproductive on the whole (for example, you and others have the compelling argument that Defund The Police is a bad slogan and a bad strategy, not that I needed much convincing). So I'll poke the bear a little bit and say that where Kendism has been useful, for me, is thinking about suburbia (or exurbia) through a racial lens. If home ownership was a way for the middle class to build wealth in the 20th century, and that access was explicitly denied to Black people, and federal government policies were explicitly designed to support suburban home building, then yes, suburbia exists on a bedrock of racism (no matter how many BLM signs you or your neighbors have on their lawns). You start talking about equitable school funding or raising property taxes and you see how quickly supposedly woke white suburbanites will show up at town halls demanding things stay the way they are.
Definitely this. The thing that has boggled my mind most (and it really shouldn’t) is how white suburbanites were all on board to defund the police and protest prison construction and end entrance exams and advanced placement courses, yet there was NO discussion of overhauling our antiquated system of public school zoning and funding. If we truly have an appetite for radical ideas, why not let any kid enroll at any public school? Of course it would be a logistical nightmare but it’s workable and seems worth discussing, except that it would destroy property value in the highly desirable school zones (plastered with BLM signs).
This is cynical, but the predicate that seems to predict anti-racism among rich white suburbanites, corporations, etc. is "does this require real sacrifice." If the answer is "yes", allies get quiet.
I suspect you hit the nail on the head. I think this is why back in the late 60s and early 70s, you had a situation where a lot of the same people who were probably quite in favor of the Civil Rights Act and protecting the "right to vote" were suddenly very against bussing kids from mostly Black neighborhoods to come to their child's school.
The other factor is anything involving kids more generally just becomes seriously fraught (and that includes housing as this involves what type of kids your child will interact with). One of the easiest ways to "touch a nerve" is hit on an issue that effects education and kids more generally. It's why QANON is so wrapped up in stories about child trafficking. Or maybe more apt to our current debates, it's why Kendi and CRT has become such a flashpoint last 6 months; because it involves school children. Panics over what's happening to our kids are not new for a reason. Katie Couric essentially built an entire career about scaring mothers about the latest new trends with teenagers. There's a reason why it was a running gag on The Simpsons to have Helen Lovejoy wail "Oh please won't someone think of the children".
I think you're remembering the bussing and desegregation fights in Northern cities a bit wrong.
The biggest flash points were not about black students being bussed to white schools. The much larger pushbacks came when school districts forced white kids to be bussed to majority black schools. I remember that pretty well, at least in my area, because my cousins in the city went to middle and high school fairly far from their houses and their parents really were not too happy about it.
This is my understanding as well - not wanting black kids to be bussed into your school seems to be pretty clearly racist (unless I'm missing something), but not wanting your kids (black or white) bussed to another school could easily just be a reasonable preference not to give your kids a long commute.
Alternatively, not wanting your kids to get bused could be because you didn't want them going to a "shitty" school (based on whichever measure of outcomes/safety/whatever you prefer).
And if that school happened to be majority-black then Kendi-ism would call that position racism, while you could also look at it as an entirely rational thing.
Interesting discourse all around.
You call it cynical, but I call it banal and normal and... just how the world works. I mean, of course everyone likes stuff that's all benefits and no costs. Of course people are more hesitant to do things that have real costs for themselves.
Everything is like that. Everything! It's not hypocrisy, it's completely natural, and indeed good. People SHOULD consider the costs as well as the benefits of any course of action, and there are costs that are too high for any particular benefit.
Now, if we could find some evidence that people are particularly likely to, I don't know, overstate the importance of racism ("It's the most important issue facing America") while at the same time being very conscious of personal inconvenience, over and above the normal banal stuff, okay, maybe that's evidence of something.
Maybe the part I find surprising is that not even POC activists were promoting this idea, or the white Gen Zers who don’t own property and hate their parents.
The BLM side of the left has decided that YIMBYism is a neoliberal plot and must be opposed. It is super unpopular in a way I find sort of baffling.
Sometimes you will see support for public housing in an abstract way.
I think this just reflects an effort to be an all-purpose left/left/left worldview so you don't ever want to say "what we have here is overregulation"
Christ. That's pretty sad, because what we have here is, in many sectors, overregulation.
To take several examples from my own field:
I can make a very good case that OSHA regulations for construction sites are designed specifically to be un-followable, such that an inspector will always have some means to trip a contractor up. In past eras that led to rampant corruption, now it leads to politicization of permitting, union or anti-union favoritism and overly high compliance costs with few or no safety benefits.
Likewise, there's little wrong with the building inspection regulations in most areas of the US, except that they're poorly enforced because they're underfunded and too wide-ranging, and the punishments for individual malfeasance is too low.
Environmental impact review, in most of the US, is a nightmare. The process could be a third as long, significantly more straightfoward, and a third as expensive and still achieve roughly the same end. The writing of these regulations has long since been captured by the consultants that other engineering consultants hire to navigate... these regulations.
Then moving beyond engineering, we have, just off the top of my head:
- Semi- and non-skilled occupational licensing
- The tax code
- Professional licensure education requirements
- Zoning laws
- Internal construction/renovation permitting
- Made-in-America regulations for one-off public infrastructure projects
I could go on and on.
Half of the country's regulatory regime is predicated on trying to use regulation to achieve outcomes that can only be achieved by public spending, then whining about how much worse outcomes are than when we started.
I think there's just too much distrust of capitalism. The Yglesias theory is that high housing prices and their impact on homelessness is fundamentally a market failure due to over-regulation. When you say it like that, it sounds like it's out of AEI, so the progressive left discounts the policy based on what it rhymes with.
Yes. And they’re stupid to do so. Markets are a mostly effective means of allocating scarce resources; when the problem is one of supply, rather than one of distribution, we should try to let them do their thing.
AEI’s problem is twofold: they use the word “market” as a dog-whistle for “corporate-run kleptocracy” and they expect “markets” to solve all problems including distribution and accessibility ones that can really only be solved with public expenditures.
Hell, half of our stupid housing policy was a case of trying to use regulation in place of spending to fix problems best solved by the latter.
YIMBYism is too close to the evil of gentrification
This is my experience too. It'd frankly be easier if this was based on straight-up material interests, but it really doesn't work out that way.
(It's not like the YIMBY coalition doesn't have more than its share of rich white suburbanites.)
I liked how this one Black woman involved in local politics/non-profits said she was tired of "white-allies" and instead waned "white co-conspirators" because too often the former wouldn't amount to much other than lip service.
Ok, so maybe there's a better word than ally that represents meaningful commitment - but doesn't conspirator have kind of a negative meaning?
I think that was her point. As long as the systems of racism can remain, those who profit off of it staying in place would see dismantling it as negative. It isn't outlandish to say that actual work that tears down racist power structures needs to be done in a 'co-conspiratorial' type of way.
wanted*
not even that! it is not a sacrifice to have black neighbors and classmates.
Sadly, it's all too rational. Here in Los Angeles, we passed Measure HHH in 2016, which funded homeless housing with $1.2 billion, by an overwhelming margin (77% "yes"). Unsurprisingly, though, many richer areas in the city were shocked to discover that this might mean homeless housing would be built in *their* neighborhoods. Resistance ensued. (I'm happy to say that my part of west LA actually welcomed a large homeless housing development, which is now under construction: miracles happen.)
Yeah, LA agreed to spend all this money and then wound up barely building anything.
Funnily enough once the homeless get housed they aren't homeless any more. Crazy how that works! I guess then they just don't like certain groups of people. Sounds pretty xenophobic to me!
I think this is one of those wishful beliefs that it is the underfunded schools that are holding back students. While I'm willing to listen to the argument that perhaps tip top achievement is being held back by middling schools (though that isn't really shown in some of the anti-specialized school research), I do not think that school underfunding is the reason for the large levels of relative underachievement.
New York City has a different way of funding public schools, with one of the highest per capita expenditures per student in the country, and their educations results are middling as well. And when you look at students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and/or ethnicities in the same schools, broken out, in NYC, you see achievement gaps.
I think the evidence that ceteris paribus more money leads to better learning outcomes is pretty compelling.
It's just that it doesn't matter *that much* in the scheme of things. I guess an analogy I might make is that a BMW M3 really is faster than my Prius, but in real world conditions the differences in car performance are swamped by driver-specific factors (like how aggressive you are) or by external factors (how's the traffic).
Baltimore city's school system has the 3rd highest spending per student, and, uhh, it isn't working. My understanding is that schools and school spending are something of a "force multiplier" wherein if you have the other stuff that matters then schools can accomplish a lot, but if school spending is all you've got then you're basically throwing money down the drain.
Separately there are issues wherein plenty of baltimore city schools either don't have heating or AC. Which raises the question of whether all that money is even being spent in ways that could theoretically be productive...
For sure. And we should probably stop funding schools through local property taxes - that seems like a very straightforward way of entrenching inequality
“…why not let any kid enroll at any public school?”
No, that’s not workable. Schools are scarce resources.
Lotteries.
You have to understand…
[In character]
Nothing is workable, and everything is perfect already, so please go away.
The San Francisco public school system used to be a complicated lottery. They recently reformed it to be less that. I didn't pay a lot of attention to the new system since we recently moved outside of city limits.
But it really was the case that basically you had "parents who looked up all the schools and found all the good ones and then signed their kids up for all of those," and you had "parents who just signed their kids up for whatever school was closest," and so you did have a lot of self-segregation.
Now, I think it's reasonable to argue that hey, we can lead a horse to water, but we can't make it drink, and we made it possible for parents who do care to, with high probability of success, get their kids into the schools that overperform, and that's something. But I also think it's reasonable to argue that we maybe are subsidizing those who need it less this way.
NYC is trying that. It has issues. One is that parents who have the resources to find out which schools are the best use those resources to do just that. And parents who do not have those resources…do not have those resources.
Yes… I agree, and it would likely get accused of being a “racist system” much like access to COVID vaccines was early on. Still, seems like it would at least give more kids access to higher performing schools even if their parents can’t afford to move, and might lead to more racial and SES integration? But if it’s failing in NYC that’s worth studying for sure. Def not my area of expertise. All in all though, seems like it’s worth more serious consideration than defunding the police!
NYC schools have far worse problems than their lottery. And it’s not truly a wide open lottery system, but one that takes geography into account.
I think MN tried to go that way, though still with preference for local residents. This says about 10% of kids hop to another school there: https://education.mn.gov/mde/fam/open/
I think you’re being a bit glib on this. Each line of attack is dealing with a serious problem that defies any easy solution.
I think you're ascribing way more long-term thought and strategy to these behaviors than probably anyone practicing them has.
Socialism often is, too.
Yeah, an outcome (rather than intent)-based definition of racism is very useful and, I would argue, necessary to addressing many big, entrenched social problems. But, if you’re concerned about outcomes, the logical thing to focus on would be outcomes over intent. Under a rigorous Kendian view, the person who shows up at every city council meeting to lobby for bus rapid transit lanes but also casually uses the phrase “black-on-black crime” is a better foot soldier than the person who is “doing the work” but has concerns about parking if they build the multifamily apartment building at the end of the street.
So it’s frustrating that the aesthetics of Kendi-ism have masked what are very powerful and potentially impactful substantive claims.
I suspect that Kendians would claim the phrase "black-on-black" crime contributes to the creation and popularity of policies that harm black people, that's how you'd put them in the racist bucket. My understanding is that you have to support "anti-racist" policies *and* not use racist/racist-adjacent terminology.
The *best* ally/movement member would be someone who does all the right things and says all the right things. But the thing I find refreshing about the Kendi view is that it tells us to focus on getting people to do the useful things, whether or not they still say or think problematic stuff at times.
The thing is... the popular interpretation of his work seems to be the exact opposite.
I guess I need to go read his book now to figure out just how badly Twitter has flipped his words on their head.
I've seen enough direct quotes to know I'm not going to agree with him on many or most topics, but perhaps some of the worst excesses are not of his own thinking.
I definitely had the same impression until I heard him on Ezra Klein's podcast last week. It's quite possible that Kendi himself, on particular cases, continues to say the bad thing, but when he is talking in the abstract sense, everything he says suggests the interpretation I give. I think it's hard for people to be thoroughgoing consequentialists in the way he says he endorses.
It's hard for people not to be intellectually lazy as hell.
But that's neither here nor there. The direct quotes I've seen lead me to the conclusion that I'm going to disagree with him about almost all of the actual policy recommendations he has. But the framework of "an ally does useful shit and tries not to do useless shit, and if they slip up in language or sensitivity, don't shoot them"... seems reasonable.
“…suburbia exists on a bedrock of racism…”
Your metaphor seems rather useless. Because what does it mean as a practical matter today? No one is prevented from moving to the suburbs because of their race.
In greatest Slow Borer tradition, I'm going to try to meet those white suburbanites where they are.
One of the complexities of this is that while there's an elite consensus among racial justice advocates about "suburbia was built on racism", there isn't anything like that consensus on what to do about it.
It's really easy to make the case that by fighting gentrification, or insisting on affordable housing mandates, you're fighting on the side of anti-racism -- and there's not really a consistent set of messages saying that "no, this isn't the right way to do it". It'd be much easier to convince these white suburbanites with BLM signs on their lawn if it was easier to point them to BLM leaders arguing for duplexes and ADUs.
I think it's a bad idea to conflate the need for more density in richer areas and racism. This is a classic case where making the class-based argument also reduces racial inequity. More, better, and less expensive housing benefits *everyone* and not just Blacks. But putting it in racial terms both elides the benefits that would go to all people, and, sadly, tends to activate underlying emotions and possibly unconscious stereotypes among homeowners that only serve to heighten their opposition and sense of being beleaguered. Sell it by saying that less expensive housing will help their kids' schoolteachers, or the police and firefighters who protect their neighborhoods instead. Let the racial amelioration happen; don't harp on it.
Unless your goal is to score debating points.
One reason the version of racism Kendi is trying to sell is unworkable is it treats today's racial categories as unalterable bedrock facts of society from which all other analysis and distribution of resources must flow - permanently and forever - instead of fluid and changing socially constructed ideas, that arose from discredited beliefs that there are meaningful innate difference between groups of people based on their physical appearance.
That idea was flawed at its root, and perpetuating it by making those categories the central basis of your entire social and economic program is not going to lead anywhere good.
They've lasted close to 400 years in America so far, so I think "fluid and changing" is a bit of a stretch, even if they're not permanently unalterable. A lot of conservatives have a totally unearned level of racial optimism that they're eager to get everyone to adopt, one that basically says that we could stop thinking about race as soon as we attain legal equality.
No they haven’t. They’ve changed here, and they’ve changed in all the formerly colonized and slaveholding nations. Many of these definitions have changed wildly in the last century. Some of these definitions have changed wildly in the last 25 years or are currently in flux.
It's just not true that racial or ethnic categories in America have not changed in 400 years. But it isn't a coincidence that the classifications that have been most persistent are the ones that were formally codified in the law for much of that period and used as a basis for determining economic opportunity and legal rights.
On the other hand, who counts as "black" has displayed a fairly high level of stickiness. Barack Obama and Kamala Harris are black politicians, despite each having one nonblack parent. Going backwards, you see things like the one-drop rule.
But on the other other hand, there's an uprecedented amount of black-white racial mixing in family formation, between marriages, adoptions, etc. The neighborhood I grew up in was about 99% white when I was a kid and now it's about 10% black. Whenever I'm back there (which is often), about half the black people I see are with their white spouse / bf / gf or their white siblings or parents, or at hanging out with a group of white friends.
That's not how it was 400 or 100 or even 50 years ago. Things are changing and all data as well as my personal experience suggests the change is accelerating.
As one example, pew research shows 5% of blacks married another group in 1980, but in 2015 that number was up to 18%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/
And multi-racial babies from 3% in 1980 to 10% in 2013. Elsewhere (I can't find it, but you probably could if you're interested) they have data on how the frequency of white-black babies identifying as multi-racial, and not black alone, is also increasing rapidly
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/06/11/multiracial-in-america/
To deny there's no change or fluidity is quite extreme
"Black" seems to be a pretty consistent category, and the black experience seems to be pretty unique from other POC groups. The "otherness" of Hispanic people has ebbed and flowed over time, and conservatives' feelings toward Asian and Hispanic people has done the same, but black people have always been seen as "more American" than other groups, they've almost always been the least wealthy of any ethnic group in the US, etc. I would chalk this up to a combination of slavery and most black people not having roots in 19th/20th century immigration, but I'm not black myself, so take that with a wheelbarrow of salt.
To the extent that 'whiteness' means anything, I suspect that in twenty years or fewer, more Latinos will consider themselves 'white' than 'POC.' Possibly the same for East and South Asians.
The majority of Latinos already check both white and latino on their census forms.
I think maybe this helps explain how Kendi's views have been so _distorted_.
Like, if you take Kendi's values at face, my rich white affluent suburb needs to dismantle its zoning laws because they're increasing the racial wealth gap. I think you'd find lots of support or "anti-racism" and no one even considering throwing out zoning. I think well-to-do liberals heard what they wanted to hear? (The introspection part, but not the consequentialist action part.)
I think upper class liberals have not been able to grasp the deeply-conflicted feelings about police in the less well-off Black community. The bias the latter face from police is certainly there (see the interesting recent study on how police -- of *all* races* talk to Black motorists) and yet, unlike upper class liberals, Blacks need a level of police protection that they feel, with some reason, that they aren't getting.
So it's simple for these liberals to pretend to a level of solidarity with Blacks that really just isn't there.
I saw that same study on John McWhorter's Substack and I just want to point out a user named JimInNashville did an extremely good job in pointing out the flaws of that study. I was thoroughly convinced that the studies conclusions are not justified from the work they did. Some of the major points I remembered:
1) The tone of the LE officer was rated as 3.7 when speaking to white motorists and 3.5 with black motorists on a 6 point scale (higher is warmer, lower is cooler). While this was judged to be "statistically significant" it's fair to question whether this meaningful in any non-academic sense.
2) No attempt was made to control for the circumstances that led to the interaction. Were the black motorists pulled over in different neighborhoods, for different reasons, at different times of day? It's also worth mentioning that the motorists' audio was also cut out. We are meant to assume that each group of 100 people would have been speaking to the police in roughly equivalent ways or that a police officer's tone should robotically stay the same regardless of the motorists demeanor.
3) They left out any details on how they sampled several hundred police/motorist interactions down to only 100 of cop-black and 100 of cop-white. A reader may assume the sample was random but as it wasn't in the methodology we shouldn't assume.
4) No effort to control for racial/ethnic interactions, as in no work was done to find out whether the results differed when various combos of ethnicities interacted. Only cop and black motorist vs cop and white motorist
5) Finally, these results, from 200 hand-selected traffic stops in one anonymous city, probably shouldn't be used to extrapolate nationwide.
Sorry for the long post. But I feel that these kinds of studies are at the heart of the replicability crisis that we have in social science and medicine. And they are quite dangerous when the media runs with their very weakly supported conclusions. I'd be interested in what a better-designed study had to say about this issue, but this study isn't it.
Those don't necessarily sound like critical flaws in the study, to me.
But it's really worth noting that one study is never conclusive proof of anything, no matter how well-defined the study is. If we get another 50 studies that are comparably well-designed that show evidence in similar directions, that tells us something meaningful. If on the other hand the next 50 studies show a mess of confusing, contradictory results, that shows us something else.
People get too eager to hyper-parse and either discredit or credit one particular study. All studies have flaws.
Wiganjust now
I hear you but then I still think it's worth saying that we don't really know what the study is concluding, because we don't have 50 studies confirming that police officers speak differently to black people.
but that said - the difference between a "warmness" of 3.7 and 3.5 out of 6 sounds incredibly trivial to me. So even this studies doesn't really move the needle much in proving things one way or the other
Sure, but the police departments are still going to be disproportionately comprised of white men with blue collars. I know in Baltimore city, for instance, plenty of the cops are actually white guys from either the extremely white suburbs or the near bits of "Pennsyltucky". In PG County maryland (which is a pretty Black suburban area near DC) the police department is much whiter than the county, and police leadership is even moreso whiter than the county.
So like, regardless of how unrepresentative the progressive groups might be, it's easy for them to point plenty of fingers at the cops without looking inwards at all.
A big part of the problem is it's very hard to recruit black police officers. I wish the defund left was making that easier, not harder.
I'm sure Baltimore would love to hire locally and hire more black officers, why wouldn't they?
This seems simple, and hinted at in Matt's subtitle. We just have two different concepts, both are useful, but we shouldn't try to change the definition of an existing concept.
Racism historically has meant intent-based discrimination or bigotry based on race. It's a very useful word. And its also pretty widely understood and can be very powerful.
Trying to now change the definition/usage of the word, given how well understood it is and how powerful it is just looks like it is going to create all softs of unnecessary problems. We saw the same thing happen with the idea from the 80s that "black people can't be racists, because they hold no power". The problem with this statement is that it required a change in what people thought the word racist meant. The introduction of this concept was valid, but now you no longer had a word to describe an equally important concept, which is the traditional definition of racism.
Kendi's outcome based view of race is interesting and useful. But it should be introduced as its own word/concept. We shouldn't replace the definition of an existing word, especially when the existing definition is useful and important.
The result is we'd spend a lot less time arguing about this. The arguments really aren't about the content of what Kendi is discussing, but rather can we juggle these two different definitions/concepts of "racism" in our mind at the same time (about the same word) -- and that just isn't an interesting or useful use of time.
I feel like I've said this in previous posts, but what I find maddening about the "racist means prejudice plus power" thing is that it's an attempt by academic elites to change the common understanding of a word. Yet the cool kids of the 21st century are universally descriptivists rather than prescriptivists: they believe that language means whatever it's used to mean, and calling a certain usage "wrong" is missing the point of language (and in fact may be discriminatory!). It's just on *this one issue* that they try the prescriptivist gambit of saying "this word which nearly everyone understands to mean X actually means Y, and if you think otherwise, you're wrong."
Yeah, I think this is right. It is endlessly confusing to me when people try to redefine a word instead of just finding a new one for whatever concept they are advancing. I don't understand the urge to do that.
I agree that it's stupid but it's pretty obvious to me why people do it: because the original word has a moral value they are trying to piggyback on.
For instance, I could try to convince you that Medicare is bad for budget reasons. It would probably be an uphill battle. But if I say that Medicare is bad because it disproportionately benefits white people (who, after all, live longer) and is therefore racist, you're in a tough position. Either you have to disprove my statistical facts (which will be difficult because I chose this battleground), or you have to say something to the effect of "just because it's racist doesn't mean it's bad" (a bad debate move if ever I saw one).
I think that a generalized version of this criticism is perhaps applicable to a lot of ideas. An idea like Kendi's has a few issues - first is it useful? Can you make sensible decisions or better understand something due to it? I think Matt showed why you cannot here.
Second, are you losing something by conflating your idea? The conflation of hate speech with violence I can understand the intention behind, but also seems to me to cause damage to useful action by being unable to distinguish things properly.
Third do you lose people by hijacking common terms to make your point? I find the formulation of racism = prejudice plus power to be unhelpful here as most people and indeed the dictionary would just go with racism = prejudice based on race and when the above definition is pulled out it feels less like an insight and more like a gotcha. This turns people off immediately. The formulation above is useful to explain why some racism is more damaging than others, and maybe deserves a different name to correctly identify it, but by re-defining an existing term people think they understand you lose a large number of listeners, and so lose the chance to convince people.
This is what I've never understood. Why couldn't anti-racism advocates have simply said "when Black people are racist it rarely does real harm, because due to centuries of being locked out of opportunity they don't have much ability to actually hurt people when they're racist, so 'reverse racism' is not a social issue anywhere near as big as anti-Black racism" instead of dying on the hill that Black people definitionally cannot be racist, except by internalized racism against other Black people? The former thing seems like a claim I – and maybe the majority of Americans – would actually agree with. Who made the decision to go with the word-redefining strategy?
Even your framing is not a claim I’d agree with. Ever looked at statistics for anti-Asian hate crime?
Poor Asian immigrants made the “mistake” of becoming the lower-middle-to-middle-income small business/petit capitalist class in urban areas, and they now take a ton of shit for it in majority black neighborhoods.
I think the right answer here is to not make any noises about “being understanding towards” violent crime of this sort and treat it as seriously as we do any other sort of violence.
There’s no need to play up the prevalence of anti-Asian and anti-Semitic sentiment among African Americans, but let’s not pretend those sentiments never harm anyone just because the community as a whole isn’t powerful,
So, time to share my most controversial opinion. I suspect the absolute lack of any stigma whatsoever within most black communities against holding racist attitudes about white people is a HUGE part of our modern problems. Baldwin stated that anti-black racism hurt whites down to their souls and ripped at the fabric of society; the same could be argued for blacks. It makes it harder to build trust across racial boundaries and lifts psychological stress exponentially. It stigmatizes assimilation in either direction (labeled “appropriation” when white people do it). At the end of the day, racist attitudes don’t necessarily hurt the subject of those attitudes, they can hurt the holder as well. Not to mention the hypocrisy about it harms the antiracist cause and fuels white nationalism.
Hmm, this is intriguing.
I mean, I'm white and upper-middle class, so I can more or less afford not to give a damn if someone with whom I interact hates me for it.
One of the reasons I do generally care deeply about racism among black people is because my wife, child, and in-laws are Asian, and I know exactly how prevalent anti-Asian racism is in the black working class.
I never really thought about it through the same framework as "being racist against black people has repeatedly and measurably harmed American white people."
Obviously the harms are different, but I can believe that they're there.
Do you find that to be true, IRL? I've certainly heard Black people express racist attitudes about White people in standup comedy and such, but actual Black people I've known almost never do.
Yes… A significant amount of content floating in the “antiracism” space is virulently anti-white. Stop by The Root sometime, or Google Rachel Cargle or Ally Henny or Ijeoma Oluo or that NYT piece about teaching one’s kids of color not to trust white people. I am white but for my whole adult life, my closest friends were black and I used to agree with all this wholeheartedly. I thought it was “necessary truths.” But I realized some time last year how toxic and counterproductive it all had become (and started a blog). Several of my lifelong college friends literally cut me out of their life when I said “maybe we’re wrong, maybe all white people/white conservatives aren’t racist.” I don’t think it’s a phenomenon that’s universal but it seems widespread especially (ironically) among the most successful/academically elite black americans, and certainly the white antiracist allies.
What’s funny is that Robin DiAngelo makes money off of writing books that take the very weird ways whites attempt to avoid stereotype threat (signal they’re not racist) and flip it around as further proof of their racism. White people get super weird around black people or avoid them all together for fear of doing/saying the wrong thing. It just makes it exponentially harder to form healthy collaborative relationships with all of this psychological jiu jitsu. Again, I’m not all that worried about how this affects white people. As a group, they’re doing fine. It’s minorities who end up suffering the worst impacts.
You're saying that Ijeoma Oluo is virulently anti-white?? She literally opens her book by talking about her white mom's trepidation and missteps around race, and how she has empathy for that and wants to help make the conversation easier and more forgiving!
Ok, “virulent” might be too strong for her. I read SYWTAR but not Mediocre. But can you imagine how people would react to a book titled “mediocre” complaining about how middling POC are after benefiting from affirmative action? Ok, yes, I can imagine it, I’m sure it exists, and I’m sure most people would consider it racist af.
I do agree with Ben Wheeler below that Kendi doesn’t get enough credit for calling this out a little in his book, but it’s also a point he doesn’t bring up himself at all in media.
That's fair, I have noticed this contrast too.
FWIW, Kendi is very, very, very, very clear that Black people can be racist, and cites at least half a dozen examples of that happening in his book.
Well this post was pretty spot on. Quite frankly the only reason I am commenting is because I'm stuck in Brazil sitting around at a power plant waiting for people.
So many discussions these days about what Racism is, but I'd like to see more discussion about what the solutions are.
With the Kendi and CRT crowd, it comes across, like nothing except quotas and reparations are acceptable, but 1. it isn't going to happen and 2. I am really skeptical about whether it would even work.
On cash reparations: By the time enough white people are convinced to support it (if ever), Hispanic voters will be a significant chunk of the voting population, and won't support it.
I myself, as a Rich person hater (rich being anyone that makes 100K more than I do), really support taxing the F out of rich people, and decreasing income inequality that way. And as Matt said, anything that decreases income equality will also decrease race income inequality.
Regardless, I suspect that the issue of racism and race inequalities is something that will be around and debated when my granddaughter is an adult.
Ok, on a personal note. I might of mentioned before, but I grew up in a racially mixed family. My bother is Asian, sister is black, both adopted as babies while we lived in New Zealand. There is only 4-years apart between us four siblings, so we grew up together. I guess as close to colorblind as you could get. I've spoken to my sister and brother about their experiences, and racism didn't play a huge part of their lives. Perhaps it was the unconditional love in our family, but even in the 80's in Los Angeles, our family was a curiosity more than any big deal (I suspect things would of been different in the South or other parts of the US). My sister said that her worst experiences were actually in High School from other black girls, because she was basically was so "white"... she listed to punk rock/ska, so didn't conform to the stereotype of what black women in LA listed to back then. But it wasn't a huge deal.
Later in life, my sister said she did have an experience with getting pulled over twice for no reason. She lived in Oak Park (upscale part of Ventura County).
Anyways, the whole issue is complex. There is literally nowhere in the world that anyone can point to that has solved the issue. I lived in Europe for 12-years, I work in South America regularly, and racial inequality and racism are present in all places.
I'm not a politician, I'm not a boss, so I guess the only thing I can do is not be an asshole, and treat everyone with respect and openness.
On a side note, the closest I have ever seen to a perfect society on this issue is my time in the USAF. Not perfect, but closer than anyplace in the civilian world.
Have a great day.
Also, unlike my usual posts, this was typed on my computer, so feel free to drag me for grammar and spelling mistakes.
Bizarre relationship with Kendi and DiAngelo. Kind of like Marx. A lot of respect. And lot of back and forth. I read them and I think…
“Wow this is a really interesting diagnosis of the problem. I think there’s value in this diagnosis. I absolutely beyond words hate your proposed solution.”
Then I go for a walk in what is… gosh (probably 98%) white/Asian/straight neighborhood and see more BLM signs than Harlem and more rainbow flags than Castro, and think “Ya know maybe Kendi-ism could actually be beneficial here. If these people are going to flaunt awareness they should take ownership of their role in it.”
Then he tweets something expressing skepticism in interracial adoptions. And… loses me once again.
It's fair that it WOULD be valuable to have some of the "woke White" communities thinking more about actual impact, in the way Kendi co-opts the term "racist"...
I watched the same neighbors who were very pro-BLM also rally to direct city resources into our parks & schools, and I remember thinking "guys... c'mon... you realize who is going to get hosed if you lean on the city to help OUR wealthy neighborhood, right?"
"Race-neutral discrimination is a thing"
At some point many people became convinced that since it is possible to mask discrimination behind facially colorblind policy, the very notion of colorblindness was discriminatory. This is a huge error, I think.
I thought the interview btw Kendi & Ezra was great. I came away thinking Kendi is mostly trying a simple sleight-of-hand to bring back affirmative action under a better branding.
1. Get everyone to define "racist" empirically, as policies that impact POC negatively
2. Get everyone to agree to be "anti-racist", because of course most people dislike racism
3. Per the first definition, anti-racist policies are ones that POSITIVELY impact POC - basically policies that were previously called affirmative action.
I too felt like the entire framework was aimed, consciously or subconsciously, at making the argument that to oppose affirmative action is racist.
I'm pretty sure that was a 100% conscious strategy on Kendi's part.
I haven't read Kendi's book, but from what I understand one way of putting his point would be that racism is something you do, not something you are. Whenever a person does something that leads to disparate racial outcomes, they are being racist. In his review, Sanneh states it as, "we should stop thinking of 'racist' as a pejorative, and start thinking of it as a simple description."
I think this is actually pretty useful, partly because it cuts against the current idea that a dumb tweet/tiktok/etc. should result in a lost job, rescinded college admission, or social ostracism. Since racism becomes something that anyone is capable of doing, including accidentally, it would seem to call for a measure of grace and humility.
It would also suggest that we stop considering racism the worse characteristic a human being could have. In-group/out-group dynamics are hard-wired into us, so while we should recognize them as destructive and morally wrong, it's a bit perverse to make racism the cardinal sin.
I don't want to minimize the tremendous harm that racist ideology has inflicted, especially on Black Americans, but I really wonder if we've reached a sort of Godwin's Law for racism. You especially saw this after the election of the former guy; there were all these arguments about whether or not they were racist, when to my mind the correct answer is, "Yeah, they're probably racist, but that doesn't invalidate their votes or exclude them from the polity." The whole "deplorables" thing was really counterproductive and only served to entrench everyone firmly in their own corners.
I very much agree with this but per the comment above, it’s very hard to get people to accept this implication of “redefining” racism, because the rhetorical strategy behind redefining it is to associate certain action, policies, etc with the shameful connotation that attaches to the original understanding of racism. So you often have people saying X person did something racist based on the updated understanding of the term but then relying on the moral judgment associated with the original understanding of the term to berate, shame, and ostracize them.
"Yeah, they're probably racist, but that doesn't invalidate their votes or exclude them from the polity."
I think that's right but . . . I heard people making the analogy of, "if you have a group voting on what to have for dinner and three people vote, 'pizza' and two people vote, 'kill and eat you.'" It's good that "pizza" won, but disturbing that those were the options.
The point that the people who you are (correctly) saying are still members of the polity are taking actions which suggest that they don't feel any concern about respecting other people as members of the polity.
The metaphor has problems, I don't mean to put too much weight on it. I'm just saying that, "we should be able to respect each other as members of a diverse liberal society" is a fairly contested idea right now.
I get what you're saying. It's hard to extend grace to the other side when clearly they see political conflict as an existential struggle that has to end in your destruction.
What I would say is that there's one narrative about politics that is the Good Guys have to defeat the Bad Guys, and there's another narrative that says that we all partake of the same fallen human nature, and that it's up to responsible leaders and citizens to overcome those baser impulse and reach a just and durable settlement through some mix of compromise, suasion, and subterfuge.
Sometimes the first narrative is more true and more useful, and sometimes the second one is, and I think the pendulum has swung recently way too far towards the former. I think Kendi shows us a way of understanding racism that could fit more into the second narrative and it's kind of a shame that anti-racism has instead turned into an auto-da-fe. I sometimes suspect Kendi wants to have it both ways, because if racism were understood as a description of the human heart instead of as the vilest ill plaguing modern society there wouldn't be the urgency to create a Dept of Antiracism.
The main problem with the metaphor is that you can kick the pro-cannibalism members of the dinner party out of the group. You can't kick out/lock up/silence 40% of the American population if they don't consider the other 60% to be worthy of membership in the democracy. It's a problem!
"I think this is actually pretty useful, partly because it cuts against the current idea that a dumb tweet/tiktok/etc. should result in a lost job, rescinded college admission, or social ostracism."
Except that it works precisely the opposite way in practice -- intent is treated as irrelevant, only impact matters, and "impact" then is defined by the reaction of the most hypersensitive, bad faith, ignorant listener.
Of all the internal disagreements among Ds, I worry that Kendi's equity-based pro-discrimination ideas have the most potential to split and sink the D party. Everything I know from following politics for a long time tells me that most people will find this unappealing and that opinion could easily crystalize against it. Maybe I'm too old to get it, or maybe it's just a passing fad, but I could see left centering this issue and insisting on it, and the D party splitting after some very bad losses. Ezra asked Kendi about the potential political downside of his agenda, and Kendi said basically you have to try even if things would be worse if you fail. Well, given the direction Rs are going, I just strongly disagree.
Honestly, the idea seems so unpopular that I don't think it'd get that far. After the 2020 primary, the NYC mayoral election, affirmative action losing in CA, the Virginia primaries, etc, it's hard to see this getting off the ground enough to actually split anyone.
I mostly agree with this, and I'm not saying it's likely, but Ds rely heavily on the Black vote, and if we end up with a lot of lefty Black activists insisting that D candidates endorse equity-based discrimination, it's going to be a problem if they don't, and if they do.
I get kind of frustrated by all this drafting over the definitions of words. The normal definition of racism and the concept of disparate outcomes are both important. Why do Kendi and others feel the need to create a new definition of racism rather than introduce a new term?
Because "racist" is a term that creates the visceral emotional reaction that fuels funding for activist organizations. Creating a new technocratic word/phrase, like "disparate impact", isn't politically motivating. Everyone hates racism and doesn't want to be a racist, so you redefine the term to make sure they act on those impulses.
I think what you're missing, Matt, is how much consequence there is to those "surface neutral, disproportionate negative effects on people of color" policies and institutions. That's surprising, because in addition to the Senate, another favorite topic of yours is housing/YIMBYism, which I think is a clear example of the value of using Kendi's definition of racism. The people with one "IN THIS HOUSE: SCIENCE IS REAL, BLACK LIVES MATTER, WE BELIEVE WOMEN etc." sign and one "OPPOSE THE PROPOSED HIGH RISE TOWER" sign are having a racist effect -- and it's valuable and valid to explain that to them.
You keep referring to people being "racists", in Kendi's definition; but in "How to Be an Anti-Racist", Kendi specifically dismisses that type of labeling, and instead emphasizes that racism is something that all of us engage in at times, which describes actions and policies, not people in any static way. He talks about many times in his own life when he took a racist view on something, and emphasizes that we shouldn't argue about who is and isn't "a" racist, and should instead focus on the impact of decisions and policies. Kalefah Sannah's "ban the box" example isn't a gotcha against Kendi's argument -- it's a perfect example of why Kendi's argument is valuable. Kendi wants us to stop fussing defensively about our intentions, to understand that racism is something to plan for and address, not to deny. In that sense, it's very much like the way our society stigmatizes drunk driving, rather than calling someone who drank and drive once "a drunk driver" forever.
I mean, the title of the book is "How to *be* an Anti-Racist." We can all be forgiven for thinking that maybe Kendi does in fact think that people can be summed up as racist or anti-racist.
That's a good point!
See also Anti-Racist Baby
I don't know if it is so valuable all the time, though. Like in the housing example, here in LA there are groups like the Tenants' Union that are lower-income, significantly POC-represented, and anti-development, plus homeowners in general (this being LA) consider themselves progressive, anti-racist, etc. I can see how pointing out disproportionate harm NIMBY policies cause to POC can be useful, but is telling them that their policy prescriptions *are racist* going to work? I feel like it's going to cause defensiveness (especially if it's me, a white dude, saying it) and cause a lot of counter-argument ("here's why YIMBYism is actually racist"). Arguing about effects is necessary; attaching a radioactive label to those effects just turns it into a game of hot potato (to mix my metaphor a bit), with everyone trying to pass it off to the other side.
I thought EK's interview was really great in both separating Kendi's ideas from the stuff that orbits him (Ezra points this out when he points out how little systemic change with real consequences happens with e.g. corporate "anti-racist" training) and it puts it clearly in focus as a consequentialist/outcomes based policy.
I think the fundamental problem is this:
1. We've had a long history in the US of doing racist things - on purpose.
2. We have never done anything to "undo" the long term damage this created.
3. Human beings have outcomes based on their circumstances - their communities, their parents, it's inter-generational.
I think Kendi's ideas about weighing current policy based on its affect on the current levels of racial disparity is the inevitable outgrowth of this. To grossly over-simplify, it's sort of a "reparations via policy-bias" approach. For as long as the US hasn't fixed the problems we have made, we have to intentionally bias every policy's outcomes to do that fixing for us.
From that point, there's almost no limit to how much you can warp a policy. If an anti-racist tax code is one that decreases the racial wealth gap, and a racist one is one that increases (or I guess preserves it) then we end up either having to have a tax code that intentionally taxes differently by race, or one that de facto does that while being "race blind" via "statistical discrimination."
(And since that policy would _clearly_ be motivated by trying to engineer an outcome, since that is the way you get an anti-racist policy, everyone would consider its being race blind to be a total fig leaf, like the twenties zoning code.)
I don't have any good ideas about what we should do. When I argue with conservative friends about reparations I say things like "it would be weird if the right amount of reparations for slavery and all of the institutionalized racism that followed it was zero" and even they can't argue with that. There is clearly a moral wrong that has never been repaired.
The discussion with reparations is frustrating to me, because everyone who seriously advances its almost never says what they mean by it. Both TNC at the Atlantic and Kendi in this interview refuse to answer the question when asked "what should the reparations be?"
I think there are two challenges to this:
1) What would be sufficient as a meaningful response to centuries of discrimination?
2) What would be not be enraging if provided to a moderately well off black person that wasn't provided to a recent poor Asian/Hispanic immigrant or poor white person?
I have no idea what would thread the needle between those two things. Which is why so many people like MY end up just wanting to address class issues and have the spillover affect of decreasing racial inequality.
I think the basic problem with race based reparations - and the reason that it feels intuitively unfair to some - is that it assumes that the only government action that has impacted one’s present conditions are the ones that involved anti-black racism. As though all of the poor white people out there are poor because of their own personal moral failings and not because of years of bad government policy. What about reparations for the Supreme Court’s Lochner Era and anti collective bargaining rulings? What about reparations for 80s farm policies or trade agreements or anything else? Once you go down this road, you realize that what we really need are reparations for poor people generally, which means a robust economic equality agenda.
Another issue that grows larger and larger is determining who is part of which category. The more meaningful the reparations, the more important this question is. Does it matter if how many of your ancestors are decedents of slaves or if you're mixed non-black ancestry? What if you a black person adopted by white parents (or vice versa)? What if your ancestors were free blacks at the time of slavery? Or immigrated from Canada during Jim Crow? What if you're Black and rich right now?
These are all edge cases, but most of them are growing proportionally as a percentage of the population.
Right - I'm definitely not making the case that reparations are simple or easy or that there's even a right answer. I'm only saying that Kendi's solution is even _more_ complicated, because it's indirect reparations by intentional policy "bias" (or - targeting reparation-like results as a required outcome for policy - my goal was to describe this as neutrally as possible but I fear that just any term I can think of is loaded in some way that I don't intend).
"2. We have never done anything to "undo" the long term damage this created."
Well, there has been 50 years of affirmative action, which reading tea leaves I think is on its last legs.
MY never defines racism. He seems to associate it with stereotyping, but stereotyping is very, very difficult to avoid because it is basically a heuristic for surviving with limited information. Defining racism as racism as “assuming things about people because of their race” is just as problematic as the Kendi definition.
Stereotyping is often quite sensible. If there’s a 99% chance a stranger wants to trade with me, a 1% chance he wants to murder me and a 1% chance he has smallpox, I had better stay away. Sure there’s a 98% chance he’s harmless, but that 2% packs a sting.
Were Aztecs being silly if they saw Spaniards as vectors of disease? Most Spaniards did not have smallpox, yet the few who did wiped out entire cities. Were Sioux Indians prejudiced for fearing white men? Most pioneers never killed an Indian, yet a brain that routinely accepted small chances of death (without some reproductive jackpot to justify it) would not sire many viable offspring.
Racialized fear is literally in our DNA. The amygdala is the brain region most associated with fear. It activates more sharply when it sees faces of other races. People can be taught that members of races are very unlikely to kill them. This type of indoctrination is much easier in peaceful times and places and it can be wiped out by a single negative interaction.
Why is MY worried about anti semitic hate crimes? His odds of being murdered are very low, at least an order of magnitude lower than those of a young black man in Southeast DC. It’s not that MY is prejudiced against non-Jews, it’s that his brain is highly evolved to avoid threats of death and, historically, out group interactions have been much more dangerous than in group interactions.
Yeah, maybe it's hard-wired in to our brains to a degree, but so what?
As a developing teen, my dad used to make these dad-joke-esque comments along the lines of "I brought you into this world, I can take you out", and I used to respond to him that if we had lived 4000 years ago, I would've already crushed his head with a rock while he slept and taken my place at the head of the tribe.
Point being, the are lots of things hard-wired into our brains that we humans have worked to leave behind, with varying degrees of success. The whole point of society, more or less, is to work to leave behind some of our baser impulses and not to just toss our hands up and say, "Ah well. Nevertheless." when confronted with actions that are wholely within human nature, historically, but which we hope to eventually move past with time and effort.
Certainly racial tolerance is worth teaching. My point is that MY seems to want a narrow definition of racism to keep policy debates from degenerating into inane anti-racist purity contests. However, defining racism as “avoiding stereotypes” has the unhelpful effect of making everyone a racist.
My upshot is that racism is a question of degree. Everyone is a little racist but the degree varies tremendously, just like everyone is a little violent, but there are huge individual differences. We don’t stigmatize a small or even average propensity towards violence— you don’t lose your job for having violent thoughts or supporting the military or watching American football. However, the most violent 5 or 10% of young men wind up in prison and the most violent 0.5 or 1% get long sentences.
The secret to preventing racism is to replace race with some other sort of group identity. Human beings are hardwire to form communities. It use to be families/clans... then as the world expanded, it was nations, then it because race, throw in political parties. I personally think patriotism is the best alternative, but unfortunately patriotism has become uncool.
I like that. I also think real assimilation, which to me means at the family level, is the only thing that's proven throughout history to erase ethno-religious prejudice and hate without a trace.
Does anti-Norman or anti-Saxon prejudice in England anymore? or anti-Lombard sentiment in Italy, or anti-Greek feeling in afghanistan, or anti-Babylonian prejudices in Iraq, or anti-Issaurian or anti-galatian feelings in Anatolia?
These sound silly now, but at various points in history these were ethnic tensions that actually existed and had big impacts on people's lives at the time. Up until these people inter-married enough with their neighbors that they assimilated together to form a new people and the old labels were forgotten.
But there are still caste tensions in India, and religious tensions in Syria and Lebanon and most of the middle east, and tensions between Roma and others in Eastern Europe, and Rohingya and the Buddhists of Myanmar and these despite these peoples living closely with their neighbors for hundreds of years - but not intermarrying.
So i think patriotism is good, but inter-marrying is even better, which is why I'm optimistic that these things will get better as the rate of interethnic marriage continues to increase.
Patriotism is only a good alternative if you live in a good country. Which the US is, of course.
I’ve been thinking about your comment all afternoon, and it suddenly dawned on me my response.
You are not talking about group identity, you are talking about group conflict.
There are always several levels of group identification. But there needs to be an overarching group. A group identity so strong that you are willing to sacrifice everything for it. Besides for the obvious of family.
Patriotism is that. I would die for my country (not that I want to).
As a working class guy… I’m am not going to die for an accountant. Well… I would because he is an American. But not because he isn’t wealthy.
Yeah. Did know my patriotism is corny.
the worst case version of a class war is also quite violent, though
Let them eat cake.
“Certainly racial tolerance is worth teaching.”
A social sanction can be applied on bigoted people. “Don’t be a bigot” can be taught.
“Don’t formulate public policies that may turn out, in retrospect, to have a racially disparate impact” cannot be taught. And can only be sanctioned in retrospect.
Insofar as Kendi stands for something like "don't self-flagellate -- DO something about racial inequities" he stands head and shoulder above most people who write these anti-racism tracts. Sure, he can be a little woo-woo - we live in a somewhat woo-woo society. But DO something, don't wallow.
Is he DOING anything though? I felt like he handwaved a lot of the data analytics required with ... "someone should be doing this like the CBO does economics". Does the Center for Antiracism Research have a data science team? It looks like it's just a data collection project - maybe still early days. A different way he could have answered these questions would have been ... "Here's what we're researching ... Here's what we've found ... ".
https://www.bu.edu/antiracism-center/antiracism-research/racial-data-lab/