-The FBI data will be nice, but the MCCA quickly released data for most of the major cities (Jeff Asher manually collected more and so did I just based on local news; error-prone I'm sure)
-Major cities account for almost half of annual murders (less that I would have thought) but murders are highly concentrated
-Across the reporting cities, murders went down slightly in a few, but mostly up, up to a 200% increase, with an average of 30%. Asher assumes suburban and rural deaths went up less; hence 25% conservatively nationally
-In these cities, there was NO correlation between the increase in murders and poverty, or the rate at which police were funded/defunded, or the number of guns bought in the state. (Fair warning, I used Excel and auto-linear regressions, don't hate.)
-I didn't bother comparing what party was in charge of cities or states bc it's a dumb idea
-The biggest jumps happened in cities where there was a high-profile police killing and large protests after (or, in the case of Seattle and Portland, just the protesting)
Questions I was left with:
-Why did murders stay flat in Baltimore? Are they just maxed out on it? Are people leaving the inner city in droves?
-Why did they go up so much in Ft. Worth?
-Was most of 2020's jump comprised of black victims, or was it proportional across racial groups? (Black victims made up more than their fare share of 2015-2019's increase in victims)
-Assuming this is driven by a breakdown in community-policing relationships, is it mostly on the community side, or the police side? Or totally mutual?
It does seem insane that we have to wait 10 months for important data.
It would also be worthwhile to consider the following hypothesis: The key difference between a murder and violence is that the victim in the former case dies. Reduced quality of healthcare -- as the system is overwhelmed with Covid -- might result in more victims of violence turning into murder victims. Cities would be more affected by Covid and cities with already poor healthcare might see less of an increase. This would be a correlation that could be tested in 2021, without having to wait another year.
Q: What percentage of hospitals were truly overwhelmed with covid patients? A: A small number of hospitals in the peak covid regions
Q: And for what percentage of 2020? A: A very small percentage. NYC hospitals, for example, were overwhelmed by covid for a few moths in the spring, but not afterwards, when the big murder surge began.
Q: And overwhelmed in a way that their ER couldn't handle gunshot victims? A: I don't know, but that sounds really farfetched to me. I'd think acute injuries like gunshots would usually get priority.
My understanding is that urban areas have both better healthcare for gunshot victims because they have a lot more practice and urban areas were able to designate specific hospitals for Covid patients (usually not the trauma centers that deal with gunshots). So if it was reduced quality of healthcare, it seems rural and suburban areas would be hit worse by the increase in gunshot victims becoming murder victims.
Do you know anything about the age of victims? My gut is that we've seen the largest increase among young teens, but I'd love to see some data to back it up.
I didn’t look into that.. the FBI data would have that breakdown by year through 2019 though, could be interesting to see if it was responsible for most of the 2015-2019 increase. You’d have to compare it with demographic shifts in age too.
"Assuming this is driven by a breakdown in community-policing relationships, is it mostly on the community side, or the police side? Or totally mutual?"
Totally anecdotal, and I live in a neighborhood that's basically murder-free, but during the pandemic I would see police cars every time I went out but I almost never saw a police officer. They just stayed in their cars all day long. I don't attribute that to anything other than that they were social distancing.
On what's being taught in schools, Wesley Yang's prescription is exactly right. And I definitely believe there is a weird textbook in Louisiana. But I also know what everybody outside the Deep South knows, and that is that we were all taught about slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights movement. This is not a known unknown, it's a known known. So I find it completely mystifying that Robin di Angelo and her ilk insist that most people weren't taught these things, and that American history as taught in school is some sort of racial nirvana. We all know this isn't true, and it's really peripheral to the anti racist central argument, which is that all whites are racist and we just need to constantly pay consultants to help us do the work. So all it does is make us seriously doubt everything else they're trying to argue for no upside.
There was a moment last year (that continues into now, but was at a fever pitch) where every third post on Facebook was from people I know (and went to school with!) bemoaning the things "[we] weren't taught in school" and many of those things we were, in fact, taught. And I know we were taught them because I was in class with many of the people making the claims.
Like, most people are taught punnett squres at some point, too, and cannot name them even 5 years later, or take several years of a foreign language only to forget all of it. Why do we assume that just because someone cannot recall being taught something as a teenage in high school (or younger) that it must be the absolute truth?
Indeed. I think it's funny how much we're talking about how what was or wasn't taught shaped people. All the shaping of my thinking about the Civil War and what followed came from outside school or took place after high school (which was soooo boring).
I mean, we teach people algebra in high school. How's that working out for them?
I think the issue with slavery and the south is not just what's taught in schools but what has been baked into our understanding via culture. The other day I was reading a YA Gary Paulsen book ("soldiers heart") that was published in the 90s. It's about a kid in the civil war who suffers from what we now call PTSD but was known as soldiers heart then. There's a one line mention of the cause of the civil war, and guess what, Paulsen says explicitly that the union soldiers don't think it's anything much to do with slavery.
Maybe I never knew Paulsen was a closeted white supremacist but I think it much more likely that this is a good example of the pervasiveness of an unfortunate "both sides matter" situation in historical education, and why CRT insistence on the centrality of slavery is probably sometimes not a bad idea. Because it would be a good thing if this bullshit idea that the civil war was about states rights went away. Sure the civil war was about states rights... to enslave people.
But were you reading that because you read somewhere that this Paulsen person wrote a racist YA book? Because there are plenty of them I'm sure. But there are lots, lots more that wrote that the Civil War happened because of slavery. And I understand that Southerners like the states rights reason, because who wants to be known for killing in defense of slavery in this day and age. But by the same token, it's silly to think that the Northern states would be teaching that it's about states' rights. We won the war, so of course we're going to celebrate its abolitionist background and resulting Emancipation Proclamation.
No, I wasn't reading it out of a gotcha sentiment. It's assigned as summer reading to the sixth graders I'm going to be working with next year.
The thing about the states rights motivation is that it was all retconned (is that the right use of the word?) well after the civil war in the south. It's total crap and exists to assuage the feelings of white southerners. So let's be honest about that and be explicit about exposing the idea as poppycock.
"The thing about the states rights motivation is that it was all retconned (is that the right use of the word?) well after the civil war in the south."
No, this was already an issue at the time. Edward Everett gave a speech in Gettysburg, PA on November 19, 1863 -- right before the delivery of a few informal remarks by the President -- in which he went into great detail about the political debates of the day. One issue was whether states had the right to secede from the Union (or rather, "the power," since as Everett says, states have powers, not rights). Everett argued that they did not.
"Certainly I do not deny that the separate States are clothed with sovereign powers for the administration of local affairs. It is one of the most beautiful features of our mixed system of government; but it is equally true, that, in adopting the Federal Constitution, the States abdicated, by express renunciation, all the most important functions of national sovereignty, and, by one comprehensive self denying clause, gave up all right to contravene the Constitution of the United States. Specifically, and by enumeration, they renounced all the most important prerogatives of independent States for peace and for war, — the right to keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, or to engage in war unless actually invaded; to enter into compact with another State or a foreign power; to lay any duty on tonnage, or any impost on exports or imports, without the consent of Congress; to enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; to grant letters of marque or reprisal, and to emit bills of credit, — while all these powers and many others are expressly vested in the general government.
To ascribe to political communities, thus limited in their jurisdiction, — who cannot even establish a post-office on their own soil, — the character of independent sovereignty, and to reduce a national organization, clothed with all the transcendent powers of government, to the name and condition of an "agency" of the States, proves nothing but that the logic of secession is on a par with its loyalty and patriotism.
O, but "the reserved rights"! And what of the reserved rights? The tenth amendment of the Constitution, supposed to provide for "reserved rights," is constantly misquoted. By that amendment, "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The "powers" reserved must of course be such as could have been, but were not delegated to the United States, — could have been, but were not prohibited to the States; but to speak of the right of an individual State to secede, as a power that could have been, though it was not delegated to the United States, is simple nonsense."
I agree that the mainspring of the insurrection was the defense of "African slavery", as several southern declarations of independence called it. And the claims of "reserved rights" were mostly nonsense, and hypocritical to boot (see the southern insistence on enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act throughout states that did not want to enforce it). But it was contemporaneous nonsense, not entirely retconned nonsense.
Of course the Union position was that secession was illegal and, in fact, impossible (and this was litigated by war and is now settled law) This doesn't mean the Confederates didn't believe what they believed and that this belief did not motivate their actions A complete story would explore both without judgment as to who was "right" which is pretty much meaningless in the context of trying to understand what happened to the people involved.
There's really no substitute for going to the original documents. It's like data collection for historical hypotheses!
The Secession Declaration of South Carolina says explicitly that SC is entitled to secede because its presence in the Union is part of a voluntary bargain, and the other parties to the bargain did not hold up their end of the bargain. What did the other parties fail to do?
"But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation."
Here is the relation between states rights and slavery, in the insurrectionists' own words: SC claimed the right to secede, because the other states would not protect the institution of slavery.
Here's the opening of the Mississippi Declaration of Secession:
"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."
Again: in their own words, they are dissolving the Union in order to protect the institution of slavery.
So: yes, the insurrectionist states often talked about their rights to secede. But the motive for invoking those rights was the protection of slavery.
And yet, the words and actions of the secessionists indicate that the principle of state’s rights was extremely important in their thinking and decision-making, how they framed the way they looked at what they were doing. It is also the case that the focus of Union leadership and people at the outset of the war was patriotism and specifically outrage at the treasonous rebellion of the Southerners and their attempt to break up the country. (This is what Lincoln was talking about in the Gettysburg address). The contemporary, documented evidence of all of this is overwhelming. It is not readily dismissable if we’re being honest and complete about it.
I would like us to commit not to the “right” history, but to “all” the history, and to understanding this history in terms of its participants, most of whom were not slaves. Otherwise it’s just virtuous propaganda instead of non-virtuous propaganda, and, in my opinion, equally worthless.
I think this is a fair point. I'm rejecting the claim that slavery isn't taught because I know it's not true in the North. And if it's true anywhere it would be in the South, but I really don't know that, and one other commenter said she was definitely taught about slavery and she's from Louisiana. Likewise, my New England teacher definitely taught that slavery was the root cause of the war, and I do believe that, but I don't really know what's being taught in the South. I try not to fall into the trap of just taking things for granted, but it's easy to do that when people are saying bad things about an area that frankly I think bad things about, with little firsthand knowledge. And you are definitely correct that there is evidence that states' rights was an issue. I just haven't done the work to see where the argument that it was "the issue" stands since I was always taught it was "fake news". I still think slavery was the dominant motivation in the North, because abolitionism was a truly passionate cause for many in a way that states' rights wasn't, and in fact New England came close to seceding in 1812 so if anything they were at least somewhat sympathetic to states' rights. But I shouldn't jump in to explain Southern motivations if I don't know what I'm talking about.
This is subject on which there could be discussion, disagreement, and synthesis which would be highly educational for high-school students, or anyone.
I understand that what we would call “true” abolitionists – people who believed that slavery should be abolished because black people were equal to white people – were rare and mostly disliked though in some cases influential. The vast majority of anti-slavery people (including Lincoln) were strongly opposed to “social amalgamation” and made a point of denying that this was their aim. In the Republican Party, a lot of people cared about abolition mainly in the context of ending “The Slave Power” that they felt was bringing free white Americans into economic and political subjection. Of course, the institution of slavery is right in the middle of all of this, but to say that the war was really “about” slavery, full-stop, is an oversimplification in my view. But it should be discussed!
Should have been clearer and the follow up comments are too long to follow on mobile. But I should have said states rights as the *central* issue is poppycock. It was states rights to enslave people. The idea that slavery was tangential at best to the civil war is insane.
I absolutely agree with that, except as usual where that needs to be heard the most is unfortunately protected by...states' rights. We had a week in eighth grade about slavery, which I remember more vividly than the subject in 11th grade, our other American history year. But Mrs. Gleason our teacher spent a whole class dismissing the states rights or economic justifications for the war. She was categorical that it was due to slavery, and again, why wouldn't she. We were in New England, and most were descended from Union soldiers and it's only a positive to feel your ancestors fought and died for a good cause. Of course because education is run on a local level, states rights will make it difficult to do the same in the South.
Just speaking on behalf of “Southerners” as I’m realizing there aren’t many of us here, but I actually feel comfortable claiming that most southerners do not believe the states rights BS, and most of us also learned about slavery’s role in the civil war in school. There are definitely more idiots than there should be but I don’t think a large majority. Then again, I grew up in New Orleans, so maybe I am deluding myself. But Georgia did go blue and Mississippi finally changed its flag…
Same here, and I grew up in Kentucky, graduating high school in the early 90s. I did grow up in a college town and they pride themselves on being a bit more civilized. I cannot vouch for what was taught in the holler, but I have friends who can help me with that, and I’m actually going to ask around.
The 90s… the film “Cold Mountain” not 20years old starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renee Zellweger basically ducks the issue of slavery in the civil war almost completely. It won numerous awards. The film Django Unchained which Tarantino-exaggerates and hyper-focuses on the issue of slavery was panned upon its release for being too graphic/violent. This idea that you portray openly and boldly the legacy of race and slavery in America is a very recent thing.
Alex Haley's Queen was a 1993 miniseries, Amistad was 1997, Beloved was 1998, Glory was 1989, Roots was 1977, with a sequel miniseries in 1988. And thats just from a list on wikipedia. None of those examples are as graphic as Django, but then, nothing is. The criticism of Django was that the graphic violence was exploitative, a charge that accompanies literally every Tarantino movie. 12 Years A Slave came out the following year, is just as violent (if not as graphic), and won Best Picture.
Agreed. I think it's a good thing that we remind ourselves of all these evils frequently (heck, we read the same damn story every year at the Passover Seder), but let's not kid ourselves that no one was aware of slavery, Jim Crow etc before we enlightened people appeared on the scene.
I was a kid in the non-posh, non-woke, very un-diverse Detroit suburbs when Roots was shown on tv and it was a major event! Everyone watched it, loved it, and talked about it obsessively (there was no cable or, IIRC, recording capacity). I had a poster of Ben Vereen in my room.
Yes I’m almost positive. It won some stuff too. What I’m talking about is that people really objected to how violent and graphic it was. And ya know… I found myself looking away at the dog scene/Mandingo fight scene. But I don’t think you would get the same pushback today for such a violent, graphic, brutal depiction of slavery.
I'm not sure why you think this supposed "pushback" was due to people not wanting to confront the "full reality" of slavery or whatever. Some of us just don't enjoy watching that level of *stylized* brutal violence on screen because it feels gratuitous. This idea that film has to be as shockingly graphic as possible to effectively convey violence and suffering always sounds like a excuse to me. As BD mentioned earlier, 12 Years a Slave came out literally the year after to great acclaim. It's not as if people didn't know *exactly* how bad slavery was until 5 years ago.
CRT is not something I like sounding off on too much. I feel that sure I may disagree with some stuff my kids learn in school, but their math education’s pathetic nature already occupies enough rent free space in my head.
However, I can’t help to resist commenting on the final point you threw out into the ether about consultants. I think you’re really on to something. I think this entire Slow Boring blog is evolving a slight niche as being home to a skepticism of “expertism” and the acknowledgment of faux, or just poor expertise’s existence, When it seems that a problem is getting more and more obscure, that the usernames and passwords for talking about it the right way are changing every 3-5 weeks… is it wrong to think that it could be a mechanism by which, as you say, we just pay consultants forever to solve it?
For my part I was basically taught nothing at all about Jim Crow. Or rather, what I was taught was teachers describing a system of southern racial apartheid under the law, and then they’d kind of handwave at it and say “…and that’s Jim Crow.”
What is? Who is that? What does that mean? Is “Jim Crow” a guy? Is it the guy who came up with the laws? It was all extremely confusing and it was literally last year - I’m a 40 year old man - where I felt like I finally understood what “Jim Crow” means, and the key insight that the societies of the south thought that they were helping minorities with these laws; that racial discrimination enforced in law would be better for minorities than racial discrimination enforced by the vagaries of mob violence. Because it was more orderly.
None of that was taught in school at all. If they’d literally just thought to call them “so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws” or something I’d have been in a much clearer place about it as a young person.
I don't think it’s that those things are taught, but how they are taught that is at issue. At this moment, the history of slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement is as potentially fraught as the teaching of evolution. There are different opinions on what facts are, and how they relate to each other, and what the story is, and a political struggle over whose cut at the issue gets to be officially sanctioned and worthy of an A grade.
I mean, yes, that's an issue, but it's not Robin's issue. She states, clearly and categorically, that slavery is not taught in US schools and most people don't know that it once existed in the US. And that couldn't be more wrong and I don't know why she persists in this lie because it really shreds whatever credibility she might have had otherwise.
I think it's best to separate diangelo from most of the liberal perspectives on this issue. I'm sure I'd count as woke and probably teach something like CRT to my students (although I'm still not really sure what CRT is). But diangelo is just far out there for most (but not all) people like me.
I agree there are a range of positions on this, just like anything. But I'm hardly cherrypicking a fringe character like Tucker does to prove a point. She is by far the most widely read anti-racism "expert", and along with Kendi, the acknowledged leader of the movement. And if you're teaching your young students that all whites are racist, you're doing it wrong.
Ok yeah. Sigh. Can't stand her prevalence either. Can I just sign up to cancel diangelo then but keep whatever is actually good about the lense of crt?
As a foreigner my opinion won't count for much but aren't there these youtubes where people call slavery a harmless institution (or even benign) and don't others compare slavery to extremely high marginal tax rates?
(I'm not complaining here: in my country of birth, the Netherlands, our role is the transatlantic slave trade is effectively no more than a footnote)
I'm sure there are, but my point isn't that everyone in America agrees with racial equity. It's a much simpler point, that we all learn about slavery in school, and progressives should stop saying otherwise. What people choose to do with that knowledge afterwards is an entirely different matter.
Grew up in Houston (born 1984). Might be the "deep south" but also one of the most populace cities in our country (think it was 3rd in pop most of my youth). We definitely were not taught much about reconstruction at all and just a skim of Jim Crow for AP American History. Honestly, I believe even American History stopped after WW2 for most classes. MLK would be taught in some separate units, but there we never got to the civil rights movement.
I graduated from a Houston high school a few years before you were born and didn’t learn much about slavery before I went to Rice and studied the various lines of inquiry about the issue. This is a roundabout way of saying there are lots of people who know little about the subject.
I thought the point of the post was that nobody knows if Wesley Yang is right because there is no attempt to collect evidence. The problem, as Matt points out, is that people like to opine about things to score personal political points on message boards and comments sections (or newspapers, TV, etc.) rather than mark their beliefs to reality.
Well not exactly because Wesley is just offering his unsubstantiated opinion of what schools should or shouldn't do. That doesn't depend on facts. I think Matt is objecting to people getting outraged at what schools (or criminals or other data points) are actually doing when they really don't know what they're doing. I was tangentially objecting to robin diangelo's acolytes basing their movement on a lie, that slavery isn't taught in schools.
>But unfortunately, as best I can tell, descriptive work is low-prestige across broad swathes of academia.
This is the buried lede of the piece. It's really bad that social science academia wastes loads of time trying to establish causality for things that don't matter! Providing better descriptive evidence of stuff people care about is a much better contribution to the sum of human knowledge than conducting RCTs and natural experiments for things nobody cares about. Scatters > Regression tables.
And this is something common to both economics and most of the rest of social science academia. Ideology doesn't come into it - the problem is their priorities and incentives.
Well you say it's the buried lede, but I don't really know what to say about it. You write that "the problem is their priorities and incentives" but *why* don't they have the incentive to do interesting descriptive work?
"but *why* don't they have the incentive to do interesting descriptive work?"
Before spinning causal/explanatory hypotheses about why some disciplines don't value descriptive work, shouldn't we get a better picture of the raw data about exactly which disciplines do and don't value descriptive work? It's a shame that no one has done any descriptive work on this.
NIH literally requires a section called "Innovation", which was added ~15 years ago. It has always felt odd to me that no matter how important the work was, if you weren't pushing the field forward in some way, it wasn't worth funding. Most of us just figured out how to spin our work to sell it as innovative though.
As someone recently escaped from this world: because it is not viewed as technically innovative and therefore does not add to the degree that one is considered a remarkable mind capable of future astounding work by one's peers.
The tenure mechanism, and the post-tenure process of trying to move "up the food chain" to other universities, encourages papers with groundbreaking and difficult methodologies to show how brilliant the authors are. Descriptive work gets written off as essentially a data entry exercise that anyone with sufficient free time could do.
That, and collecting descriptive informative is boring and time-intensive.
I ran into this doing my grad work in economics. Pure data and measurement work does not get you attention and is perceived as "boring". I presented some cross country education rates by industry aggregated from census data. I thought there were interesting data points for understanding economic development, but the gatekeepers thought it was boring. I built a mathy model to explain the patterns (poorly) and got more traction.
I think there are two things happening: 1) if you sell your work as theory based on a fixed set of assumptions it is easier to defend then explaining real data, 2) the audience is academic editors who value clever or odd findings over pragmatic approaches.
This tendency also exists in microeconomics, where using fancy math was long essential to getting tenure or even a PhD. Looking at the actual behavior of actual consumers would be too easy. Any competent senior undergrad could do that! It would not be consistent with the prestige of the profession. Much more intellectual to fantasize perfectly rational consumers and then unspool beautiful equations where ever purchase is a move in a championship level game of chess.
Isn't this mostly the work of statistical agencies and specialist state commissions?
I mean, it's a wonderful job for some people to think really hard how quality changes and new products should be incorporated into changes of the price level but most of our national accounts (and crime and chicken stats) are clerical and mostly computerised activities.
Yes, they are a public good and they're great but that means that they should be well funded, not that loads of PhD students should be producing them.
I think the disparate organization of stats collecting in the US Government leads to the lowered prestige. Census, BLS, Agriculture, etc are all responsible for various stats. The Canadian structure of StatsCanada means that even though googling "lamb production stats" is easy - you can just go to Stats Canada for whatever you need. It's not intuitive to know the best customized chart making comes from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED).
Odd. I trust fields less that call more elaborate curve fittings the next great revolution in human progress that will make work obsolete, and robots kill you.
Criticizing the timeliness of homicide data is reasonable, but it would be good to know *why* the problem exists. Jim Lynch is an extremely well-respected criminologist who ran the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2010-2013 under Obama, and his whole vision was to revolutionize crime data so that real time data could be used in policy decisions. What went wrong? You should just ask him. That's one benefit of being a famous journalist: People will actually answer your phone calls and you can tell us what they said.
One of the genuine problems in social studies is really we don’t know what we’re supporting to teach.
Like in Math, the Legislature is pretty prescriptive. In first grade
We learn how to make halves and quarters in second grade we add thirds and in 3rd grade we do fractions. ELA is slightly less specific but we teach main idea in k-2 and add theme in 3rd.
“ Evaluate the contributions of various African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, veterans, and women.” Is 1/28th of 2nd grade social studies. You tell me what that means I should teach. I’m not interested in teaching the more batshit stuff but I could fit almost anything I want to here and be within the guidelines.
To have this trench war over a subject that’s not really taken seriously by anyone is weird. I’ve been teaching 11 in grades 1-3 and no one has ever cared about social studies and now it’s the most important thing in the world to politics.
Andrew, I grew up a brown immigrant kid in US public schools in the 80s and 90s, and social studies was my favorite subject and extremely formative for me.
To this day, I remember learning about MLK and the American Melting Pot and believing that even though I'm obviously different from all of the other kids, I get to be included the same as everybody else.
I would hate for the second and third grade teachers who taught me this (both women of color) to think that what they were teaching didn't matter to me or my family.
Oh to be clear I love social studies personally. My students love some of those units, but I’ll never be observed for it. I’ll never have a curriculum or resources provided. It will never ever be clear what constitutes if I’ve taught many of the standards the way it is in Math.
Sorry, I was unclear. I understand your view. My response was to "this trench war over a subject that’s not really taken seriously by anyone." My purpose was to explain why I do take it seriously and why I think people should.
Yeah I think the "no one" you mention in your original comment refers to admin and parents and the community at large. "oh, so...social studies. What have you covered lately?" 90% of parent conferences / small talk at a party. And yes nobody in admin (until this coming year perhaps?) cares enough to observe the classroom or get invested in the curriculum.
I always had the vague sense that all US attempts at setting national standards are in ELA and math because social studies and the sciences (and the arts and PE too I guess) have always been culture war third rails that no federal policymaker wanted to touch. Admittedly I don't have proof of this, but I did go to a bilingual K-12 school where we learned history from both French and US textbooks, and the contrast between the former (streamlined, full of pictures and bullet points, you could read the whole thing in an afternoon and I enjoyed doing so) and the latter (an impenetrable brick full of overwrought narrative passages no one could possibly get through all of in a year) was really bemusing. It seemed to confirm the idea that US social studies textbooks suffer from having to serve a plethora of interests, which is an idea I think I first read about in James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.
I was talking to my wife this past week comparing my high-school experience (private school in the South) with hers (public school in the North). We were able to make lots of comparisons about the English literature curriculum, but when it came to American history, neither of us remembered much about what was covered, because we both found it so dull.
In my case anyway, my high-school history and social studies teachers were mostly hired as football and basketball coaches, and academic subjects were a secondary duty. Needless to say, this did not tend to produce inspiring teachers of those subjects.
Same in my high school. The social studies teachers seemed mostly to have been hired as sports coaches, not for their infectious enthusiasm for civics and social studies. The English teachers, or some of them, on the other hand, clearly loved their subject and it showed in their teaching.
Fascinating. Many (but not all) English teachers at my high school really seemed to be phoning it in, but the history teachers really challenged us. History teachers assigned tons of reading, led engaging discussions and provided extensive feedback on our writing. I learned much more in any one of my high school history classes than I learned in four years of English classes.
"In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology."
I don't understand why this is considered okay.
Freddie DeBoer had two articles recently that really struck a nerve with me about how there is no accountability for "social justice" dictates outside of them being essentially pointless. Its okay to force people to sit through "weird DEI trainings, [where they] roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal" because they have no real impact other than making everyone hate DEI initiatives for being pointless. But it feels like so much of the energy and passion of progressives around social justice get's caught up in the culture war and symbolic posturing instead of actual action taken to help people.
I also wonder how many employers are requiring these weird trainings? I'm in the Milwaukee area and I haven't heard of any of my friends that, like me, work in the business sector having to go through one of these. It seems mainly like a non-profit and education thing. Let me stress again though this is just what I have heard in my admittedly small corner of the world.
The chicken example isn't that random--those stats exist because people trade agricultural and livestock ETFs, futures, etc.
Financial markets are really good at information discovery and dissemination. Conversely, there is no market for "how much critical race theory will be taught in the US in any given year?" and as a consequence, there is no reliable information on it.
All true, but Matt's point is more, if the public good of it is so great, why not do what financial markets do and figure it out? It's a good point and I back more information gathering. I would love to know through satellite data how many people use certain parks so cities would know what people actually want. I would love if we could know where garbage generation that pollutes x water supply or y forest is coming from. These are important things to aggregate and know and we just... don't. So we are forced to hold bad opinions or do nothing.
"What’s more, there’s what’s on paper and then there’s what’s happening in classrooms.
In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology. And by the same token, it’s very normal for history teachers to go off-book if there’s something in the textbook they don’t think is spun the right way. "
Thank you for saying this! There is powerful disincentive for school systems to be open about what is taught in social studies and history: what ever you say has a very real chance of sending someone to the local news outlet, of sending outraged and deaf parents to school board meetings, and contributing to the certainty that all education everywhere is some lethal combination of incompetence and indoctrination.
This is not to say there is not lethal incompetence in education and in the classroom. Rather that it doesn't look as people expect. What history is taught, what books are read are nothing compared to the commitment to teach students how to write coherent paragraphs and essays. Not what to think, but how to structure a coherent argument.
There are over a hundred school systems in my state, which means thousands of individual schools under thousands of individual principals. When this is multiplied out across the whole nation, the idea the "education" is some monolithic thing, everywhere the same, should become obviously nonsensical. Even more outlandish is the idea one could get that many Americans to even come close to marching in lockstep about anything.
> how is it that all the tech bros in San Francisco are convinced there’s been a surge in shoplifting and petty crime when the data says the opposite?
I think this gets to something important about crime stats- they represent the number of crimes reported to and accepted by the police department.
If the police department refuses to accept reports, or systematically minimises crimes, the data will be bad. If people believe that reporting crime won't do anything, they won't report it.
Walgreens closed ten stores because of theft in SF, I am not sure why people get skeptical about this. Drug stores have been pretty essential and open all pandemic. This is a strange and local thing.
More epistemic humility! Preface all national crime statistics with a catechism about how they are collected in diverse ways with diverse standards and come with the warning that they should not be used to make comparisons!
FWIW, I saw a video by an independent journalist on YouTube (who seemed pretty centrist) interview a security guard at a pharmacy in SF, and he said that their standing order at the time was to let the shoplifters go, and not to bother reporting to the police, and that policy was well known to the shoplifters, so of course some people weren't shy about not paying.
I live near SF and have to go there the various shops have changed a lot over the last year or so. Putting more things behind glass cases more security etc.
Those statements by Walgreens and its peer chains should be treated with at least a touch of skepticism, as they are motivated arguments being put forward by PR flacks. The suggestion that there is a causal link b/t store closing over a 2 year period and theft levels is possibly, even probably, true. But they're also completely unsupported by anything except statements made by their PR people with the goal of influencing public policy. They don't really have any incentive to be honest about the strength of the causal connection.
Sure, but there is plenty of corroborating evidence- those stores often look windswept, a wild amount of stuff is locked behind glass, everyone local complains about crime, occasionally videos of people hauling garbage bags of sundries out go viral locally. East coast skepticism seems crazy in the local context.
I just read an article that was criticizing the reporting on shoplifting in San Fran which claimed that shoplifting is down—but the article admitted that small-value shoplifting is down but high-value shoplifting is up. I didn’t think the article reckoned with the fact that it is entirely rational to care 10x as much about a theft of $400 as a theft of $40, and that it doesn’t take much of an increase in major shoplifting to completely negate the effects of a decline in minor shoplifting.
Similarly, if people feel their chances of being murdered are up, it doesn’t matter how low the chances are for minor crimes.
About low value shoplifting- because of a recent law, Prop 47, anything under $950 is a ticket, and you aren't supposed to get arrested. Police departments and retailers are occasionally grumpy about this and claim it is at the root of theft increases. I don't have any proof that that is true, but it seems like something that might factor into reporting rates of low dollar value theft.
The strongest bias in journalism is the bias towards giving the reader the impression that by reading the article, they are informed as to what happened.
In one case, a reporter friend who works at a major paper told me privately that they believe a particular person was shot by the mafia because of romantic rivalry, but that they feared reprisal if they ran that, so instead they just extensively quoted a government official who said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity. I asked, why not just run that you believe you know who shot the gun and why, but can't tell the reader for fear of reprisal? And, tell the reader that you believe the government is not telling the truth? They didn't have a reason, besides just that their paper would never, ever run such a story.
This was the refreshing genius of Gawker -- they had an institutional culture of always telling the reader what they believed to be true, period.
I know it was a military thing that predates Rumsfeld making it famous, and his application with regard to WMDs in Iraq was completely ghoulish, but the Known-Unknown Punnett square matrix is a fantastically useful decision matrix and has got to be one of the more useful things ever popularized by one of histories worst ppl lol
OK, I have to point out that Dr. Love's work helping teachers be less racist is not morally the same as racist history books. Setting aside the fact that the textbooks are meant to be seen by children while Love's work is meant to be seen by professional educators, the goal of her book is to persuade teachers to be nicer to their black and brown students. The goal of those history books is to tell racist lies to children.
The article Matt links to is just three paragraphs, each an anecdote of professional educators being mean to black and brown kids. That's it. It does not deserve to be lumped in with myths about the War of Northern Aggression and the nobility of General Lee.
I went to school in Louisiana in the 80s and 90s. We definitely learned about slavery, it’s horrors, and its being the primary cause of the civil war. Matt’s point was that one textbook is not helpful for knowing what’s actually being taught in every single school. It’s concerning, for sure, but both sides are nutpicking.
I'm extremely glad that you learned from better history books than the one Matt cited. That doesn't mean that the one that Matt cited is not racist, and it doesn't mean that intensely antiracist people are some kind of congruent opposite to racist people.
I didn’t say both sides were “the same,” I said both sides are nutpicking. You’re allowed to say that both extremes are bad without quantifying which is worse. Love’s approach is not necessary to challenging inaccurate textbooks and some would argue is counterproductive to the goal. I take it you just actually support Love’s approach?
I know quite a bit about race theory, but all I know about Dr. Love specifically is what has been linked to from here. I haven't read enough to say I agree with all or most of her conclusions, but I do generally believe that teachers (I've been a teacher for over 15 years) need to be educated in antiracism and need to be encouraged to be deliberately nice to students in general.
"You’re allowed to say that both extremes are bad without quantifying which is worse." -- This still qualifies telling teachers "be antiracist and nice" as a position that is similar in extremity to telling students about the War of Northern Aggression.
One is a racist lie. The other is a pretty conventional idea about how to make public schooling a little less miserable for some kids. They are not morally or intellectually similar.
Yeah, sorry, this is toxic as fuck: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619087/ it is not the same as “be nice to each other.” Robin Diangelo just wrote a book about how being nice is racist. There’s absolutely a moral problem on the left too (and I’m a lefty).
A pedantic point, to be sure, but one worth making is that Dr. Love is not the originator of "spirit murder". That would be Patricia Williams who first wrote about spirit murder in a the University of Miami Law Review. While rhetorically provocative, there's nothing particularly radical about spirit murder - so un-radical that it's only the second purpose of the article.
Williams says that racism is an offense "so deeply painful and assaultive" that in some ways it is just as costly to the victim as being robbed or assaulted and that often the victims of racism are put in the position of having to convince others (namely police, courts, legal officials) that he or she are not at fault and that a real harm has indeed happened. Williams argues against what she feels is the prevailing notion that "a prejudiced society is better than a violent society" and that there are real harms to prejudice and discrimination, even if they are primarily psychological and emotional.
Yet, when viewed through official actions by various authorities in NYC at the time the article was published, there seems to be no recognition that discrimination is a harm, that individuals facing discrimination must prove both the discrimination and the harm, and that the victim did not somehow do something else to deserve that treatment. Williams argues this most closely resembles child abuse or rape because victims are routinely viewed with doubt or incredulity. It is this situation that Williams calls spirit murder.
Now, I've become used to closeted defenses of racism in the comments of Matt's substack. It's generally the tactic here to lump all efforts at making society more equal under either the umbrella of socialism or the umbrella of "woke-ism" and dismissed out of hand. My recommendation is that you do not feed the trolls as most are arguing in bad faith to score internet points. Otherwise, why spend a half-dozen messages arguing against an idea so banal as "racism is bad and hurts people's mental and emotional wellbeing" - or saying that "racism is bad" is somehow equivalently harmful to the discourse to a miseducative textbook? It's not a real objection, they all just want to yell at people they don't like on the internet.
"My recommendation is that you do not feed the trolls "
I think we have to pick our spots, and I don't think Marie is a troll. In fact, I have deliberately picked MY's blog comments as the place where I have conversations about antiracism. If we can't even do that here--in the comments below blog posts about public policy--then there is basically no place where these conversations can be had.
I’m not familiar with Williams’ work, or Love’s, for that matter. I agree thinkers in this space are often trying to urge people to acknowledge the extent of the damage they can sometimes unknowingly afflict on children.
Now, I’m not sure the extent to which you consider me one of the trolls. I do occasionally feel like people will see me as a “sea lion” since I try to earnestly raise alternative perspectives. Anyway feel free not to engage. I’ll just say I care deeply about the pain people feel when they feel they’ve been subjected to racism or discrimination. However we only make that psychological pain *worse* when we broaden the scope of what counts as “racism” to include things like microaggressions, which are just seen as normal awkward human interactions when they happen between people of the same race. We make it worse when we explicitly or implicitly teach children, who lack subtlety, that the world thinks white kids are better than black ones. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but when I speak up about some of the tactics being used under the guise of anti-racism, it’s not because I object to the claim “racism is bad,” it’s because I think these approaches have become too common, don’t get enough serious scrutiny, and often make the situations we all want to address worse.
So maybe you can tell me - when did this "War of Northern Aggression" stuff get started? My grandmother (early 70's) called it "The War Between the States".
I did a poll of one and asked my mom, who grew up in Baton Rouge in a typically racist household in the 1960s. She said she was taught it was the Civil war, it was over slavery, slavery was bad, and it's good the south lost.
For sure. I'd venture a guess that, oh, 99%+ of the 23 million black southerners do. This 2011 Pew survey had some interesting data. Only 52% of white people living in formerly confederate states see themselves as "southerners" at all? And of those people, only 22% have positive associations with the confederate flag (though too many "neutrals" for my liking): https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/04/08/civil-war-at-150-still-relevant-still-divisive/
I grew up in Kentucky, and the seven states that I’ve lived in since include Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee. I never heard War of Northern Aggression until these last few years. Obviously that’s anecdotal, but never. I’m sure it really is happening, but maybe just in certain (awful) social circles?
I knew somebody in college from Georgia who was taught that phrase, and this was back in the early 2000s (so he went to elementary/high school in the 1990s)
That seems like an interesting question. "The War of the Rebellion" seems to me to be a term that pretty clearly gives a lot less credit to the Confederacy. "Civil War" comes over as a more neutral term, this late unpleasantness between us that we have got over, etc. I wonder did "Civil War" catch on as a more "politically correct" term for the war that spared the finer feeling of Southerners, but without conceding who was at fault for starting it. I feel like I want to start calling it "The War of the Rebellion" now.
Well, the Examiner article doesn't have any actual reporting in it. It's just a summary of an article written by somebody who claims on his website that "My investigative reporting recently led President Trump to issue an executive order banning critical race theory from the federal government" and calls CRT "a toxic neo-Marxist ideology."
The specific article in question refers to a "whistleblower," but the event was presumably attended by dozens of people who are free to talk about anything they want to talk about. It presents supposed revelations from documents that seem to be promotional material and take-home handouts.
If that author wants to make his arguments against CRT, he is free to do that, but what he presents as some kind of nefarious Marxist conspiracy is neither secret nor radical. Any article that presents it as such is indeed mischaracterizing it.
Does the article mischaracterize her work? It says, for example,
“Love claimed that public schools ‘don't see [blacks] as human,’ perpetuate ‘anti-Blackness,’ and ‘spirit murder babies,’” Rufo said.
Rufo reports that the “concept of ‘spirit murder’ is at the heart of Love’s teachings,” which Love defines as “a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.”
Are those lies or do those statements reasonably characterize Love’s work?
Of course we should collect more data on important issues in public policy. There's just no controversy here.
Who is going to say, "no, we should make the country stupider and make our policies worse by outlawing data collection"? Who is going to be so comically villainous as to forbid health workers from collecting info on important causes of death?
I appreciate that this is mostly just ironic set-up but let me express that I think it's genuinely good for Matt to post things that are interesting and true and maybe not-well-known even if they're not blazing-hot-controversial
Plus one, M M. Doing the blocking and tackling is vital. Without it, all the chin stroking deep thinking we all do is a joke. Good for Matt for highlighting a vital, if non-sexy issue.
The issue is not that people don't want better data; it's that most people don't realize how bad our current data collection is. By and large theHe media treats crime data as though it were just as accurate as chicken production data.
Like Matt has said that to many people inflation means “the price of gas and maybe milk”, to many ordinary people the crime rate means, “the rate of murder, robbery, and unfortunate public interactions, possibly weighted in that order”. (AKA “how safe do I feel?”)
I see this in the controversy in San Francisco—no matter how much progressive politicians and activists tell the public that crime overall is down, people don’t care because the crime they care about is up.
And progressives often have really bad messaging about this—one assistant to the DA locked her Twitter after she compared a citizen complaining about not feeling safe in public to the KKK. I think this is because it’s become normalized on the progressive left that everyone who disagrees with you is a racist arguing in bad faith, which is a bad way to treat constituents even when true. Telling people that their fears make them bad people is a losing strategy.
So, I attempted to answer some of the questions Matt has related to 2020's murder surge: https://postwoke.substack.com/p/20000lives
A few points:
-The FBI data will be nice, but the MCCA quickly released data for most of the major cities (Jeff Asher manually collected more and so did I just based on local news; error-prone I'm sure)
-Major cities account for almost half of annual murders (less that I would have thought) but murders are highly concentrated
-Across the reporting cities, murders went down slightly in a few, but mostly up, up to a 200% increase, with an average of 30%. Asher assumes suburban and rural deaths went up less; hence 25% conservatively nationally
-In these cities, there was NO correlation between the increase in murders and poverty, or the rate at which police were funded/defunded, or the number of guns bought in the state. (Fair warning, I used Excel and auto-linear regressions, don't hate.)
-I didn't bother comparing what party was in charge of cities or states bc it's a dumb idea
-The biggest jumps happened in cities where there was a high-profile police killing and large protests after (or, in the case of Seattle and Portland, just the protesting)
Questions I was left with:
-Why did murders stay flat in Baltimore? Are they just maxed out on it? Are people leaving the inner city in droves?
-Why did they go up so much in Ft. Worth?
-Was most of 2020's jump comprised of black victims, or was it proportional across racial groups? (Black victims made up more than their fare share of 2015-2019's increase in victims)
-Assuming this is driven by a breakdown in community-policing relationships, is it mostly on the community side, or the police side? Or totally mutual?
It does seem insane that we have to wait 10 months for important data.
"-I didn't bother comparing what party was in charge of cities or states bc it's a dumb idea"
Alas, sometimes you have to examine the dumb ideas in order to refute the dumb ideas.
Especially when they are being marketed aggressively.
Asher already did. Most cities are run by Ds, most states by Rs. No correlation.
Blessings on Asher, for having examined the dumb idea.
It would also be worthwhile to consider the following hypothesis: The key difference between a murder and violence is that the victim in the former case dies. Reduced quality of healthcare -- as the system is overwhelmed with Covid -- might result in more victims of violence turning into murder victims. Cities would be more affected by Covid and cities with already poor healthcare might see less of an increase. This would be a correlation that could be tested in 2021, without having to wait another year.
Q: What percentage of hospitals were truly overwhelmed with covid patients? A: A small number of hospitals in the peak covid regions
Q: And for what percentage of 2020? A: A very small percentage. NYC hospitals, for example, were overwhelmed by covid for a few moths in the spring, but not afterwards, when the big murder surge began.
Q: And overwhelmed in a way that their ER couldn't handle gunshot victims? A: I don't know, but that sounds really farfetched to me. I'd think acute injuries like gunshots would usually get priority.
Possible, but seems unlikely as non-fatal shootings were also up significantly in 2020, and murder rates have stayed high into 2021.
My understanding is that urban areas have both better healthcare for gunshot victims because they have a lot more practice and urban areas were able to designate specific hospitals for Covid patients (usually not the trauma centers that deal with gunshots). So if it was reduced quality of healthcare, it seems rural and suburban areas would be hit worse by the increase in gunshot victims becoming murder victims.
Do you know anything about the age of victims? My gut is that we've seen the largest increase among young teens, but I'd love to see some data to back it up.
I didn’t look into that.. the FBI data would have that breakdown by year through 2019 though, could be interesting to see if it was responsible for most of the 2015-2019 increase. You’d have to compare it with demographic shifts in age too.
You have to pull this table for each year: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-2.xls Note the expanded data doesn’t cover all homicides, it’s about 80% though
"Assuming this is driven by a breakdown in community-policing relationships, is it mostly on the community side, or the police side? Or totally mutual?"
Totally anecdotal, and I live in a neighborhood that's basically murder-free, but during the pandemic I would see police cars every time I went out but I almost never saw a police officer. They just stayed in their cars all day long. I don't attribute that to anything other than that they were social distancing.
"They just stayed in their cars all day long. I don't attribute that to anything other than that they were social distancing."
What used to bug me was when I walked by the cop cars and they would click their doors locked.
But now that I know it was just social distancing, I don't feel so bad.
On what's being taught in schools, Wesley Yang's prescription is exactly right. And I definitely believe there is a weird textbook in Louisiana. But I also know what everybody outside the Deep South knows, and that is that we were all taught about slavery, reconstruction, Jim Crow, civil rights movement. This is not a known unknown, it's a known known. So I find it completely mystifying that Robin di Angelo and her ilk insist that most people weren't taught these things, and that American history as taught in school is some sort of racial nirvana. We all know this isn't true, and it's really peripheral to the anti racist central argument, which is that all whites are racist and we just need to constantly pay consultants to help us do the work. So all it does is make us seriously doubt everything else they're trying to argue for no upside.
Thank you!
There was a moment last year (that continues into now, but was at a fever pitch) where every third post on Facebook was from people I know (and went to school with!) bemoaning the things "[we] weren't taught in school" and many of those things we were, in fact, taught. And I know we were taught them because I was in class with many of the people making the claims.
Like, most people are taught punnett squres at some point, too, and cannot name them even 5 years later, or take several years of a foreign language only to forget all of it. Why do we assume that just because someone cannot recall being taught something as a teenage in high school (or younger) that it must be the absolute truth?
It would be Interesting to debate whether the concept of teaching automatically implies the concept of learning.
Indeed. I think it's funny how much we're talking about how what was or wasn't taught shaped people. All the shaping of my thinking about the Civil War and what followed came from outside school or took place after high school (which was soooo boring).
I mean, we teach people algebra in high school. How's that working out for them?
I think the issue with slavery and the south is not just what's taught in schools but what has been baked into our understanding via culture. The other day I was reading a YA Gary Paulsen book ("soldiers heart") that was published in the 90s. It's about a kid in the civil war who suffers from what we now call PTSD but was known as soldiers heart then. There's a one line mention of the cause of the civil war, and guess what, Paulsen says explicitly that the union soldiers don't think it's anything much to do with slavery.
Maybe I never knew Paulsen was a closeted white supremacist but I think it much more likely that this is a good example of the pervasiveness of an unfortunate "both sides matter" situation in historical education, and why CRT insistence on the centrality of slavery is probably sometimes not a bad idea. Because it would be a good thing if this bullshit idea that the civil war was about states rights went away. Sure the civil war was about states rights... to enslave people.
But were you reading that because you read somewhere that this Paulsen person wrote a racist YA book? Because there are plenty of them I'm sure. But there are lots, lots more that wrote that the Civil War happened because of slavery. And I understand that Southerners like the states rights reason, because who wants to be known for killing in defense of slavery in this day and age. But by the same token, it's silly to think that the Northern states would be teaching that it's about states' rights. We won the war, so of course we're going to celebrate its abolitionist background and resulting Emancipation Proclamation.
No, I wasn't reading it out of a gotcha sentiment. It's assigned as summer reading to the sixth graders I'm going to be working with next year.
The thing about the states rights motivation is that it was all retconned (is that the right use of the word?) well after the civil war in the south. It's total crap and exists to assuage the feelings of white southerners. So let's be honest about that and be explicit about exposing the idea as poppycock.
"The thing about the states rights motivation is that it was all retconned (is that the right use of the word?) well after the civil war in the south."
No, this was already an issue at the time. Edward Everett gave a speech in Gettysburg, PA on November 19, 1863 -- right before the delivery of a few informal remarks by the President -- in which he went into great detail about the political debates of the day. One issue was whether states had the right to secede from the Union (or rather, "the power," since as Everett says, states have powers, not rights). Everett argued that they did not.
"Certainly I do not deny that the separate States are clothed with sovereign powers for the administration of local affairs. It is one of the most beautiful features of our mixed system of government; but it is equally true, that, in adopting the Federal Constitution, the States abdicated, by express renunciation, all the most important functions of national sovereignty, and, by one comprehensive self denying clause, gave up all right to contravene the Constitution of the United States. Specifically, and by enumeration, they renounced all the most important prerogatives of independent States for peace and for war, — the right to keep troops or ships of war in time of peace, or to engage in war unless actually invaded; to enter into compact with another State or a foreign power; to lay any duty on tonnage, or any impost on exports or imports, without the consent of Congress; to enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; to grant letters of marque or reprisal, and to emit bills of credit, — while all these powers and many others are expressly vested in the general government.
To ascribe to political communities, thus limited in their jurisdiction, — who cannot even establish a post-office on their own soil, — the character of independent sovereignty, and to reduce a national organization, clothed with all the transcendent powers of government, to the name and condition of an "agency" of the States, proves nothing but that the logic of secession is on a par with its loyalty and patriotism.
O, but "the reserved rights"! And what of the reserved rights? The tenth amendment of the Constitution, supposed to provide for "reserved rights," is constantly misquoted. By that amendment, "the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The "powers" reserved must of course be such as could have been, but were not delegated to the United States, — could have been, but were not prohibited to the States; but to speak of the right of an individual State to secede, as a power that could have been, though it was not delegated to the United States, is simple nonsense."
I agree that the mainspring of the insurrection was the defense of "African slavery", as several southern declarations of independence called it. And the claims of "reserved rights" were mostly nonsense, and hypocritical to boot (see the southern insistence on enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act throughout states that did not want to enforce it). But it was contemporaneous nonsense, not entirely retconned nonsense.
Everett's speech was pretty good (https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/everett-gettysburg-address-speech-text/). Excellent long setup for Lincoln's also pretty good brief remarks.
" Excellent long setup for Lincoln's also pretty good brief remarks."
Yup. When they work, snappy synthetic overviews stand on the shoulders of more extended, detailed expositions of the facts.
Of course the Union position was that secession was illegal and, in fact, impossible (and this was litigated by war and is now settled law) This doesn't mean the Confederates didn't believe what they believed and that this belief did not motivate their actions A complete story would explore both without judgment as to who was "right" which is pretty much meaningless in the context of trying to understand what happened to the people involved.
There's really no substitute for going to the original documents. It's like data collection for historical hypotheses!
The Secession Declaration of South Carolina says explicitly that SC is entitled to secede because its presence in the Union is part of a voluntary bargain, and the other parties to the bargain did not hold up their end of the bargain. What did the other parties fail to do?
"But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them. In many of these States the fugitive is discharged from service or labor claimed, and in none of them has the State Government complied with the stipulation made in the Constitution. The State of New Jersey, at an early day, passed a law in conformity with her constitutional obligation; but the current of anti-slavery feeling has led her more recently to enact laws which render inoperative the remedies provided by her own law and by the laws of Congress. In the State of New York even the right of transit for a slave has been denied by her tribunals; and the States of Ohio and Iowa have refused to surrender to justice fugitives charged with murder, and with inciting servile insurrection in the State of Virginia. Thus the constituted compact has been deliberately broken and disregarded by the non-slaveholding States, and the consequence follows that South Carolina is released from her obligation."
Here is the relation between states rights and slavery, in the insurrectionists' own words: SC claimed the right to secede, because the other states would not protect the institution of slavery.
Here's the opening of the Mississippi Declaration of Secession:
"In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."
Again: in their own words, they are dissolving the Union in order to protect the institution of slavery.
So: yes, the insurrectionist states often talked about their rights to secede. But the motive for invoking those rights was the protection of slavery.
And yet, the words and actions of the secessionists indicate that the principle of state’s rights was extremely important in their thinking and decision-making, how they framed the way they looked at what they were doing. It is also the case that the focus of Union leadership and people at the outset of the war was patriotism and specifically outrage at the treasonous rebellion of the Southerners and their attempt to break up the country. (This is what Lincoln was talking about in the Gettysburg address). The contemporary, documented evidence of all of this is overwhelming. It is not readily dismissable if we’re being honest and complete about it.
I would like us to commit not to the “right” history, but to “all” the history, and to understanding this history in terms of its participants, most of whom were not slaves. Otherwise it’s just virtuous propaganda instead of non-virtuous propaganda, and, in my opinion, equally worthless.
I think this is a fair point. I'm rejecting the claim that slavery isn't taught because I know it's not true in the North. And if it's true anywhere it would be in the South, but I really don't know that, and one other commenter said she was definitely taught about slavery and she's from Louisiana. Likewise, my New England teacher definitely taught that slavery was the root cause of the war, and I do believe that, but I don't really know what's being taught in the South. I try not to fall into the trap of just taking things for granted, but it's easy to do that when people are saying bad things about an area that frankly I think bad things about, with little firsthand knowledge. And you are definitely correct that there is evidence that states' rights was an issue. I just haven't done the work to see where the argument that it was "the issue" stands since I was always taught it was "fake news". I still think slavery was the dominant motivation in the North, because abolitionism was a truly passionate cause for many in a way that states' rights wasn't, and in fact New England came close to seceding in 1812 so if anything they were at least somewhat sympathetic to states' rights. But I shouldn't jump in to explain Southern motivations if I don't know what I'm talking about.
This is subject on which there could be discussion, disagreement, and synthesis which would be highly educational for high-school students, or anyone.
I understand that what we would call “true” abolitionists – people who believed that slavery should be abolished because black people were equal to white people – were rare and mostly disliked though in some cases influential. The vast majority of anti-slavery people (including Lincoln) were strongly opposed to “social amalgamation” and made a point of denying that this was their aim. In the Republican Party, a lot of people cared about abolition mainly in the context of ending “The Slave Power” that they felt was bringing free white Americans into economic and political subjection. Of course, the institution of slavery is right in the middle of all of this, but to say that the war was really “about” slavery, full-stop, is an oversimplification in my view. But it should be discussed!
Should have been clearer and the follow up comments are too long to follow on mobile. But I should have said states rights as the *central* issue is poppycock. It was states rights to enslave people. The idea that slavery was tangential at best to the civil war is insane.
"The idea that slavery was tangential at best to the civil war is insane."
Well, deeply uninformed, or viciously mendacious. Probably not insane.
Slavery was at the heart of every declaration of secession. I have quoted several in order to bring some contemporaneous witnesses into the debate.
I absolutely agree with that, except as usual where that needs to be heard the most is unfortunately protected by...states' rights. We had a week in eighth grade about slavery, which I remember more vividly than the subject in 11th grade, our other American history year. But Mrs. Gleason our teacher spent a whole class dismissing the states rights or economic justifications for the war. She was categorical that it was due to slavery, and again, why wouldn't she. We were in New England, and most were descended from Union soldiers and it's only a positive to feel your ancestors fought and died for a good cause. Of course because education is run on a local level, states rights will make it difficult to do the same in the South.
Just speaking on behalf of “Southerners” as I’m realizing there aren’t many of us here, but I actually feel comfortable claiming that most southerners do not believe the states rights BS, and most of us also learned about slavery’s role in the civil war in school. There are definitely more idiots than there should be but I don’t think a large majority. Then again, I grew up in New Orleans, so maybe I am deluding myself. But Georgia did go blue and Mississippi finally changed its flag…
Same here, and I grew up in Kentucky, graduating high school in the early 90s. I did grow up in a college town and they pride themselves on being a bit more civilized. I cannot vouch for what was taught in the holler, but I have friends who can help me with that, and I’m actually going to ask around.
The 90s… the film “Cold Mountain” not 20years old starring Jude Law, Nicole Kidman, and Renee Zellweger basically ducks the issue of slavery in the civil war almost completely. It won numerous awards. The film Django Unchained which Tarantino-exaggerates and hyper-focuses on the issue of slavery was panned upon its release for being too graphic/violent. This idea that you portray openly and boldly the legacy of race and slavery in America is a very recent thing.
Alex Haley's Queen was a 1993 miniseries, Amistad was 1997, Beloved was 1998, Glory was 1989, Roots was 1977, with a sequel miniseries in 1988. And thats just from a list on wikipedia. None of those examples are as graphic as Django, but then, nothing is. The criticism of Django was that the graphic violence was exploitative, a charge that accompanies literally every Tarantino movie. 12 Years A Slave came out the following year, is just as violent (if not as graphic), and won Best Picture.
Agreed. I think it's a good thing that we remind ourselves of all these evils frequently (heck, we read the same damn story every year at the Passover Seder), but let's not kid ourselves that no one was aware of slavery, Jim Crow etc before we enlightened people appeared on the scene.
"(heck, we read the same damn story every year at the Passover Seder)"
Well, Pharoah's refusal to release the Jews was mostly about states' rights, after all.
I was a kid in the non-posh, non-woke, very un-diverse Detroit suburbs when Roots was shown on tv and it was a major event! Everyone watched it, loved it, and talked about it obsessively (there was no cable or, IIRC, recording capacity). I had a poster of Ben Vereen in my room.
Django was nominated for best picture in its release year?
And the much older Roots series, which was hugely popular in the US, hardly portrayed slavery in a favorable light.
Yes I’m almost positive. It won some stuff too. What I’m talking about is that people really objected to how violent and graphic it was. And ya know… I found myself looking away at the dog scene/Mandingo fight scene. But I don’t think you would get the same pushback today for such a violent, graphic, brutal depiction of slavery.
I'm not sure why you think this supposed "pushback" was due to people not wanting to confront the "full reality" of slavery or whatever. Some of us just don't enjoy watching that level of *stylized* brutal violence on screen because it feels gratuitous. This idea that film has to be as shockingly graphic as possible to effectively convey violence and suffering always sounds like a excuse to me. As BD mentioned earlier, 12 Years a Slave came out literally the year after to great acclaim. It's not as if people didn't know *exactly* how bad slavery was until 5 years ago.
Very graphic violence, Tarantino, etc. gets pushback even in movies having nothing to do with slavery.
Not exactly the same thing, but I've read some pushback against the recent Amazon series Them, which apparently displays a lot of Black trauma, e.g., https://level.medium.com/amazons-them-is-visual-terrorism-72ed7147dcb2
Unsurprisingly, I decided not to watch it.
CRT is not something I like sounding off on too much. I feel that sure I may disagree with some stuff my kids learn in school, but their math education’s pathetic nature already occupies enough rent free space in my head.
However, I can’t help to resist commenting on the final point you threw out into the ether about consultants. I think you’re really on to something. I think this entire Slow Boring blog is evolving a slight niche as being home to a skepticism of “expertism” and the acknowledgment of faux, or just poor expertise’s existence, When it seems that a problem is getting more and more obscure, that the usernames and passwords for talking about it the right way are changing every 3-5 weeks… is it wrong to think that it could be a mechanism by which, as you say, we just pay consultants forever to solve it?
For my part I was basically taught nothing at all about Jim Crow. Or rather, what I was taught was teachers describing a system of southern racial apartheid under the law, and then they’d kind of handwave at it and say “…and that’s Jim Crow.”
What is? Who is that? What does that mean? Is “Jim Crow” a guy? Is it the guy who came up with the laws? It was all extremely confusing and it was literally last year - I’m a 40 year old man - where I felt like I finally understood what “Jim Crow” means, and the key insight that the societies of the south thought that they were helping minorities with these laws; that racial discrimination enforced in law would be better for minorities than racial discrimination enforced by the vagaries of mob violence. Because it was more orderly.
None of that was taught in school at all. If they’d literally just thought to call them “so-called ‘Jim Crow’ laws” or something I’d have been in a much clearer place about it as a young person.
I don't think it’s that those things are taught, but how they are taught that is at issue. At this moment, the history of slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement is as potentially fraught as the teaching of evolution. There are different opinions on what facts are, and how they relate to each other, and what the story is, and a political struggle over whose cut at the issue gets to be officially sanctioned and worthy of an A grade.
I mean, yes, that's an issue, but it's not Robin's issue. She states, clearly and categorically, that slavery is not taught in US schools and most people don't know that it once existed in the US. And that couldn't be more wrong and I don't know why she persists in this lie because it really shreds whatever credibility she might have had otherwise.
I think it's best to separate diangelo from most of the liberal perspectives on this issue. I'm sure I'd count as woke and probably teach something like CRT to my students (although I'm still not really sure what CRT is). But diangelo is just far out there for most (but not all) people like me.
I agree there are a range of positions on this, just like anything. But I'm hardly cherrypicking a fringe character like Tucker does to prove a point. She is by far the most widely read anti-racism "expert", and along with Kendi, the acknowledged leader of the movement. And if you're teaching your young students that all whites are racist, you're doing it wrong.
Ok yeah. Sigh. Can't stand her prevalence either. Can I just sign up to cancel diangelo then but keep whatever is actually good about the lense of crt?
As a foreigner my opinion won't count for much but aren't there these youtubes where people call slavery a harmless institution (or even benign) and don't others compare slavery to extremely high marginal tax rates?
(I'm not complaining here: in my country of birth, the Netherlands, our role is the transatlantic slave trade is effectively no more than a footnote)
I'm sure there are, but my point isn't that everyone in America agrees with racial equity. It's a much simpler point, that we all learn about slavery in school, and progressives should stop saying otherwise. What people choose to do with that knowledge afterwards is an entirely different matter.
Grew up in Houston (born 1984). Might be the "deep south" but also one of the most populace cities in our country (think it was 3rd in pop most of my youth). We definitely were not taught much about reconstruction at all and just a skim of Jim Crow for AP American History. Honestly, I believe even American History stopped after WW2 for most classes. MLK would be taught in some separate units, but there we never got to the civil rights movement.
I graduated from a Houston high school a few years before you were born and didn’t learn much about slavery before I went to Rice and studied the various lines of inquiry about the issue. This is a roundabout way of saying there are lots of people who know little about the subject.
I thought the point of the post was that nobody knows if Wesley Yang is right because there is no attempt to collect evidence. The problem, as Matt points out, is that people like to opine about things to score personal political points on message boards and comments sections (or newspapers, TV, etc.) rather than mark their beliefs to reality.
Well not exactly because Wesley is just offering his unsubstantiated opinion of what schools should or shouldn't do. That doesn't depend on facts. I think Matt is objecting to people getting outraged at what schools (or criminals or other data points) are actually doing when they really don't know what they're doing. I was tangentially objecting to robin diangelo's acolytes basing their movement on a lie, that slavery isn't taught in schools.
>But unfortunately, as best I can tell, descriptive work is low-prestige across broad swathes of academia.
This is the buried lede of the piece. It's really bad that social science academia wastes loads of time trying to establish causality for things that don't matter! Providing better descriptive evidence of stuff people care about is a much better contribution to the sum of human knowledge than conducting RCTs and natural experiments for things nobody cares about. Scatters > Regression tables.
And this is something common to both economics and most of the rest of social science academia. Ideology doesn't come into it - the problem is their priorities and incentives.
Well you say it's the buried lede, but I don't really know what to say about it. You write that "the problem is their priorities and incentives" but *why* don't they have the incentive to do interesting descriptive work?
"but *why* don't they have the incentive to do interesting descriptive work?"
Before spinning causal/explanatory hypotheses about why some disciplines don't value descriptive work, shouldn't we get a better picture of the raw data about exactly which disciplines do and don't value descriptive work? It's a shame that no one has done any descriptive work on this.
No one likes doing "normal science". Everyone wants to do a Kuhnian revolution. Grants want to fund something innovative, not just plug-and-chug.
(And everyone ignores that the way you get something innovative is from someone having done *lots* of plug-and-chug and figured it out.)
NIH literally requires a section called "Innovation", which was added ~15 years ago. It has always felt odd to me that no matter how important the work was, if you weren't pushing the field forward in some way, it wasn't worth funding. Most of us just figured out how to spin our work to sell it as innovative though.
As someone recently escaped from this world: because it is not viewed as technically innovative and therefore does not add to the degree that one is considered a remarkable mind capable of future astounding work by one's peers.
The tenure mechanism, and the post-tenure process of trying to move "up the food chain" to other universities, encourages papers with groundbreaking and difficult methodologies to show how brilliant the authors are. Descriptive work gets written off as essentially a data entry exercise that anyone with sufficient free time could do.
That, and collecting descriptive informative is boring and time-intensive.
I ran into this doing my grad work in economics. Pure data and measurement work does not get you attention and is perceived as "boring". I presented some cross country education rates by industry aggregated from census data. I thought there were interesting data points for understanding economic development, but the gatekeepers thought it was boring. I built a mathy model to explain the patterns (poorly) and got more traction.
I think there are two things happening: 1) if you sell your work as theory based on a fixed set of assumptions it is easier to defend then explaining real data, 2) the audience is academic editors who value clever or odd findings over pragmatic approaches.
This tendency also exists in microeconomics, where using fancy math was long essential to getting tenure or even a PhD. Looking at the actual behavior of actual consumers would be too easy. Any competent senior undergrad could do that! It would not be consistent with the prestige of the profession. Much more intellectual to fantasize perfectly rational consumers and then unspool beautiful equations where ever purchase is a move in a championship level game of chess.
But fancy math actually *is* more fun though :( (I say as a mathematician)
Descriptive work is comparatively easy. It doesn’t prove ones brilliance or prove that one is more worthy of tenure than the other PhDs.
Isn't this mostly the work of statistical agencies and specialist state commissions?
I mean, it's a wonderful job for some people to think really hard how quality changes and new products should be incorporated into changes of the price level but most of our national accounts (and crime and chicken stats) are clerical and mostly computerised activities.
Yes, they are a public good and they're great but that means that they should be well funded, not that loads of PhD students should be producing them.
I think the disparate organization of stats collecting in the US Government leads to the lowered prestige. Census, BLS, Agriculture, etc are all responsible for various stats. The Canadian structure of StatsCanada means that even though googling "lamb production stats" is easy - you can just go to Stats Canada for whatever you need. It's not intuitive to know the best customized chart making comes from the St. Louis Federal Reserve (FRED).
You’d think this would be a great issue for some up & coming legislators, particularly if you’re of the “problem solver” ilk.
Odd. I trust fields less that call more elaborate curve fittings the next great revolution in human progress that will make work obsolete, and robots kill you.
Criticizing the timeliness of homicide data is reasonable, but it would be good to know *why* the problem exists. Jim Lynch is an extremely well-respected criminologist who ran the Bureau of Justice Statistics from 2010-2013 under Obama, and his whole vision was to revolutionize crime data so that real time data could be used in policy decisions. What went wrong? You should just ask him. That's one benefit of being a famous journalist: People will actually answer your phone calls and you can tell us what they said.
https://ccjs.umd.edu/facultyprofile/lynch/james
One of the genuine problems in social studies is really we don’t know what we’re supporting to teach.
Like in Math, the Legislature is pretty prescriptive. In first grade
We learn how to make halves and quarters in second grade we add thirds and in 3rd grade we do fractions. ELA is slightly less specific but we teach main idea in k-2 and add theme in 3rd.
“ Evaluate the contributions of various African Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, veterans, and women.” Is 1/28th of 2nd grade social studies. You tell me what that means I should teach. I’m not interested in teaching the more batshit stuff but I could fit almost anything I want to here and be within the guidelines.
To have this trench war over a subject that’s not really taken seriously by anyone is weird. I’ve been teaching 11 in grades 1-3 and no one has ever cared about social studies and now it’s the most important thing in the world to politics.
Andrew, I grew up a brown immigrant kid in US public schools in the 80s and 90s, and social studies was my favorite subject and extremely formative for me.
To this day, I remember learning about MLK and the American Melting Pot and believing that even though I'm obviously different from all of the other kids, I get to be included the same as everybody else.
I would hate for the second and third grade teachers who taught me this (both women of color) to think that what they were teaching didn't matter to me or my family.
Oh to be clear I love social studies personally. My students love some of those units, but I’ll never be observed for it. I’ll never have a curriculum or resources provided. It will never ever be clear what constitutes if I’ve taught many of the standards the way it is in Math.
Sorry, I was unclear. I understand your view. My response was to "this trench war over a subject that’s not really taken seriously by anyone." My purpose was to explain why I do take it seriously and why I think people should.
Yeah I think the "no one" you mention in your original comment refers to admin and parents and the community at large. "oh, so...social studies. What have you covered lately?" 90% of parent conferences / small talk at a party. And yes nobody in admin (until this coming year perhaps?) cares enough to observe the classroom or get invested in the curriculum.
I always had the vague sense that all US attempts at setting national standards are in ELA and math because social studies and the sciences (and the arts and PE too I guess) have always been culture war third rails that no federal policymaker wanted to touch. Admittedly I don't have proof of this, but I did go to a bilingual K-12 school where we learned history from both French and US textbooks, and the contrast between the former (streamlined, full of pictures and bullet points, you could read the whole thing in an afternoon and I enjoyed doing so) and the latter (an impenetrable brick full of overwrought narrative passages no one could possibly get through all of in a year) was really bemusing. It seemed to confirm the idea that US social studies textbooks suffer from having to serve a plethora of interests, which is an idea I think I first read about in James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.
I was talking to my wife this past week comparing my high-school experience (private school in the South) with hers (public school in the North). We were able to make lots of comparisons about the English literature curriculum, but when it came to American history, neither of us remembered much about what was covered, because we both found it so dull.
In my case anyway, my high-school history and social studies teachers were mostly hired as football and basketball coaches, and academic subjects were a secondary duty. Needless to say, this did not tend to produce inspiring teachers of those subjects.
Same in my high school. The social studies teachers seemed mostly to have been hired as sports coaches, not for their infectious enthusiasm for civics and social studies. The English teachers, or some of them, on the other hand, clearly loved their subject and it showed in their teaching.
Fascinating. Many (but not all) English teachers at my high school really seemed to be phoning it in, but the history teachers really challenged us. History teachers assigned tons of reading, led engaging discussions and provided extensive feedback on our writing. I learned much more in any one of my high school history classes than I learned in four years of English classes.
"In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology."
I don't understand why this is considered okay.
Freddie DeBoer had two articles recently that really struck a nerve with me about how there is no accountability for "social justice" dictates outside of them being essentially pointless. Its okay to force people to sit through "weird DEI trainings, [where they] roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal" because they have no real impact other than making everyone hate DEI initiatives for being pointless. But it feels like so much of the energy and passion of progressives around social justice get's caught up in the culture war and symbolic posturing instead of actual action taken to help people.
I also wonder how many employers are requiring these weird trainings? I'm in the Milwaukee area and I haven't heard of any of my friends that, like me, work in the business sector having to go through one of these. It seems mainly like a non-profit and education thing. Let me stress again though this is just what I have heard in my admittedly small corner of the world.
The chicken example isn't that random--those stats exist because people trade agricultural and livestock ETFs, futures, etc.
Financial markets are really good at information discovery and dissemination. Conversely, there is no market for "how much critical race theory will be taught in the US in any given year?" and as a consequence, there is no reliable information on it.
On a non-market side, how much food will exist in the immediate future is a very important thing for government to keep track of.
All true, but Matt's point is more, if the public good of it is so great, why not do what financial markets do and figure it out? It's a good point and I back more information gathering. I would love to know through satellite data how many people use certain parks so cities would know what people actually want. I would love if we could know where garbage generation that pollutes x water supply or y forest is coming from. These are important things to aggregate and know and we just... don't. So we are forced to hold bad opinions or do nothing.
"What’s more, there’s what’s on paper and then there’s what’s happening in classrooms.
In my experience, lots of people sit through weird DEI trainings, roll their eyes, and then proceed as normal. It’s just a checkbox compliance thing from the legal department. The problem is that the DEI trainers themselves aren’t in on the joke, so they’ve developed some elaborate pseudo-radical ideology. And by the same token, it’s very normal for history teachers to go off-book if there’s something in the textbook they don’t think is spun the right way. "
Thank you for saying this! There is powerful disincentive for school systems to be open about what is taught in social studies and history: what ever you say has a very real chance of sending someone to the local news outlet, of sending outraged and deaf parents to school board meetings, and contributing to the certainty that all education everywhere is some lethal combination of incompetence and indoctrination.
This is not to say there is not lethal incompetence in education and in the classroom. Rather that it doesn't look as people expect. What history is taught, what books are read are nothing compared to the commitment to teach students how to write coherent paragraphs and essays. Not what to think, but how to structure a coherent argument.
There are over a hundred school systems in my state, which means thousands of individual schools under thousands of individual principals. When this is multiplied out across the whole nation, the idea the "education" is some monolithic thing, everywhere the same, should become obviously nonsensical. Even more outlandish is the idea one could get that many Americans to even come close to marching in lockstep about anything.
> how is it that all the tech bros in San Francisco are convinced there’s been a surge in shoplifting and petty crime when the data says the opposite?
I think this gets to something important about crime stats- they represent the number of crimes reported to and accepted by the police department.
If the police department refuses to accept reports, or systematically minimises crimes, the data will be bad. If people believe that reporting crime won't do anything, they won't report it.
Walgreens closed ten stores because of theft in SF, I am not sure why people get skeptical about this. Drug stores have been pretty essential and open all pandemic. This is a strange and local thing.
More epistemic humility! Preface all national crime statistics with a catechism about how they are collected in diverse ways with diverse standards and come with the warning that they should not be used to make comparisons!
FWIW, I saw a video by an independent journalist on YouTube (who seemed pretty centrist) interview a security guard at a pharmacy in SF, and he said that their standing order at the time was to let the shoplifters go, and not to bother reporting to the police, and that policy was well known to the shoplifters, so of course some people weren't shy about not paying.
It really reminds me of the meanest, most critiquey parts of Seeing Like A State. The sacred reported number blinding the state to reality.
The AI skeptics are always scared of paperclip maximizers, but we do it all by ourselves.
I live near SF and have to go there the various shops have changed a lot over the last year or so. Putting more things behind glass cases more security etc.
Those statements by Walgreens and its peer chains should be treated with at least a touch of skepticism, as they are motivated arguments being put forward by PR flacks. The suggestion that there is a causal link b/t store closing over a 2 year period and theft levels is possibly, even probably, true. But they're also completely unsupported by anything except statements made by their PR people with the goal of influencing public policy. They don't really have any incentive to be honest about the strength of the causal connection.
Sure, but there is plenty of corroborating evidence- those stores often look windswept, a wild amount of stuff is locked behind glass, everyone local complains about crime, occasionally videos of people hauling garbage bags of sundries out go viral locally. East coast skepticism seems crazy in the local context.
I just read an article that was criticizing the reporting on shoplifting in San Fran which claimed that shoplifting is down—but the article admitted that small-value shoplifting is down but high-value shoplifting is up. I didn’t think the article reckoned with the fact that it is entirely rational to care 10x as much about a theft of $400 as a theft of $40, and that it doesn’t take much of an increase in major shoplifting to completely negate the effects of a decline in minor shoplifting.
Similarly, if people feel their chances of being murdered are up, it doesn’t matter how low the chances are for minor crimes.
Here is the article by the way:
http://www.cjcj.org/mobile/news/13165
About low value shoplifting- because of a recent law, Prop 47, anything under $950 is a ticket, and you aren't supposed to get arrested. Police departments and retailers are occasionally grumpy about this and claim it is at the root of theft increases. I don't have any proof that that is true, but it seems like something that might factor into reporting rates of low dollar value theft.
The strongest bias in journalism is the bias towards giving the reader the impression that by reading the article, they are informed as to what happened.
In one case, a reporter friend who works at a major paper told me privately that they believe a particular person was shot by the mafia because of romantic rivalry, but that they feared reprisal if they ran that, so instead they just extensively quoted a government official who said the shooting was a case of mistaken identity. I asked, why not just run that you believe you know who shot the gun and why, but can't tell the reader for fear of reprisal? And, tell the reader that you believe the government is not telling the truth? They didn't have a reason, besides just that their paper would never, ever run such a story.
This was the refreshing genius of Gawker -- they had an institutional culture of always telling the reader what they believed to be true, period.
I know it was a military thing that predates Rumsfeld making it famous, and his application with regard to WMDs in Iraq was completely ghoulish, but the Known-Unknown Punnett square matrix is a fantastically useful decision matrix and has got to be one of the more useful things ever popularized by one of histories worst ppl lol
OK, I have to point out that Dr. Love's work helping teachers be less racist is not morally the same as racist history books. Setting aside the fact that the textbooks are meant to be seen by children while Love's work is meant to be seen by professional educators, the goal of her book is to persuade teachers to be nicer to their black and brown students. The goal of those history books is to tell racist lies to children.
The article Matt links to is just three paragraphs, each an anecdote of professional educators being mean to black and brown kids. That's it. It does not deserve to be lumped in with myths about the War of Northern Aggression and the nobility of General Lee.
I went to school in Louisiana in the 80s and 90s. We definitely learned about slavery, it’s horrors, and its being the primary cause of the civil war. Matt’s point was that one textbook is not helpful for knowing what’s actually being taught in every single school. It’s concerning, for sure, but both sides are nutpicking.
No, both sides are not the same. That's my point.
I'm extremely glad that you learned from better history books than the one Matt cited. That doesn't mean that the one that Matt cited is not racist, and it doesn't mean that intensely antiracist people are some kind of congruent opposite to racist people.
I didn’t say both sides were “the same,” I said both sides are nutpicking. You’re allowed to say that both extremes are bad without quantifying which is worse. Love’s approach is not necessary to challenging inaccurate textbooks and some would argue is counterproductive to the goal. I take it you just actually support Love’s approach?
I know quite a bit about race theory, but all I know about Dr. Love specifically is what has been linked to from here. I haven't read enough to say I agree with all or most of her conclusions, but I do generally believe that teachers (I've been a teacher for over 15 years) need to be educated in antiracism and need to be encouraged to be deliberately nice to students in general.
"You’re allowed to say that both extremes are bad without quantifying which is worse." -- This still qualifies telling teachers "be antiracist and nice" as a position that is similar in extremity to telling students about the War of Northern Aggression.
One is a racist lie. The other is a pretty conventional idea about how to make public schooling a little less miserable for some kids. They are not morally or intellectually similar.
Yeah, sorry, this is toxic as fuck: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619087/ it is not the same as “be nice to each other.” Robin Diangelo just wrote a book about how being nice is racist. There’s absolutely a moral problem on the left too (and I’m a lefty).
A pedantic point, to be sure, but one worth making is that Dr. Love is not the originator of "spirit murder". That would be Patricia Williams who first wrote about spirit murder in a the University of Miami Law Review. While rhetorically provocative, there's nothing particularly radical about spirit murder - so un-radical that it's only the second purpose of the article.
Williams says that racism is an offense "so deeply painful and assaultive" that in some ways it is just as costly to the victim as being robbed or assaulted and that often the victims of racism are put in the position of having to convince others (namely police, courts, legal officials) that he or she are not at fault and that a real harm has indeed happened. Williams argues against what she feels is the prevailing notion that "a prejudiced society is better than a violent society" and that there are real harms to prejudice and discrimination, even if they are primarily psychological and emotional.
Yet, when viewed through official actions by various authorities in NYC at the time the article was published, there seems to be no recognition that discrimination is a harm, that individuals facing discrimination must prove both the discrimination and the harm, and that the victim did not somehow do something else to deserve that treatment. Williams argues this most closely resembles child abuse or rape because victims are routinely viewed with doubt or incredulity. It is this situation that Williams calls spirit murder.
Now, I've become used to closeted defenses of racism in the comments of Matt's substack. It's generally the tactic here to lump all efforts at making society more equal under either the umbrella of socialism or the umbrella of "woke-ism" and dismissed out of hand. My recommendation is that you do not feed the trolls as most are arguing in bad faith to score internet points. Otherwise, why spend a half-dozen messages arguing against an idea so banal as "racism is bad and hurts people's mental and emotional wellbeing" - or saying that "racism is bad" is somehow equivalently harmful to the discourse to a miseducative textbook? It's not a real objection, they all just want to yell at people they don't like on the internet.
"My recommendation is that you do not feed the trolls "
I think we have to pick our spots, and I don't think Marie is a troll. In fact, I have deliberately picked MY's blog comments as the place where I have conversations about antiracism. If we can't even do that here--in the comments below blog posts about public policy--then there is basically no place where these conversations can be had.
I’m not familiar with Williams’ work, or Love’s, for that matter. I agree thinkers in this space are often trying to urge people to acknowledge the extent of the damage they can sometimes unknowingly afflict on children.
Now, I’m not sure the extent to which you consider me one of the trolls. I do occasionally feel like people will see me as a “sea lion” since I try to earnestly raise alternative perspectives. Anyway feel free not to engage. I’ll just say I care deeply about the pain people feel when they feel they’ve been subjected to racism or discrimination. However we only make that psychological pain *worse* when we broaden the scope of what counts as “racism” to include things like microaggressions, which are just seen as normal awkward human interactions when they happen between people of the same race. We make it worse when we explicitly or implicitly teach children, who lack subtlety, that the world thinks white kids are better than black ones. I don’t speak for anyone but myself, but when I speak up about some of the tactics being used under the guise of anti-racism, it’s not because I object to the claim “racism is bad,” it’s because I think these approaches have become too common, don’t get enough serious scrutiny, and often make the situations we all want to address worse.
What I wouldn't give for an edit button
So maybe you can tell me - when did this "War of Northern Aggression" stuff get started? My grandmother (early 70's) called it "The War Between the States".
I did a poll of one and asked my mom, who grew up in Baton Rouge in a typically racist household in the 1960s. She said she was taught it was the Civil war, it was over slavery, slavery was bad, and it's good the south lost.
Ergo millions of southerners think it's good the south lost.
For sure. I'd venture a guess that, oh, 99%+ of the 23 million black southerners do. This 2011 Pew survey had some interesting data. Only 52% of white people living in formerly confederate states see themselves as "southerners" at all? And of those people, only 22% have positive associations with the confederate flag (though too many "neutrals" for my liking): https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2011/04/08/civil-war-at-150-still-relevant-still-divisive/
I grew up in Kentucky, and the seven states that I’ve lived in since include Georgia, Louisiana and Tennessee. I never heard War of Northern Aggression until these last few years. Obviously that’s anecdotal, but never. I’m sure it really is happening, but maybe just in certain (awful) social circles?
Same here. I never heard the term uttered seriously, only in reference to people being absurd.
That’s interesting, as a Yankee I didn’t know but it sounds as if this is a trope.
I was literally just discussing this with my mom and she thinks maybe they used it on the Beverly Hillbillies?
I knew somebody in college from Georgia who was taught that phrase, and this was back in the early 2000s (so he went to elementary/high school in the 1990s)
The plaque on Pennsylvania's memorial at Gettysburg, from about 1910, dedicates it to Pennsylvanians who fought in "The War of the Rebellion".
Yes, I've seen that the War of the Rebellion was the name that Union people used in the time. I'm not sure when "The Civil War" became current.
That seems like an interesting question. "The War of the Rebellion" seems to me to be a term that pretty clearly gives a lot less credit to the Confederacy. "Civil War" comes over as a more neutral term, this late unpleasantness between us that we have got over, etc. I wonder did "Civil War" catch on as a more "politically correct" term for the war that spared the finer feeling of Southerners, but without conceding who was at fault for starting it. I feel like I want to start calling it "The War of the Rebellion" now.
This was interesting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_American_Civil_War
I was in college in the mid 90s, in Wisconsin, and had a professor call it the war of Northern aggression. (He was from Virginia). It was awkward.
"...Dr. Love's work helping teachers be less racist is not morally the same as racist history books."
Did that Washington Examiner article mischaracterize her work?
Well, the Examiner article doesn't have any actual reporting in it. It's just a summary of an article written by somebody who claims on his website that "My investigative reporting recently led President Trump to issue an executive order banning critical race theory from the federal government" and calls CRT "a toxic neo-Marxist ideology."
The specific article in question refers to a "whistleblower," but the event was presumably attended by dozens of people who are free to talk about anything they want to talk about. It presents supposed revelations from documents that seem to be promotional material and take-home handouts.
If that author wants to make his arguments against CRT, he is free to do that, but what he presents as some kind of nefarious Marxist conspiracy is neither secret nor radical. Any article that presents it as such is indeed mischaracterizing it.
Does the article mischaracterize her work? It says, for example,
“Love claimed that public schools ‘don't see [blacks] as human,’ perpetuate ‘anti-Blackness,’ and ‘spirit murder babies,’” Rufo said.
Rufo reports that the “concept of ‘spirit murder’ is at the heart of Love’s teachings,” which Love defines as “a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.”
Are those lies or do those statements reasonably characterize Love’s work?
As hot takes go, Matt, this is pretty tepid.
Of course we should collect more data on important issues in public policy. There's just no controversy here.
Who is going to say, "no, we should make the country stupider and make our policies worse by outlawing data collection"? Who is going to be so comically villainous as to forbid health workers from collecting info on important causes of death?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment
I appreciate that this is mostly just ironic set-up but let me express that I think it's genuinely good for Matt to post things that are interesting and true and maybe not-well-known even if they're not blazing-hot-controversial
Plus one, M M. Doing the blocking and tackling is vital. Without it, all the chin stroking deep thinking we all do is a joke. Good for Matt for highlighting a vital, if non-sexy issue.
"... I think it's genuinely good for Matt to post things that are interesting and true..."
A tepid take on tepid takes!
(But is it a tepid meta-take, or a meta-tepid take? Or a meta-tepid meta-take? Controversy reigns!)
The issue is not that people don't want better data; it's that most people don't realize how bad our current data collection is. By and large theHe media treats crime data as though it were just as accurate as chicken production data.
Yes but … an interesting question here could concern administrative and other practical reasons why the collection of accurate data is so difficult.
And cf.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiahrt_Amendment
Like Matt has said that to many people inflation means “the price of gas and maybe milk”, to many ordinary people the crime rate means, “the rate of murder, robbery, and unfortunate public interactions, possibly weighted in that order”. (AKA “how safe do I feel?”)
I see this in the controversy in San Francisco—no matter how much progressive politicians and activists tell the public that crime overall is down, people don’t care because the crime they care about is up.
And progressives often have really bad messaging about this—one assistant to the DA locked her Twitter after she compared a citizen complaining about not feeling safe in public to the KKK. I think this is because it’s become normalized on the progressive left that everyone who disagrees with you is a racist arguing in bad faith, which is a bad way to treat constituents even when true. Telling people that their fears make them bad people is a losing strategy.
Headline should have been, "Yes, you can count chickens before they're hatched,..., but not other important stuff". LOL