Great article. Really really good. There is a lot to respect about Tim Scott without agreeing with his program.
One point though is that the liberal argument is a straw man. Disparities matter. And many folks who study disparities, racial or otherwise, try to dig into why they exist and parse what it means to eliminate them and improve underlying wellbeing irrespective of disparity.
The racial homeownership gap has many fathers, and some just stem from preferences and geographical distribution- but the goal for managing the issue has always been improving access and choice to buy a home, and whatever drivers prevent that from happening, while making sure renting is viable for wealth building and positive wellbeing to those with no access.
Tim Scott’s world stops at removing statistical discrimination, a liberal world wants to change the mindsets and goals of police institutions
"You have to be sensitive to the reality that people like Scott, in particular, are going to be hypersensitive to the concern that they are being singled out for poor treatment because they are particularly likely to be living large swathes of their lives in what Elijah Anderson calls white space. To use an old-fashioned term, there’s actually quite a bit of value in the idea of trying to be “politically correct” — sensitive to people’s feelings, careful about your choice of words and framing, and overall trying to persuade rather than troll."
Love this. How much better off we'd be in our political discourse if we all tried to practice it.
Okay so Congress making a law is different than an administrative directive by a government agency based on an interpretation of the Civil Rights Act. Congress will not pass a law that says lenders have to lose money in order to eliminate discrimination. It will be a directive by an agency.
For the taxi example, at what point does rational (Gary Becker’s term)/statistical discrimination become disparity without any discriminatory intent? Imagine it’s an Uber driver, who instead of seeing a Black person flagging him down, gets a ride request on the app without a profile picture but with a destination to a neighborhood where the driver is unlikely to get another fare. The driver may even have statistical information (possibly supplied by Uber to point drivers to areas of high demand). Although statistically more likely, customer may not in fact be Black and/or the destination may not be in a black neighborhood (it could be a poor white area or just sparsely populated).
This would not be prohibiting certain economic activity. This would be forcing businesses to assume additional costs in order to eliminate discrimination to one class of customers.
How did the party that freed the slaves become the party that is seen as, at best, ambivalent to the concerns of black Americans?
Sixty or seventy years ago, conservatives would label civil rights activists as “communists”. A smarter conservative movement would have engaged with civil rights groups to encourage an agenda of capitalist opportunity rather than socialist redistribution.
Sorry, I realize he doesn't have huge name recognition, that's the runner-up in San Francisco's District Attorney race (he got 46% of the vote so not a fringe candidate)
What I saw earlier in the media was liberals attacking Tim Scott for not using the "correct" language for talking about racism; i.e. "you gotta say 'white supremacy' and 'systemic racism' or else you're ... (I'm not really sure what you are, probably damned.) Hearts and minds one at a time is the way to go, and Tim Scott may be immensely more effective in getting people to recognize and work against racism than current progressives ever will be. Conservatives will be a lot more open to looking at the endless complex nuances around policing in an environment where they feel that their thought processes might be acknowledged in the first place.
Maybe it's my five years in the pulpit in both conservative and liberal congregations, but wise preachers and activists know you have to tailor your language to your audience. Even Paul tells us not to scandalize our fellow Christians over ritual practices (for the Corinthians it was about eating meat, but I'll interpret it to mean "just don't do it if it's going to polarize the community.") I'm glad to see Scott raising his eyebrows at white Republicans and reminding conservatives that they still need to think about racism after they've been pushed back into defensive positions by progressives disrespectfully claiming to hold the high moral ground. Cultural change is extremely slow and, as we've seen, is very easy to set back, even by those with the best intentions.
Excellent essay. You say “There are lots of reasons that the base rate of infractions could differ, and that equal enforcement could lead to a disparity.”
Much of the problem is, as Scott’s own story highlights, enforcement is NOT equal. Logically, that makes all criminal statistics suspect, IMO. If enforcement is biased, the stats are biased, which means the stereotyping is biased as well. I think it’s important to make this crystal clear.
Everyone who studies the issue is aware that most criminal statistics are not reliable even on the victim side, because of reporting differences. But that's even more true on the offender side for many obvious reasons.
So that's why homicide rates are the most relied upon indicator of violent crime, and traffic fatality rates are the most relied upon indicator of dangerous driving.
And disparities show up in those rates. Black Americans had a 50% higher rate of dying in traffic accidents than other races in 2021, and an 800% greater(!) chance of being murdered.
It's still possible that stereotyping is biased, as you put it, but it's not clear to me that's a large part of the problem. Even if you remove all distortions in stereotyping you'll be left with disparities that are tricky to deal with
I feel that you are spending a lot of time trying to engage with an essentially non-existent policy oriented right wing. But I approve anyhow! My feeling is that statistical discrimination is absolutely necessary in some contexts (I will personally discriminate in contexts where my own physical safety is in play) but in others it is just too harmful to allow. It’s definitely worthwhile to debate and develop some principled ideas of when or when not it should be tolerated or endorsed by the government.
The Tim Scott problem is a hard one. No one likes being pulled over. And if there’s any plausible racial narrative, they’re going to get wrapped around that narrative. It’s a good way to self-justify, and it’s a good way to bond with people. People love to spin their personal drama into a group conflict. Regardless, no one likes being saddled with a stereotype, if only for the inconvenience.
So, if we accept that stereotypes are bad, if only as a matter of political reality, we can do two things. First, we can prohibit people from relying on them. Three issues. One, to so prohibit, we wind up really policing speech associated with acting on stereotypes. This is where woke speech codes come from. Two, you have the problem of the wolf and the fox. Classy people (foxes) have the resources to arrange their lives to rely on stereotypes and not leave evidence. Three, stereotypes convey helpful information, as you’ve discussed. It’s weird that they’re this forbidden fruit of human knowledge!
The second option is to address the underlying reality that causes the stereotype. If Tim Scott feels like he is pulled over too often by the police, then he should try to bring the black crime rate more in line with that of other races. Maybe this would involve more police, pharmacological improvements to impulse control, who knows. But right now, “black crime” is taboo among white cultural elites so it’s hard to know where to even begin.
Once you start down the first path, though, you get further and further from solving the underlying issue. So-called racial liberals will seek to ban not only the stereotype but also silence the statistics, as you are aware. Moreover, they will come after even individualized signifiers, like SAT scores and credit reports, arguing that these reflect past racism. Black identity politics is about telling blacks what they want to hear, so it’s all one thread.
On #2 - I know this is one of the worst of right-wing bogeymen and taboos, but if I could wave a magic wand and change one disparity to make life better for Black people in America it would be the crime disparity.
One of the only things worse than being a victim of a serious crime (and Black people are 8 times more likely to be murdered than other races) is committing one. A single shooting or assault is a MASSIVE drain on the health and economic resources of the community wherever it takes, my back of the envelope guess is something like half a million to a million dollars is spent on EMTs, detectives, medical treatment, foregone wages of the victim, incarceration of the offender. And that's without taking into account psychological damage and disinvestment.
It's really a crime (sorry) that the Left has abrogated talking about Black victims of crime for fear of acknowledging that many of the perpetrators are also black. 14,000 Black people were murdered last year and double that many shot, non-fatally. And back to the whole point of today's post, the disparities in crime make policing fairness that much more difficult to achieve. I'm all for improving police forces in any way possible and doing more to limit bad practices that harm innocent minorities. But all of that is so much harder when rates of serious crime are disproportionately higher
In the situation where DJT is removed from contention for the GOP nomination, I continue to place my money on Tim Scott as the most likely candidate to win.
Great post. I would like to elaborate on a small point. White liberals aren’t fake in the sense that their lying. They definitively do believe that anti-black discrimination is morally impermissible. But they so often live as if they have inferred some things about blacks. When you think about a generic white liberal, what comes to mind? What kind of neighborhood do they live in? Where do they send their kids to school? With whom do they associate? Sure, from their perspective, all this is just how things turn out. But from other people’s perspective, white liberals have just spent money and cultural capital to do taste-based discrimination in a way they can feel good about.
We can also insist on a higher bar of equality for the high-volume largely performative aspects of law enforcement -- the TSA can clamp down on water bottles by all races equally. I doubt anyone would lose sleep if our "left turn without blinking" enforcement was sub-optimal. It's more important for Tim Scott & others to live a normal life. On the other hand, we can still insist that violent crimes are pursued effectively (instead of leaving guns on the street in the name of equity e.g. https://twitter.com/HamasakiLaw/status/1366816361020678145 )
Great article. Really really good. There is a lot to respect about Tim Scott without agreeing with his program.
One point though is that the liberal argument is a straw man. Disparities matter. And many folks who study disparities, racial or otherwise, try to dig into why they exist and parse what it means to eliminate them and improve underlying wellbeing irrespective of disparity.
The racial homeownership gap has many fathers, and some just stem from preferences and geographical distribution- but the goal for managing the issue has always been improving access and choice to buy a home, and whatever drivers prevent that from happening, while making sure renting is viable for wealth building and positive wellbeing to those with no access.
Tim Scott’s world stops at removing statistical discrimination, a liberal world wants to change the mindsets and goals of police institutions
"You have to be sensitive to the reality that people like Scott, in particular, are going to be hypersensitive to the concern that they are being singled out for poor treatment because they are particularly likely to be living large swathes of their lives in what Elijah Anderson calls white space. To use an old-fashioned term, there’s actually quite a bit of value in the idea of trying to be “politically correct” — sensitive to people’s feelings, careful about your choice of words and framing, and overall trying to persuade rather than troll."
Love this. How much better off we'd be in our political discourse if we all tried to practice it.
"This is a very neglected corner of conceptual space in the United States,"
Cosmic LOL
Congratulations on the new logo
Okay so Congress making a law is different than an administrative directive by a government agency based on an interpretation of the Civil Rights Act. Congress will not pass a law that says lenders have to lose money in order to eliminate discrimination. It will be a directive by an agency.
For the taxi example, at what point does rational (Gary Becker’s term)/statistical discrimination become disparity without any discriminatory intent? Imagine it’s an Uber driver, who instead of seeing a Black person flagging him down, gets a ride request on the app without a profile picture but with a destination to a neighborhood where the driver is unlikely to get another fare. The driver may even have statistical information (possibly supplied by Uber to point drivers to areas of high demand). Although statistically more likely, customer may not in fact be Black and/or the destination may not be in a black neighborhood (it could be a poor white area or just sparsely populated).
This would not be prohibiting certain economic activity. This would be forcing businesses to assume additional costs in order to eliminate discrimination to one class of customers.
How did the party that freed the slaves become the party that is seen as, at best, ambivalent to the concerns of black Americans?
Sixty or seventy years ago, conservatives would label civil rights activists as “communists”. A smarter conservative movement would have engaged with civil rights groups to encourage an agenda of capitalist opportunity rather than socialist redistribution.
Mainstream Republicans did not label civil rights activists as "Communists." There is a difference between Jacob Javits and Ron Johnson.
Sorry, I realize he doesn't have huge name recognition, that's the runner-up in San Francisco's District Attorney race (he got 46% of the vote so not a fringe candidate)
What I saw earlier in the media was liberals attacking Tim Scott for not using the "correct" language for talking about racism; i.e. "you gotta say 'white supremacy' and 'systemic racism' or else you're ... (I'm not really sure what you are, probably damned.) Hearts and minds one at a time is the way to go, and Tim Scott may be immensely more effective in getting people to recognize and work against racism than current progressives ever will be. Conservatives will be a lot more open to looking at the endless complex nuances around policing in an environment where they feel that their thought processes might be acknowledged in the first place.
Maybe it's my five years in the pulpit in both conservative and liberal congregations, but wise preachers and activists know you have to tailor your language to your audience. Even Paul tells us not to scandalize our fellow Christians over ritual practices (for the Corinthians it was about eating meat, but I'll interpret it to mean "just don't do it if it's going to polarize the community.") I'm glad to see Scott raising his eyebrows at white Republicans and reminding conservatives that they still need to think about racism after they've been pushed back into defensive positions by progressives disrespectfully claiming to hold the high moral ground. Cultural change is extremely slow and, as we've seen, is very easy to set back, even by those with the best intentions.
Excellent essay. You say “There are lots of reasons that the base rate of infractions could differ, and that equal enforcement could lead to a disparity.”
Much of the problem is, as Scott’s own story highlights, enforcement is NOT equal. Logically, that makes all criminal statistics suspect, IMO. If enforcement is biased, the stats are biased, which means the stereotyping is biased as well. I think it’s important to make this crystal clear.
Everyone who studies the issue is aware that most criminal statistics are not reliable even on the victim side, because of reporting differences. But that's even more true on the offender side for many obvious reasons.
So that's why homicide rates are the most relied upon indicator of violent crime, and traffic fatality rates are the most relied upon indicator of dangerous driving.
And disparities show up in those rates. Black Americans had a 50% higher rate of dying in traffic accidents than other races in 2021, and an 800% greater(!) chance of being murdered.
It's still possible that stereotyping is biased, as you put it, but it's not clear to me that's a large part of the problem. Even if you remove all distortions in stereotyping you'll be left with disparities that are tricky to deal with
I feel that you are spending a lot of time trying to engage with an essentially non-existent policy oriented right wing. But I approve anyhow! My feeling is that statistical discrimination is absolutely necessary in some contexts (I will personally discriminate in contexts where my own physical safety is in play) but in others it is just too harmful to allow. It’s definitely worthwhile to debate and develop some principled ideas of when or when not it should be tolerated or endorsed by the government.
The Tim Scott problem is a hard one. No one likes being pulled over. And if there’s any plausible racial narrative, they’re going to get wrapped around that narrative. It’s a good way to self-justify, and it’s a good way to bond with people. People love to spin their personal drama into a group conflict. Regardless, no one likes being saddled with a stereotype, if only for the inconvenience.
So, if we accept that stereotypes are bad, if only as a matter of political reality, we can do two things. First, we can prohibit people from relying on them. Three issues. One, to so prohibit, we wind up really policing speech associated with acting on stereotypes. This is where woke speech codes come from. Two, you have the problem of the wolf and the fox. Classy people (foxes) have the resources to arrange their lives to rely on stereotypes and not leave evidence. Three, stereotypes convey helpful information, as you’ve discussed. It’s weird that they’re this forbidden fruit of human knowledge!
The second option is to address the underlying reality that causes the stereotype. If Tim Scott feels like he is pulled over too often by the police, then he should try to bring the black crime rate more in line with that of other races. Maybe this would involve more police, pharmacological improvements to impulse control, who knows. But right now, “black crime” is taboo among white cultural elites so it’s hard to know where to even begin.
Once you start down the first path, though, you get further and further from solving the underlying issue. So-called racial liberals will seek to ban not only the stereotype but also silence the statistics, as you are aware. Moreover, they will come after even individualized signifiers, like SAT scores and credit reports, arguing that these reflect past racism. Black identity politics is about telling blacks what they want to hear, so it’s all one thread.
On #2 - I know this is one of the worst of right-wing bogeymen and taboos, but if I could wave a magic wand and change one disparity to make life better for Black people in America it would be the crime disparity.
One of the only things worse than being a victim of a serious crime (and Black people are 8 times more likely to be murdered than other races) is committing one. A single shooting or assault is a MASSIVE drain on the health and economic resources of the community wherever it takes, my back of the envelope guess is something like half a million to a million dollars is spent on EMTs, detectives, medical treatment, foregone wages of the victim, incarceration of the offender. And that's without taking into account psychological damage and disinvestment.
It's really a crime (sorry) that the Left has abrogated talking about Black victims of crime for fear of acknowledging that many of the perpetrators are also black. 14,000 Black people were murdered last year and double that many shot, non-fatally. And back to the whole point of today's post, the disparities in crime make policing fairness that much more difficult to achieve. I'm all for improving police forces in any way possible and doing more to limit bad practices that harm innocent minorities. But all of that is so much harder when rates of serious crime are disproportionately higher
In the situation where DJT is removed from contention for the GOP nomination, I continue to place my money on Tim Scott as the most likely candidate to win.
Great post. I would like to elaborate on a small point. White liberals aren’t fake in the sense that their lying. They definitively do believe that anti-black discrimination is morally impermissible. But they so often live as if they have inferred some things about blacks. When you think about a generic white liberal, what comes to mind? What kind of neighborhood do they live in? Where do they send their kids to school? With whom do they associate? Sure, from their perspective, all this is just how things turn out. But from other people’s perspective, white liberals have just spent money and cultural capital to do taste-based discrimination in a way they can feel good about.
Or statistical discrimination.
We can also insist on a higher bar of equality for the high-volume largely performative aspects of law enforcement -- the TSA can clamp down on water bottles by all races equally. I doubt anyone would lose sleep if our "left turn without blinking" enforcement was sub-optimal. It's more important for Tim Scott & others to live a normal life. On the other hand, we can still insist that violent crimes are pursued effectively (instead of leaving guns on the street in the name of equity e.g. https://twitter.com/HamasakiLaw/status/1366816361020678145 )
Who is that imbecile and why ain’t he in the gop urging more guns to fight shootings?