I also wonder to what extent all these things correlate with wealth / income. Most of rural America is really struggling economically, and I think it’s hard for people who are seeing their communities die to believe that they somehow have a special advantage in life. It may be true in aggregate, but individuals aren’t statistics.
John McWhorter has advocated for changing affirmative action in universities to focus strictly on low income families, and I recall a while back that Texas A&M made a big program to recruit first generation college students. Those kinds of programs will still greatly benefit racial minority groups, but because they aren’t explicitly racial they don’t exclude the possibility of a very poor or low status white person from benefitting, which leads to less opposition and less resentment.
Lastly I strongly agree that there’s a messaging problem. Many on the left have become infected with this idea that America is an evil nation, some think irredeemably evil. That seeps into the messaging and drives away most of the country. If we’re all evil then what are you going to do if you’re elected, punish us for our sins? How is that going to help? To win in America it helps to believe that America is a fundamentally good nation that is always overcoming its flaws and moving toward the “more perfect Union,” and you have to cast a positive vision of how we can all win and make things better for everyone together.
I just find it so fundamentally bizarre that researchers would argue that an issue related to people's views on any subject whatsoever and how those views impact their votes has nothing to do with messaging. This is politics and opinions- the whole point is messaging. Even if you do something that objectively benefits peoples lives (like passing a law that gives poor Americans money), those who benefit might still vote against you if the other side's message is better ("sure, you got money, but that will raise your taxes and destroy the economy, costing you your job and making you worse off in the future"). Literally everything about politics is a messaging issue.
The logical conclusion of that kind of rhetoric is to fight to (1) replace the American system of government, currently a flawed democracy that tilts the playing field in the right's favor, with a government where only Americans with "correct" views are able to vote or hold office, (2) replace the American polity itself with some other polity or collection of polities that are not world powers and that do not valorize or accept any of the USA's symbols or founding myths.
None of this is ever actually going to happen, obviously.
Even with stuff where the policy had _explicitly racial roots_, like where we redlined areas that had high populations of minorities, it's important to remember that those redlined areas always had _some_ white residents! So if you attempted to redress those policies by doing some kind of special refundable tax credit for people whose direct ancestors _lived in redlined areas_, some of that money addressing racial justice would "leak out" to help white people... But that's a feature! Not a bug! Those people's white ancestors who lived in those districts _were hurt by the racist policy_, and it is just to help them out too!
Look into the matter, you’ll see that redlining was not invented for the purpose of persecuting black people. It affected more than just “some white residents” but encompassed many working class neighborhoods (like the North End of Boston) with tens of thousands of people in them, virtually none of them black. People don’t realize how white large cities were before the Sixties. New York in 1950 had seven million white people and they outnumbered black people by 15 to 1. What the victims had in common is that the characteristics of the neighborhood both technical, (e.g. the quality of housing stock) and social, was deemed to create risks for the type of housing investment that the Feds preferred to make. And what the people suffered was the economic loss of being unable to get loans to fix up their houses that they wanted to stay in, and the cultural loss of having to disperse to other neighborhoods. Some did well after this, and some didn’t. None of this remotely justifies refundable tax credits for direct ancestors of anyone.
Sure, redlining was justified as preventing the federal government from backing mortgages in places they would be more likely to default.
But the guidelines for defining those were quite explicit that if an area had more minority residents, that _in and of itself_ should be considered a risk factor.) And the feds actively encouraged the spread of racial covenants in the new suburban neighborhoods that the loans were subsidizing.
I don't know offhand whether it would be accurate to say that more White people in aggregate were harmed by redlining than Black, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were true, even while a much greater percentage of the Black community was affected. Certainly that's a fairly typical calculation with other issues of poverty. There are just a lot more white people, and so there can be more white poor people, even while they're a smaller percentage of the larger group.
As for what it justifies, and whether people who are doing fine now should still get some kind of restitution for harm inflicted on their family in the past... I dunno. I think that's a complicated conversation. Certainly one can make arguments for the position that we should only use government programs to help out those who are lower on the wealth and income scales right this instant. But it's a bit simplistic to just say "oh, such-and-such policy is 'in the past' and so it doesn't matter anymore." It's generally good, when a government does something that hurts a bunch of its citizens, to try to go back and provide restitution.
"Even with stuff where the policy had _explicitly racial roots_, like where we redlined areas that had high populations of minorities, it's important to remember that those redlined areas always had _some_ white residents!"
I take your larger point, but there are in fact, a lot of examples from US history where black folks were *explicitly* carved out of programs that benefited white folks, and that those exclusions did not apply to whites. Examples, are the Homestead Act(s) which created the landed rural farming class, the GI Bill, etc, etc...
True enough. And of course while slavery in America didn't _start out_ racial, it became fully codified as racial in law even before the time of the Revolution.
But I guess my point is just that if we want to be in the business of providing restitution for past policies at all, we have to be open to actually helping everyone based on some estimate the individual harm, rather than just assuming the debt owed is some flat number for each person who we now classify as "Black", and zero for each person who we now classify as "White". (Especially considering we _know_ there's been plenty of transit back and forth across that "line".) You'd need both the political consensus that we want to do anything at all (which obviously isn't there, for now), and somebody like a Ken Feinberg to actually implement a fair repayment scheme.
I was gonna say a similar thing. For a minority of whites, there really is no structural advantage because circumstances suck for everyone in their communities.
By way of an obvious analogy, the fact that there were poor Christians in Germany in the 1930s does not refute the claim that Christians were "privileged" over Jews.
But that analogy doesn't work for the USA. You're comparing a caste system style of society, where virtually every jew was officially placed below every gentile, to our current society, where there are vast degrees of overlap between the privilege/advantage/disadvantage experienced by individuals in the populations.
It would likely be very hard to find even a small, dirt poor gentile German village in 1937 that would be "worse off" due to the Nazi state than even the most privileged Jews. In today's USA finding communities within disadvantaged populations who are more privileged than the poorest whites in the country is a trivial exercise - even more so to find advantaged individuals within any disadvantaged ethnicity.
Hmmm. Not sure I buy your “caste system” distinction. As far as I know, India is a caste system and there are Dalit millionaires. Also, many have made the case that Jim Crow (and the current racial hangover) is a caste system.
India had a caste system. It doesn't currently have a caste system. The only laws I'm aware of are affirmative-action style and so push in the other direction. The history of the caste system still exerts great social forces, and the majority of Indians intermarry within their own religion, caste and language. But economically, Dalits are free to be make themselves millionaires if they're able. That wasn't the case 100 years ago.
So India had a caste system, but is evolving in a different direction.
Jim Crow was a caste system. Separate but equal (but not really) and all that. I don't know if Black millionaires existed in the South at the time, but I'd be very surprised if there were many.
A caste system society has hard boundaries between different castes, limiting social and economic mobility, whether those castes are races, ethnicities, classes or actual "castes". We don't have that today. Individuals of all ethnicities can go wherever they want in society. The forces of history, defined in whatever way you want, shaped the places each person started but don't define where they will end up.
That's why I specified it's a minority. Relative to middle/upper class people of *any* ethnicity they are not privileged. You would not want to trade places with them (assuming you are middle class).
"Many on the left have become infected with this idea that America is an evil nation, some think irredeemably evil."
I think this is something folks on the right like to tell themselves--certainly it was a key charge leveled at civil rights activists in the 60s, and in previous iterations, the 40s, 20s, etc...--but I see very little evidence it's the case.
In my observation, the common worldview statements of those many on the left today, don’t come from a position of “let’s improve American democracy and defend it from threats” They don’t make a coherent case for running the place to make it better for everyone, but are rather as if our national troubles should continue to exist. This maintains a self-image as people “in the know” about how really bad all our national values and history are (i.e. not those stupid flag-waving Trump-voting so-called "patriots"). It’s not about the good of marginalized people, it’s about ill-will towards those not considered marginalized. I think many of the people who have these views, don’t even know or consider their implications.
As an example: to emphasize native Americans as agentless victims while remaining silent about the violence with which these very real and live and active people engaged in warfare over centuries, including well before Europeans arrived, is very telling. It creates the narrative that the forebears were entirely guilty of aggression against peaceful people, and deliberately suppresses any understanding of why large numbers of Americans of past eras might might have hated and feared Indians and wanted them gone. It exploits a sad historical tragedy for their own political and psychological ends. Which doesn't seem admirable or principled at all, to me.
I'm really confused by this. "The forebears" actually were "entirely guilty of aggression" against the Native Americans; they stole all their land at gunpoint.
Is it your contention that because the Native Americans went to war to fight this invasion, white American settlers were justified in hating, fearing, and nearly exterminating them? And that acknowledging this tragedy is somehow self-serving on the part of present-day non-Native Americans?
This is a comic-book version of the history. In fact this was a complex interaction between two radically different cultures over hundreds of years, which included cooperation as well as conflict. Make your commonplace political points if you like, but at least don't pretend that they are based in any curiosity about or knowledge of the actual content of this relationship.
"Little evidence." Hmmm. I'll invite you to go to any left-leaning forum and suggest that the Civil War was unnecessary to abolish slavery and that slavery in US would have been eliminated through economic and political means by the late 19th Century and see what reaction you get. I can basically guarantee you that a large share of the responses will be to the effect that slavery would continue to exist in the US to this very day but for the Civil. Those responses, I-C, are a implicit statement that the speaker considers the US to be fundamentally evil, since every other developed nation (even those that were just as dependent on slavery as a part of their economy, like Brazil) managed to eliminate slavery within its borders through economic and political means.
I actually agree with this take. But then found this Census report from 2016 showing lower Rural poverty rates vs. Urban and just slightly lower median incomes. Now maybe this is skewed by the use of households or age could be skewing this too (i.e., $50k as a starting point for a 24 y/o in a city has a way different outlook that the same income ~ topped out at a mid-career point in a Rural community). But it doesn't *look* like they're struggling materially more from this view.
You suggest an age difference, I think you might be on to something. The sense I get in my travels across rural America is that things are dying of old age - so there are okay jobs currently held by the 50-60 year olds who already own a home etc, but their kids all left for reasons, one of which is the lack of career opportunities for young people. So it might be true that the workforce in most of rural America is “doing okay” in terms of cash flow, but what’s really hurting is the sense that everything is steadily declining around them and it’ll all eventually be abandoned.
Lots of the world is grappling with this issue of depopulating rural areas these days, so we’re not alone in that. But the US is unique in that it was designed to favor rural interests over dense cities (thanks, founders), so when we face rural decline the political consequences are more dire.
I live in deep red Branson, MO. It definitely skews older and less healthy. Lots of people in electric wheelchairs when you go to Wal Mart. I also own and manage an apartment complex that services lower income people (i.e. the ones who work at Wal Mart). We also have a fair number of seniors on a fixed income.
There are very few Black people here, but they exist and seem to fit in just fine. (I grant there's probably racism I don't see). The main issue here is there's just not very many good jobs and most people live paycheck to paycheck. I imagine they see someone on TV talking about privilege and just laugh.
It's not economic dislocation, per se. Those who still live in rural areas like the one in which my mother's family has resided for generations are mostly doing ok, at least in the NE, Great Lakes, and Upper Midwest (the South is very different).
The issue is that there is an all-pervasive sense that there won't be anyone left in these places in a few more decades. Even as people make a reasonably good living, they see schools consolidated from five districts to one, restaurants close for lack of customers, stores consolidate in big-box formats farther and farther away, the nearby "big town" Main Street dwindle to nothing, cultural mainstays and amenities disappear... and then their grandchildren come back for a day or two at a shot and look at the place like it's a foreign country, because it is to them.
They're voting in ways that risk denying everyone a decent future in part because they're convinced that they already don't have one.
I read a book about rage in rural America and the author says that one of the biggest disturbances a small town could experience was the closure of the school. I can’t imagine a more visceral symbol that your community is dying than not having enough children to keep the school open.
It’s very Children of Men. Sam Scheffler argues that we need the idea that humanity will continue past us in order to give our lives meaning, but maybe this recapitulates at the community level too.
My experience in rural areas is that there is huge bifurcation. You have wealthy people who own at least a couple of acres, nice to very nice houses, etc. Then you have either older people who are living on SS+pensions or young people with few very limited job prospects who live in older small homes or trailers.
I wonder what would happen if the same people who were asked, "Do you agree or disagree that white people in the United States have certain advantages because of the color of their skin?" had instead been asked, "Do you agree or disagree that black people in the United States have been treated worse because of the color of their skin?"
That difference in framing could be huge. Most white people, especially those who aren't at least upper middle class, don't think of themselves as having *extra* advantages, but may recognize that others are treated worse than they are.
It's levels and rates. Answers to some polling question that requires interpretation don't mean much because we don't know how the interviewee is interpreting the question, and the interviewee doesn't know what's intended by the question. (Not the case for, e.g., who will you vote for next week).
The *rate* aspect is interesting, though. If you ask the same question over time and the % answering one way changes a lot, that may indicate something important.
Man, I swear I'm going to cut back on Substack, and you lure me back in with this blatant catnip.
I find the Wapo analysis superficial, and unchallenging to the self-serving biases of urban voters. Its analysis, and the studies it cite, assume as fact that white Americans do enjoy significant advantages on account of their whiteness (as opposed to their inherited wealth or dominant cultural traits, for those who specifically enjoy those privileges--something not true of all whites and not untrue of all non-whites), and these "racist" rural voters are "denying" it/their own racism. Now, to be clear, I personally believe that there are some advantages to being white in America, as there are with being attractive, thin, athletically-inclined, born to a married pair of college-educated parents, natively English speaking, etc etc etc. You could add "urban" to the list too. The racial advantage is definitely more unfair than the others as it should be totally irrelevant. But it's time to admit that this dynamic is always changing/evolving (studies from 2004 are ancient history), and it's conflated with 1000 other factors (wealth, culture, network effects, etc)... each person's assessment of its salience today will be heavily impacted by the world they live in, the people they know personally, the news they read. Again, the authors take a firm position that their assessment of the current state of racial advantages is the accurate one, and the rural denial of their assessment is not just a difference of perspective but a moral failing.
Additionally, they assume these immoral attitudes come first, and the political alignment comes second, caused by the racial attitudes--a causation claim supported only by tight correlation. My personal belief is that moral frameworks evolve in a group to bind them together in opposition to a perceived threat/enemy, in this case, elite urban liberals lecturing them about how racist they are. The more "we" talk about racism, the more "they" will take an oppositional stance. The more "they" take the opposite stance, the more "we" feel the urge to talk about racism. Meanwhile, NO ONE is actually being helped--not minorities, not low-income people of all racial backgrounds/geographic locations, not politicians who want to pass laws or voters who want them to.
“Meanwhile, NO ONE is actually being helped--not minorities, not low-income people of all racial backgrounds/geographic locations, not politicians who want to pass laws or voters who want them to.”
This occurs to me so often. We tie these attitudes to politics, but what are the political goals? Any policy proposals? On the very rare occasion when you see one, it’s wildly unpopular.
Another, maybe separate, issue: every person in my life who is talking about privilege, racial justice etc is the well-off white child of well-off white parents. I see the same thing in public life; not exclusively white but overwhelmingly white, and well-off. I’m not the only one who notices.
Having these folks lecture everyone about privilege, not to mention how those dumb, poor-signaling people are the root of all evil, is just a terrible look. And they’re brutal.
There are several liberals in my life who’ve become so frankly gross toward the less fortunate (that they think of as white) that I don’t want to be around them. None of them know it, because I learned to pass in a “better” world, but they’re talking about my family. I like to think I’d feel this way even if that weren’t true, but who knows?
Hilariously, it was an (actually good and not divisive) diversity training that may have radicalized me on the advantages of a two parent family. We (the staff at a community college in an “unpopular suburb”) we’re doing the raise-your-hand-if game. This was a pretty white group, but split between rural and urbane and private versus public college.
We also overwhelmingly came from two-parent families, to an extent the trainer was even a bit surprised.
I feel like this is one of those things that is completely obvious to parents, but maybe not? I'll admit that most of my peer group is two-parent families with children, and I think that the broad consensus is that we are all barely keeping our shit together.
Relatedly, it's been interesting to see other people that I know choose to have children without a partner, which I think challenges many parents to separate their belief that there isn't anything immoral or specifically wrong with doing that from their strong subjective sense that it is probably a terrible personal decision.
This is great and encapsulates much of what I thought when I read the article. A set of the populace has "kinda sort of" redefined racism and want that definition to carry the weight of what others see racism to be. It would be interesting to have asked: "Would you be ok with your child marrying someone of another race". I am willing to guess that the numbers would not be much different among urban/rural with most people saying yes. Also, it is not clear that the difference in racial attitudes is at all causal and not just the most charged issue at the moment. So your point about oppositional politics driving attitudes is spot on.
Interestingly and tellingly, vocal support for interracial marriage is at an all-time high of 94% approval!! https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx Do people lie to pollsters, and agree to hypotheticals they've never been tested on? Of course! But the vast majority of Americans know it's wrong to hold biases against people based on their race, and try to live up to that. (They feel totally free to hold biases over politics though.) It's not totally outlandish that conservative voters would think progressives are exaggerating the day-to-day salience of racism, and have cooked up "systemic racism" as a way to keep moving the goalposts. (For the record, I think the truth is messier than either take, but if you can't see how/why progressives are the bad guy in the conservative worldview, you're in no position to analyze their motives for how they vote.)
I’m always shocked when I realize that as of when I graduated high school, in the late 1990s, most Americans still were willing to tell pollsters that they would disapprove of my parents’ marriage.
"But the vast majority of Americans know it's wrong to hold biases against people based on their race, and try to live up to that. (They feel totally free to hold biases over politics though"
Yep, I would be way more open to my kids marrying someone of another race than a liberal...
I think this is a great response. I would just add that assumptions about "urban" and "rural" are also very misleading if one is concerned about Senate representation. For example, the two states with the largest rural populations are Vermont and Maine, both solidly blue. By contrast 4 of the 10 most urbanized states (Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah) are red to purply-red. The middle of the pack in terms of rural population at the state level are all over the map politically.
At best, the percentage of the rural population is an imperfect proxy for partisan leanings at the state level, much less supposedly racist attitudes.
My view is that elections are mostly won and lost in the suburbs. There are only a couple of states with majority rural populations, and two of them are solid blue.
I suppose it’s notable that the two states that are more than 60% rural are both blue. But there are two more states that are more than 50% rural - West Virginia and Mississippi - and there are six more states that are over 40% rural - Montana, Arkansas, South Dakota, Kentucky, Alabama, North Dakota. This is an overwhelming red advantage of rural over representation even if the two most extreme examples slightly undercut the red advantage.
No. 40% rural is probably 25% urban and 35% suburban. You don’t stop calling them a rural state until some category other than rural is larger. And in a country that is 20% rural and 50% suburban, 38% rural and 42% suburban would still be disproportionately rural, even though the suburban populations is slightly larger.
"You don’t stop calling them a rural state until some category other than rural is larger."
By that standard, any state that is less than 33% rural is no longer a rural state just based on math. That's about 18 states. Take away the 4 states that are majority rural leaves about 14 that we'd have to look at more closely to see which ones may have a suburban or urban plurality. I don't know the numbers there.
Your point is true when discussing Senate representation (the bigger issue in the Senate is the small-but-not-tiny states are heavily red (Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, etc).
But really, outside New England, rural and White = extremely Republican. New England is just an outlier.
Sure, but the point is that Democrats aren't losing, for instance, Florida because of the rural vote. Florida is the fifth most urbanized state and is more urbanized than New York. Other states that are more urban than NY: Arizona and Utah.
Kansas and Oklahoma, which you also mention, are around 25% and 30% rural respectively.
Outside of a small handful of more rural (but still majority urban) states, rural populations are small. These states are red only in part because of their rural populations. In contrast, a clear majority of Americans live in suburbs and this is only increasing. This is where elections will be one and lost in most cases.
In that case I mostly agree with you. Except that while we think of elections in terms of geography, it's important to remember that gaining 1,000 rural votes (even if the rural county is still blood red) is just as good as gaining the 1,000 votes needed to flip a suburb of Miami. So every vote helps.
Also the definition of rural used by the Census is a bit weird. Most Americans would consider Red Bluff, California (I'm a Californian so I'm using an example from here) to be rural. But I doubt the Census does.
Yes, the Census definition is annoying and causes much confusion. Where I live (Colorado), my typical suburban neighborhood is classified as "urban" but the next neighborhood over is considered "rural." From what I can guess it's because that subdivision has slightly bigger lots and is a bit further from the closest urban core.
In medicine, we’ve finally learned that if you want someone to change a harmful belief or behavior, the least effective thing to do is shouting and shaming. The best thing to do is to listen to the patient’s values and goals and help them see how the new behavior better fits with how they see themselves and what they want to accomplish. Oh, and don’t focus on how hard and unpleasant change will be. I’m perplexed why my fellow progressives think that the best way we can cure people of racial biases is to blame them and tell them they need to do a lot of work and it will be unpleasant. It may be justified and fair, but I’m not clear why we should expect it to work based on what else we know about changing human behavior
You're assuming they want to cure people of racial biases. The loudest voices on this issue aren't interested in rehabilitation. They perceive racism to be a core moral failing, the stain of which in some sense can never be made clean, and therefore racists should be shunned and immiserated. You see this especially in those memes that say, like, "we can have a difference of opinion about taxes, but not <tendentious question about race>." To be a racist isn't to get something wrong, or to misunderstand the facts; it's to be a *bad person*. And trying to tailor your messaging to make these morally defective monsters feel better about their morally defective and monstrous beliefs is to compromise yourself, as well.
I wouldn't be the first to point out that their beliefs function much more like religion than politics.
In the vein of the religion comment, I'm often tempted to note that one of the major barriers to forming hard moral judgments about taxation is that taxation is a complex and nuanced issue that requires a lot of specific knowledge and consideration of falsifiable real-world experiences.
You don't need to have any specific information about racism to have a strong opinion about it.
Gentle and listening is very hard. The free std clinic in Berkeley did a very good job of that and the one in West Hollywood is pretty good too, but most others I have encountered have a hard time maintaining their non-judgmental attitudes to the behaviors many clients describe.
As a "woke" rural liberal, I have no trouble agreeing that white privilege is very real. However, few rural white people experience their lives as privileged. That makes it exceedingly difficult to argue for policies that will level up people of color. I'm not sure how to resolve this rhetorical conundrum.
MY has a bunch of articles on race-neutral framing of issues that will help all privileged people, regardless of race. They tend to be popular across the board, even in rural america, despite disproportionately help non-white people, whereas skin-color based policies tend to be very unpopular
MY has also never answered why the Democratic party's long history of directly helping white people (Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, food stamps, public colleges, expanded electricity grid, internet, subsidized natural resources) hasn't made them like us any more. Obamacare in particular helped millions of rural white people get medicine they couldn't get before, and they only hated us more for it.
Wigan, do you have any thoughts on why we should expect this to change the next time we spend our political capital to help people who hate us? To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we don't pass good policy (and helping people in general is good policy). I'm suggesting that simply passing good policy hasn't helped us politically since before the Civil Rights movement.
One thing I miss about liberal politics from 5 years ago is the idea that having outgroups was a natural tendency, but something we should overcome. Not to call you out in particular, but you're clearly talking about rural whites as an outgroup (count the number of theys and wes in the above). That sort of outgroup from anyone is not helpful to actually getting to a better place as a country as diverse as America.
I'm having trouble accepting most of this premise - are we talking about white people in general or rural white people specifically?
SS and Medicare - these were passed long ago. Prior to Trump, Republicans campaigned on limiting these programs and lost support for doing so. One of Trump's major win was that he essentially surrendered on those issues, taking an issue that made poorer white people dislike Rs off the table. I would guess food stamps kind of go the same way, i.e. people on food stamps probably vote for the party that favors food stamps in elections if that issue becomes salient, regardless of ethnicity.
Internet - are we talking about rural broadband? Subsidized natural resources, expanded grid and public colleges all sound like things that might be targeted towards rural areas, and I'm not nearly informed enough about how they played out politically in the past to have an opinion. Apart from colleges, if I'm supposed to know that these are things that Democrats have been fighting for than messaging is definitely part of the problem. I don't associate the other 3 with Dems.
I also don't know much about rural areas. I live in the rust belt / great lakes region and all-White rural areas still vote about 30-40% for Dems. I don't sense a lot of hatred towards the D party among the non-college educated white people I know. There's more of a feeling that they're out of touch.
We don't pass laws to win elections. We win elections to pass laws. Medicare was good. If it won us votes also that's great! But the real win was that Medicare is politically sacrosanct now and will probably never go away beyond minor tweaks.
People care about more than "free" stuff from the government. So a lot of people would oppose Obamacare because it also included a provision that said the government could force you to buy a product.
There's probably also a smaller segment that (at least at the time) was concerned about debts and deficits.
In addition, even if those people were overall happy with the results of Obamacare, they would still be put off with Democrat efforts to take their guns, or allow for unrestricted abortion.
Of course there are politicians that successfully navigate those waters such as Manchin. But I think to get more of him, you would need more people willing to break with Pelosi and Schumer on issues important in their state. IE, the old Blue Dog Democrats
The key phrase missing from the progressive discourse seems to be “all else being equal”. I don’t know that anyone can argue that among two socio economically identical persons the white one does not face less discrimination, enjoys more access to the full trappings of society, etc. But nothing is ever equal, and there are so many people for whom other factors outweigh the advantage of their whiteness who rightly don’t feel privileged.
This is a version of signal / noise problem that bedevils policy in my view. We focus on the signal and ignore the noise. The problem with that approach is pushing policies that on average are helpful but create a ton of dispersion / differing outcomes. Take free trade. On average, a society with more free trade is richer by a bit than the one with less. But boy oh boy, it sure creates a lot of winners and losers which frays at the social fabric. But sadly the economic / expert consensus largely waives the “noise” away.
I am not at all saying that we should not fight systemic injustice. But it seems that keeping in mind distributional consequEnces - maybe with another post it that says “all else is rarely equal” - would greatly help the cause.
All else is sometimes equal - researchers have sent around loads of pairs of application letters, pairs that are identical (schools, grades etc) exc for a White vs a Black sounding name. And the response rates and job offer rates are way apart.
And researchers have sent identical mails to real estate agents; if a White couple shows up, their reception is different (on average) from the Black couple that shows up.
I remember trying to put a hierarchy on privilege - as in what had actual most effect on your chances down to what had least. At the top was living in a developed country - instantly puts me above a large chunk of the world, next was my class - professional middle class as the UK calls it - valuing education, engaged parents etc, to a somewhat lesser degree, contacts. After that was my luck of the draw on genetics - above average intelligence, no disabilities, only minor downsides like relative lack of co-ordination and appearance.
Only after this did colour, sex, sexuality start appearing in my ranking - I have drawn the easy ride here being a white cis male, so maybe I have not see this in action, but I think middle classness (upper classness in US terms?) out weighs the effects.
And given this massive effect on life chances I can see someone who shares my white cis-maleness, but not my middle classness, being annoyed when a middle class person who does not share one of more of white cis-maleness calls them privileged.
Yes they technically privileged are in those traits but the middle-classness of the privilege caller completely out weighs that, and it comes across as punching down.
"All else equal" is a perfectly valid tool for analyzing a causal relationship where there are many influences on a dependent variable of interest. However, social systems are complex and interconnected, so such analysis is inappropriate for short term predictions. It may, at best, indicate the long term tendency of the system.
"It's almost like the whole concept of white privilege is counterproductive..."
Well, concepts produce some stuff, like understanding, and they don't produce other stuff, like votes. Concepts are for thinking with -- they can be clarifying or confused, accurate or inaccurate, and so on. For many sociologists, historians, and psychologists, the concept of white privilege is not only accurate and fruitful, but indispensable. There are historical phenomena that you cannot understand clearly without it. If your metric is the production of understanding, it's a productive concept.
Political messaging, on the other hand, has only one metric: persuading votes and winning elections. If you had said, "it's almost like the focus on white privilege in political messaging is counterproductive," then I would totally agree with you. It's not gaining votes, and its not winning elections.
So: our politicians and advisers should shut up about white privilege. As messaging, it does not produce winning elections.
I think describing it as majority group privilege would be a better way to understand what they are describing. It's not specific to white Europeans. I think its a very common in group/out group human dynamic that they are describing. Calling that 'white privilege' is specifically U.S. centric political messaging.
For such a diverse, globalized, immigrant-heavy country, the US understanding of race suffers from a surprising amount of parochialism.
I wish there was more study of how ethnic politics and privilege plays out across the world. I always find it really interesting.
Suriname is 27% East Indian, 22% "Maroon" which would code as black in the US, 14% Indonesian, 7% Chinese, 4% Native American, 1% White, 16% "Creole" (would also code as black here) and 13% "mixed". I wonder how their discussions on racism play out.
It’s not always majority group privilege. My understanding is that there are places where a minority group gets this same privilege, whether it’s white people in 19th century South Carolina or Chinese people in 20th century Malaysia.
I strongly dislike the term "systemic racism" because of
A) The way it is used, with the twin purposes of silencing people who's opinions you disagree with, and to draw moral conclusions about issues and institutions which do not logically stem from the facts. Is the Senate "systemically racist" because more white people live in rural states? I think the answer is obviously no; there is a bias, but the bias itself is not racist. As Matt wrote: nobody who crafted the Senate thought "this is a way we can keep POC from power in the future!" I doubt they thought about how this will impact race relations much at all. The Senate is no more racist than any other institution, it has bias problems which must be addressed, and we can draw that conclusion without morally blinding ourselves.
B) The inherent moral judgment in the term leads to overreaction. The Senate's bias against Democrats has existed for about a decade, and during that time Democrats controlled the Senate for three of the six Senate cycles. There is no guarantee that Republicans will control the Senate forever. As we saw in both 2018 and 2020: state partisan leans change. Arizona and Georgia elected slates of Democratic senators, which was unthinkable a decade ago. There is no reason Democrats cannot find other opportunities to win other former red states. North Carolina, Texas and Florida could all flip to purple or blue states. If migration from California continues other states could come into play as well.
The best political solution for Democrats is to work within the system to win, the current Democratic Party is self-righteously assuming they are on the "right side of history" and are demanding they be handed power instead of actually working to obtain it. I voted for Joe Biden but he has, at minimum, acquiesced to this language in his presidency (which is disappointing). Democrats need to find ways to elect MORE Joe Manchins, Sherrod Browns and Jon Testers not less. The current Democratic Party seems disinterested in this concept.
"As Matt wrote: nobody who crafted the Senate thought "this is a way we can keep POC from power in the future!""
No, Matt wrote something both slipperier and more sophistical than that. He wrote:
"The Senate was not set up in order to systematically down-weight the votes of non-white people (I doubt anyone involved anticipated them voting much at all)."
That confuses two questions:
1) Was the Senate designed to support the racial hierarchy of white supremacy?
2) Was the senate designed to dilute the votes of black people?
Of course we know that 2) is false, since (as MY says) the Senate was designed at a time when few if any thought that black people would ever get the vote.
But 2) is a straw man for 1), which is a much more serious question. It is much harder to dismiss the idea that the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power.
So, Matt wrote something that is undeniably true (the Senate was not designed to dilute black votes) but sounds sorta like something that is probably false and is at least controversial (the Senate was not designed to uphold the racial hierarchy). You heard what you wanted to hear, which is not what he wrote.
This makes Matt either a good writer or a very bad one.
The senate was designed to put every state on equal footing regardless of population or land area, as a way to get the small states to join the Union. Otherwise why join a Union where you’ll just be ruled by the bigger states? The house proportional representation is meant to be an offsetting compromise.
All of this also hinges on the question of what the federal government is for. The founders thought of the federal government more in the way Europeans thought of the EU today - a way to keep the states together as a power bloc, while each state largely remained autonomous and free to be very different.
The design of the senate goes far beyond 1789. The senate was very carefully curated in the various “compromises” of 1830 and 1850 and so on, where prospective states were sliced and diced to ensure a split senate on the slavery question. There’s no reason Maine had to be separated from Massachusetts, or Kansas and Nebraska split into separate states, except to preserve the status quo on slavery.
It's hard to take Senate as a tool for slave states seriously as it belies the relative size and power of states at the founding. The Senate was a way to get states like RI, and Delaware and NH, GA on board and not be subject to the whims of Virginia, NC, PA and NY. The big/small states were pretty split between slave and not-slave states.
I also wonder to what extent all these things correlate with wealth / income. Most of rural America is really struggling economically, and I think it’s hard for people who are seeing their communities die to believe that they somehow have a special advantage in life. It may be true in aggregate, but individuals aren’t statistics.
John McWhorter has advocated for changing affirmative action in universities to focus strictly on low income families, and I recall a while back that Texas A&M made a big program to recruit first generation college students. Those kinds of programs will still greatly benefit racial minority groups, but because they aren’t explicitly racial they don’t exclude the possibility of a very poor or low status white person from benefitting, which leads to less opposition and less resentment.
Lastly I strongly agree that there’s a messaging problem. Many on the left have become infected with this idea that America is an evil nation, some think irredeemably evil. That seeps into the messaging and drives away most of the country. If we’re all evil then what are you going to do if you’re elected, punish us for our sins? How is that going to help? To win in America it helps to believe that America is a fundamentally good nation that is always overcoming its flaws and moving toward the “more perfect Union,” and you have to cast a positive vision of how we can all win and make things better for everyone together.
I just find it so fundamentally bizarre that researchers would argue that an issue related to people's views on any subject whatsoever and how those views impact their votes has nothing to do with messaging. This is politics and opinions- the whole point is messaging. Even if you do something that objectively benefits peoples lives (like passing a law that gives poor Americans money), those who benefit might still vote against you if the other side's message is better ("sure, you got money, but that will raise your taxes and destroy the economy, costing you your job and making you worse off in the future"). Literally everything about politics is a messaging issue.
The logical conclusion of that kind of rhetoric is to fight to (1) replace the American system of government, currently a flawed democracy that tilts the playing field in the right's favor, with a government where only Americans with "correct" views are able to vote or hold office, (2) replace the American polity itself with some other polity or collection of polities that are not world powers and that do not valorize or accept any of the USA's symbols or founding myths.
None of this is ever actually going to happen, obviously.
Even with stuff where the policy had _explicitly racial roots_, like where we redlined areas that had high populations of minorities, it's important to remember that those redlined areas always had _some_ white residents! So if you attempted to redress those policies by doing some kind of special refundable tax credit for people whose direct ancestors _lived in redlined areas_, some of that money addressing racial justice would "leak out" to help white people... But that's a feature! Not a bug! Those people's white ancestors who lived in those districts _were hurt by the racist policy_, and it is just to help them out too!
Look into the matter, you’ll see that redlining was not invented for the purpose of persecuting black people. It affected more than just “some white residents” but encompassed many working class neighborhoods (like the North End of Boston) with tens of thousands of people in them, virtually none of them black. People don’t realize how white large cities were before the Sixties. New York in 1950 had seven million white people and they outnumbered black people by 15 to 1. What the victims had in common is that the characteristics of the neighborhood both technical, (e.g. the quality of housing stock) and social, was deemed to create risks for the type of housing investment that the Feds preferred to make. And what the people suffered was the economic loss of being unable to get loans to fix up their houses that they wanted to stay in, and the cultural loss of having to disperse to other neighborhoods. Some did well after this, and some didn’t. None of this remotely justifies refundable tax credits for direct ancestors of anyone.
Sure, redlining was justified as preventing the federal government from backing mortgages in places they would be more likely to default.
But the guidelines for defining those were quite explicit that if an area had more minority residents, that _in and of itself_ should be considered a risk factor.) And the feds actively encouraged the spread of racial covenants in the new suburban neighborhoods that the loans were subsidizing.
I don't know offhand whether it would be accurate to say that more White people in aggregate were harmed by redlining than Black, though I wouldn't be at all surprised if it were true, even while a much greater percentage of the Black community was affected. Certainly that's a fairly typical calculation with other issues of poverty. There are just a lot more white people, and so there can be more white poor people, even while they're a smaller percentage of the larger group.
As for what it justifies, and whether people who are doing fine now should still get some kind of restitution for harm inflicted on their family in the past... I dunno. I think that's a complicated conversation. Certainly one can make arguments for the position that we should only use government programs to help out those who are lower on the wealth and income scales right this instant. But it's a bit simplistic to just say "oh, such-and-such policy is 'in the past' and so it doesn't matter anymore." It's generally good, when a government does something that hurts a bunch of its citizens, to try to go back and provide restitution.
If anybody should get restitution, everybody should get restitution. That's why almost nobody gets restitution.
"Even with stuff where the policy had _explicitly racial roots_, like where we redlined areas that had high populations of minorities, it's important to remember that those redlined areas always had _some_ white residents!"
I take your larger point, but there are in fact, a lot of examples from US history where black folks were *explicitly* carved out of programs that benefited white folks, and that those exclusions did not apply to whites. Examples, are the Homestead Act(s) which created the landed rural farming class, the GI Bill, etc, etc...
True enough. And of course while slavery in America didn't _start out_ racial, it became fully codified as racial in law even before the time of the Revolution.
But I guess my point is just that if we want to be in the business of providing restitution for past policies at all, we have to be open to actually helping everyone based on some estimate the individual harm, rather than just assuming the debt owed is some flat number for each person who we now classify as "Black", and zero for each person who we now classify as "White". (Especially considering we _know_ there's been plenty of transit back and forth across that "line".) You'd need both the political consensus that we want to do anything at all (which obviously isn't there, for now), and somebody like a Ken Feinberg to actually implement a fair repayment scheme.
I was gonna say a similar thing. For a minority of whites, there really is no structural advantage because circumstances suck for everyone in their communities.
By way of an obvious analogy, the fact that there were poor Christians in Germany in the 1930s does not refute the claim that Christians were "privileged" over Jews.
But that analogy doesn't work for the USA. You're comparing a caste system style of society, where virtually every jew was officially placed below every gentile, to our current society, where there are vast degrees of overlap between the privilege/advantage/disadvantage experienced by individuals in the populations.
It would likely be very hard to find even a small, dirt poor gentile German village in 1937 that would be "worse off" due to the Nazi state than even the most privileged Jews. In today's USA finding communities within disadvantaged populations who are more privileged than the poorest whites in the country is a trivial exercise - even more so to find advantaged individuals within any disadvantaged ethnicity.
Hmmm. Not sure I buy your “caste system” distinction. As far as I know, India is a caste system and there are Dalit millionaires. Also, many have made the case that Jim Crow (and the current racial hangover) is a caste system.
India had a caste system. It doesn't currently have a caste system. The only laws I'm aware of are affirmative-action style and so push in the other direction. The history of the caste system still exerts great social forces, and the majority of Indians intermarry within their own religion, caste and language. But economically, Dalits are free to be make themselves millionaires if they're able. That wasn't the case 100 years ago.
So India had a caste system, but is evolving in a different direction.
Jim Crow was a caste system. Separate but equal (but not really) and all that. I don't know if Black millionaires existed in the South at the time, but I'd be very surprised if there were many.
A caste system society has hard boundaries between different castes, limiting social and economic mobility, whether those castes are races, ethnicities, classes or actual "castes". We don't have that today. Individuals of all ethnicities can go wherever they want in society. The forces of history, defined in whatever way you want, shaped the places each person started but don't define where they will end up.
That's why I specified it's a minority. Relative to middle/upper class people of *any* ethnicity they are not privileged. You would not want to trade places with them (assuming you are middle class).
Likely a slight structural advantage if you are white vs. black when you get pulled over by the police for speeding in MAGA-land...
This is probably true.
"Many on the left have become infected with this idea that America is an evil nation, some think irredeemably evil."
I think this is something folks on the right like to tell themselves--certainly it was a key charge leveled at civil rights activists in the 60s, and in previous iterations, the 40s, 20s, etc...--but I see very little evidence it's the case.
In my observation, the common worldview statements of those many on the left today, don’t come from a position of “let’s improve American democracy and defend it from threats” They don’t make a coherent case for running the place to make it better for everyone, but are rather as if our national troubles should continue to exist. This maintains a self-image as people “in the know” about how really bad all our national values and history are (i.e. not those stupid flag-waving Trump-voting so-called "patriots"). It’s not about the good of marginalized people, it’s about ill-will towards those not considered marginalized. I think many of the people who have these views, don’t even know or consider their implications.
As an example: to emphasize native Americans as agentless victims while remaining silent about the violence with which these very real and live and active people engaged in warfare over centuries, including well before Europeans arrived, is very telling. It creates the narrative that the forebears were entirely guilty of aggression against peaceful people, and deliberately suppresses any understanding of why large numbers of Americans of past eras might might have hated and feared Indians and wanted them gone. It exploits a sad historical tragedy for their own political and psychological ends. Which doesn't seem admirable or principled at all, to me.
I'm really confused by this. "The forebears" actually were "entirely guilty of aggression" against the Native Americans; they stole all their land at gunpoint.
Is it your contention that because the Native Americans went to war to fight this invasion, white American settlers were justified in hating, fearing, and nearly exterminating them? And that acknowledging this tragedy is somehow self-serving on the part of present-day non-Native Americans?
This is a comic-book version of the history. In fact this was a complex interaction between two radically different cultures over hundreds of years, which included cooperation as well as conflict. Make your commonplace political points if you like, but at least don't pretend that they are based in any curiosity about or knowledge of the actual content of this relationship.
"Little evidence." Hmmm. I'll invite you to go to any left-leaning forum and suggest that the Civil War was unnecessary to abolish slavery and that slavery in US would have been eliminated through economic and political means by the late 19th Century and see what reaction you get. I can basically guarantee you that a large share of the responses will be to the effect that slavery would continue to exist in the US to this very day but for the Civil. Those responses, I-C, are a implicit statement that the speaker considers the US to be fundamentally evil, since every other developed nation (even those that were just as dependent on slavery as a part of their economy, like Brazil) managed to eliminate slavery within its borders through economic and political means.
I actually agree with this take. But then found this Census report from 2016 showing lower Rural poverty rates vs. Urban and just slightly lower median incomes. Now maybe this is skewed by the use of households or age could be skewing this too (i.e., $50k as a starting point for a 24 y/o in a city has a way different outlook that the same income ~ topped out at a mid-career point in a Rural community). But it doesn't *look* like they're struggling materially more from this view.
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/12/a_comparison_of_rura.html
You suggest an age difference, I think you might be on to something. The sense I get in my travels across rural America is that things are dying of old age - so there are okay jobs currently held by the 50-60 year olds who already own a home etc, but their kids all left for reasons, one of which is the lack of career opportunities for young people. So it might be true that the workforce in most of rural America is “doing okay” in terms of cash flow, but what’s really hurting is the sense that everything is steadily declining around them and it’ll all eventually be abandoned.
Lots of the world is grappling with this issue of depopulating rural areas these days, so we’re not alone in that. But the US is unique in that it was designed to favor rural interests over dense cities (thanks, founders), so when we face rural decline the political consequences are more dire.
Thanks for sharing!
I live in deep red Branson, MO. It definitely skews older and less healthy. Lots of people in electric wheelchairs when you go to Wal Mart. I also own and manage an apartment complex that services lower income people (i.e. the ones who work at Wal Mart). We also have a fair number of seniors on a fixed income.
There are very few Black people here, but they exist and seem to fit in just fine. (I grant there's probably racism I don't see). The main issue here is there's just not very many good jobs and most people live paycheck to paycheck. I imagine they see someone on TV talking about privilege and just laugh.
This.
It's not economic dislocation, per se. Those who still live in rural areas like the one in which my mother's family has resided for generations are mostly doing ok, at least in the NE, Great Lakes, and Upper Midwest (the South is very different).
The issue is that there is an all-pervasive sense that there won't be anyone left in these places in a few more decades. Even as people make a reasonably good living, they see schools consolidated from five districts to one, restaurants close for lack of customers, stores consolidate in big-box formats farther and farther away, the nearby "big town" Main Street dwindle to nothing, cultural mainstays and amenities disappear... and then their grandchildren come back for a day or two at a shot and look at the place like it's a foreign country, because it is to them.
They're voting in ways that risk denying everyone a decent future in part because they're convinced that they already don't have one.
I read a book about rage in rural America and the author says that one of the biggest disturbances a small town could experience was the closure of the school. I can’t imagine a more visceral symbol that your community is dying than not having enough children to keep the school open.
It’s very Children of Men. Sam Scheffler argues that we need the idea that humanity will continue past us in order to give our lives meaning, but maybe this recapitulates at the community level too.
https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/death-and-the-afterlife/
My experience in rural areas is that there is huge bifurcation. You have wealthy people who own at least a couple of acres, nice to very nice houses, etc. Then you have either older people who are living on SS+pensions or young people with few very limited job prospects who live in older small homes or trailers.
I wonder what would happen if the same people who were asked, "Do you agree or disagree that white people in the United States have certain advantages because of the color of their skin?" had instead been asked, "Do you agree or disagree that black people in the United States have been treated worse because of the color of their skin?"
That difference in framing could be huge. Most white people, especially those who aren't at least upper middle class, don't think of themselves as having *extra* advantages, but may recognize that others are treated worse than they are.
It's levels and rates. Answers to some polling question that requires interpretation don't mean much because we don't know how the interviewee is interpreting the question, and the interviewee doesn't know what's intended by the question. (Not the case for, e.g., who will you vote for next week).
The *rate* aspect is interesting, though. If you ask the same question over time and the % answering one way changes a lot, that may indicate something important.
Man, I swear I'm going to cut back on Substack, and you lure me back in with this blatant catnip.
I find the Wapo analysis superficial, and unchallenging to the self-serving biases of urban voters. Its analysis, and the studies it cite, assume as fact that white Americans do enjoy significant advantages on account of their whiteness (as opposed to their inherited wealth or dominant cultural traits, for those who specifically enjoy those privileges--something not true of all whites and not untrue of all non-whites), and these "racist" rural voters are "denying" it/their own racism. Now, to be clear, I personally believe that there are some advantages to being white in America, as there are with being attractive, thin, athletically-inclined, born to a married pair of college-educated parents, natively English speaking, etc etc etc. You could add "urban" to the list too. The racial advantage is definitely more unfair than the others as it should be totally irrelevant. But it's time to admit that this dynamic is always changing/evolving (studies from 2004 are ancient history), and it's conflated with 1000 other factors (wealth, culture, network effects, etc)... each person's assessment of its salience today will be heavily impacted by the world they live in, the people they know personally, the news they read. Again, the authors take a firm position that their assessment of the current state of racial advantages is the accurate one, and the rural denial of their assessment is not just a difference of perspective but a moral failing.
Additionally, they assume these immoral attitudes come first, and the political alignment comes second, caused by the racial attitudes--a causation claim supported only by tight correlation. My personal belief is that moral frameworks evolve in a group to bind them together in opposition to a perceived threat/enemy, in this case, elite urban liberals lecturing them about how racist they are. The more "we" talk about racism, the more "they" will take an oppositional stance. The more "they" take the opposite stance, the more "we" feel the urge to talk about racism. Meanwhile, NO ONE is actually being helped--not minorities, not low-income people of all racial backgrounds/geographic locations, not politicians who want to pass laws or voters who want them to.
Y'all know I could talk all day about this but I really do have to go. Here's more of my half-baked philosophy on all this... https://postwoke.substack.com/p/systems-and-starlings-and-magnets
“Meanwhile, NO ONE is actually being helped--not minorities, not low-income people of all racial backgrounds/geographic locations, not politicians who want to pass laws or voters who want them to.”
This occurs to me so often. We tie these attitudes to politics, but what are the political goals? Any policy proposals? On the very rare occasion when you see one, it’s wildly unpopular.
Another, maybe separate, issue: every person in my life who is talking about privilege, racial justice etc is the well-off white child of well-off white parents. I see the same thing in public life; not exclusively white but overwhelmingly white, and well-off. I’m not the only one who notices.
Having these folks lecture everyone about privilege, not to mention how those dumb, poor-signaling people are the root of all evil, is just a terrible look. And they’re brutal.
There are several liberals in my life who’ve become so frankly gross toward the less fortunate (that they think of as white) that I don’t want to be around them. None of them know it, because I learned to pass in a “better” world, but they’re talking about my family. I like to think I’d feel this way even if that weren’t true, but who knows?
Something can be absolutely, 100% the truth and still be bad politics.
Donald Trump is no more comfortable with "working class schmuks" than AOC, probably less.
Hilariously, it was an (actually good and not divisive) diversity training that may have radicalized me on the advantages of a two parent family. We (the staff at a community college in an “unpopular suburb”) we’re doing the raise-your-hand-if game. This was a pretty white group, but split between rural and urbane and private versus public college.
We also overwhelmingly came from two-parent families, to an extent the trainer was even a bit surprised.
I feel like this is one of those things that is completely obvious to parents, but maybe not? I'll admit that most of my peer group is two-parent families with children, and I think that the broad consensus is that we are all barely keeping our shit together.
Relatedly, it's been interesting to see other people that I know choose to have children without a partner, which I think challenges many parents to separate their belief that there isn't anything immoral or specifically wrong with doing that from their strong subjective sense that it is probably a terrible personal decision.
yes 100x
This is great and encapsulates much of what I thought when I read the article. A set of the populace has "kinda sort of" redefined racism and want that definition to carry the weight of what others see racism to be. It would be interesting to have asked: "Would you be ok with your child marrying someone of another race". I am willing to guess that the numbers would not be much different among urban/rural with most people saying yes. Also, it is not clear that the difference in racial attitudes is at all causal and not just the most charged issue at the moment. So your point about oppositional politics driving attitudes is spot on.
Interestingly and tellingly, vocal support for interracial marriage is at an all-time high of 94% approval!! https://news.gallup.com/poll/354638/approval-interracial-marriage-new-high.aspx Do people lie to pollsters, and agree to hypotheticals they've never been tested on? Of course! But the vast majority of Americans know it's wrong to hold biases against people based on their race, and try to live up to that. (They feel totally free to hold biases over politics though.) It's not totally outlandish that conservative voters would think progressives are exaggerating the day-to-day salience of racism, and have cooked up "systemic racism" as a way to keep moving the goalposts. (For the record, I think the truth is messier than either take, but if you can't see how/why progressives are the bad guy in the conservative worldview, you're in no position to analyze their motives for how they vote.)
I’m always shocked when I realize that as of when I graduated high school, in the late 1990s, most Americans still were willing to tell pollsters that they would disapprove of my parents’ marriage.
"But the vast majority of Americans know it's wrong to hold biases against people based on their race, and try to live up to that. (They feel totally free to hold biases over politics though"
Yep, I would be way more open to my kids marrying someone of another race than a liberal...
I think this is a great response. I would just add that assumptions about "urban" and "rural" are also very misleading if one is concerned about Senate representation. For example, the two states with the largest rural populations are Vermont and Maine, both solidly blue. By contrast 4 of the 10 most urbanized states (Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and Utah) are red to purply-red. The middle of the pack in terms of rural population at the state level are all over the map politically.
At best, the percentage of the rural population is an imperfect proxy for partisan leanings at the state level, much less supposedly racist attitudes.
My view is that elections are mostly won and lost in the suburbs. There are only a couple of states with majority rural populations, and two of them are solid blue.
I suppose it’s notable that the two states that are more than 60% rural are both blue. But there are two more states that are more than 50% rural - West Virginia and Mississippi - and there are six more states that are over 40% rural - Montana, Arkansas, South Dakota, Kentucky, Alabama, North Dakota. This is an overwhelming red advantage of rural over representation even if the two most extreme examples slightly undercut the red advantage.
40% rural is 60% urban. How low does the rural percentage need to drop before we can stop calling them rural states?
No. 40% rural is probably 25% urban and 35% suburban. You don’t stop calling them a rural state until some category other than rural is larger. And in a country that is 20% rural and 50% suburban, 38% rural and 42% suburban would still be disproportionately rural, even though the suburban populations is slightly larger.
"You don’t stop calling them a rural state until some category other than rural is larger."
By that standard, any state that is less than 33% rural is no longer a rural state just based on math. That's about 18 states. Take away the 4 states that are majority rural leaves about 14 that we'd have to look at more closely to see which ones may have a suburban or urban plurality. I don't know the numbers there.
Your point is true when discussing Senate representation (the bigger issue in the Senate is the small-but-not-tiny states are heavily red (Kansas, Oklahoma, Utah, etc).
But really, outside New England, rural and White = extremely Republican. New England is just an outlier.
Sure, but the point is that Democrats aren't losing, for instance, Florida because of the rural vote. Florida is the fifth most urbanized state and is more urbanized than New York. Other states that are more urban than NY: Arizona and Utah.
Kansas and Oklahoma, which you also mention, are around 25% and 30% rural respectively.
Outside of a small handful of more rural (but still majority urban) states, rural populations are small. These states are red only in part because of their rural populations. In contrast, a clear majority of Americans live in suburbs and this is only increasing. This is where elections will be one and lost in most cases.
In that case I mostly agree with you. Except that while we think of elections in terms of geography, it's important to remember that gaining 1,000 rural votes (even if the rural county is still blood red) is just as good as gaining the 1,000 votes needed to flip a suburb of Miami. So every vote helps.
Also the definition of rural used by the Census is a bit weird. Most Americans would consider Red Bluff, California (I'm a Californian so I'm using an example from here) to be rural. But I doubt the Census does.
Yes, the Census definition is annoying and causes much confusion. Where I live (Colorado), my typical suburban neighborhood is classified as "urban" but the next neighborhood over is considered "rural." From what I can guess it's because that subdivision has slightly bigger lots and is a bit further from the closest urban core.
I accidentally deleted my comment when I meant to copy/paste to make an edit :(
In medicine, we’ve finally learned that if you want someone to change a harmful belief or behavior, the least effective thing to do is shouting and shaming. The best thing to do is to listen to the patient’s values and goals and help them see how the new behavior better fits with how they see themselves and what they want to accomplish. Oh, and don’t focus on how hard and unpleasant change will be. I’m perplexed why my fellow progressives think that the best way we can cure people of racial biases is to blame them and tell them they need to do a lot of work and it will be unpleasant. It may be justified and fair, but I’m not clear why we should expect it to work based on what else we know about changing human behavior
You're assuming they want to cure people of racial biases. The loudest voices on this issue aren't interested in rehabilitation. They perceive racism to be a core moral failing, the stain of which in some sense can never be made clean, and therefore racists should be shunned and immiserated. You see this especially in those memes that say, like, "we can have a difference of opinion about taxes, but not <tendentious question about race>." To be a racist isn't to get something wrong, or to misunderstand the facts; it's to be a *bad person*. And trying to tailor your messaging to make these morally defective monsters feel better about their morally defective and monstrous beliefs is to compromise yourself, as well.
I wouldn't be the first to point out that their beliefs function much more like religion than politics.
In the vein of the religion comment, I'm often tempted to note that one of the major barriers to forming hard moral judgments about taxation is that taxation is a complex and nuanced issue that requires a lot of specific knowledge and consideration of falsifiable real-world experiences.
You don't need to have any specific information about racism to have a strong opinion about it.
Gentle and listening is not really how the anti-tobacco messaging at my local HMO comes across, but point taken.
Then they are doing it wrong 🙂
Gentle and listening is very hard. The free std clinic in Berkeley did a very good job of that and the one in West Hollywood is pretty good too, but most others I have encountered have a hard time maintaining their non-judgmental attitudes to the behaviors many clients describe.
I don’t think government should try to cure people of racism so much as negate or counteract the impact of racism.
As a "woke" rural liberal, I have no trouble agreeing that white privilege is very real. However, few rural white people experience their lives as privileged. That makes it exceedingly difficult to argue for policies that will level up people of color. I'm not sure how to resolve this rhetorical conundrum.
MY has a bunch of articles on race-neutral framing of issues that will help all privileged people, regardless of race. They tend to be popular across the board, even in rural america, despite disproportionately help non-white people, whereas skin-color based policies tend to be very unpopular
MY has also never answered why the Democratic party's long history of directly helping white people (Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, food stamps, public colleges, expanded electricity grid, internet, subsidized natural resources) hasn't made them like us any more. Obamacare in particular helped millions of rural white people get medicine they couldn't get before, and they only hated us more for it.
Wigan, do you have any thoughts on why we should expect this to change the next time we spend our political capital to help people who hate us? To be clear, I'm not suggesting that we don't pass good policy (and helping people in general is good policy). I'm suggesting that simply passing good policy hasn't helped us politically since before the Civil Rights movement.
One thing I miss about liberal politics from 5 years ago is the idea that having outgroups was a natural tendency, but something we should overcome. Not to call you out in particular, but you're clearly talking about rural whites as an outgroup (count the number of theys and wes in the above). That sort of outgroup from anyone is not helpful to actually getting to a better place as a country as diverse as America.
I'm having trouble accepting most of this premise - are we talking about white people in general or rural white people specifically?
SS and Medicare - these were passed long ago. Prior to Trump, Republicans campaigned on limiting these programs and lost support for doing so. One of Trump's major win was that he essentially surrendered on those issues, taking an issue that made poorer white people dislike Rs off the table. I would guess food stamps kind of go the same way, i.e. people on food stamps probably vote for the party that favors food stamps in elections if that issue becomes salient, regardless of ethnicity.
Internet - are we talking about rural broadband? Subsidized natural resources, expanded grid and public colleges all sound like things that might be targeted towards rural areas, and I'm not nearly informed enough about how they played out politically in the past to have an opinion. Apart from colleges, if I'm supposed to know that these are things that Democrats have been fighting for than messaging is definitely part of the problem. I don't associate the other 3 with Dems.
I also don't know much about rural areas. I live in the rust belt / great lakes region and all-White rural areas still vote about 30-40% for Dems. I don't sense a lot of hatred towards the D party among the non-college educated white people I know. There's more of a feeling that they're out of touch.
We don't pass laws to win elections. We win elections to pass laws. Medicare was good. If it won us votes also that's great! But the real win was that Medicare is politically sacrosanct now and will probably never go away beyond minor tweaks.
People care about more than "free" stuff from the government. So a lot of people would oppose Obamacare because it also included a provision that said the government could force you to buy a product.
There's probably also a smaller segment that (at least at the time) was concerned about debts and deficits.
In addition, even if those people were overall happy with the results of Obamacare, they would still be put off with Democrat efforts to take their guns, or allow for unrestricted abortion.
Of course there are politicians that successfully navigate those waters such as Manchin. But I think to get more of him, you would need more people willing to break with Pelosi and Schumer on issues important in their state. IE, the old Blue Dog Democrats
Assuming you meant “less privileged” here, agree ^
The key phrase missing from the progressive discourse seems to be “all else being equal”. I don’t know that anyone can argue that among two socio economically identical persons the white one does not face less discrimination, enjoys more access to the full trappings of society, etc. But nothing is ever equal, and there are so many people for whom other factors outweigh the advantage of their whiteness who rightly don’t feel privileged.
This is a version of signal / noise problem that bedevils policy in my view. We focus on the signal and ignore the noise. The problem with that approach is pushing policies that on average are helpful but create a ton of dispersion / differing outcomes. Take free trade. On average, a society with more free trade is richer by a bit than the one with less. But boy oh boy, it sure creates a lot of winners and losers which frays at the social fabric. But sadly the economic / expert consensus largely waives the “noise” away.
I am not at all saying that we should not fight systemic injustice. But it seems that keeping in mind distributional consequEnces - maybe with another post it that says “all else is rarely equal” - would greatly help the cause.
All else is sometimes equal - researchers have sent around loads of pairs of application letters, pairs that are identical (schools, grades etc) exc for a White vs a Black sounding name. And the response rates and job offer rates are way apart.
And researchers have sent identical mails to real estate agents; if a White couple shows up, their reception is different (on average) from the Black couple that shows up.
And other experiments.
Link?
for example: http://datacolada.org/36
Thanks!
I remember trying to put a hierarchy on privilege - as in what had actual most effect on your chances down to what had least. At the top was living in a developed country - instantly puts me above a large chunk of the world, next was my class - professional middle class as the UK calls it - valuing education, engaged parents etc, to a somewhat lesser degree, contacts. After that was my luck of the draw on genetics - above average intelligence, no disabilities, only minor downsides like relative lack of co-ordination and appearance.
Only after this did colour, sex, sexuality start appearing in my ranking - I have drawn the easy ride here being a white cis male, so maybe I have not see this in action, but I think middle classness (upper classness in US terms?) out weighs the effects.
And given this massive effect on life chances I can see someone who shares my white cis-maleness, but not my middle classness, being annoyed when a middle class person who does not share one of more of white cis-maleness calls them privileged.
Yes they technically privileged are in those traits but the middle-classness of the privilege caller completely out weighs that, and it comes across as punching down.
"All else equal" is a perfectly valid tool for analyzing a causal relationship where there are many influences on a dependent variable of interest. However, social systems are complex and interconnected, so such analysis is inappropriate for short term predictions. It may, at best, indicate the long term tendency of the system.
The answer is easy. Use the economic self interest of non privileged whites to argue for gap closing policies.
It's almost like the whole concept of white privilege is counterproductive and Dems should just focus on economically progressive policies.
"It's almost like the whole concept of white privilege is counterproductive..."
Well, concepts produce some stuff, like understanding, and they don't produce other stuff, like votes. Concepts are for thinking with -- they can be clarifying or confused, accurate or inaccurate, and so on. For many sociologists, historians, and psychologists, the concept of white privilege is not only accurate and fruitful, but indispensable. There are historical phenomena that you cannot understand clearly without it. If your metric is the production of understanding, it's a productive concept.
Political messaging, on the other hand, has only one metric: persuading votes and winning elections. If you had said, "it's almost like the focus on white privilege in political messaging is counterproductive," then I would totally agree with you. It's not gaining votes, and its not winning elections.
So: our politicians and advisers should shut up about white privilege. As messaging, it does not produce winning elections.
I think describing it as majority group privilege would be a better way to understand what they are describing. It's not specific to white Europeans. I think its a very common in group/out group human dynamic that they are describing. Calling that 'white privilege' is specifically U.S. centric political messaging.
For such a diverse, globalized, immigrant-heavy country, the US understanding of race suffers from a surprising amount of parochialism.
I wish there was more study of how ethnic politics and privilege plays out across the world. I always find it really interesting.
Suriname is 27% East Indian, 22% "Maroon" which would code as black in the US, 14% Indonesian, 7% Chinese, 4% Native American, 1% White, 16% "Creole" (would also code as black here) and 13% "mixed". I wonder how their discussions on racism play out.
It’s not always majority group privilege. My understanding is that there are places where a minority group gets this same privilege, whether it’s white people in 19th century South Carolina or Chinese people in 20th century Malaysia.
100%
Sort of. “The Sum Of Us” deals with this in some depth.
I strongly dislike the term "systemic racism" because of
A) The way it is used, with the twin purposes of silencing people who's opinions you disagree with, and to draw moral conclusions about issues and institutions which do not logically stem from the facts. Is the Senate "systemically racist" because more white people live in rural states? I think the answer is obviously no; there is a bias, but the bias itself is not racist. As Matt wrote: nobody who crafted the Senate thought "this is a way we can keep POC from power in the future!" I doubt they thought about how this will impact race relations much at all. The Senate is no more racist than any other institution, it has bias problems which must be addressed, and we can draw that conclusion without morally blinding ourselves.
B) The inherent moral judgment in the term leads to overreaction. The Senate's bias against Democrats has existed for about a decade, and during that time Democrats controlled the Senate for three of the six Senate cycles. There is no guarantee that Republicans will control the Senate forever. As we saw in both 2018 and 2020: state partisan leans change. Arizona and Georgia elected slates of Democratic senators, which was unthinkable a decade ago. There is no reason Democrats cannot find other opportunities to win other former red states. North Carolina, Texas and Florida could all flip to purple or blue states. If migration from California continues other states could come into play as well.
The best political solution for Democrats is to work within the system to win, the current Democratic Party is self-righteously assuming they are on the "right side of history" and are demanding they be handed power instead of actually working to obtain it. I voted for Joe Biden but he has, at minimum, acquiesced to this language in his presidency (which is disappointing). Democrats need to find ways to elect MORE Joe Manchins, Sherrod Browns and Jon Testers not less. The current Democratic Party seems disinterested in this concept.
"As Matt wrote: nobody who crafted the Senate thought "this is a way we can keep POC from power in the future!""
No, Matt wrote something both slipperier and more sophistical than that. He wrote:
"The Senate was not set up in order to systematically down-weight the votes of non-white people (I doubt anyone involved anticipated them voting much at all)."
That confuses two questions:
1) Was the Senate designed to support the racial hierarchy of white supremacy?
2) Was the senate designed to dilute the votes of black people?
Of course we know that 2) is false, since (as MY says) the Senate was designed at a time when few if any thought that black people would ever get the vote.
But 2) is a straw man for 1), which is a much more serious question. It is much harder to dismiss the idea that the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power.
So, Matt wrote something that is undeniably true (the Senate was not designed to dilute black votes) but sounds sorta like something that is probably false and is at least controversial (the Senate was not designed to uphold the racial hierarchy). You heard what you wanted to hear, which is not what he wrote.
This makes Matt either a good writer or a very bad one.
The senate was designed to put every state on equal footing regardless of population or land area, as a way to get the small states to join the Union. Otherwise why join a Union where you’ll just be ruled by the bigger states? The house proportional representation is meant to be an offsetting compromise.
All of this also hinges on the question of what the federal government is for. The founders thought of the federal government more in the way Europeans thought of the EU today - a way to keep the states together as a power bloc, while each state largely remained autonomous and free to be very different.
The design of the senate goes far beyond 1789. The senate was very carefully curated in the various “compromises” of 1830 and 1850 and so on, where prospective states were sliced and diced to ensure a split senate on the slavery question. There’s no reason Maine had to be separated from Massachusetts, or Kansas and Nebraska split into separate states, except to preserve the status quo on slavery.
That's the composition of the Senate - not the design.
Whatever “the senate was designed” to do has little bearing on what it does currently after the nakedly political addition of states over the years.
It's hard to take Senate as a tool for slave states seriously as it belies the relative size and power of states at the founding. The Senate was a way to get states like RI, and Delaware and NH, GA on board and not be subject to the whims of Virginia, NC, PA and NY. The big/small states were pretty split between slave and not-slave states.