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.
The founding is not the only time the senate was designed. States were consciously admitted in pairs of slave and free to ensure that this original split was maintained.
What Chris said. The states most supportive of the Senate at the founding were not slave states, but largely 'free' states (or states which quickly abandoned slavery after the Constitutional Convention). The largest supporter of proportional representation in the Senate was Virginia, the largest state at the time and a supporter of slave states. Overall, I disagree entirely that the Senate was designed to protect slavery.
Contrary to your statement it is "Progressives" today who see what they want to see in the Founding.
I think it's nearly impossible for us to psychologically "get" what the founders were experiencing when they dreamed up the Constitution. In that time their only experience of anything close to federal power was the occupying forces of Great Britain, and it was bad. Local concerns were much, much more important to them.
Traveling from Monticello to Philadelphia took days. They didn't even have the telegraph then! So for them the federal government was this far away thing that may as well have been across the ocean while the states were the ones passing and enforcing laws.
Plus, most people made their living on farms, so cities were largely an abstraction in picture books. Today even the most rural voters sees cities all the time on TV.
More importantly, there was no single thing they were "trying to do". They were a somewhat diverse lot that were trying to do many different things with, often, mutually exclusive ambitions! What we ended up with was the end result of a lot of compromises as opposed to a first principles - "This is What Government Should Be"
> It is much harder to dismiss the idea that the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power.
That is totally untrue though. The Virginia plan was to have a unicameral legislature with representation by population, because a lot of people lived there, free and enslaved. The Senate is there to empower all the tiny New England states and their parochial legislatures.
But in later decades, when big chunks of territory could have been admitted as single states or divided into multiple states, they specifically chose the divisions to maintain particular balances in the senate. *That* is now the bigger influence in the design of the senate than its intentions at the founding.
Which brings up another point: the suppression of most American history that is the context for so much of discussion of race in America. You can’t talk about “the Founders’ vision” then jump directly to 2021 without engaging *how* we got here.
"It is much harder to dismiss the idea that the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power."
If one wishes to properly discuss "the Senate's design" one must include the full design, not merely the original design. There are no more slave states, therefore the Senate is not designed to amplify their power.
Yes, but the Senate as it exists, absolutely privileges white rural voters, who hold the most racially atavistic attitudes, which is why it continues to exist as it does.
"the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power."
Except that is, of course, irrelevant to how the Senate works today -- the states that benefit the most from how the Senate is structured (e.g., Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, etc.) didn't even exist prior to the end of the Civil War, so it's not like a significant number of states are getting a disproportionate amount of representation in the Senate as a legacy of they're having been slave states once upon a time.
It also took me awhile to get an understanding of what it means. Good political slogans and issues are pretty clear to everyone. You didn't have to tell me twice what pro-choice / pro-life meant. College professors probably didn't come up with those slogans. But ask 10 random people what structural racism means and see what answers come back. You'll probably first have to define it for them.
‘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.‘
I’m curious: Why do you think rural states are so white?
Because people, of all ethnicities, aren't moving to them. You can check for yourself that the start with the largest growth in every non-White population is North Dakota, due to the economics of the shale oil boom.
But contrast that to the rural areas near where I live in the Rust Belt. The area's biggest population growth came in the previous era of immigration at the turn of the previous century, when nearly all immigrants were from countries that are very white by today's standards. But for the past 50 years people are leaving those rural areas and no one is moving in.
"Because people, of all ethnicities, aren't moving to them."
Me: Why do you think rural states are so white?
You: Because people aren't moving to them.
This seems like an odd explanation to say the least. I was expecting something along the lines of "Because there was a massive federal program with the express purpose of settling white people, and white people only, in those rural areas west of the Appalachians."
Either of our 3 or 4 sentence answers are going to be incomplete. The farther back you go the more you can trace the origins to official government actions made during a time when races were writ into law.
But the closer you get to present the more incomplete those explanations become. Whichever Federal programs you're referring to would also apply to California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois and Washington which at one time were almost entirely rural, and mostly white states. But today whites are solidly on track to be no more than a plurality in all of them if not a minority. Rural West Texas is becoming mostly Latino. Non-White people emigrate to NZ, Australia, Canada and the UK in great numbers and are free to move to rural areas in all of them, yet they don't, they move to thriving cities.
“ today whites are solidly on track to be no more than a plurality in all of them if not a minority”
Again, history didn’t begin yesterday. How much land wealth is owned by whites vs blacks in these states? The establishment of white communities was heavily subsidized by the US government. Those subsidies were explicitly denied to blacks which prevented them from building those communities in the first place in the West.
In the South, a multi-generational campaign of racial terrorism was waged to destroy black wealth and drive them off their land.
It's a little simplistic to reduce "the urban/rural divide" like this survey apparently did, when the lived reality in different places is not the same when it comes to race.
Every community has it's food chain, with some people at the top and some at the bottom. That's true in a city or state that 98% white and in one that much more mixed. But to tell the people in the community that's overwhelmingly white that race is a big part of advancing, or not, in America, when in their community there's no evidence of that, is to talk about something that just isn't very relevant to daily life in that community. It can seem out of touch and forced.
I think that's more true of the upper northwest quadrant of the country, less so the southeast. And Central American immigration is different again.
Just want to agree with you about relevance. Rural America is 78% white and economically disadvantaged, which makes the idea of 'privilege' bizarre and a bit insulting. Reading this piece in Maine - 97% white - debating white privilege is like debating Amazon deforestation. Important maybe, but not irrelevant to immediate needs. And boy, do we have needs! Rural Maine is depopulating, seeing schools close and transport links degrade in a deepening vicious spiral. No broadband infrastructure. Lousy health services Places with shocking levels of poverty. Democrats, please, a plan to help turn things round!
We certainly have city privilege and coastal privilege here. White privilege is an abstraction. And if you tell the people of Maine that they are 'racism deniers' they will remind you the volunteer 20th Maine Infantry turned the tide at Gettysburg.
Also: Author Harriet Beecher Stowe was married to a senior professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The Stowes would periodically invite junior faculty members and students to their home for dinner and discussion. While Harriet was writing Uncle Tom's Cabin she would read the most recently completed chapter of the book during these gatherings. The discussions about the book and the abolition movement more broadly were said to have deeply impressed those present, including one junior professor, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who went on to become the commander of the 20th Maine and led the famed bayonet charge on Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
Hate to break it to you, but it was actually the First Minnesota Regiment that was pivotal at Gettysburg. I learned that in elementary school on a field trip to the state capitol in St Paul, where their shot-up flag is on display.
Have you actually read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? I'm sure influential and deeply impressive to the Bowdoin College campus of the time, but the dullest book ever. However, if it led to heroism at Little Round Top from whatever state and the abolition of slavery, I'm all for it.
I do not mean to try to draw a straight line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Gettysburg. Chamberlain was a complicated man whose sense of duty was as a man, a Christian, a Mainer, and as an American.
From Wikipedia:
“Chamberlain was of English ancestry and could trace his family line back to twelfth-century England, during the reign of King Stephen. Chamberlain's great-grandfather Ebenezer, was a New Hampshire soldier in the French and Indian War, and the American Revolutionary War. Chamberlain's grandfather Joshua, was a ship builder, and colonel during the War of 1812, before moving his family to a Brewer farm in 1817. Chamberlain's father Joshua served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Aroostook War.
“Chamberlain was the first of five children. His father named him after James Lawrence, and favored a military career for his son, while Chamberlain's mother wanted him to become a minister.”
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When the US Army decided to write a field manual on military leadership, the 20th Maine and Colonel Chamberlain was the first case study:
“The 20th Maine arrived at Gettysburg near midday on 2 July, after marching more than one hundred miles in five days. They had had only two hours sleep and no hot food during the previous 24 hours. The regiment was preparing to go into a defensive position…
…The 20th Maine was literally at the end of the line.”
I agree with this angle. Especially in a heavily white community that is poor, and suffering from addiction the standard resident is surrounded on all sides by unhealthy white people doing very poorly. It would be odd to check the “major advantage” box in a survey. Honestly I’m surprised it was in the high 40s.
Right, in a community where most of the people above you and below you in the pecking order are also white, it isn't necessarily racist to question whether being white is a significant advantage - it just observing what's around you. Kind of a "when everyone is special, no one is special" thing.
I don't follow you. Maybe the disconnect is on how a white person living in a rural community that's overwhelmingly white is benefiting from being white - are you saying it's racist to question that?
My unoriginal observation about this, is that rural people put a high value on patriotism and respect for authority. The Vietnam War created a root association of racial justice and liberal militancy with contempt for and hostility to those basic values. It was the major line of social division when I was growing up in Kansas in the curdled tail-end of that period. And this division has been ground in throughly in the half century since. Factor this out of your statistics, and you may find the racial component to be less than you think.
The determination to associate disrespectful and unpatriotic woke discourse with basic justice for black people, is utterly lethal to that cause. Maybe challenging Fox News to feature more of the many black people in our nation who serve in the military and love their country, might have a positive effect. Not on the Democrats’ prospects for election, but at least on polls about racial attitudes in Red areas.
Big agree especially on the 'respect for authority' value, and actually I'd broaden that to all of the working class, whether they're rural or urban. I suspect most of this Substack grew up in a relatively educated home, but if you know, spend time with, or just observe blue collar families- unquestioning respect for authority is a key, key value. Whereas I'd say I was inculcated with the value of challenging authority & assuming that the existing social order was at least kinda unjust from a really early age. 'You have to do what the teacher/coach/adult/foreman/shift leader/police officer/sergeant/lieutenant says without questioning it' is something blue collar families teach their kids from day one.
You see this a lot with debates about police reform. Go read the comments section of any online forum with a lot of working class folks (I've been a Sherdog regular forever as I'm an MMA fan). You see a ton of 'well they should've just done what the officer said, how can you question the officer's authority'. They literally don't understand the 'it's OK to question the state security services' educated value system.
Related- did anyone here grow up having to call adults Mr. and Mrs. so-and-so? Because I grew up in a hippieish place where we called all adults by their first name, except for our parents and teachers at school- then I went out into broader America and in all of the blue collar areas you're supposed to call *every* adult Mr. Last Name (I'm unclear how old you have to be before this can stop). An example of the authority figure axis
"...unquestioning respect for authority is a key, key value..."
Yes and no.
Lots of right-wing voters are happy to tell black people to respect authorities, and to blame them for getting shot and killed: "'You have to do what the...police officer/sergeant/lieutenant says."
But then they turn around and storm the US Capitol, beating and maiming police, or bring guns into the Michigan Capitol and taunt and berate the police there. Or they take over the Malheur Sanctuary in Oregon, destroy property, defy police, state troopers, and FBI agents, and disregard the law.
Or they go to school-board meetings and shout at the superintendents. Or they go to election meeting and threaten the election officials with death-threats. Or they claim to know more than the medical authorities, and threaten the hospitals if they won't give their relatives some weird poison they read about on the internet.
In fact, it's almost like they respect no authority whatsoever if it ever crosses them.
But, yeah, they certainly talk a lot about how black people should respect authority. Which might call into question your suggestion that attitudes towards authority are more important than racism.
You're changing the "they" here to the actions of the worst % of Trump voters. Lost Future was talking about a cultural dynamic that relates to every American. I don't follow, or maybe just don't buy the argument. Some (dozens of) right-wingers brought guns to the Michigan Capital and taunted police there - that means Lost Future is half wrong when he says blue collar families tend to teach respect for authority more than white collar families do?
This feels like an argument that Christian (or insert X religion) values aren't the real Christian values because it's easy to find examples of Christians who are doing sinful things.
Fwiw I completely understand the dynamic he's describing. It's a class distinction that influences voting behavior. It's not the voting behavior itself.
Rural voters certainly aren't respecting medical authorities. That's undeniable. It's not like "well, most people are getting vaccinations, it's just a few bad apples." It's the entire barrel.
Yeah I don't think that's the same thing. Calling a doctor "Doctor ___" and not by his or her first name is a pretty different form of respect from doing what a doctor tells you to do once your out of their office.
But also - I think we were talking about Blue Collar people in general, not rural voters in particular, right?
Another way to look at is this: Most of the people of Latin America consider themselves more respectful of authority than "Gringos" are. The whole culture is though of as more hierarchical than American's. It's even built into the language with "tu / ustedes". I once saw a doctor and Peru and when I asked a question that felt very natural as an American he looked at me in shock before sort of realizing that it wasn't a challenge to his authority but a "weird foreigner thing".
If you're ever stopped by the police in Mexico, I would recommend being extremely respectful of their authority. But yet - murders of police officers happen. Burglaries and violence happen, political protests happen, etc.. I don't understand why you guys are conflating cultural habits of respect for authority with specific acts of defiance. Respect for authority isn't the same thing as docile obedience to all authorities at all times
I haven't actually been in a rural medical clinic or hospital lately, but people who have, doctors and nurses who work there, are reporting record levels of abuse during the covid crisis. So I'm not seeing this supposed respect. And I'm also seeing no condemnation among rural people of the abuse to school boards and health authorities.
"You're changing the "they" here to the actions of the worst % of Trump voters. " Maybe that's what dysphemistic treadmill did but lots of right wing voters didn't feel Obama was their president. Not exactly a respect for authority. And more like tens of millions than several hundreds.
But again - you're talking about voters. LF was talking about the culture of blue-collar people. There is some correlation with vote preference but as has been pointed out elsewhere, Biden's largest voting block was non-college educated white.
I don't think LFs comment was meant to explain every action of every person all the time. It's just an observation (which I strongly agree with) that blue collar people are raised to default to accepting authority more often white collar people are. It doesn't mean every blue collar person will accept every authority figures legitimacy at all times. Rural serfs and peasants (and slaves) were more deferential to authority than any modern person and yet there were still peasant and slave uprisings. I don't get why this seems to be hard to accept. This cultural trait is something I was aware of as soon as I hit middle school and started socializing with kids from the nearby white collar suburb.
Something weird is sure happening all right. I wish I understood it better. I feel the need for that, rather than to just to tag them as hypocritical and evil.
I still do it with people who are significantly older than me when I’m not in white collar spaces. And I’m not even consciously deciding, in the moment, to behave differently in the different spaces. It just happens, from some strange instinct.
I literally had no idea this was even a thing until I left for college. I was like, why would I call my friend's Dad Mr. So-and-So, he's not my teacher....? Home from summer after college, I remember a bunch of us who went to high school together discussing how weird the rest of America was about this one thing
" Factor this out of your statistics, and you may find the racial component to be less than you think."
This is at least a testable hypothesis, and it may already be a tested one.
Unfortunately, the WaPo article does not contain a link to the complete paper. It does have a link to the author's webpage and CV, but I could not find the complete paper there, either.
So, I agree that they should look at this. Perhaps they already did.
Hey Matt, can you send those guys the David Shor number-nerd bat-signal and have them come over here to comments so that we can talk with them? We got questions.
I’ve seen several people say this “rural people and respect for authority”. I say it’s not quite that cut and dry. Karen’s calling 911 are usually white liberal women. Rural residents are more… live and let live.
I'm not trying to stereotype here. In my experience the authority that matters here is that of parents (and God, for the Christians). This is totally compatible with a live-and-let-live attitude.
The racial resentment test was designed to tease out a difference between conservatives and liberals. The questions asked were the following:
1. Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.
2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.
3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
4. It's really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough: if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.
The way they tease out the difference is by wording the questions to be about how much you can overcome stuff, work your way out, worked your way up, making it about effort.
Interesting. As maybe you are saying, this doesn’t measure racism, but rather some (antiquated) ways in which the test designers interpret how racism might be expressed. It doesn’t really get at the question of whether you are a person who actually thinks other races are inferior and deserve to have second-class status, which is what actual racism is. If we are relying on this to understand where we are as citizens in America, well, it’s an awfully weak reed.
I think it’s entirely possible to answer in the positive to #1 and maybe in a degree to #4 without feeling racial animus or resentment at all. The first is simply about an interpretation of citizenship. The second is about an interpretation of the American Dream.
I understand and largely believe the correlations that this piece brings out, but I've always found the claims that "racial resentment" is *causally* responsible for the urban-rural divide weird for several reasons.
First, I think we need to parse what these survey questions are actually asking. The most precise interpretation that I can attempt is the following: "Do racist attitudes account for a large share of income and wealth disparities across *individuals* in the U.S.?" This is an empirical claim, not a value judgment. I have no idea how exactly one could test it-- the ideal experiment would be to change the skin color of a random sample of Americans. It seems strange to moralize this type of statement. Additionally, there's a broad range of possible interpretations of this question.
Second, there's some evidence that people who think black individuals don't face a significant disadvantage also have this attitude about ALL races:
That is, when you ask people the same racial resentment questions, but insert "Latvian" or "Greek" rather than "Black," they give the same answers.
Third, the fact that these racial resentment measures aren't super robust suggests that rural voters may just have a very different mental model of how the world works. I wouldn't be surprised if this same mental model is what makes them distrust coastal elites (since apparently there's also a strong correlation between social trust and voting for Trump). Out of all the things that correlate with voting for Trump, how can we say that racist attitudes are the root cause and decisive voting issue?
Analyses like these start with the end in mind. “Only bad people would vote for Trump. What flavor of bad are these people?” Then they get to claim they’ve found the root cause when they land on “racist,” as if it’s an immutable characteristic. The far more interesting question would be, what is the root cause of these professed beliefs about race?
Reminds me of Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” when he critiques the shallowness of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s criticism of slaveholders in Uncle Toms Cabin: “What constriction or failure of perception forced her to … leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.”
Rural whites I know eat up any messaging from their favorite sources that say urbanites are calling them racists. I don’t think there is much progressives can do to counter this. The slightest anecdote gets transformed into a talking point that elites are calling them racist. One such person I know even seems proud to end any sentence with, “well, I guess I’m just a racist.” The right knows this messaging works, they’ve turned it into a weird badge of honor. When Trump says he’s the least racist person he knows, well, that guy probably believes that about himself too. I think the best the left can do to is make modest gains, or move to the country (which is happening more).
I think that when there are lots of cases where progressives absolutely, undoubtedly, are calling them racist, that increases their sensitivity to ambiguous statements that might be calling them racist.
Like, if I had said ten times "John Crespi had a ludicrously huge nose," in your hearing, and then I made some allusion to Cyrano that was kind of ambiguous, don't you think you'd reasonably suspect that I was making another crack about your nose?
(I have never seen John and have no reason to suspect that his nose is anything other than perfectly sized for his face.)
"Rural whites I know eat up any messaging from their favorite sources that say urbanites are calling them racists. I don’t think there is much progressives can do to counter this."
Not so sure that's the case. We've seen a number of instances lately where moderate Democrats have prevailed over their "loony left" opponents in primaries. I think in many cases candidates honestly get their messaging "calculus" wrong, and could, if they so choose, prevail with a more moderate branding. This is likely because of the hugely expanded influence of digital media (and its domination by extremes and political junkies). I suspect many candidates and campaign managers are simply not getting a very accurate measurement of voter sentiment. Most normies aren't on Twitter. That's true even in Boston and San Francisco.
I’m not a rural white voter, but I am a Southern, exurban voter whom overly woke Democrats might lose. Yet politics are neat. When I see once proud British dominions prostrated by lockdowns and supposedly free people willing to sell their freedom cheaply, and I see many progressives pining for similarly noxious lockdowns, I begin to feel a bit Republican. Covid cowardice is my biggest beef with progressives by far.
Have *you* looked at Australia? The lockdowns vary wildly from state to state. I suggest you go listen to the last episode of The Fifth Column podcast where they interview Australian civil libertarian Josh Szeps about what is actually going on in Oz, it's not nearly as dramatic as many here are making it out to be.
I think that there is some validity to the rural viewpoint. I am absolutely not saying that there is not systemic racism. But an awful lot of the unreasonable crap (like mistreatment by cops) that happens to poor black people happens to poor white people. I can see how they might be annoyed that "liberal elites" are framing as racial what might be framed to cover their own mistreatment.
I'm also always confused who Joe Biden is talking to when he talks about structural racism. You'd think that's messaging to Black voters to say "I've got your back". But everything I've heard tells me the Black voters who supported Biden don't care about this much...they're more conservative and tend to care more about policy issues. So is he just saying this to keep liberals on Twitter happy?
I haven't seen data on this that maybe you have, but as someone who is Black in a Black social group it's somewhat nuanced. Most Blacks don't necessarily care about talking about structural racism in general. For example, racial sensitivity training at jobs is probably more uncomfortable for us than it is for white people taking it. BUT people who stand up and deny the existence of structural racism cause the hair on the back of our necks to rise. And it seems like a clear dog whistle to more blatant racism.
Right, denying it's existence is one thing. And I think Matt's point is denying it is different than just talking about it without any clear reason for doing so, especially if evidence suggests it could be counter-productive.
What's not clear to me is if you can fix the problem without talking about it. Maybe you can in some areas, maybe not in others.
I think most people would agree that racism is real. But also think it's a pretty small part of America. And the argument that America is a racist country goes way to far
black voters over 30 are practical enough not to trust a 72% white electorate to care much about structural racism. they understand the practicality of tying their interests to those of working stiffs generally
That's a good point. I feel Black people in America in general are the savviest voters. If it had been up to white progressives, Trump would probably have prevailed over Bernie or Warren in the general election.
Probably so. I'd like to know if typical Black voters even use the term "structural racism". It sounds like an extremely academic term. I'd expect very few of the 75% of Americans without a college degree would readily understand that term, regardless of their race or views on racism.
Good piece, Matt. Many people have said it, but it's a little weird to believe simultaneously that racism is the central animating theme of American history and also that it now needs to be stamped out everywhere at every turn.
I buy the "implicit bias" dogma that everyone harbors racist attitudes; in-group/out-group dynamics are found in every human society ever, so how could they not? There's a perfectly coherent synthesis of this idea with increasing demands for racial justice, viz. that we hate the sin and love the sinner. Racist systems and policies are bad; racist people are just you and me. This is the one useful contribution that Kendi makes to the conversation: racism is not a sin to be redeemed in the human heart, it's whatever leads to racist outcomes. (Although he goes off the rails when he defines any difference at all as racist.)
Instead, displaying racist attitudes is still the most stigmatized thing you can do in polite society. Why? Racism is horrible, so are people generally, and we don't say that only good people should vote. As you point out, throwing out all the crooked timber leaves us just about enough to build a small bookshelf.
"racism is not a sin to be redeemed in the human heart, it's whatever leads to racist outcomes. "
I totally disagree with that. Racism is treating someone different because of the color of their skin. Unequal outcome can come from racism, but they can also come from MANY other things. Unequal outcomes is not proof of racism.
As someone in the (small urban/suburban) Deep South who considers himself a “moderate” and who mostly votes Dem these days, it’s interesting to imagine what different messaging on race from Dems might look like. I think there’s a decent chance it would lead to some major internal divisions between the more urban and moderate Dem world.
During the Trump era, I would have fights with “certain people” in real life about racial issues. To be quite frank, in a general sense, I think some of these people were in a matter-of-fact-way truly racist. Violent racist? Not at all. They spoke highly of black people in their small hometown who “acted right” and weren’t into BLM and weren’t so destructive (a lot of these conversations happened in summer of 2020). But this same person also said it makes him sick when he sees a white woman and a black man together. Racism exists on a spectrum.
I remember debating this particular individual about general systematic racism, and one thing he would always say is “look at the Japanese! They were treated like shit but have been very successful compared to blacks!”
I of course would respond that the Japanese didn’t have the same level of oppression over the same amount of vast time as the blacks, and I also brought up the idea that Japanese self-selected to come here and that that self-selection from any group could possibly make them more resilient in the “business” sense vs a group that was forced to come here agains their will.
Anyway, of course none of my counter arguments worked. He would roll his eyes at them. But it’s funny how I kept trying to look for ways to find areas where I could agree with him.
Here a few direct messages I said to him:
1. Slavery and Jim Crow when thinking of race relations/issues today shouldn’t be thought of as *everything* and envoked every time there’s a racial issue to discuss. At the same time, it certainly shouldn’t be thought of as nothing in today’s racial world. But bringing it up every time something bad happens with race might be counterproductive I conceded.
2. This overlaps a little with 1, but I agreed/conceded that people (including me at times) talk too much about race, in general. I don’t care how right someone is or how righteous their views are, if it’s talked about constantly the risk of back lash is heightened.
But I think embracing both 1 & 2 above could cause fairly major rifts between Dems. Not sure it would move the needle much with conservatives. I think the guy I was talking to still views me as a squish just like he views most Dems.
I think it’s awesome you’re actually having conversations with people who have a different view. That’s rare these days.
I also think you may have had more impact than you realize. Most people are loathe to admit that they are changing their mind. But overtime, you may notice that the arguments drift in your favor, and things the person would dismiss outright a year ago they now merely shrug and deflect, and eventually they kind of nod and move on. The fact that this person had continuing conversations with you and listened to what you had to say is encouraging.
I would also be interested to hear why this person felt the difference between Japanese Americans and Black Americans was important. What’s underneath that? Maybe what’s underneath that is the person just doesn’t think much of Black people, and there’s little you can do about it. But I find that a lot of people, especially whites in the south, carry tremendous shame over the history of slavery in their region. They’re normal humans who want to be proud of their heritage, but they largely can’t. So they get very defensive and look for anything else they can point to that would make things “not our fault,” and by extension not their ancestors fault.
I think in this particular case, this person being older and his general temperament, there won’t be much change. But I agree in the sense that it’s helpful when the “other side” isn’t raging against each other, and I think me and this particular person have reached a point where we don’t rage against each other. But we certainly have. What’s funny is I actually enjoy being around him in general. We don’t talk as much about these race issues in the Biden admin. We don’t talk about politics nearly as much anymore and that’s really a good thing I think because it felt mostly pointless when we did and then there was always a chance of yelling/outbursts.
This particular person actually grew up in New York City in the 50s/60s and told me when he was a little kid he told his dad he backed the black people in the Harlem riots. His dad basically said those people threw their trash everywhere and weren’t worth caring about.
Democratic candidates could make progress with voters by just avoiding academic language and talking about racism (and everything else) in the language of normal people.
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.
The founding is not the only time the senate was designed. States were consciously admitted in pairs of slave and free to ensure that this original split was maintained.
That's not 'designing' anything - that's politics and compromise.
What Chris said. The states most supportive of the Senate at the founding were not slave states, but largely 'free' states (or states which quickly abandoned slavery after the Constitutional Convention). The largest supporter of proportional representation in the Senate was Virginia, the largest state at the time and a supporter of slave states. Overall, I disagree entirely that the Senate was designed to protect slavery.
Contrary to your statement it is "Progressives" today who see what they want to see in the Founding.
I think it's nearly impossible for us to psychologically "get" what the founders were experiencing when they dreamed up the Constitution. In that time their only experience of anything close to federal power was the occupying forces of Great Britain, and it was bad. Local concerns were much, much more important to them.
Traveling from Monticello to Philadelphia took days. They didn't even have the telegraph then! So for them the federal government was this far away thing that may as well have been across the ocean while the states were the ones passing and enforcing laws.
Plus, most people made their living on farms, so cities were largely an abstraction in picture books. Today even the most rural voters sees cities all the time on TV.
More importantly, there was no single thing they were "trying to do". They were a somewhat diverse lot that were trying to do many different things with, often, mutually exclusive ambitions! What we ended up with was the end result of a lot of compromises as opposed to a first principles - "This is What Government Should Be"
> It is much harder to dismiss the idea that the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power.
That is totally untrue though. The Virginia plan was to have a unicameral legislature with representation by population, because a lot of people lived there, free and enslaved. The Senate is there to empower all the tiny New England states and their parochial legislatures.
But in later decades, when big chunks of territory could have been admitted as single states or divided into multiple states, they specifically chose the divisions to maintain particular balances in the senate. *That* is now the bigger influence in the design of the senate than its intentions at the founding.
Which brings up another point: the suppression of most American history that is the context for so much of discussion of race in America. You can’t talk about “the Founders’ vision” then jump directly to 2021 without engaging *how* we got here.
"It is much harder to dismiss the idea that the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power."
If one wishes to properly discuss "the Senate's design" one must include the full design, not merely the original design. There are no more slave states, therefore the Senate is not designed to amplify their power.
Yes, but the Senate as it exists, absolutely privileges white rural voters, who hold the most racially atavistic attitudes, which is why it continues to exist as it does.
“…white rural voters, who hold the most racially atavistic attitudes…”
Begging the question?
"the Senate's design was intended to assist Slave States and amplify their power."
Except that is, of course, irrelevant to how the Senate works today -- the states that benefit the most from how the Senate is structured (e.g., Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, etc.) didn't even exist prior to the end of the Civil War, so it's not like a significant number of states are getting a disproportionate amount of representation in the Senate as a legacy of they're having been slave states once upon a time.
It also took me awhile to get an understanding of what it means. Good political slogans and issues are pretty clear to everyone. You didn't have to tell me twice what pro-choice / pro-life meant. College professors probably didn't come up with those slogans. But ask 10 random people what structural racism means and see what answers come back. You'll probably first have to define it for them.
Agreed.
‘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.‘
I’m curious: Why do you think rural states are so white?
Because people, of all ethnicities, aren't moving to them. You can check for yourself that the start with the largest growth in every non-White population is North Dakota, due to the economics of the shale oil boom.
https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/interactive/race-and-ethnicity-in-the-united-state-2010-and-2020-census.html
But contrast that to the rural areas near where I live in the Rust Belt. The area's biggest population growth came in the previous era of immigration at the turn of the previous century, when nearly all immigrants were from countries that are very white by today's standards. But for the past 50 years people are leaving those rural areas and no one is moving in.
"Because people, of all ethnicities, aren't moving to them."
Me: Why do you think rural states are so white?
You: Because people aren't moving to them.
This seems like an odd explanation to say the least. I was expecting something along the lines of "Because there was a massive federal program with the express purpose of settling white people, and white people only, in those rural areas west of the Appalachians."
Either of our 3 or 4 sentence answers are going to be incomplete. The farther back you go the more you can trace the origins to official government actions made during a time when races were writ into law.
But the closer you get to present the more incomplete those explanations become. Whichever Federal programs you're referring to would also apply to California, Texas, Arizona, Nevada, Illinois and Washington which at one time were almost entirely rural, and mostly white states. But today whites are solidly on track to be no more than a plurality in all of them if not a minority. Rural West Texas is becoming mostly Latino. Non-White people emigrate to NZ, Australia, Canada and the UK in great numbers and are free to move to rural areas in all of them, yet they don't, they move to thriving cities.
How does your explanation explain these facts?
“ today whites are solidly on track to be no more than a plurality in all of them if not a minority”
Again, history didn’t begin yesterday. How much land wealth is owned by whites vs blacks in these states? The establishment of white communities was heavily subsidized by the US government. Those subsidies were explicitly denied to blacks which prevented them from building those communities in the first place in the West.
In the South, a multi-generational campaign of racial terrorism was waged to destroy black wealth and drive them off their land.
It's not the Democratic Party, it's the socialists who have embedded themselves in it.
It's a little simplistic to reduce "the urban/rural divide" like this survey apparently did, when the lived reality in different places is not the same when it comes to race.
Every community has it's food chain, with some people at the top and some at the bottom. That's true in a city or state that 98% white and in one that much more mixed. But to tell the people in the community that's overwhelmingly white that race is a big part of advancing, or not, in America, when in their community there's no evidence of that, is to talk about something that just isn't very relevant to daily life in that community. It can seem out of touch and forced.
I think that's more true of the upper northwest quadrant of the country, less so the southeast. And Central American immigration is different again.
Just want to agree with you about relevance. Rural America is 78% white and economically disadvantaged, which makes the idea of 'privilege' bizarre and a bit insulting. Reading this piece in Maine - 97% white - debating white privilege is like debating Amazon deforestation. Important maybe, but not irrelevant to immediate needs. And boy, do we have needs! Rural Maine is depopulating, seeing schools close and transport links degrade in a deepening vicious spiral. No broadband infrastructure. Lousy health services Places with shocking levels of poverty. Democrats, please, a plan to help turn things round!
We certainly have city privilege and coastal privilege here. White privilege is an abstraction. And if you tell the people of Maine that they are 'racism deniers' they will remind you the volunteer 20th Maine Infantry turned the tide at Gettysburg.
Also: Author Harriet Beecher Stowe was married to a senior professor at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. The Stowes would periodically invite junior faculty members and students to their home for dinner and discussion. While Harriet was writing Uncle Tom's Cabin she would read the most recently completed chapter of the book during these gatherings. The discussions about the book and the abolition movement more broadly were said to have deeply impressed those present, including one junior professor, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who went on to become the commander of the 20th Maine and led the famed bayonet charge on Little Round Top at Gettysburg.
Hate to break it to you, but it was actually the First Minnesota Regiment that was pivotal at Gettysburg. I learned that in elementary school on a field trip to the state capitol in St Paul, where their shot-up flag is on display.
Success has many parents.
Both.
"After Gettysburg, the flag became too tattered to continue and was retired."
https://www.maine.gov/sos/arc/collections/20thbattleflag.html
Have you actually read 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'? I'm sure influential and deeply impressive to the Bowdoin College campus of the time, but the dullest book ever. However, if it led to heroism at Little Round Top from whatever state and the abolition of slavery, I'm all for it.
I do not mean to try to draw a straight line from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Gettysburg. Chamberlain was a complicated man whose sense of duty was as a man, a Christian, a Mainer, and as an American.
From Wikipedia:
“Chamberlain was of English ancestry and could trace his family line back to twelfth-century England, during the reign of King Stephen. Chamberlain's great-grandfather Ebenezer, was a New Hampshire soldier in the French and Indian War, and the American Revolutionary War. Chamberlain's grandfather Joshua, was a ship builder, and colonel during the War of 1812, before moving his family to a Brewer farm in 1817. Chamberlain's father Joshua served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Aroostook War.
“Chamberlain was the first of five children. His father named him after James Lawrence, and favored a military career for his son, while Chamberlain's mother wanted him to become a minister.”
-
When the US Army decided to write a field manual on military leadership, the 20th Maine and Colonel Chamberlain was the first case study:
“The 20th Maine arrived at Gettysburg near midday on 2 July, after marching more than one hundred miles in five days. They had had only two hours sleep and no hot food during the previous 24 hours. The regiment was preparing to go into a defensive position…
…The 20th Maine was literally at the end of the line.”
https://www.armyheritage.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/FM-22-100-Aug99.pdf
I agree with this angle. Especially in a heavily white community that is poor, and suffering from addiction the standard resident is surrounded on all sides by unhealthy white people doing very poorly. It would be odd to check the “major advantage” box in a survey. Honestly I’m surprised it was in the high 40s.
I agree. I think experts focus on aggregates and downplay people’s lives experience as a valid yard stick. And then act surprised / morally affronted.
Right, in a community where most of the people above you and below you in the pecking order are also white, it isn't necessarily racist to question whether being white is a significant advantage - it just observing what's around you. Kind of a "when everyone is special, no one is special" thing.
Another way to put it is I had several advantages while growing up. Being white wasn't one of them.
What I've noticed here is the pecking order isn't so much race, but Surnames. Being "Not from around here" one is viewed through a different lens.
This is an extremely permissive attitude toward racism, and it doesn't really give us a way to move forward other than "be nicer to the racists."
I don't follow you. Maybe the disconnect is on how a white person living in a rural community that's overwhelmingly white is benefiting from being white - are you saying it's racist to question that?
My unoriginal observation about this, is that rural people put a high value on patriotism and respect for authority. The Vietnam War created a root association of racial justice and liberal militancy with contempt for and hostility to those basic values. It was the major line of social division when I was growing up in Kansas in the curdled tail-end of that period. And this division has been ground in throughly in the half century since. Factor this out of your statistics, and you may find the racial component to be less than you think.
The determination to associate disrespectful and unpatriotic woke discourse with basic justice for black people, is utterly lethal to that cause. Maybe challenging Fox News to feature more of the many black people in our nation who serve in the military and love their country, might have a positive effect. Not on the Democrats’ prospects for election, but at least on polls about racial attitudes in Red areas.
Big agree especially on the 'respect for authority' value, and actually I'd broaden that to all of the working class, whether they're rural or urban. I suspect most of this Substack grew up in a relatively educated home, but if you know, spend time with, or just observe blue collar families- unquestioning respect for authority is a key, key value. Whereas I'd say I was inculcated with the value of challenging authority & assuming that the existing social order was at least kinda unjust from a really early age. 'You have to do what the teacher/coach/adult/foreman/shift leader/police officer/sergeant/lieutenant says without questioning it' is something blue collar families teach their kids from day one.
You see this a lot with debates about police reform. Go read the comments section of any online forum with a lot of working class folks (I've been a Sherdog regular forever as I'm an MMA fan). You see a ton of 'well they should've just done what the officer said, how can you question the officer's authority'. They literally don't understand the 'it's OK to question the state security services' educated value system.
Related- did anyone here grow up having to call adults Mr. and Mrs. so-and-so? Because I grew up in a hippieish place where we called all adults by their first name, except for our parents and teachers at school- then I went out into broader America and in all of the blue collar areas you're supposed to call *every* adult Mr. Last Name (I'm unclear how old you have to be before this can stop). An example of the authority figure axis
"...unquestioning respect for authority is a key, key value..."
Yes and no.
Lots of right-wing voters are happy to tell black people to respect authorities, and to blame them for getting shot and killed: "'You have to do what the...police officer/sergeant/lieutenant says."
But then they turn around and storm the US Capitol, beating and maiming police, or bring guns into the Michigan Capitol and taunt and berate the police there. Or they take over the Malheur Sanctuary in Oregon, destroy property, defy police, state troopers, and FBI agents, and disregard the law.
Or they go to school-board meetings and shout at the superintendents. Or they go to election meeting and threaten the election officials with death-threats. Or they claim to know more than the medical authorities, and threaten the hospitals if they won't give their relatives some weird poison they read about on the internet.
In fact, it's almost like they respect no authority whatsoever if it ever crosses them.
But, yeah, they certainly talk a lot about how black people should respect authority. Which might call into question your suggestion that attitudes towards authority are more important than racism.
You're changing the "they" here to the actions of the worst % of Trump voters. Lost Future was talking about a cultural dynamic that relates to every American. I don't follow, or maybe just don't buy the argument. Some (dozens of) right-wingers brought guns to the Michigan Capital and taunted police there - that means Lost Future is half wrong when he says blue collar families tend to teach respect for authority more than white collar families do?
This feels like an argument that Christian (or insert X religion) values aren't the real Christian values because it's easy to find examples of Christians who are doing sinful things.
Fwiw I completely understand the dynamic he's describing. It's a class distinction that influences voting behavior. It's not the voting behavior itself.
And it's not like rural voters are condemning the violence. It's not like they're turning their backs on the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.
‘You're changing the "they" here to the actions of the worst % of Trump voters.‘
While not every single GOP partisan I know participated in the Capitol insurrection, nearly everh single one I know has minimized and normalized it.
Rural voters certainly aren't respecting medical authorities. That's undeniable. It's not like "well, most people are getting vaccinations, it's just a few bad apples." It's the entire barrel.
Yeah I don't think that's the same thing. Calling a doctor "Doctor ___" and not by his or her first name is a pretty different form of respect from doing what a doctor tells you to do once your out of their office.
But also - I think we were talking about Blue Collar people in general, not rural voters in particular, right?
Another way to look at is this: Most of the people of Latin America consider themselves more respectful of authority than "Gringos" are. The whole culture is though of as more hierarchical than American's. It's even built into the language with "tu / ustedes". I once saw a doctor and Peru and when I asked a question that felt very natural as an American he looked at me in shock before sort of realizing that it wasn't a challenge to his authority but a "weird foreigner thing".
If you're ever stopped by the police in Mexico, I would recommend being extremely respectful of their authority. But yet - murders of police officers happen. Burglaries and violence happen, political protests happen, etc.. I don't understand why you guys are conflating cultural habits of respect for authority with specific acts of defiance. Respect for authority isn't the same thing as docile obedience to all authorities at all times
At the risk of
I haven't actually been in a rural medical clinic or hospital lately, but people who have, doctors and nurses who work there, are reporting record levels of abuse during the covid crisis. So I'm not seeing this supposed respect. And I'm also seeing no condemnation among rural people of the abuse to school boards and health authorities.
"You're changing the "they" here to the actions of the worst % of Trump voters. " Maybe that's what dysphemistic treadmill did but lots of right wing voters didn't feel Obama was their president. Not exactly a respect for authority. And more like tens of millions than several hundreds.
But again - you're talking about voters. LF was talking about the culture of blue-collar people. There is some correlation with vote preference but as has been pointed out elsewhere, Biden's largest voting block was non-college educated white.
I don't think LFs comment was meant to explain every action of every person all the time. It's just an observation (which I strongly agree with) that blue collar people are raised to default to accepting authority more often white collar people are. It doesn't mean every blue collar person will accept every authority figures legitimacy at all times. Rural serfs and peasants (and slaves) were more deferential to authority than any modern person and yet there were still peasant and slave uprisings. I don't get why this seems to be hard to accept. This cultural trait is something I was aware of as soon as I hit middle school and started socializing with kids from the nearby white collar suburb.
Something weird is sure happening all right. I wish I understood it better. I feel the need for that, rather than to just to tag them as hypocritical and evil.
Authority. Wear masks everywhere. Even on playgrounds.
Rural people: no
Urban people: ok
The whole respect for authority thing is so much more complex than people’s stereotypes.
I'm mid 40's and I'm _still_ uncomfortable calling my parents' friends by solely their first names.
I still do it with people who are significantly older than me when I’m not in white collar spaces. And I’m not even consciously deciding, in the moment, to behave differently in the different spaces. It just happens, from some strange instinct.
I literally had no idea this was even a thing until I left for college. I was like, why would I call my friend's Dad Mr. So-and-So, he's not my teacher....? Home from summer after college, I remember a bunch of us who went to high school together discussing how weird the rest of America was about this one thing
This was quite common in Kansas in the 1970's where I grew up. Military families and Christians, especially.
" Factor this out of your statistics, and you may find the racial component to be less than you think."
This is at least a testable hypothesis, and it may already be a tested one.
Unfortunately, the WaPo article does not contain a link to the complete paper. It does have a link to the author's webpage and CV, but I could not find the complete paper there, either.
So, I agree that they should look at this. Perhaps they already did.
Hey Matt, can you send those guys the David Shor number-nerd bat-signal and have them come over here to comments so that we can talk with them? We got questions.
.>>>..that rural people put a high value on patriotism and respect for authority.<<<
This must be why they're so supportive of masking and vaccination mandates, wildlife protection laws, and federal land management policies.
I’ve seen several people say this “rural people and respect for authority”. I say it’s not quite that cut and dry. Karen’s calling 911 are usually white liberal women. Rural residents are more… live and let live.
I'm not trying to stereotype here. In my experience the authority that matters here is that of parents (and God, for the Christians). This is totally compatible with a live-and-let-live attitude.
It really boils down to a lot of differences about agency and how much each of us has.
Interesting. Can you elaborate?
The racial resentment test was designed to tease out a difference between conservatives and liberals. The questions asked were the following:
1. Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors.
2. Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class.
3. Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve.
4. It's really a matter of some people just not trying hard enough: if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites.
The way they tease out the difference is by wording the questions to be about how much you can overcome stuff, work your way out, worked your way up, making it about effort.
Interesting. As maybe you are saying, this doesn’t measure racism, but rather some (antiquated) ways in which the test designers interpret how racism might be expressed. It doesn’t really get at the question of whether you are a person who actually thinks other races are inferior and deserve to have second-class status, which is what actual racism is. If we are relying on this to understand where we are as citizens in America, well, it’s an awfully weak reed.
I think it’s entirely possible to answer in the positive to #1 and maybe in a degree to #4 without feeling racial animus or resentment at all. The first is simply about an interpretation of citizenship. The second is about an interpretation of the American Dream.
Thanks for this.
All this stuff is basically the same strategy over and over.
I understand and largely believe the correlations that this piece brings out, but I've always found the claims that "racial resentment" is *causally* responsible for the urban-rural divide weird for several reasons.
First, I think we need to parse what these survey questions are actually asking. The most precise interpretation that I can attempt is the following: "Do racist attitudes account for a large share of income and wealth disparities across *individuals* in the U.S.?" This is an empirical claim, not a value judgment. I have no idea how exactly one could test it-- the ideal experiment would be to change the skin color of a random sample of Americans. It seems strange to moralize this type of statement. Additionally, there's a broad range of possible interpretations of this question.
Second, there's some evidence that people who think black individuals don't face a significant disadvantage also have this attitude about ALL races:
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/carneyenos.pdf
That is, when you ask people the same racial resentment questions, but insert "Latvian" or "Greek" rather than "Black," they give the same answers.
Third, the fact that these racial resentment measures aren't super robust suggests that rural voters may just have a very different mental model of how the world works. I wouldn't be surprised if this same mental model is what makes them distrust coastal elites (since apparently there's also a strong correlation between social trust and voting for Trump). Out of all the things that correlate with voting for Trump, how can we say that racist attitudes are the root cause and decisive voting issue?
I mean, they just did a few linear regressions, nothing fancy. It's all just correlative; they aren't in a position to make any causal claims.
Is this not the statement they're making, though? They say that racism denial "drives" the urban-rural voting split.
Oh ya definitely. I was agreeing that the work they did doesn't justify the causal claims they are making.
"Out of all the things that correlate with voting for Trump, how can we say that racist attitudes are the root cause and decisive voting issue?"
Because it's the lazy answer.
Analyses like these start with the end in mind. “Only bad people would vote for Trump. What flavor of bad are these people?” Then they get to claim they’ve found the root cause when they land on “racist,” as if it’s an immutable characteristic. The far more interesting question would be, what is the root cause of these professed beliefs about race?
Reminds me of Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” when he critiques the shallowness of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s criticism of slaveholders in Uncle Toms Cabin: “What constriction or failure of perception forced her to … leave unanswered and unnoticed the only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.”
Rural whites I know eat up any messaging from their favorite sources that say urbanites are calling them racists. I don’t think there is much progressives can do to counter this. The slightest anecdote gets transformed into a talking point that elites are calling them racist. One such person I know even seems proud to end any sentence with, “well, I guess I’m just a racist.” The right knows this messaging works, they’ve turned it into a weird badge of honor. When Trump says he’s the least racist person he knows, well, that guy probably believes that about himself too. I think the best the left can do to is make modest gains, or move to the country (which is happening more).
I think that when there are lots of cases where progressives absolutely, undoubtedly, are calling them racist, that increases their sensitivity to ambiguous statements that might be calling them racist.
Like, if I had said ten times "John Crespi had a ludicrously huge nose," in your hearing, and then I made some allusion to Cyrano that was kind of ambiguous, don't you think you'd reasonably suspect that I was making another crack about your nose?
(I have never seen John and have no reason to suspect that his nose is anything other than perfectly sized for his face.)
That’s actually funny… I do have a Cyranic proboscis
"Rural whites I know eat up any messaging from their favorite sources that say urbanites are calling them racists. I don’t think there is much progressives can do to counter this."
Stop talking about racism maybe.
That'll win you a Democratic party primary. /s
Isn't that a large part of the problem. Democrats have to embrace the loony left to win primaries, and Republicans the conspiracy theory right.
This isn't good
Not so sure that's the case. We've seen a number of instances lately where moderate Democrats have prevailed over their "loony left" opponents in primaries. I think in many cases candidates honestly get their messaging "calculus" wrong, and could, if they so choose, prevail with a more moderate branding. This is likely because of the hugely expanded influence of digital media (and its domination by extremes and political junkies). I suspect many candidates and campaign managers are simply not getting a very accurate measurement of voter sentiment. Most normies aren't on Twitter. That's true even in Boston and San Francisco.
It’s not clear that this would work. You have to get them to stop *thinking* you are talking about racism.
So tackle the edge cases. Don’t call people whom you haven’t met “deplorables,” for instance.
I’m not a rural white voter, but I am a Southern, exurban voter whom overly woke Democrats might lose. Yet politics are neat. When I see once proud British dominions prostrated by lockdowns and supposedly free people willing to sell their freedom cheaply, and I see many progressives pining for similarly noxious lockdowns, I begin to feel a bit Republican. Covid cowardice is my biggest beef with progressives by far.
Look at Australia. And there are Americans who would support that amount of restrictions.
Have *you* looked at Australia? The lockdowns vary wildly from state to state. I suggest you go listen to the last episode of The Fifth Column podcast where they interview Australian civil libertarian Josh Szeps about what is actually going on in Oz, it's not nearly as dramatic as many here are making it out to be.
Yes. I am familiar. I follow him on Twitter. Not as bad as some say. But still facist and way more than anyone should accept.
If you are defending them. Or in anyway support that level of restrictions, I am truly stunned.
Australians are unable to leave their own country.
Their are limits to returning citizens.
This isn’t false. https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/09/17/australian-police-use-facial-recognition-to-make-sure-you-re-home-during-covid-quarantine
I think that there is some validity to the rural viewpoint. I am absolutely not saying that there is not systemic racism. But an awful lot of the unreasonable crap (like mistreatment by cops) that happens to poor black people happens to poor white people. I can see how they might be annoyed that "liberal elites" are framing as racial what might be framed to cover their own mistreatment.
I'm also always confused who Joe Biden is talking to when he talks about structural racism. You'd think that's messaging to Black voters to say "I've got your back". But everything I've heard tells me the Black voters who supported Biden don't care about this much...they're more conservative and tend to care more about policy issues. So is he just saying this to keep liberals on Twitter happy?
I haven't seen data on this that maybe you have, but as someone who is Black in a Black social group it's somewhat nuanced. Most Blacks don't necessarily care about talking about structural racism in general. For example, racial sensitivity training at jobs is probably more uncomfortable for us than it is for white people taking it. BUT people who stand up and deny the existence of structural racism cause the hair on the back of our necks to rise. And it seems like a clear dog whistle to more blatant racism.
Right, denying it's existence is one thing. And I think Matt's point is denying it is different than just talking about it without any clear reason for doing so, especially if evidence suggests it could be counter-productive.
What's not clear to me is if you can fix the problem without talking about it. Maybe you can in some areas, maybe not in others.
I think most people would agree that racism is real. But also think it's a pretty small part of America. And the argument that America is a racist country goes way to far
black voters over 30 are practical enough not to trust a 72% white electorate to care much about structural racism. they understand the practicality of tying their interests to those of working stiffs generally
That's a good point. I feel Black people in America in general are the savviest voters. If it had been up to white progressives, Trump would probably have prevailed over Bernie or Warren in the general election.
Probably so. I'd like to know if typical Black voters even use the term "structural racism". It sounds like an extremely academic term. I'd expect very few of the 75% of Americans without a college degree would readily understand that term, regardless of their race or views on racism.
I'm also always confused who Joe Biden is talking to when he talks about structural racism.
So is Joe, but they told him to read off the teleprompter.
Good piece, Matt. Many people have said it, but it's a little weird to believe simultaneously that racism is the central animating theme of American history and also that it now needs to be stamped out everywhere at every turn.
I buy the "implicit bias" dogma that everyone harbors racist attitudes; in-group/out-group dynamics are found in every human society ever, so how could they not? There's a perfectly coherent synthesis of this idea with increasing demands for racial justice, viz. that we hate the sin and love the sinner. Racist systems and policies are bad; racist people are just you and me. This is the one useful contribution that Kendi makes to the conversation: racism is not a sin to be redeemed in the human heart, it's whatever leads to racist outcomes. (Although he goes off the rails when he defines any difference at all as racist.)
Instead, displaying racist attitudes is still the most stigmatized thing you can do in polite society. Why? Racism is horrible, so are people generally, and we don't say that only good people should vote. As you point out, throwing out all the crooked timber leaves us just about enough to build a small bookshelf.
"racism is not a sin to be redeemed in the human heart, it's whatever leads to racist outcomes. "
I totally disagree with that. Racism is treating someone different because of the color of their skin. Unequal outcome can come from racism, but they can also come from MANY other things. Unequal outcomes is not proof of racism.
As someone in the (small urban/suburban) Deep South who considers himself a “moderate” and who mostly votes Dem these days, it’s interesting to imagine what different messaging on race from Dems might look like. I think there’s a decent chance it would lead to some major internal divisions between the more urban and moderate Dem world.
During the Trump era, I would have fights with “certain people” in real life about racial issues. To be quite frank, in a general sense, I think some of these people were in a matter-of-fact-way truly racist. Violent racist? Not at all. They spoke highly of black people in their small hometown who “acted right” and weren’t into BLM and weren’t so destructive (a lot of these conversations happened in summer of 2020). But this same person also said it makes him sick when he sees a white woman and a black man together. Racism exists on a spectrum.
I remember debating this particular individual about general systematic racism, and one thing he would always say is “look at the Japanese! They were treated like shit but have been very successful compared to blacks!”
I of course would respond that the Japanese didn’t have the same level of oppression over the same amount of vast time as the blacks, and I also brought up the idea that Japanese self-selected to come here and that that self-selection from any group could possibly make them more resilient in the “business” sense vs a group that was forced to come here agains their will.
Anyway, of course none of my counter arguments worked. He would roll his eyes at them. But it’s funny how I kept trying to look for ways to find areas where I could agree with him.
Here a few direct messages I said to him:
1. Slavery and Jim Crow when thinking of race relations/issues today shouldn’t be thought of as *everything* and envoked every time there’s a racial issue to discuss. At the same time, it certainly shouldn’t be thought of as nothing in today’s racial world. But bringing it up every time something bad happens with race might be counterproductive I conceded.
2. This overlaps a little with 1, but I agreed/conceded that people (including me at times) talk too much about race, in general. I don’t care how right someone is or how righteous their views are, if it’s talked about constantly the risk of back lash is heightened.
But I think embracing both 1 & 2 above could cause fairly major rifts between Dems. Not sure it would move the needle much with conservatives. I think the guy I was talking to still views me as a squish just like he views most Dems.
I think it’s awesome you’re actually having conversations with people who have a different view. That’s rare these days.
I also think you may have had more impact than you realize. Most people are loathe to admit that they are changing their mind. But overtime, you may notice that the arguments drift in your favor, and things the person would dismiss outright a year ago they now merely shrug and deflect, and eventually they kind of nod and move on. The fact that this person had continuing conversations with you and listened to what you had to say is encouraging.
I would also be interested to hear why this person felt the difference between Japanese Americans and Black Americans was important. What’s underneath that? Maybe what’s underneath that is the person just doesn’t think much of Black people, and there’s little you can do about it. But I find that a lot of people, especially whites in the south, carry tremendous shame over the history of slavery in their region. They’re normal humans who want to be proud of their heritage, but they largely can’t. So they get very defensive and look for anything else they can point to that would make things “not our fault,” and by extension not their ancestors fault.
I think in this particular case, this person being older and his general temperament, there won’t be much change. But I agree in the sense that it’s helpful when the “other side” isn’t raging against each other, and I think me and this particular person have reached a point where we don’t rage against each other. But we certainly have. What’s funny is I actually enjoy being around him in general. We don’t talk as much about these race issues in the Biden admin. We don’t talk about politics nearly as much anymore and that’s really a good thing I think because it felt mostly pointless when we did and then there was always a chance of yelling/outbursts.
This particular person actually grew up in New York City in the 50s/60s and told me when he was a little kid he told his dad he backed the black people in the Harlem riots. His dad basically said those people threw their trash everywhere and weren’t worth caring about.
Democratic candidates could make progress with voters by just avoiding academic language and talking about racism (and everything else) in the language of normal people.