I grew up in a marginalized black community. "Marginalized black community" is the phrase that I settled on to convey the Wilsonian reality that there really is such a thing as a poor dysfunctional black community, but use the modern language focused on inclusion. "Under-resourced" is another good one for the modern parlance.
What you have to do, speaking to a modern anti-racist who believes everything is discrimination and nothing is merit, is point out that the real dysfunction is the real racism. And being anti-racist in this context, therefore means tackling the hard problems in these communities not dismissing them either as fictional stereotypes
Speaking to a conservative, you have to emphasize that this is a community that wants what any other community wants - safety, jobs, stable home life. Go to a black church as see how interrupting with "defund the police" gets you. The marginalized black community ks not a large group of people spontaneously deciding to make bad choices and bring everything on themselves, but a community with endemic poverty, created by the long shadow of the deeply racist past.
Tldr, some Americans are so out of touch they don't know what poverty is.
> But it’s difficult because actually solving hard problems is hard.
I sometimes think a suitable analogy for a hard problem is that it is like a really hard piece of wood, and solving that hard problem is like drilling a hole through that hard piece of wood. Ultimately, you can do it, but you need to drill really slow.
"and we’re now suffering through an extended backlash, with all kinds of racists coming out of the woodwork."
While I think that there is truth to this, I also think that not everyone who thinks that Kendi's ideas are stupid is racist. It always seems to me that the focus on race is never going to get us to a non-racist society. I am glad that a liberal in some position of stature can point out the unworkable nature of his philosophies. When someone pointed that out 2 years ago, they would be attacked as racist for even questioning him. So the backlash appears pretty deserved to me.
Wilson is spot on. Our focus should be on relieving the cycle of poverty wherever it is found. While I suspect that Ketanji Jackson has experienced prejudice, she also came from an extremely privileged upbringing. Liking her experience to what inner city kids suffer is laughable. A poor white girl in rural West Virginia has far more to overcome than KBJ ever did. I think poverty based programs resonate with a lot more voters than the current fad of trying to help people based on racial identity.
"We instead had a brief time in which the naive and unworkable views of Ibram Kendi were fashionable, and we’re now suffering through an extended backlash, with all kinds of racists coming out of the woodwork."
Keep deluding yourself with the usual strategies of denial that the Left has used for decades, dismissing the seriousness of the problems coming from our side while magnifying the horrid problems coming from the Right.
I read the cultural/political discourse in your country (and unfortunately mine) every day. Kendi may have fallen out of favour in his own University, but his ideas are still very much fashionable and entrenched, like those of DiAngelo, in the unbudgeable, unreasonable worldviews of the bloated Far-left, sustained by the interest of cadres over cadres of overpaid, ubiquitous Critical Social Justice gurus and admins.
That there is a backlash -- which I expect to be ugly -- is due to the above having pushed masses of moderates to align with the Right and the Right to shift to the Far-Right... mutually feeding phenomena to be sure. The only thing that could have prevented this would have been serious resistance from the centre, in both fields; reasonable moderates that want to build and mediate in order to build, like you show in your every post is possible.
But the centre has been cravenly hiding and keeping its head low, except for a few thinkers to whom it listened, nodded, and went back to being intimidated by the bullies. Reasonable moderate people do not make for great fighters in times of truculent politics, as the beginning of the past century painfully illustrated.
Good defense of Season 2 right here. Not to violate the comments policy but I think a lot of these important and complex arguments just went over the heads of the haters as they complained about wanting more cops and robbers stuff. But it's a good season and kind of trail blazing that they decided to "build a city" rather than just have more cops and robbers stuff like in say Justified (which is a good show but not on The Wire's level).
Anyway the weakest season is clearly 5 because 1. the serial killer plot doesn't make much sense and 2. David Simon had way to much authority over the scripts at this point and so just put in a lot of his own angry rants/revenge fantasies about other media people we worked with at The Sun in the the 90's and that sort of self-indulgence just isn't that interesting. Plus he gives a made up never was view of analogue media that totally ignores it's real flaws and blames it's breakdown on dumb bosses not, you know, a technological revolution in how information is accessed (pieces of a tree replaced by electrons etc).
I loved Season 2. Agree on the problems with Season 5. David Simon wasn’t able to apply the same jaundiced eye to his reporters that he did to all his other characters. Clark Johnson was his Mary Sue.
That’s also a good point that he personalized the paper’s problems into mean bosses, when Season 2 was so good at highlighting how technological improvements in shipping logistics were leaving many people behind.
To some extent this was a problem with his treatment of the police and City Hall: everything's the fault of bad actors who are keeping down the paragons (like Bunny) who know exactly what's best. The port workers, the teachers, and the gang members are the ones who are doing the best they can with an intractable situation.
The times, how they have changed...it's true that social media encourages hyperbole, but hard to countenance nonetheless that anyone (who actually watched the show! rather than just hip-shooting about it, like so much media criticism!) would walk away convinced it was some sort of racist right-wing agitprop. What would help the enterprising Bubbles more, a Section 8 voucher or a real job? Would moving funds from the police force to social workers have stopped Stringer Bell's empire? But even more than that, it's a show that does a good job advocating for the humanity and dignity of its "dysfunctional" black characters, without making them agency-less objects of patronizing pity.
Though I am glad this person actually bothered to watch. Continually disappointed by how much Truly Great Art of past ages - not that The Wire was even that long ago, relatively - gets kicked to the curb for not meeting the high bar of modern sensibilities. An impoverished canon, indeed. This would matter less if there was an offsetting quantity of woke Noveau Art. But as FdB often writes, a focus on checking litmus boxes first tends to come at the expense of artistic merit (and as you've written, diverse art is most impactful when it's actually, well, good).
Two increasingly disfunctional places: the Berkshires, where I recently moved--declining population, rural poverty, decades of unaddressed infrastructure problems, increasing gap between the newly-arrived wealthy like me and the folks struggling just to get by. Second place: my beloved hometown Memphis. Rates of poverty and murder escalating. Urban black ghetto life horrific. 50% girls by puberty have been raped by a relative. A telling bit: several years ago my uncle wanted to treat an inner city twelfth grade class to a graduation trip. Nashville? Ozarks? What do you want to do? The class asked to see the Mississippi River. Nobody had ever seen it. The river is/was a one/two-hour walk from the neighborhood. On the other hand, just last month I was in Texas. I spend a lot of time in Texas. Lots of family there. No question there is poverty. I have seen it. But OMG the flourishing middle classes! Dawdling on a drive from Austin to San Antonio, I was astonished at the many many many iterations of prosperous middle class life. And forget the current white/black obsession of media elites, who seem to be blind to the increasing presence of many different Spanish-speaking (and not the same Spanish) citizens and the ways they are enriching and shaping our culture. (Political participation tbd.)
"certainly the emphasis on moral guidance has a rightward inflection"
I know this isn't the main point, but can we please kill this idea with fire? Nuke it from orbit to make sure it dies and stays dead! "The right" has bent the knee before the most amoral scumbag ever to hold the office of POTUS, and they continue to support him wholeheartedly, with a few honorable exceptions. They are as qualified to provide "moral guidance" as I am to play shortstop for the Red Sox. Jesus.
I think the lack of progressive desire to actually solve problems really comes down to us becoming a society of narcissists.
Whether left or right, most of the people getting attention on the TV or internet today are swaggering peacocks, not serious analysts looking for answers. No one pays attention to you unless you say incendiary things, so everyone has a perverse incentive to point fingers and claim victimhood, all the while being the most edgy.
People don't invest energy today in solving problems because that would take time away from the game of self promotion. This is how societies collapse.
Reading old JD Vance quotes is so mind boggling to me, is that person still inside him? A piece of me thinks he must be, that this is all a fictional persona. I just don't know though.
JD Vance underwent a religious conversion to Ultraconservative Roman Catholicism a few years after he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Ultraconservative Catholics act and think the way Vance acts now, so I think the change is genuine. I think he really is what he seems to be now. There is no other secret "good" person on the inside.
I think he’s 100% a snake oil salesman. I read Hillbilly Elegy, and even then it read as a political campaign launcher. And he didn’t actually offer any solutions to the dysfunction he grew up. I believe he specifically said better funded schools wouldn’t help, because the kids going to those schools don’t care. Which, maybe true, but like all righwing populists, the actual populist part was missing.
After the 2016 election there was a lot of self congratulation/pity about how basically the most economically prosperous areas had voted for Hillary and the laggard parts of the country voted for Trump. A lot of theorizing went in to how Red States were eating their own seed by politicizing/destroying their universities, refusing to give public services to poor people, etc.
But I think this growth pattern was broadly something going on in the economy perhaps that low interest rates favored the tech industry which is broadly centered in big coastal cities. Because if you look at Joseph Politano's recent tweets you can see that the best performing metros are generally red state ones in the South and West. Obviously the usual caveats about "blue metros in red states" applies, etc. But Red States are clearly not crushing their own growth.
There is also a common "housing theory of everything" on the Left which theorizes basically the only problem with blue states is basically not enough people can afford to live there. But I think if you look at other quality of life ratings and education stuff, even states with fairly aggressively conservative governments like Wisconsin and Idaho do pretty well. Maybe the right wing governments are just in the process of ruining life there, but Idaho has been conservative for a long time and broadly seems like an OK place to live. So I do think people in like Maryland and California really ought to think about this... Wisconsin is 22nd in the country in median household income but it has better schools and less poverty than California which is #5.
If the commentary from AnechoicMedia is meant as a jumping off point to make a counterpoint, fine. But if it's meant as representative of how people think today, I note the Twitter account has fewer than 10,000 followers, and the two posts got about 200 likes each, and many probably the same.
This was a great column - The Wire is some of the best drama ever televised, in large part, I think, because it presented most characters as real people - almost everyone had a redeeming side as well as a flawed side. I really enjoyed your application of Wilson's work to it and it is inspiring me to read some of the pieces you mentioned. This is why I subscribe!
I grew up in a marginalized black community. "Marginalized black community" is the phrase that I settled on to convey the Wilsonian reality that there really is such a thing as a poor dysfunctional black community, but use the modern language focused on inclusion. "Under-resourced" is another good one for the modern parlance.
What you have to do, speaking to a modern anti-racist who believes everything is discrimination and nothing is merit, is point out that the real dysfunction is the real racism. And being anti-racist in this context, therefore means tackling the hard problems in these communities not dismissing them either as fictional stereotypes
Speaking to a conservative, you have to emphasize that this is a community that wants what any other community wants - safety, jobs, stable home life. Go to a black church as see how interrupting with "defund the police" gets you. The marginalized black community ks not a large group of people spontaneously deciding to make bad choices and bring everything on themselves, but a community with endemic poverty, created by the long shadow of the deeply racist past.
Tldr, some Americans are so out of touch they don't know what poverty is.
Now *this* article is what I call anti-racism. It's time to redefine this poorly-designed catchphrase.
> But it’s difficult because actually solving hard problems is hard.
I sometimes think a suitable analogy for a hard problem is that it is like a really hard piece of wood, and solving that hard problem is like drilling a hole through that hard piece of wood. Ultimately, you can do it, but you need to drill really slow.
"and we’re now suffering through an extended backlash, with all kinds of racists coming out of the woodwork."
While I think that there is truth to this, I also think that not everyone who thinks that Kendi's ideas are stupid is racist. It always seems to me that the focus on race is never going to get us to a non-racist society. I am glad that a liberal in some position of stature can point out the unworkable nature of his philosophies. When someone pointed that out 2 years ago, they would be attacked as racist for even questioning him. So the backlash appears pretty deserved to me.
Wilson is spot on. Our focus should be on relieving the cycle of poverty wherever it is found. While I suspect that Ketanji Jackson has experienced prejudice, she also came from an extremely privileged upbringing. Liking her experience to what inner city kids suffer is laughable. A poor white girl in rural West Virginia has far more to overcome than KBJ ever did. I think poverty based programs resonate with a lot more voters than the current fad of trying to help people based on racial identity.
"We instead had a brief time in which the naive and unworkable views of Ibram Kendi were fashionable, and we’re now suffering through an extended backlash, with all kinds of racists coming out of the woodwork."
Keep deluding yourself with the usual strategies of denial that the Left has used for decades, dismissing the seriousness of the problems coming from our side while magnifying the horrid problems coming from the Right.
I read the cultural/political discourse in your country (and unfortunately mine) every day. Kendi may have fallen out of favour in his own University, but his ideas are still very much fashionable and entrenched, like those of DiAngelo, in the unbudgeable, unreasonable worldviews of the bloated Far-left, sustained by the interest of cadres over cadres of overpaid, ubiquitous Critical Social Justice gurus and admins.
That there is a backlash -- which I expect to be ugly -- is due to the above having pushed masses of moderates to align with the Right and the Right to shift to the Far-Right... mutually feeding phenomena to be sure. The only thing that could have prevented this would have been serious resistance from the centre, in both fields; reasonable moderates that want to build and mediate in order to build, like you show in your every post is possible.
But the centre has been cravenly hiding and keeping its head low, except for a few thinkers to whom it listened, nodded, and went back to being intimidated by the bullies. Reasonable moderate people do not make for great fighters in times of truculent politics, as the beginning of the past century painfully illustrated.
So here we are.
Can anyone recommend some more recent books on this topic?
Good defense of Season 2 right here. Not to violate the comments policy but I think a lot of these important and complex arguments just went over the heads of the haters as they complained about wanting more cops and robbers stuff. But it's a good season and kind of trail blazing that they decided to "build a city" rather than just have more cops and robbers stuff like in say Justified (which is a good show but not on The Wire's level).
Anyway the weakest season is clearly 5 because 1. the serial killer plot doesn't make much sense and 2. David Simon had way to much authority over the scripts at this point and so just put in a lot of his own angry rants/revenge fantasies about other media people we worked with at The Sun in the the 90's and that sort of self-indulgence just isn't that interesting. Plus he gives a made up never was view of analogue media that totally ignores it's real flaws and blames it's breakdown on dumb bosses not, you know, a technological revolution in how information is accessed (pieces of a tree replaced by electrons etc).
I loved Season 2. Agree on the problems with Season 5. David Simon wasn’t able to apply the same jaundiced eye to his reporters that he did to all his other characters. Clark Johnson was his Mary Sue.
That’s also a good point that he personalized the paper’s problems into mean bosses, when Season 2 was so good at highlighting how technological improvements in shipping logistics were leaving many people behind.
To some extent this was a problem with his treatment of the police and City Hall: everything's the fault of bad actors who are keeping down the paragons (like Bunny) who know exactly what's best. The port workers, the teachers, and the gang members are the ones who are doing the best they can with an intractable situation.
The times, how they have changed...it's true that social media encourages hyperbole, but hard to countenance nonetheless that anyone (who actually watched the show! rather than just hip-shooting about it, like so much media criticism!) would walk away convinced it was some sort of racist right-wing agitprop. What would help the enterprising Bubbles more, a Section 8 voucher or a real job? Would moving funds from the police force to social workers have stopped Stringer Bell's empire? But even more than that, it's a show that does a good job advocating for the humanity and dignity of its "dysfunctional" black characters, without making them agency-less objects of patronizing pity.
Though I am glad this person actually bothered to watch. Continually disappointed by how much Truly Great Art of past ages - not that The Wire was even that long ago, relatively - gets kicked to the curb for not meeting the high bar of modern sensibilities. An impoverished canon, indeed. This would matter less if there was an offsetting quantity of woke Noveau Art. But as FdB often writes, a focus on checking litmus boxes first tends to come at the expense of artistic merit (and as you've written, diverse art is most impactful when it's actually, well, good).
Big Picture question:
What do we do for people who just don’t have the analytical or creative aptitude needed to move up the economic ladder?
Do we need to sacrifice some of the efficiency gained from trade and technology for the social stability of providing decent paying low-skill jobs?
A noticeable percentage of people moving up the economic ladder don’t have the analytical or creative skills to move up the economic ladder.
Real socialism has never been tried
Two increasingly disfunctional places: the Berkshires, where I recently moved--declining population, rural poverty, decades of unaddressed infrastructure problems, increasing gap between the newly-arrived wealthy like me and the folks struggling just to get by. Second place: my beloved hometown Memphis. Rates of poverty and murder escalating. Urban black ghetto life horrific. 50% girls by puberty have been raped by a relative. A telling bit: several years ago my uncle wanted to treat an inner city twelfth grade class to a graduation trip. Nashville? Ozarks? What do you want to do? The class asked to see the Mississippi River. Nobody had ever seen it. The river is/was a one/two-hour walk from the neighborhood. On the other hand, just last month I was in Texas. I spend a lot of time in Texas. Lots of family there. No question there is poverty. I have seen it. But OMG the flourishing middle classes! Dawdling on a drive from Austin to San Antonio, I was astonished at the many many many iterations of prosperous middle class life. And forget the current white/black obsession of media elites, who seem to be blind to the increasing presence of many different Spanish-speaking (and not the same Spanish) citizens and the ways they are enriching and shaping our culture. (Political participation tbd.)
"certainly the emphasis on moral guidance has a rightward inflection"
I know this isn't the main point, but can we please kill this idea with fire? Nuke it from orbit to make sure it dies and stays dead! "The right" has bent the knee before the most amoral scumbag ever to hold the office of POTUS, and they continue to support him wholeheartedly, with a few honorable exceptions. They are as qualified to provide "moral guidance" as I am to play shortstop for the Red Sox. Jesus.
I think the lack of progressive desire to actually solve problems really comes down to us becoming a society of narcissists.
Whether left or right, most of the people getting attention on the TV or internet today are swaggering peacocks, not serious analysts looking for answers. No one pays attention to you unless you say incendiary things, so everyone has a perverse incentive to point fingers and claim victimhood, all the while being the most edgy.
People don't invest energy today in solving problems because that would take time away from the game of self promotion. This is how societies collapse.
Reading old JD Vance quotes is so mind boggling to me, is that person still inside him? A piece of me thinks he must be, that this is all a fictional persona. I just don't know though.
JD Vance underwent a religious conversion to Ultraconservative Roman Catholicism a few years after he wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Ultraconservative Catholics act and think the way Vance acts now, so I think the change is genuine. I think he really is what he seems to be now. There is no other secret "good" person on the inside.
I think he’s 100% a snake oil salesman. I read Hillbilly Elegy, and even then it read as a political campaign launcher. And he didn’t actually offer any solutions to the dysfunction he grew up. I believe he specifically said better funded schools wouldn’t help, because the kids going to those schools don’t care. Which, maybe true, but like all righwing populists, the actual populist part was missing.
After the 2016 election there was a lot of self congratulation/pity about how basically the most economically prosperous areas had voted for Hillary and the laggard parts of the country voted for Trump. A lot of theorizing went in to how Red States were eating their own seed by politicizing/destroying their universities, refusing to give public services to poor people, etc.
But I think this growth pattern was broadly something going on in the economy perhaps that low interest rates favored the tech industry which is broadly centered in big coastal cities. Because if you look at Joseph Politano's recent tweets you can see that the best performing metros are generally red state ones in the South and West. Obviously the usual caveats about "blue metros in red states" applies, etc. But Red States are clearly not crushing their own growth.
There is also a common "housing theory of everything" on the Left which theorizes basically the only problem with blue states is basically not enough people can afford to live there. But I think if you look at other quality of life ratings and education stuff, even states with fairly aggressively conservative governments like Wisconsin and Idaho do pretty well. Maybe the right wing governments are just in the process of ruining life there, but Idaho has been conservative for a long time and broadly seems like an OK place to live. So I do think people in like Maryland and California really ought to think about this... Wisconsin is 22nd in the country in median household income but it has better schools and less poverty than California which is #5.
If the commentary from AnechoicMedia is meant as a jumping off point to make a counterpoint, fine. But if it's meant as representative of how people think today, I note the Twitter account has fewer than 10,000 followers, and the two posts got about 200 likes each, and many probably the same.
This was a great column - The Wire is some of the best drama ever televised, in large part, I think, because it presented most characters as real people - almost everyone had a redeeming side as well as a flawed side. I really enjoyed your application of Wilson's work to it and it is inspiring me to read some of the pieces you mentioned. This is why I subscribe!
Not some. THE best! Undefeated, even decades later. Breaking Bad came close.
Justified after season 1 (which was good but not great) also came close.
And The Americans