Check the books, Andrew
Andrew Sullivan is crowing.
So if an army of accountants added up all the numbers and could tell us exactly how many billions of dollars were withheld from former slaves and their descendants by a century of deeply racist laws that for instance made it illegal for those descendants to refuse a job, no matter how shit the pay and dangerous the conditions – would Sullivan still call it “racist” to try to pay back some little fraction of that massive sum?
Not to mention all the wages not paid for the three centuries before the Civil War.
To call it racist to pay back a tiny tiny piece of that stolen money is either clueless or evil.
Black and other minority farmers were dealt a new legal blow on Wednesday when a Florida federal court issued a preliminary injunction halting a key part of the Biden administration’s federal stimulus relief package that forgave agricultural debts to farmers of color.
But but but there are white farmers who need help too!
Yes, but farmers of color have an actual quantifiable debt owed to them. Generations of stolen labor made it all but impossible for descendants of enslaved people to get off the bottom rung of the ladder.
Howard wrote that in crafting this debt program benefiting farmers based on race that “Congress also must heed its obligation to do away with governmentally imposed discrimination based on race.”
Before paying back the billions in stolen wages.
It isn’t a favor or a gift or a sentimental feel-good stunt, it’s a debt. It’s a debt that built up over four centuries. It’s a bit late to say oh but we mustn’t discriminate.
Ophelia, you are guilty of seeing color. Obviously, Andrew doesn’t. He’s above all that.
I know it’s a gross generalization, but I really do think that basis for critical race theory is pretty simple.
http://farcornercafe.blogspot.com/2021/06/its-really-not-that-hard.html
from the 1860s to the 1960s whites were in a position to bank the political, social, and economic spoils of racism and like all compounded interest, by the time some small progress began in the 1960s, the advantage was exponential.
Ah good one Pliny.
I mean, ultimately squabbling over the label is essentially orthogonal to the issue. Ask people about their feelings on healthcare policies by name (medicare for all, Obamacare, the ACA, etc.) and the answers you get will be wildly different from asking about individual policies by implementation. Whether one calls the ideas and attitudes being taught “critical race theory” or something else, what matters is the content and quality of those ideas and attitudes.
True enough, but it doesn’t actually help us discuss the content and quality of a set of ideas and attitudes if we don’t know which set we’re talking about.
If Sullivan wants to crow this much maybe he ought to go ahead and join Fox News or similar; it’d be good for his career. I mean, I also prefer a more colourblind policy that is merely means tested (in a non welfare “reform” sense), but that’s just because it’s a lot better politically.
I know I don’t need to say this, but this isn’t eliminating honours/AP/Gifted courses, this is directly addressing the racial wealth gap which is *THE* thing that matters most in discussions of race in the United States.
Ophelia: Well, yes, that’s true. Getting people onto the same terminological page is something of an ongoing struggle. Bjarte’s “persons with a preponderance of physical characteristics more representative of those persons traditionally classed mothers” language comes to mind. As does the difficulty of talking about cancel culture and gender/trans ideology, both of which we are constantly reminded (read: informed) don’t exist. This kerfluffle over CRT strikes me as uncannily reminiscent of the conversation around cancel culture, such as it is. “People are just complaining that they’re finally being held accountable,” goes the rather reductive refrain.
A requirement reimposed in the 1990s by Bill Clinton in the name of welfare “reform”. When I was desperate, living on almost nothing, I had an income low enough to qualify for welfare. They told me essentially that I had to drop out of the master’s program that was the only thing pulling me up, take whatever crap job I was offered, and if I did this, applied and interviewed 10 times a week, I could get $75 a month to raise my teenage boy. And no matter what, I could not turn down a job that was offered, even if the hours conflicted with school, my son’s time at home, or anything else. I was told that I could not receive a report that indicated I didn’t perform well at the interview.
$75 a month. And you are only eligible to receive it if you are willing to be treated like an animal in a cattle call (I hated sitting in the office, and I could tell everyone else there was as humiliated as I was; at least the social worker was pleasant and wanted to help; the new laws tied her hands). And once you’ve been on welfare for 5 years, you are not eligible again. Ever. For your entire life.
And I still hear assholes tell me about their deadbeat neighbor who has been on welfare his whole life, and will continue cheating them out of their hard earned dollars by sucking on the welfare tit. Yeah, right. Don’t say that to me, bud. I know the difference.
A lot of the reason for welfare ‘reform’ is the perception that it is giving money to people of color who are too lazy to work. Flash: When I was on food stamps (and probably still), young white women with children were the largest group of recipients. But try answering hatred and racism with data. I’ve discovered it gets you nowhere.
Re: welfare. Racism surely plays a part, and another part is what many nowadays would refer to as the myth of meritocracy. This bothers the pedant in me, because meritocracy refepost-privation the telos of an organization. What is actually “myth”, in the sense of being a misconception, is the metaphysical proposition that the universe is so constituted that people are where they are if-and-only-if they deserve to be there. Metaphysics and politics are different branches of philosophy for a reason, dammit. If one accepts this metaphysics, then welfare just is giving money to people too lazy to work. I dream of a post-job, post-privation world, but this bs metaphysics won’t even let us get to UBI.
Fargin’ iceholes.
Stupid text editor.
I was reading a George Floyd bio in the WAPO yesterday. His ancestors had been slaves in North Carolina, and when a great-great grandfather was emancipated managed to acquire 500 acres of land for farming. He had taken shitty land, worked it, and when it was good land, the white people took it from him. That was a common practice, but that’s not racist tho and there is no need to acknowledge it, is there?
One of the episodes of the 1619 Project podcast featured a farmer who was being played with by the local bank in approving the seed loans he needed to plant. For years they were delaying his money until past optimal drilling time, and he gained a reputation for putting his crops in late. People gossip about farmers being lazy, you know.
But, that’s not racist tho, is it?
I’m not pleased with this response by Our Andrew.
Derek Chauvin just sentenced to 22 1/2 years, George Floyd arrested and executed without trial. :(