Guest post: To see the ocean we swim in
From a comment by Rob on Systemic v individual.
I’m not going to enumerate all the examples of serious cultural, institutional and systemic racism in western society. Any reasonable person just needs to open their eyes to see the ocean we swim in. CRT was initially adopted by law schools as a tool for analysing the effect of laws (past and present) and the way their application affected people coming into contact with the legal system (police, courts and prisons). Remember this isn’t just kumbaya-singing hippies at universities, but hard headed lawyers from a wide ranging political and social spectrum. You can find plenty of non-academic lawyers and prosecutors online who give meaningful and specific examples of current systemic racism in the ‘law’ and a number who write about the racist background of specific laws and classes of law that still exist, but were designed to target black people.
Let’s not get started shall we on on the number of States in the US that are actively gerrymandering their Districts to disadvantage black voters, and who are also changing their voting procedures to specifically disadvantage not all Democratic voters, but overwhelmingly those of black or latino background.
Even if, for arguments sake, we say that there is only historical racism, that still doesn’t remove the consequences of generations of past active racism. Multigenerational disadvantage and poverty – laws around redlining, the ability to work (or refuse work), violent destruction of black wealth, refusal to allow loans on an equal basis, underfunding of public utilities, healthcare and education. That’s what creates ‘black’ culture.
NZ, as I’ve said before, has its fair share of racists (and racism deniers), but as a society we have been making a conscious effort for the last generation to redress some of the inequalities that exist. That has included reparations to Iwi groups, some of whom have invested wisely and created employment and wealth for their people and some not. Recognition of language, incorporation of cultural values and consultation into Government policies. Even so, we still have much worse outcomes for health, education, housing, imprisonment for Maori compared to non-Maori. A recent large study of health outcomes found, as an example, that when a particular subset of patients’ case files were examined (late middle aged obese male smokers with heart conditions), if you were white you were more likely to be referred by your doctor for further tests, medication and treatment. if you were Maori you were more likely to be sent home and told to quite smoking and exercise more. Maori are more likely to rearrested, and imprisoned, for the same crime than white people. Dysfunctional Maori families are far more likely to have their children ‘uplifted’ than non-Maori similarly situated.
There are rays of sunshine. These things are part of national debate and there is wide acceptance at Government and within many professions that things need to change. Schools that have made even token changes to adopt elements of Maori language and culture have found that students become more engaged and outcomes improve.
The best evidence that there is a systemic issue is that when people do try to change the system, the very structures and practices themselves make shifting outcomes slow and difficult and easily eroded. I don’t believe that NZ is unique and I don’t believe we are the worst country in the world with respect to these issues.
Thank you, Rob. This is splendid.
One minor correction.
While certainly not dressed in tie-dyed shirts and munching home-made granola, they were also not from a wide ranging political spectrum.
Hi Nullius, my point is that CRT is widely adopted as a tool of critical thought in the legal profession by those who have an interest in addressing such matters. If it was solely a left-wing thing, I wouldn’t be reading analysis of the impact of racism in the law from lawyers of known progressive, conservative and libertarian (small L) persuasion. If CRT had always and only ever been at the extreme left end of the spectrum, it would never have gained enough traction to come to anyones notice. It’s only recently (literally within the last few months) that it has become a political litmus test.
@Rob, since this was largely addressed to me:
Exactly. That was pretty much the point I was making. Current black culture is indeed strongly influenced by that history. But the diagnosis does matter because you need the right remedy.
It is a fact that, in the US today, when it comes to high-school leavers, group-mean academic performance by Asian-American kids tends to be higher than that of the African-American kids. (So much so that leading universities massively down-rate applications from the former and massively boost applications from the latter.) Why is that?
Greater poverty of the household in the former? Doesn’t seem to be, since the disparity does not go away when you match the sample by economic status.
Schools for the latter tend to be systematically worse? Teachers mistreat the latter kids? For reasons we can go in to, this doesn’t seem to be the answer. At least not nowadays, and I’m discussing nowadays. (The disparity does not go away when we’re discussing kids in the same school. And school teaching tending to be such a thankless task that people going into it have to be motivated by a strong desire to do their best for the kids.)
Different peer-group culture, one tending to be anti-schooling one very pro-schooling, this then reinforced by parental influence? It is a fact that Asian-American kids on-average spend more hours doing homework than African-American kids. And as for parental influence, the two groups have a very different likelihood of a father living in the home.
My suggestion is the last of the three explanations is at least as important, to group-mean outcomes, as the other two. (And, again, nothing about that statement denies the role of racism in arriving at today’s situation.) Which one would you go for, and why? And again, what to do about it would be necessarily very different under each of the above three possibilities.
So do we have an evidence-based discussion of this, and of what to do about it, or do we just shut down any analysis that fails to attribute everything to present-day racism?
Coel, this is what I’m reading in your argument: none of the present-day problems affecting Black people are due to present-day racism; none of those problems are due to conditions of society at large; all are due to Black culture; other people are arguing that everything is due to racism, and nothing is due to Black culture. Is that correct?
I don’t think any of that is true, including the part about what other people are arguing.
Just one example: there are practices that adversely affect poor people. Black people are disproportionately poor. Some of those practices are racist in intent, harming Black people deliberately while having the cover of also harming poor white people. Some are not racist in intent, but there are racial disparities in effect because of demographics. Both are concerning, both exist, and I don’t see that anyone other than perhaps you is arguing that one or the other doesn’t exist.
@Sackbut:
Nope, it’s not remotely correct. Principally, there are vast acres of space between “all of X is attributable to Y” and “none of X is attributable to Y”.
Nope, my suggestion is that the truth is somewhere in-between the “all of” and “none of” positions, and thus that we need an evidence-based discussion.
Ditto.
Yes, some people of the CRT/woke persuasion (that’s “some”) do indeed reject any fault, agency or responsibility for such things being attributed to US black culture. Blame is always attributed to “whiteness”.
This recent NYT article may be of interest:
Critical Race Theory: A Brief History
As mostly feminists, or at least feminist sympathizers/allies, I’m sure we’we all come across studies in which large numbers of prospektive employers are asked to assess the identical resume. Identical, that is, apart from the name of the applicant which is either male of female. E.g. Moss-Racusin et al (2012):
The same general idea has also been applied to racial disparities, eg. Milkman et al (2014):
I have seen similar studies with similar results.
If differences in outcome between the between different ethnicities – or between the sexes – could be adequately accounted for by white males simply being better qualified on average, you would not expect the exact same qualifications to yield such different outcomes. There is certainly nothing in my experience, anecdotal and non-representative as it may be, that gives me reason to doubt these findings. Back around the turn of the millennium I was going through a dark period in my life. I had dropped out of the University (I did make up for it later) and was working in a large storehouse to make ends meet. One of my coworkers was a young Somalian with a very strong University degree in architecture. I once asked him why he was working in a storehouse with an education like that. He told me that he had been applying for every relevant job he could find for years without getting a single job offer. Indeed the most common response was total silence.
Coel – I would argue, and with good reason, that your third point is in many ways largely the result of the systemic racism and the differential treatment of ‘the other’ in our society. As a woman, I have felt it, too. I am hearing your arguments applied also to women, but the evidence that exists is scanty and in many cases poorly done. Women are “naturally” less academic, less assertive, less committed, than men. Women are more interested in their kids than in work. Women are softer, less able to do the hard-hitting things needed to succeed. (By the way, the least soft people I have known in my life have ALL been women…I acknowledge, like Bjarte, that it is anecdotal and non-representative.) Robust, well done studies fail to find women unable to succeed, unable to be productive. But the argument still hangs on, and “female culture” is still being blamed.
My experience as a teacher that has had students of many different races has been one that confounds your argument. My white male students have often proven to be lazy, expecting things to be done for them. (By no means all, I acknowledge.) A sense of entitlement is rampant. The hardest working students in my class are usually the women and the Hispanic students. As for my black students, as a whole I have been quite impressed with their performance, but find that they often believe themselves to be achieving less and capable of less than they are demonstrating. They tend to defer to the white male students in class, sometimes coming up with a wrong answer because they changed their right answer to conform with what the white males thought (this is on group exercises, where I have had an opportunity to observe them working collaboratively). I see the same pattern in women of all races and Hispanics. The deference given to white men is all over the place, and most of my students don’t seem to realize they are doing it. Why do extremely intelligent women and people of color defer? I would argue that it is systemic racism and sexism. They have felt it their whole lives, even in places that are ostensibly equal.
@iknklast #9:
Regarding girls vs boys there is no gap that needs explaining. (E.g.: “with 25.5 per cent of girls achieving grades of A and above, compared with 25.4 per cent of boys.”)
For US ethnic groups we do need an explanation. If it’s “racism”, how come the Asian-Americans do better than the whites? And how come black kids from recently-immigrated African families do much better (on average) than African-American kids?
As I’ve already mentioned, one likely reason is the history. Descendants of slaves have many many reasons to feel less at home in the institutions of this country, including the educational ones.
For nearly four hundred years, the message has been sent to black Americans that they are a lesser species of humans than whites under the law. In calling men “boy” when being polite, the message is driven home as a micro-aggression. In segregated schools, which used discarded books from the white schools and which were in poorer condition than the white kid’s schools, the message that black are lesser is driven home. In the media the message had been sent through culturally biased IQ tests, that blacks are lesser. With faux science on intelligence as published in the Bell Curve, the mssage is driven home.
It takes extra-ordinary fortitude to overcome such a cultural disadvantage. Anyone who repeatedly receives the message that they are of lesser intelligence, and in the case of black Americans it has been several generations, are going to have accumulated the weight of such cultural beliefs, that they are less capable. And people who believe that they have lesser abilities, will demonstrate lesser abilities even if it is not true.
As for Asian-American students, I would like to see the numbers on that. Often they are held up as the “Model Minority,” but many of my Asian friends have told me that they feel stereotyped as not being as smart as white people.
I have a feeling some “Asians” are more “Asian” than others in that context.
I’m just finding it really difficult to separate what is happening racially from systemic racism. I don’t feel personally responsible for the situation, I don’t feel guilty, and I don’t hate my race. I see a long-term problem that needs to be solved, and the denial that racism (separate from individual bigotry) is systemic in our instiutions and culture is a symptom of wilfull denial. I can see this as plain as the nose on my face. Am I wearing the wrong-color glasses. We can’t fix sexism and misogyny if we deny that it exists, and we can’t fix racism if we refuse to see it; or if we try to explain it away as something else.
So, as people can “live up” to expectations, they can “live down” to expectations (depending on the expectation).
This discussion brought to mind a vague memory of hearing about “stereotype threat” years ago. I thought I misremembered the term, so I checked wikipedia:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereotype_threat
Wikipedia’s description of it more or less matches my memory, but since the memory is old (I figure at least a decade) and vague, caveats apply.
Bjarte: It is plausible that hiring bias based on applicant name is not because name functions as proxy for race, but rather because name functions as proxy for socioeconomic class. There is at least one study I know of that attempted to see if this was the case by using race- and ethnicity-associated names that are not class-associated.
Source:
https://munewsarchives.missouri.edu/news-releases/2016/0426-race-and-gender-may-not-affect-employer-interest-in-resumes/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13504851.2015.1114571
Nullius, in response to a black name/white name study Charles “Bell Curve'” Murray tweeted outright that give the disparity in IQ between black and white people it was a rational hiring choice.
Yeah.
The ocean we swim in
A common theme in many ethical thought experiments is forcing a choice under extreme epistemic restriction. The trolley problem is the paradigmatic case, but it’s just one of many within a larger family. It boils down to having to make an ethical judgement on the basis of a single variable. Here’s a similar one. You have to pick one of two people to perform an emergency tracheotomy. All you can know is that one is a med student, and the other is a jazz pianist. Whom do you choose?
Rob #17
That reminds me of some dudebro who once argued that it was reasonable for an employer to favor a male applicant over a female one with identical qualifications. His “theory” (based on the highly scientific method of “Proof from Personal Impression”*) was that the best female students managed to do as well as the best male ones only by working their asses off, whereas many of the best males partied and slept their way through college and still got top grades by virtue of being that much smarter. Therefore, according to his theory, if a man and a woman got identical grades, the woman was probably already at 100 % of her potential and could advance no further, whereas the man was more likely to have vast reserves of untapped potential at his disposal. It just goes to show, once again. that there’s always a way to retrofit any set of data to a pre-determined conclusion.
*As someone with two educations (first in linguistics and later in engineering), all I can say is that his personal impression was very different than mine.
Bjarte#20
To adopt Nullius’s sort of ‘thought experiment’ (one wishes he would come out and say what he really wants to say and why he wants to say it), and since he has brought up jazz, perhaps because jazz was invented by black musicians, let’s take the subject of music:
Assume you are a male member of a group of judges charged with listening to musicians, both male and female, who are auditioning for a place in orchestra. The choice is between two musicians, one female and one male. Whom would you choose?
‘The better musician, of course!’ would be the almost universal response. But how does one judge the better musician? Before the introduction of ‘blind’ auditions, the percentage of female musicians in the five highest-ranked orchestras in USA was 6 percent. After the introduction of ‘blind’ auditions, the percentage had risen to 21 percent by 1993. See:
https://gap.hks.harvard.edu/orchestrating-impartiality-impact-%E2%80%9Cblind%E2%80%9D-auditions-female-musicians
Tim @21, I recall reading once that a female musician attending a blind audition caused a stir by removing her high heels before walking onto stage behind the screens. She correctly pointed out that anyone capable of judging the nuances of the performers skill would also be able to spot the sound of stiletto shoes.
Tim: Your thought experiment is unrecognizable as such. A more accurate descriptor would be riddle, as it’s largely just a red herring like the old “where do you bury the survivors?” bit.
Also, blind auditions are an example of systemic racism.
@Tim #21:
Except that the study did not show what is claimed. E.g. See here. The “blind audition study” is a myth, one of multiple in the social sciences.
Ditto for “stereotype threat” (mentioned up thread), the studies don’t replicate. Any such effect (if there is one at all) is weak. Ditto for “micro-aggressions”, there is no literature backing that concept up as being significant. Ditto for “implicit bias”, there’s no literature showing that has real-world significance.
Lots of “accepted wisdom” in the social sciences is the product of p-hacking, publication bias, and experimenters making interpretations in line with their preconceptions.
Over decades, there’s been far too little critical scrutiny, checking and replication in the social sciences, with the result that much that is in textbooks is not actually supported by evidence. A big problem is the ideological bias of the whole field (overwhelmingly social-science academics self-identify as “far left”), leading to reinforcement of each other’s ideas, rather than proper critical scrutiny.
(The physical sciences, where critical scrutiny of claims — and indeed self-scrutiny — is routine and considered necessary and laudable, are much better at this.)
Well, thank you for the link, Coel. One wonders why Harvard still has it up. I was interested to see, however, in the experiment conducted with managers in the Australian Public Service, where ‘blind’ selection was compared with non-blind selection, that ‘”…de-identifying candidates reduced the likelihood of women being selected for the shortlist.” It turned out that many senior managers, aware that sexist assumptions had once kept women out of upper-level positions, already practiced a mild form of affirmative action.’ Clearly, some sort of message seems to be getting through.
@Tim #25:
Indeed. While I know little about orchestras, in what I do know about, hard-science academia in the English-speaking world today*, there is currently rather marked and substantial pro-women and pro-ethnic-minority** discrimination/affirmative action.
*I readily grant that the reverse was true in the past.
**Well, not Asian-origin ethnic-minority people, obviously, they’ve been re-badged as “white”.
Really? All of them? Indonesians? Pakistanis? People from the Philippines?
Good point, no, not all of them. Chinese, Japanese and Indians, yes, Filipinos and some others, not really. Though Dr. Tara Gustilo (Filipino) seems to have been deemed “white” (politically at least) and thus persona non grata. Tricky stuff, this, keeping up with wokeness!
This is good: Frederick Douglass and the essence of authentic antiracism.
(Though it could have omitted the references to God.)
re: stereotype threat
The wikipedia article does discuss problems with the hypothesis – publication bias, small effect, significance.
I wouldn’t be suprised if confounding factors are a significant issue.
I don’t know enough about it to comment further.