Systemic racism, properly understood…
So should we read that “barn-burner” letter that Bari Weiss is so excited about? Sure.
He The author addresses fellow Brearley parents to say why he’s taking his daughter out of the school. It’s because it’s not good enough.
It cannot be stated strongly enough that Brearley’s obsession with race must stop. It should be abundantly clear to any thinking parent that Brearley has completely lost its way. The administration and the Board of Trustees have displayed a cowardly and appalling lack of leadership by appeasing an anti-intellectual, illiberal mob, and then allowing the school to be captured by that same mob. What follows are my own personal views on Brearley’s antiracism initiatives, but these are just a handful of the criticisms that I know other parents have expressed.
I object to the view that I should be judged by the color of my skin.
Oh here we go – it’s the old “I don’t see color” thing. The trouble with white people saying they don’t see color is that of course they don’t, because they don’t have to. It doesn’t follow that everyone else is in the same boat.
I cannot tolerate a school that not only judges my daughter by the color of her skin, but encourages and instructs her to prejudge others by theirs. By viewing every element of education, every aspect of history, and every facet of society through the lens of skin color and race, we are desecrating the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and utterly violating the movement for which such civil rights leaders believed, fought, and died.
Blah blah blah. It’s always King and it always misunderstands him. King was not the only civil rights activist on the scene, and it’s kind of telling that barn-burning white people seem to think he was.
I object to the charge of systemic racism in this country, and at our school. Systemic racism, properly understood, is segregated schools and separate lunch counters.
Ah, “properly understood” according to this one guy, who clearly knows nothing about it. Segregated schools still exist, and there is a lot more to systemic racism than segregated schools and separate lunch counters. Take a look at prison population statistics for example. Take a look at patterns of sentencing. Take a look at wealth, and who has more of it, and why.
It is the interning of Japanese and the exterminating of Jews. Systemic racism is unequivocally not a small number of isolated incidences over a period of decades.
Small number? Isolated instances? (Or incidents. He meant one of those. He didn’t mean “incidences.”) They’re not small and not isolated. What makes him think he could even know that? Does he think they all get reported in the news media and that he sees all the reporting? He can’t think that, surely, because it would be so stupid…but that ridiculous assertion seems to indicate that he does.
We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years.
Does he even know that some of those reforms have now been reversed thanks to Republicans in Congress and on the Supreme Court? Like a key part of the Voting Rights Act for instance?
And does he think all systemic racism just vanished in the wake of the reforms? Just bam, they’re gone? Because that’s not how it works, and it’s not how it did work.
There’s a lot more in the same vein. It may be that Brearley’s training is badly done, irritating, condescending, mistaken in parts; I don’t know, because I don’t know anything about it. But Mister Barnburner is objecting to the whole idea, and to the underlying acknowledgement that racism didn’t melt into air in 1965. I guess that’s why Bari Weiss is so pleased with him?
Bari Weiss is a woman.
Eava, ‘He addresses fellow Brearley parents’ refers to the father who wrote the letter that Weiss wrote about on her Substack.
I’d say the main trouble with white people saying they don’t see color is that it’s not true. Plenty of studies have demonstrated that people really do notice color and are affected by it no matter how much they insist that the opposite is true. E.g. I remember reading about one study in which test-subjects were shown pictures of various people along with a list of words. One of these words applied to the person on the picture while the rest were irrelevant. The test-subjects were then asked to identify the right word as quickly as possible for each picture. The good news is that liberals and progressives were less likely than conservatives to wrongly associate black people with crime-related words. The bad news is that even they needed more time to correctly answer these questions while no such time-delay was found when the person depicted was white. To explain their results the researchers argued that liberals and lefties had the same immediate gut-reaction as the conservatives, but then proceeded to correct themselves, hence the time-lapse.
Simon and Chabris’ famous studies of “change blindness” showed that about half of all people fail to notice one stranger being replaced by another as long as the change itself happens out of sight (e.g. one person bending down behind a counter and another person standing up in his/her place). The exceptions were if you tried to replace one person with someone of a different sex (probably transphobic, right?) or ethnicity.
These are just two examples off the top of my head. I know there are others as well.
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Hell, there can be discrimination where colour isn’t ever seen but suspected:
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Original study, Are Emily and Greg more employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A field experiment in labor market discrimination is here:
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A meta-analysis of similar studies suggests that there has been little change over time:
Meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/09/11/1706255114
But there’s hope! Members of racial minorities just have to “Whiten” their resumes!
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Whitened Résumés: Race and Self-Presentation in the Labor Market
http://www-2.rotman.utoronto.ca/facbios/file/Whitening%20MS%20R2%20Accepted.pdf
I’m not sure what the problem here is. Do you not object to the view that people should be judged by the color of their skin?
Bjarte:
This is known as an implicit association test (IAT). IATs have issues, especially replicability and predictive validity. At bottom, it is not even clear what exactly the test is measuring (via the proxy of reaction times). Even the coauthors of the initial study have said that IATs’ issues “render them problematic to use to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination”.
These aren’t actually mutually exclusive. When a society is as racist as American society throughout history, racism can decrease over time, and yet many forms of racist behaviors remain intact.
Yes about 1 & 2; sorry about the lack of clarity.
I don’t know the specifics of what this school is doing (I’d think that people promoting the letter might share some info on that, but they don’t seem to), but I know there are a lot of schools that have been pushing critical race theory hard on very young children in what to me seems to be very age-inappropriate ways.
So, assuming that’s what’s happening at Brearley, then, sure, some pushback may be in order. But this letter is garbage. Maybe this author’s kids and their peers should just be being taught the basics of being nice to each other, but he could use some serious race-sensitivity training, some history education, and at least a passing familiarity with current events.
@Nullius #5
I got the same impression Ophelia did: that a white person emphatically refusing to be judged by the color of his skin is almost always a white person objecting to any sort of remedial preferential treatment for non-white people, such as affirmative action, or even just demographic statistics gathering. That is, I see the statement as code for something else.
Exactly. I was going to say that but you got there first – it’s code. When a clueless & indignant white guy who is complaining about education on systemic racism says it, it’s code.
The education in question could be amateurish or worse, as Skeletor said, but talking about race and how it shapes people’s prospects is not wicked.
I think someone like the parent writing that letter, quoting King in that way, is making the implicit claim that we have reached King’s desired end state where we can actually be “colour blind.” Nice to think that this guy wants to live in a post racial society. Too bad he thinks we’re already there. Maybe if we don’t talk about the problem, it will just go away, or, at the very least, we can pretend it’s not there (“We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years.”)The King quote is also used as cover for those who insist that pointing out systemic racism (and want use government/legal tools and structures to address it) is worse than the racism itself, and is in fact racist.
Sorry about the double post above. When I didn’t see it show up, I thought I’d screwed up somehow. I guess it got held up because of all the links, or something.
Yep it was the links.
“It was the salmon mousse.”
Acolyte of Satan, too much cold medicine, not enough sleep or coffee.
Sackbut:
Ah, I see. I mean, I can sort of see that. It’s certainly plausible that someone could say it and mean those sorts of things. Only …
Such inferences about motives and coded language are easy to make but difficult to establish or refute. (They follow this structure, which has a name: If you were [something] then you would say [stuff]; you do say [stuff]; therefore you’re [something].) We’ve all been on the receiving end of it, too, whether in conversation about religion, shouting matches about gender woowoo, or debates about politics. Don’t know about you, but I’ve always found it frustrating as |= |_| ( |<.
Maybe I'm just idealistic, but I'd prefer to live in a world with room to affirm basic facts, both descriptive and normative, without having that be taken as evidence of mens rea.
Nullius, it would be nice to make such assumptions. But I’ve heard this kind of talk too many times before, and in the context of the actual text of the letter and the program being complained about, I think that it is coded language is quite clear. It is possible that my explanation was too coarse, too general, but I think in this case Ophelia was entirely justified in being wary of coded language, and I made the same leap.
I think part of the clue that it is coded is that this is a white man who is complaining about being judged for the color of his skin. Note he’s not saying people shouldn’t be judged by skin color, he’s just talking about himself, or perhaps all people like him. Add to that his rejection of system racism, and I think it’s clear that he’s concerned about white people being maligned, not about ending racism. But that first statement is a signal to be wary of what else is about to be said.
It is an unfortunate fact that an awful lot of discussions about racism revolve around coded language. “Inner city”, “slums”, “forced busing”, “states’ rights”.
“Voter fraud”
“Welfare queens” “hoodlums” “predators” – the list is long.
The fact that Mister Brearley Father said “We have not had systemic racism against Blacks in this country since the civil rights reforms of the 1960s, a period of more than 50 years” is a huge flashing neon sign that he’s deeply ignorant at best and deeply racist at worst.
I suspect White people are blind to their own color. Seeing themselves as the ‘generic’ humans, from whom others diverge in quaint or limiting ways. Add the effective segregation of daily life, and the real conditions of other people don’t register at all.
Still, I have a sinking suspicion that the school’s ‘antiracism’ curriculum will veer off into Farrakhanish racism and historical foolery.
Indeed. That’s what I meant by “The trouble with white people saying they don’t see color is that of course they don’t, because they don’t have to.” We don’t have to, we aren’t forced to, life doesn’t shove it at us, so we’re blind to it. Nice to have that luxury.
For myself, I sometimes don’t recognize color. That doesn’t mean that I don’t see color, because I do.
2 cases in point, both baseball related.
I remember growing up in the 1960’s, not really so terribly long, in the scheme of things, after the breaking of the color barrier. I remember the thrill of the Dodgers season in which Maury Wills stole 104 bases. An amazing feat!
Years later, I saw a film about black pioneers of major league baseball, including Maury Wills. I was shocked! I had no idea that Maury Wills was black. I just thought he was an exotic looking person. Naturally, my surprise was totally colored by my majority-white culture. My “default person,” if you will, was some version of white, though possibly Mediterranean or something similar. Can’t say my assumptions aren’t racist; they are.
Something similar happened with Derek Jeter’s farewell season. Until it was repeated umpteen times that season, I hadn’t realized before that he was mixed race. Again, he just looked exotic to me.
I know that, at the margins, I sometimes don’t recognize race. Certain people, if I were asked what race they were, I’d have to say “I don’t know.”
Not the same thing as “I don’t see race,” though.
Also, I’m not particularly good at recognizing people anyway, regardless of race, but I’m definitely an exemplar that cross-racial identifications are even harder.
In my experience claiming to not see color and appropriating talk of not judging people by their skin color to deflect claims of white privilege is especially popular among the kind of people who like explaining at great length why “equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome” while defining “equality of opportunity” in the broadest possible sense: As long as there are no laws on the book explicitly discriminating against certain groups, we have real equality of opportunity, and any talk of privilege, stereotypes, cultural biases etc. is just professional victimhood and an excuse for incompetence, bad attitudes, and a loser mindset (and hence conclusive proof that you don’t deserve equality of outcome). So what if somebody else got a 100 meter head start on the 200 meter sprint? Just run twice as fast and quit whining! Because everyone has created him/herself entirely from nothing through an effort of the will, circumstances don’t matter, and people born into wealthy families with parents who can afford to send them to the best schools don’t enjoy any unfair advantage over people who have to work three lousy jobs just to afford the rent on their crappy apartment while trying to get an education.