ACTUALLY you’re the racist
Elon launches another “Hooray for racism!!” into the world.
Twitter and Tesla chief Elon Musk defended Scott Adams, the under-fire creator of “Dilbert,” in a series of tweets Sunday, blasting media organizations for dropping his comic strip after Adams said that White people should “get the hell away from Black people.”
Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
He’s a busy man, he doesn’t have time to comment on what Adams said, he has time only to defend him for saying it.
But Elon Musk is an irreproachable genius*, how could this be? Meanwhile Adams, blames media bias and lack of context. Sure, let’s go with that.
*(statement verified using Trumpian Intelligence Evaluation technology)
*(person, woman, man, ebay, tesla, spacex, camera, tv)
lol
So. Apparently, he liked the “Apart” in Apartheid.
Looks like it’s my role here to defend Musk again, or, phrasing that differently, provide a bit of balance:
And Ophelia:
There is no Tweet that can be reasonably said to be “defending Adams”.
There is no “series of tweets … blasting media organizations …”
The linked-to article does not link to any Tweets doing either of those things.
(Feel free to provide links or screenshots refuting me, I may have missed something.)
What Musk’s actual Tweets say includes:
Then, in reply to another person saying:
To which Musk replies “exactly”.
So Musk supports color-blind policies. One can argue about that but I don’t see how it can be fairly labelled as “Hooray for racism!!”.
And yes, one can indeed make an argument that a lot of the media nowadays has the reverse bias on racial matters to what it historically had. (Some will argue that that’s a good thing, a necessary corrective.)
If, just for one example, Harvard were found to be routinely downrating the “personality” scores of black applicants to avoid having to admit them, all hell would break loose, yet, when it does that to Asian-American applicants the mainstream media tends to just shrug or keep silent. (Hopefully the Supreme Court is going to stop this sort of discrimination.)
Or one can imagine the media reaction if a poll of white people had nearly half of them not agreeing that “it’s ok to be black”.
So Musk (along with Adams) claims (generally and dubiously) “media bias,” and agrees with the “truth” of Adams’ statements, and the statements themselves promote racism (is there an argument that they don’t?). Promoting racism = hooray for racism.
Go see what Adams said from his own mouth. Going on a tangent about how it was reported and citing examples of racial bias elsewhere in the world is not the point. Unless you’re saying racism is so pervasive that it’s inescapable. Is that the defense? Everyone else is racist too? Does that make it right? I think it’s ad populum rubbish even if there was any truth to it.
I’m just left wondering when there was ever a colorblind approach to race.
Adams said white people should stay away from black people, that the race is a terrorist organization.
I don’t see how that can be just ignored.
This is a complicated issue to me.
I read what Adams said, and I think the way it’s being presented in the media is inaccurate. I don’t like Adams, I think he’s proven himself to be a jerk in oh so many ways, but I think that one quoted bit has a point, even if it’s a strained one.
I used to serve as a moderator on a couple of online discussion forums. One issue that came up frequently was whether to deal with individual posts or with patterns of behavior. For instance, to tell if Oswald is attacking Beatrice in violation of the rules, do we need to show there is a single post from Oswald that constitutes an attack, or can we look at a whole bunch of posts from Oswald that indicate a pattern of harassment, even if the single posts don’t cross some line?
I think Adams’ comment seems sufficient as a “last straw” for the pattern of objectionable statements from him; in and of itself, it seems insufficient. As an advocate of the “pattern of harassment” viewpoint in the past, I’m OK with the newspapers deciding to drop his strip on that basis.
What did he say? He noted that a survey showed 53% of black people agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white”, meaning that 47% disagreed or were unsure; if nearly half of black people don’t think it’s OK to be white, he claimed, then “that’s a hate group”. He elaborated further on that basis. It’s a strained point, it doesn’t acknowledge “unsure”, is misses the implications and history of “It’s OK to be white”, and it is insufficient basis for his “advice” to “stay the hell away”, but it’s a point. Mind you, I find casual designation of any group as a “hate group” problematic, given the way “hate group” is bandied about. But nearly half of a population saying “it’s not OK to be gay” or “it’s not OK to be atheist” or whatever would certainly be a concern.
I don’t agree with Musk’s statement, that US media is now “racist against whites and Asians”. Partly this is because I don’t think I share the same meaning of “racist” that he uses, and because I don’t think it’s the media that he’s really talking about. Jay Caspian Kang, an Asian writer who used to have an opinion column in the New York Times, wrote a number of cogent pieces about college admissions and high school admissions, and about how Asians were discriminated against in an effort to deal with Asian over-representation. I don’t think that’s “racism”, and I don’t think that’s the media. This discrimination was used as a wedge in the effort to dismantle affirmative action. Some opponents think affirmative action is a good thing badly implemented, some think it’s a bad thing in and of itself. Musk’s statement gives me the impression he thinks any means of taking race into account in school admissions is “racist” (in his terms) and therefore bad. I don’t agree either that it’s “racist” or that it’s bad, but I can see that many ways of taking race into account are clumsy and problematic.
It’s become a trope in social media to claim that any mention of race is racist (or “playing the race card”), that the (usually white) person making that claim “doesn’t see color” and is a living example of Dr. King’s vision (it’s almost always “Dr.” King). But if you don’t see color, then you can’t see the effects of racism.
It’s a conundrum, of course, because the ultimate goal of achieving a non-racist society implies the end not just of racism, but of any notion of separate races. But it’s impossible to achieve that goal without focusing on race.
There’s an article in the latest edition of The Atlantic contrasting the approaches of France and the US to racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, the gist of which is that neither approach is entirely satisfactory.
Wish I had some wise words to sum up, but wisdom (as always) eludes me.
Via the CNN report:
“…His comments came in response to a poll from the conservative firm Rasmussen Reports that said 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be White.””
Is this a legitimate poll, or does Adams’ confirmation bias accept this as a given fact? Also, his response:
““If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people – according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll – that’s a hate group””
Does the poll say or show that blacks are a hate group? Or support Adams’ conclusion that enough of them are a hate group that all be blacks be lumped together under the umbrella of a hate group? How fucking racist can you get? Also according to Adams:
““I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams added. “And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people, just get the f**k away … because there is no fixing this.””
So this conclusion as well, segregation, is a reasonable response, or even possible? Hasn’t that been tried? Stay away… I mean who in TF are you trying to advise here, mister hatemonger? I live in Atlanta, not in some white bread suburbia in the East Bay. Yes I know what Pleasanton is like, I lived very near there, and I’ll not be going back. My advice is don’t come here, not even for a visit. And then:
“Adams has since said on Twitter that he was only “advising people to avoid hate” and suggested that the cancellation of his cartoon signals that free speech in America is under assault.”
Right, your free speech is curtailed because some of it promotes racism, so all of America is under assault by the evil biased media and the support of the black hate group. But your hate should be allowed. Musk seems to think so. Well I’m not going to agree that all viewpoints are valid, or exempt from being evaluated on their merits or lack thereof. Avoid hate my eye.
@10: What a Maroon:
Quoting from Coleman Hughes: Actually, Color-Blindness Isn’t Racist:
“Critics of color-blindness argue it lacks teeth in the fight against racism. If we are blind to race, they say, how can we see racism? … But this argument is no more than a cheap language trick. … to interpret “color-blind” so literally is to misunderstand it …
““Color-blind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for color-blindness is not to pretend you don’t notice color. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives.”
[The whole thing is well worth a read.]
Coel, WaM acknowledges that. Color-blindness is a goal, certainly. But confusing the goal with the current situation is a category error. When you talk about the process, you are talking about something different than the product. WaM was talking about the process; Coleman Hughes appears to be discussing the product.
In short, “not seeing color” is valid in a world where color is not used as a point of discrimination. In a world where discrimination still exists, some of the means of redressing the inequality may involve “seeing color”. If you “don’t see color”, then the beating of a black man by a group of white thugs, the lynching of a black man by a group of white thugs, is just man being inhumane to man. If you see color, you can recognize that it is the black man who gets hung while the white man does the hanging. And that is essential to the process of eliminating racism – seeing it.
To relate this to something I understand on a more visceral level, I know a lot of men who do not see sexism. They don’t understand that it is sexism to rub a woman’s butt or put your hand on a woman’s knee when she is working next to you. It is the same sort of thing claimed by TiMs wanting to intrude on women’s spaces – if you can’t see sex, you won’t see the problem with this.
Process – seeing color is necessary —-> Product – seeing color is unnecessary
[…] a comment by Sackbut on ACTUALLY you’re the […]
The thing about “color-blind” to me is that it’s utopian. I think people who say they “don’t see color” are fooling themselves (or, less forgivingly, flattering themselves). We don’t live in that world. If we did there would be nothing to not see. We can’t just wave away this long ugly history by claiming we don’t see it.
(I posted the above comment before seeing iknklast’s @ 13.)
Find someone who loves you the way Coel loves Elon Musk.
@iknklast:
You’re entirely right here, seeing race is indeed necessary for seeing and eliminating racism. But “color-blind” really does not mean being blind to or overlooking race or race-based injustice. That’s the theme of Coleman Hughes’s piece.
[And you’re right, a lot of men are sexist and oblivious to their unthinking sexism.]
By the way, is there much actual anti-black discrimination in the US today? There’s an argument that the concept of “systemic racism” was invented because the evidence of actual racism nowadays is getting meagre.
Have you read Worse Than Slavery yet? I keep urging you to, because it would fill in a lot you seem unaware of. Even if there were zero “actual anti-black discrimination in the US today” in the sense of people doing overtly racist things that are on the Official List of Overtly Racist Things, the fact would remain that no compensation was ever paid to former slaves or to their descendants, and instead a new system of exploitation was put in place such that they could not escape generational poverty. Things have improved now, but they certainly haven’t achieved any kind of balance.
Or (or better, and) you could read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, which lays out how redlining prevented generation upon generation of Black people from acquiring wealth by buying a good house in a flourishing neighborhood. They were SYSTEMATICALLY barred from doing that.
I’ve mentioned both of these to you in the past. You seem uninterested. Why’s that?
iknklast said what I was trying to say, and much better than I could say.
I’ll just add an experiment to try: tell your Black friends and/or colleagues that you don’t see race, and let us know how they react.
I suspect the evidence of “actual” racism is much like the evidence of “actual” sexism. In my place of employment, they have done a lot of CYA to hide any of those things. HR departments know how to word it when they hire the man over the woman, the white person of the person of color, etc. There are a lot of games they play in how they make those assessments.
Just like the time the VP of our college didn’t want to approve the Freethought Group one of my students was trying to get started. They said “We have so many campus religious groups all ready, we’re afraid of splitting them too much and confusing students”…they knew the difference between her group and Campus Crusade. They just knew they couldn’t say “We don’t want an atheist group on campus”, because they aren’t allowed to do that.
The same thing with racism/sexism and institutions. They know the words. They say the words. They may not even realize they are doing it. But there are a lot of ways to shut out people of color without “actually” saying “we don’t hire people of color/women/gay/disabled here”. And they know those ways.
This makes “actual” racism hard to see, but doesn’t mean it’s not there. Trying to interpret it is a minefield. You could easily interpret something quite innocent as discrimination, while missing actual discrimination, because they bury things under so many levels of corporate-speak.
There is evidence of actual anti black discrimination in Scott Adams’ comments. I could also reply a definitive yes anecdotally, not waged against me personally, but against those I care about.
@Ophelia:
Because I’m not disputing it! I fully grant that in the past things were dire for blacks in the US.
But, I’m more interested in how things are for today’s kids who weren’t even born in the year 2000 (it’s weird to me when a new intake of college students comes along and their birth dates are all 20-something, and yet they’re clearly adult size!).
Re intergenerational wealth:
A major point to realise is that, while black vs white disparities are huge at the upper end of the wealth distribution, they’re not that different in the bottom half. So, yes, vastly more white families have >10 million dollars in wealth.
But the bottom 40% of whites have no intergenerational wealth and the bottom 40% of blacks have no intergenerational wealth. There are more white kids than black kids growing up in families with no intergenerational wealth (since whites are a bigger fraction of the population).
In the same way, more whites were redlined than blacks (though, of course, the fraction of whites redlined was lower than the fraction of blacks).
Similarly, a lot of Asian-Americans are not benefitting from intergenerational wealth. Many are in families that relatively recently migrated to the US. China (for example) is a relatively poor country. Plenty of such families started, in recent times, with little.
Further, you can easily control for family socio-economic status. You can compare SAT scores, crime rates, etc for blacks, whites, Asians, of the same family wealth and income.
Economic disparity does not explain the differences in group-mean outcomes between these groups! The “standard left-wing assumption” is that economic status is the variable that explains everything else. It simply isn’t. The data are entirely clear on this. Of course the MSM simply refuse to discuss this in an evidence-based fashion.
So, if there are on-going effects of past racism (and gross and rampant past racism is something that no-one denies), it is not about intergenerational wealth and family socioeconomic status. We need another hypothesis.
If you want to argue for the on-going effects of past racism, damage to group culture is perhaps a better suggestion … (though that then leads to a new set of arguments for and against).
If you want to count cases of ‘driving while black’ then systemically as well, if you count law enforcement as part of the system. I can also cite cases of being treated preferentially because I’m *not* a POC. It exists. Also sexism. I’ve been asked to accompany women to the car repair shop before so they don’t get taken advantage of, not just because of my knowledge, but because of my sex and what people assume about me by my appearance. Just an example, but you don’t have to look far once you start seeing it, it’s pretty much everywhere.
On the one hand, we have someone calling a quarter of a racial demographic a hate group and advising people to get away from them. On the other, we have more than a quarter of one racial demographic saying it’s not okay (and another near quarter unsure that it’s okay) to be another racial demographic. Why does the former draw more concern than the latter? Indeed, downplaying the latter while being outraged by the former is almost sufficient to vindicate the assertion of bias against the the Group It’s Not Okay To Be.
I know enough Critical Theory that I can give an analysis of why the statement, “white lives don’t matter,” is true within that theoretical framework. What it is in reality is horrifying, just like, “It’s not okay to be white.” The two are conceptually linked, leading to a place where no one of good conscience can want to go.
Statistically, it is the fraction part that matters. In other words, if you have a higher percentage of blacks being redlined than whites, it can be said to be at least partially about race.
iknklast:
Isn’t it the individual that matters? If you’re a white kid in a low-income family living in a trailer park, why is it relevant that a lower fraction of whites than blacks were redlined or that a higher fraction of whites are multi-millionaires? What’s that got to do with that kid?
If we’re arguing that a kid from Race A deserves consideration owing to the low-income family they were born into (which was not their doing or choice), why do we not give the same consideration to a kid from Race B in the same circumstances?
Identity politics has gone badly wrong by treating the group-average is all important, and the individual as secondary to that, when we should reverse those priorities.
If you want policies that help kids from poor backgrounds (and if that happens to benefit more people from Race A) then fine, I’ll support you. But we shouldn’t have policies that benefit, say, Obama’s daughters, or others that don’t need help, owing only to the group mean of some disparate group that they happen to be members of.
A couple of things about that Rasmussen poll. First, they sampled 1000 people total, but only 13% of the sample was Black. There’s no reporting of the confidence level or margin of error, but there’s some reason to think it’s not a terribly representative sample. Second, they don’t report any qualitative results on how people were interpreting the question. It would help to know what people were thinking when the disagreed with the statement “It’s ok to be white”, especially in light of this report from the Anti-Defamation League.
I don’t claim that the people who designed the survey were aware of this history, but if the respondents were, that could explain their response.
@29,
That sounded familiar to me when someone first pointed it out in response to this poll. I couldn’t say offhand if I would have remembered it if I had been part of the polling sample, but I’m pretty sure the phrase would have sent up alarm bells with me about the good faith of the pollster, and I probably would have been recorded as a “refused to answer.”
#29
Ah, yes. An innocuous statement like “woman = adult, human female”.
Coel, I am not saying it matters to the individual. Unfortunately, politics is about a social system, not an individual. Each individual should be treated equally, regardless of race, color, creed, national origin, sex, age, etc. But policy is not based on individuals, it is based on averages. Whether this is right or not, I don’t know. I’m not an ethicist, I am a scientist.
I was a poor white kid. I struggled a lot of my life in a world that wasn’t made for me, or anyone like me. Poverty and sex worked against me. But I still recognized the importance of getting the numbers right.
Absolute numbers are used when someone wants to hide systemic discrimination; the fact that there are more white people than black people in this country can lead people to believe that whites are being uniquely discriminated against. It has always been used that way, in my experience. But absolute numbers can be misleading when you figure that there are higher percentages of black individuals being redlined than white. Ideally, a policy would deal with both, and I believe it should. I just am sick to death of seeing people misuse numbers in a convoluted and inaccurate way.
It works the other way, too. Because there are more white women than black women having plays they wrote produced in theatres across the country, everyone believes that white women are doing great while black women are being harmed. In reality, black women are being produced at a slightly higher percentage than their percentage in the population, while white women are being produced at a rate that is only half the percentage in the population. Plays by white men are produced at numbers that put them more than twice their percentage in the population. Is the relationship irrelevant? Not at all. In calculating the proper way to redress a situation like this, ideally you would try to promote the work of white women, but not only is no one doing that, many theatres are rejecting work that is by white women.
Now that I’ve put it that way, where the white population is the one being harmed, can you see what the fuck I am trying to say? Policy that discriminates against one group more than another is inherently discriminatory. In some cases, that can be good, such as policy that discriminates against men when determining the make up of women’s prisons or women’s sports. In other cases it can be bad, such as redlining.
As an individual, I might want all policies to be about me. But they aren’t. And they won’t be. And we won’t get it right until we understand how statistics work.
Coel @ 24 –
Fine, be interested in whatever you’re interested in, but at least take the reality into account when you’re talking about racism and wokeness etc. This is a massive debt that was never paid – generations of unpaid labor that made other people rich and left the laborers destitute and subject to sadistic persecution including lynching. If that labor had been paid things would have been different.
Iknklast:
To be honest, no, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say.
No-one is disputing that blacks had it worse over redlining (a higher fraction were redlined).
But, if you were going to compensate descendants of families that were redlined then, in absolute numbers, you’d help more whites than blacks.
There is less of a case for: “to compensate for redlining we will help blacks whose families were redlined but not whites”.
Nor for: “to compensate for redlining we will help all blacks, including those whose families were not redlined, but we won’t help whites whose families were redlined. (Which is actually what the “anti-racists” would argue for.)
Anyhow, all of that is too long ago to make it sensible to attempt to redress.
But, what we can readily do is address current-day discrimination.
Currently, in blatant and out-in-the-open discrimination in college admissions: Asian-Americans are strongly disadvantaged; whites are slightly disadvantaged; Hispanics and Native Americans are slightly advantaged; and black Americans are very strongly advantaged.
It’s not just redlining, it’s the centuries of unpaid labor—->no opportunity to build wealth to pass on to the next generation. Obviously most white people hasten to agree that it’s waaaaaaaaaaaaaay too late to redress that, but I remain unconvinced.
Ophelia:
Agreed, and all through the Middle Ages (1066 to about 1850) generation after generation of English serfs worked on the lords’ land without being paid for it. (They got only the right to farm a small plot for their own subsistence.) If that labor had been paid things would have been different. Until post-WW2, only a small minority of the population owned any wealth or property that they could pass on.
All that is bygone. And kids are born anew each generation. What their parents and ancestors suffered is pretty irrelevant to their ability to pass math exams. That’s affected by how things are today.
@Ophelia:
And over those same centuries the vast majority of white people were not building up intergenerational wealth either.
But they were not slave labor. Come on.
Coel, I am saying that you are using numbers to confuse, and perhaps to deny the existence of systemic racism. That is all I was saying.
Nullius, please do give us that analysis of why ‘the statement, “white lives don’t matter,” is true within the theoretical framework of Critical Race Theory.’
Also, are you seriously suggesting that, given the provenance of the phrase ‘It’s okay to be white’, it is in any serious way comparable with ‘woman=adult, human female”?
I don’t know why Coel gives the wholly false date of the end of serfdom in Britain as coming in 1850. Perhaps it derives from his obvious lack of interest in history. Serfdom in fact predated the Norman Conquest (which he gives as its beginning), and had largely disappeared by the end of the 15th century. Perhaps he is mistaking Britain for Russia or some other European countries.
An easy mistake. /s
I notice that Coel’s concern for fairness seems to be expressed only when he feels that white people are being adversely affected, at least where universities and mathematics are concerned. For it seems that, in Coel’s eyes, discrimination exists only in the academy. The simplified world of the libertarian or Randian seems very seductive to a certain kind of mind. As for fairness outside the academy (and I am talking about a fairer society in general, and by no means only about matters of race, which, for reasons of history, are peculiarly salient in the USA, though extant everywhere), this does not seem a matter which concerns Coel much. At least he never mentions it, preferring to worship such heroes as Elon Musk, and not to consider the huge gaps in wealth that have grown, and continue to grow, particularly in the UK & the USA, and that are damaging our societies, socially, economically, and politically. Were these gaps addressed, as well as such matters as the ready availability of assault weapons and qualified immunity for bad policemen, then perhaps a fair bit of interracial animosity would disappear as well.
Tim: Yes, I am suggesting that the two are comparable, and it’s exactly the “given the provenance of” form that they share. We see the selection of an innocuous, obviously true phrase in the expectation that left-aligned people will react negatively to it, thus showing themselves willing to suborn reality to politics. The primary difference is that the instigators of one are labeled racist trolls, and the instigators of the other are labeled transphobic trolls. From the perspective of those whose ire is provoked, each phrase is a dog whistle used to trick the unaware into unknowingly supporting bigotry.
As for “white lives don’t matter”, the relevant factor is that white isn’t theorized as a political identity in the same way as Black. Under Critical Theory, meaning and value derive from dominance hierarchies, specifically from overturning the existing system of oppression. Under Critical Race Theory, white lives qua white lives don’t matter because white lives can only support the existing superstructure of Whiteness. White people have constructed Whiteness within society such that the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that maintain, reinforce, and reify Whiteness are inescapably socialized into white and white-adjacent people, which results in automatic privilege-preserving cognition and behavior. A white life cannot, then, bring about the desired revolution and as such is without value. Thus, while the life of a trans white person can matter qua trans person, it cannot matter qua white person.
And so on and so forth in tortuous coils of totalizing “facts and logic”.
iknklast#42 !!!
‘We see the selection of an innocuous, obviously true phrase in the expectation that left-aligned people will react negatively to it, thus showing themselves willing to suborn reality to politics.’
From the website ‘Proof’: ‘In pursuit of their scheme, the neo-Nazis on 4chan made sure that their new phrase was widely enough known—that is, they made sure it was widely enough known that “It’s Okay to Be White” was a white supremacist meme—that even more left-leaning Americans than might otherwise have been the case rejected it, thereby launching a “vicious circle” in which the bad guys have already baked in their desired outcome.’
As the writer, points out, the question, even if one does not know its provenance, is a peculiar one, and at once raises, in what is, unfortunately, a racially-charged atmosphere, the question of the intention behind asking it. The writer also points out that only 26% of the Black respondents answered ‘No’, for whatever reasons (which may well have included in a number of cases the awareness that the question was in fact a white supremacist trope), 21% answered ‘I don’t know’ (again quite possibly because the question is a very odd one, and its intention unclear, or because of they knew that the question was a white supremacist trope); and 53% answered ‘Yes’. Dilbert than goes on to claim that 50% of the respondents had a problem with whiteness. That is thoroughly disingenuous of him.
The intention of “woman = adult, human female” is very clear. It is not vague, as ‘It’s OK To Be White’ is, and it is not intended as a dog-whistle to stir up trans-supporters, but as a denial of certain claims made by trans supporters.
Your account of Critical Race Theory makes it sound very Foucauldian. I shall take your word for it that what you say is true.
Oh, it’s definitely Foucauldian. There’s no doubt about that.
I will dispute that “adult, human female” wasn’t intended to be provocative. According to Kellie-Jay, her billboard was intended to spark conversation and debate, and it did so precisely because it was innocuous. If it had been clearly abusive, no one would have given its removal much thought, but it was only the patently unobjectionable dictionary definition of “woman”. And as with “It’s okay to be white”, ignorance of the “problematicity” plays a role. The advertiser claimed ignorance as their defense:
The parallels are obvious, when viewed from the opposing perspective. As quick as we are to see the fault in someone else’s gris-gris, that slow are we to see the fault in our own.
Additional: the billboard successfully started conversation and debate by stirring up trans supporters, who got it taken down.
Tim Harris posts yet another comment full of snide misprepresentations of what I’ve said.
And yet I’ve repeatedly highlighted anti-Asian-American discrimination …
Oh look, snide misrepresentation as a personal attack.
And yet I explicitly expressed support up thread for policies benefitting kids from poor families.
Tim, why the continual snide misrepresentation and personal attacks? What’s the point?
@iknklast:
I thought I’d been fully open and explicit about the numbers, and the difference between numbers of people and fraction of groups.
And no-one is denying rampant systemic racism in the past! Really, no one is!
Is the continual harking back to past racism because there is rather little evidence of it today?
@52 — The black population in the US is roughly 12%, while the black population in US prisons is roughly 35%.
Evidence of systemic racism or not?
And by “is” I mean currently, not historically. Anyway I’d like to see a coherent counterexplanation of the disparity @53 that would suggest that there is no evidence of systemic racism. Even a good working theory would do.
‘And no-one is denying rampant systemic racism in the past!’
Here we have Coel again pretending that the past is a locked box and has nothing to with our glorious present where all problems have been solved, and every individual is individually happy! No British serfs left even! I suggest, Coel, that you actually look at the present, and pay rather more attention to what happens outside the academic box in which you appear to live your life. I certainly agree with you that it is disgraceful that there are, as seems pretty obvious, quotas for Asian-American students at universities, and that this should be done away with, but you seem to seize upon this horrid example as a way of proving your anti-racist credentials in every respect. If you’re right in this case, you seem to think, it will make you appear to be right in every other claim you make.
I notice that the members of some wealthy families in Britain, families that gained their wealth from slave-holding, are now seeking to make amends by using some of their wealth to help nations in the Caribbean. They certainly have the honesty to recognise that the effects of slavery are very much here, working in the present.
In addition to actually looking at present realities outside the academic box, I suggest you do a little research into serfs, in Britain and elsewhere.
Tim @55 It looks like Coel is trying to say that the effects of historical racism still exist, but since slavery has been largely eliminated and no longer acceptable, that today’s racism only exists as a legacy. Hence the “born after the 2000’s” comment. I’m not sure how this eliminates all the racists like Scott Adams and those who support such views from the equation. It’s the old ‘we don’t have slavery anymore, so racism is over’ argument. There is plenty of evidence for systemic racism, my example @53 is but one. Racists and bigots exist in the world, and some are not so obvious until they make some pronouncement like Scott Adams did, then those such as Musk who fail to condemn it, and people who go along with racism or fail to see it are complicit, and there are a lot of them.
In the words of Zack de la Rocha — “Some of those that work forces, are the same that burn crosses.” Not that there hasn’t been some improvement, but racism exists today. It’s fairly obvious, unless you’re an ostrich or something.
@twiliter:
No, not evidence, without further information. It’s only “systemic racism” if you automatically discount all other explanations on ideological grounds.
The male population of the US is 50%, while the population in jail is 90% male. Evidence of systemic sexism or not?
@Tim Harris:
Oh look, yet more blatant misrepresentation.
All I’m asking for is one or both of:
Evidence (not just assertion) of ongoing systemic racism, or evidence (not just assertion) of ongoing detrimental effects of past systemic racism.
It’s telling how few people want to discuss this issue on the evidence.
Without any context, “It’s ok to be white” may seem innocuous, but context matters, and in this case the context of the phrase being used by white supremacists raises questions. Did the creators of the poll know that context? Perhaps not, but then how did they stumble on that wording? It’s odd phrasing to use in a poll. Were the respondents aware of that context? Without follow-up questions, that’s impossible to say, but in the “all lives matter” era I can see why it might make Black people suspicious. Was Scott Adams aware of the context? Again, I don’t know, but he apparently travels in those circles, so I suspect he was.
In any case, drawing any broad conclusions about a population of around 40 million from the responses of 130 is not very sound social science.
@57 Why do we have to discount all other explanations on ideological grounds? I’m not sure what further information you’d need to draw an inference here.
Systemic sexism? Yes of course it is. Rightly so. Males are more violent and less law abiding than females, is that fact in dispute? Do you think all sexism is bad? I don’t. We have to acknowledge the differences in the sexes. I also don’t think all racism is bad. If we were all ‘colorblind,’ then how would we go about addressing Sickle Cell Anemia, for example? Acknowledgement of racial differences is sometimes important, it doesn’t mean we are bigots or prejudiced. Again with the misdirection.
Again, do you have a counterexplanation for the disparity @53? I mean if you need to dismiss all other explanations on ideological grounds, then don’t bother. I don’t want to waste your time with that.
@twiliter,
I don’t think you meant to address your response to me. But in any case, taking race (or sex) into account isn’t the same as racism (or sexism), as the sickle cell anemia example shows.
Yes WaM, I understand your point, but for the sake of argument, racism and sexism are *examples of* acknowledgment of the differences between races and sexes. The negative connotations of bigotry and prejudice are detachable, but I wasn’t clear about that. Just as the negative connotations of ignorance are detachable in philosophy.
Yes WaM, I think it was @57 when I was composing a reply? My mistake, and thanks for the reply as well.
I see several of my posts are misnumbered, probably due to editing. Either that or I need new glasses. :D Sorry folks.
@twiliter:
Here, as before, you are using words differently from the standard meaning.
The words “sexism” and “racism” connote improper and prejudiced attitudes or treatment of people owing to sex or race.
Thus, a higher fraction of men in jail owing to them being more violent is not “sexism” and medical treatment that takes proper account of someone’s race is not “racism”.
And, again, “color-blind” does not mean literally never seeing race. Read the Coleman Hughes piece linked above on that.
Coel @63 Er, that’s what WaM said, see my reply to same.
Again you fail to answer a direct question with a direct answer.
Help me understand why.
Coel,
If you’re looking for evidence of systemic racism, this article is a good place to start. It highlights five areas in which systemic racism has been shown to have an effect on the health of people of color (political disempowerment, segregation, financial practices, environmental injustice, and the criminal justice system), with extensive citations of the literature. To give just one example:
(Those wonky-looking numbers are footnotes, with references.)
So there’s the evidence you’re looking for, a fairly substantial body. Can you refute it?
Anyhoo… Coel @63, using your example and ‘standard’ definition of what sexism and racism are, complete with negative connotations, why use the example of the percentage of men in prison vs. women if it merely ‘acknowledges the difference,’ in comparison with the percentage of black men in prison as being an example of systemic racism (again in your ‘standard’ definition)? This implies that there is a higher percentage of incarcerations of black men because we ‘acknowledge the difference’ using your comparison. So I guess from that I can assume that you believe they are there simply by virtue of their race. This makes no logical sense to me, which one is it?
Do you derive some pleasure out of being obtuse? Is there some point to it?
@twiliter:
I’m not being obtuse, but we need to be clear on word meanings.
If the 90:10 split of males:females in jail is because men are more likely to commit violent crimes that get themselves locked up, then I do not agree that that is “sexism”.
Similarly, the reason why the black fraction in jail is much higher than their population share is because they commit much more crime. Thus, that in itself is not “racism”.
OK, you might reply, but maybe their greater crime rate is caused by “racism”. OK, so what is the mechanism for this?
The “standard left” answer is: higher crime is the result of lower economic status, and the latter is caused by racism.
But we can then evaluate this claim. We can compare the crime rate among black Americans with that among Asian-Americans of the same economic status. And if we do that, the rate of violent crime among the former group is ten times higher. So, no, economic status is not the answer. (Or at least, it can only be a minor factor.)
So, maybe some other factor is the cause, and maybe that other factor is due to racism. OK, maybe, but then what is that factor? Go ahead and make your case.
So, no, the higher incarceration rate of blacks is not in itself evidence of “racism” any more than the higher incarceration rate of males is evidence of “sexism”.
@What a Maroon:
First, thanks for the link to the article, I’ll have a read (but likely won’t be able to assimilate it and reply for a while).
But, since you quote this:
Yes, black men are killed by the police at a much higher rate than their population share. Blacks are 35% of those killed by police (cf 13% population share).
But then they commit 35% of violent crime (and above 50% of homicides). Wouldn’t you expect that a group committing 35% of violent crime constitute 35% of those killed by police? Is that evidence of biased police?
Roland Fryer looked into this, and concluded — much against his expectations when starting the study — that the rate at which black males were killed by police was fully explained by their crime rate, and was not evidence of police bias.
(Of course Roland Fryer was then vilified for arriving at this conclusion.)
Again, males are upwards of 95% of those killed by police. Is that because the police are rampantly sexist, or because males are the ones acting in ways that get into such confrontations?
twiliter: What you’re doing with the word sexism is called a persuasive definition; i.e., a bespoke definition designed to support a desired conclusion. This may or may not be fallacious, primarily depending on (a) whether all parties stipulate to the definition and (b) whether arguments using or conclusions drawn from the new definition are transposed to the existing definition. Either would be sufficient to count as fallacious, and you’re tripping both.
Coel @67 Well I appreciate it if you’re not deliberately being obtuse. That would lead to unfortunate and unkind assumptions about you on my part.
It’s not just the “standard left” claim, additionally it’s the fact that racists exist in the world in a nontrivial percentage, and that those racists hold positions of power in society, and those same racists make decisions using that power in a prejudiced way. The examples are numerous (see WaM’s post). I see the economic element as relevant also, but it’s not necessary to my point.
If you deny that there are racists in positions of power in nontrivial numbers, then we can’t proceed. If you accept that there are racists in positions of power in a nontrivial percentage, then I would submit that they are not localized and incidental like drops of oil in a glass of water, but that they are dispersed proportionally and part of the system, more like drops of food coloring in a glass of water. Hence the ‘systemic’ aspect. Systemic means part of the system, the system we are talking about is composed of people, and if there are racists among those people, then they are part of the system and have an effect.
I would also submit that ‘black men commit more crime’ as not evidence based, but a biased claim. The actions of law enforcement, the court systems, and the prison systems cannot be dismissed. If there are racists in these systems, then there is an effect. A systemic one.
Thanks NiV @69, I agree. I was making too many assumptions there. Sloppy of me. I did address it, sort of, in the subsequent post.
twiliter: Well, I worry that you’re also rather stretching the meaning of “systemic”, to be honest. Or perhaps it’s more fundamental, and it’s the concept of system that you’re extending. Regardless, we ought to be able to distinguish between the racism of a system and the racism of people. That is, we should be able to say, “the system is racist, but the people are not,” or, “the people are racist, but the system is not.” If we can’t distinguish these claims, then racism and systemic racism collapse into each other, making the phrase “systemic racism” redundant at best.
NiV@72 Well I think the ‘system’ in question is composed of people mainly, but the infrastructure of the system contains the body of law as well. I don’t see any overt racism in law anymore, but that doesn’t mean that there are not racists in the system, or take it for granted that the laws are executed (by people) fairly either. Fair point.
twiliter: Yeah, that’s about the size of it. I think the distinction is important, because it does a couple of good things.
One, it lets us see and choose the proper solution to a problem. If the infrastructure is rotten (i.e., the problem is systemic), then even magically making everyone morally perfect doesn’t eliminate the problem. If the people are immoral, then even magically making the infrastructure flawless doesn’t eliminate the problem. Focusing our efforts on the wrong area can be fruitless or even counterproductive. It’s like debugging software. There are multiple potential sources of any problem: programming, user input, system configuration, etc. The first step in troubleshooting is figuring out from which area or areas the problem comes. Every programmer has had that experience of spending hours (or longer) chasing down a programming error, only to find that the problem was actually a typo in the test command or a disabled network interface (or a puppy chewing through your Ethernet cables, which actually happened to me), and now you have to go back and undo all the changes you made under the assumption that the error was in your code. It’s maddening.
Two, it allows systemic claims to be fallible. That doesn’t sound like a good thing, but it’s kinda necessary for propositional logic. When foo entails systemic foo, a claim of systemic foo is impossible to refute except by denying foo entirely.
NiV @74 Good points as well. The infrastructure of the body of law cannot be made perfect, and it has been refined to eliminate most or nearly all known flaws re: racism, but not perfectly. Given that, I think moral perfection is not possible, because it begs the questions of who’s morality and why. If we could even all agree what racism is (we can’t) which has been demonstrated here, and why it’s wrong, again, by who’s code of morality. There are lots of fuzzy edges to deal with, no doubt. Still, if we concede racism exists in people, and we concede that people are a part of what’s commonly referred to as the ‘system’ in this context, then there is racism. Therefore if there is racism present in the system, you know the rest. I don’t think ‘systemic’ as it’s used in the vernacular and in political viewpoints is well defined, but as a concept it’s not entirely incoherent. It does point to something.
If we are going to talk about ‘systemic racism’, I suggest that one looks at the definition of ‘institutional racism’ that was made in the Macpherson Report on the killing of Stephen Lawrence in London in 1993:
‘The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping.’
‘Systemic racism’ us the term usually used now. I prefer ‘institutional racism’, since ‘systemic’ – to me at least – suggests some kind of system-wide intention or behind things, an intention that does not necessarily exist (though there is certainly conscious bigotry on the part of some the bad actors involved), and that the ‘system’ has been designed to be racist. One might want to add the words ‘or organisations’ after ‘The collective failure of an organisation’.
Sir William Macpherson and his team were certainly able to find strong evidence of institutional racism, but perhaps Coel disagrees that they did so? I am frankly uninterested in Coel’s hair-splitting when at the basis of it there appears not to be an interest in truth but a liking for the right-wing trope that was helpfully trotted out by Elon Musk the other day in support of Scott Dilbert’s rant: he tweeted that the media and elite academic institutions are racist against white and Asian people.
I note also that ‘the California Civil Rights Department, formerly known as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, sued Tesla after a three-year investigation, alleging widespread racist discrimination at Tesla factories and facilities across the state.
‘The CRD alleged that Tesla has kept Black workers in lower-level roles at the company even when they have the skills and experience to be promoted to more senior roles; assigned Black workers more demanding, dangerous and dirty work in their facilities; and retaliated against Black workers who complained formally about what they endured, including racist slurs used by managers.’
Well that’s interesting.
Tim Harris, I find that interesting. I know Coel will dispute my example I’m about to give because it was in the past (anything I did before this exact minute are, by definition, in the past, but I will concede that the 1980s were a little more in the past than 2 seconds ago). When I was working in Oklahoma, at the Department of Human Services, study after study showed that the department was meeting equal opportunity standards; the number of black workers met or exceeded their proportion in the population.
My boss (the only woman in middle management) was suspicious. She undertook a study (which I was actually the one doing) to find out how those numbers worked. Thanks to her diligence (and mine), we discovered that, while there were quite a number of black employees, something like 95% of them were in shit jobs – some of them literally, changing diapers at state schools. They were paid less even than clerical employees, who were mostly white women, and way below upper level employees, who were ALL white men. (I say that because my boss was a middle management token woman, and her supervisor was a middle management token black man – the only woman and the only person of color in the administration at the time).
This didn’t get better. When I moved to the Disability Division, they announced one year that the fifteen people they were hiring would all be white men, because we were low on our quota of white men. Anyone looking around the office would be astonished, because white men were everywhere you looked. It was a sleight of hand trick. We didn’t have anywhere close to equity in our professional staff; it was almost strictly white. There were two black examiners, one woman, one man. They were counting everyone – clerical and janitorial – in the quota of black, and in the quota of women.
When they counted the white men, they only looked at the examiners (a professional level job, but not supervisory). There, we were low on white men, being almost completely white women. That was not by discrimination or design. The simple truth, when I started, they hired as many white men as they did anyone else. Any of them who made it through probation (which was only one of them) were promoted within the first year.
The white men were all high muckety mucks with high salaries. The non-white non-men were…not. Lest you wonder why men didn’t make it through probation, I think it’s because most of them had the attitude that they were above this, At least, all the ones in my class were…and, as I said, if they did make it, they were quickly promoted.
In short, many studies are done in a superficial way that hides more information than it shows. Numerous black people came into HR when I worked there; the only ones they hired were those who weren’t qualified for professional level jobs…except for the one token Personnel Manager. As for the women, most of the degreed women there were stuck in clerical level jobs. If they were women of color, they were emptying trash cans and sweeping floors.
I should add that one might call the easy use of institutional or systemic racism as constituting in itself a reason for some failing a kind of category mistake, since it is not a reason in itself but a term that encompasses a number of factors, which include both the kind of ‘unwitting prejudice’ and ‘ignorance’ that Macpherson draws attention to, as well as racist beliefs and policies, and the willingness to act upon them, and the interaction among those factors.
@What a Maroon:
OK, I’ve now read it. It is basically theology, a recitation of catechism. It doesn’t attempt to supply evidence behind its claims.
I added emphasis around “has been shown”. No, it has not been shown. The article just assumes it. The article just leaps again and again from “there is a disparity” to “it was caused by racism”.
They don’t even attempt to dig into actual causes, consider alternative explanations, and then show that racism is indeed the cause. This is what you have to do if you’re doing actual social science and not just reciting dogma.
Now it may be that some of this evidence-supplying is done in the cited literature (though I looked at a couple of them and it wasn’t), but as presented this paper doesn’t even attempt to do what it claims to do.
See my comments above about this. The paper doesn’t even mention the higher rates of violent crime among black Americans as being part of the explanation! This is ludicrous. It’s not even an attempt at a serious analysis.
Yes, blacks are 35% of those killed by police (cf 13% of the population), but they are also responsible for 35% of violent crime (and about 50% of homicides).
And that’s not just based on police/court data (in case you want to argue that that is biased), it’s corroborated by experience-of-crime surveys that are nothing to do with the police.
Similarly, the paper complains that black kids are expelled from school at a higher rate, and calls this “systemic racism”. It doesn’t even ask the question of whether black kids misbehave at a higher rate. This is not even an attempt at a serious analysis.
There is pretty much zero evidence in that paper, and more-or-less no attempt to present any. Feel free to dig into the cited works and find some actual evidence and present it here, if you want to.
Just thought I’d reiterate that, early on, I asked whether anyone could point to actual Tweets where Musk “defended Scott Adams” or “blast[ed] media organizations for dropping his comic strip”, as the Washington Post alleged.
Do few people care that once-reputable media organisations such as the Washington Post just routinely and deliberately mispresent facts to fit their agenda? (As does at least one poster here.)
If Coel is so exercised about whether or not there is evidence of institutional or systemic racism, why does not he not do a bit of genuine research by himself? He might begin by reading the Macpherson Report.
What kind of societal conditions produce these crime statistics? One where racism has been eliminated? Is that the “little evidence for” that shows how racism has disappeared?
Is the statement “this is how black people are” as a rebuttal to claims of racism, itself free from racial bias?
@twiliter:
See my comment #67 where I addressed exactly this. If you are claiming that the higher crime rate among blacks is itself caused by “racism” then go ahead and make your case, including specifying the mechanism by which this works.
And we know that the mechanism cannot be “greater poverty” because we can control for that, and the disparities do not go away.
If we compare cohorts of black-American 18-yr-olds with Asian-American 18-yr-olds, and controlling for income, then Asian-American 18-yr-olds have very low rates of crime (lower than among whites) and high rates of academic achievement (indeed higher than among whites). The black American 18-yr-olds have crime rates a factor 10 higher and much worse levels of academic achievement.
What do you think causes that? Waving airily at “racism” is a non-answer. (And, no, it’s not about school spending, which is not that different.)
Note that this is actually an important question, one that is central to much of public policy in the US today (and the MSM will perhaps not get away with avoiding it for ever).
Or evidence that racism is no longer a factor could be argued for. Either way.
Stating the fact that there are racists in society, and some of these racists are in positions of power is not “waving airily,” and it has yet to be explained away.
I don’t argue that historical racism and it’s legacy are a large part of it, but it seems that blaming a group of people in a more or less homogenous society for their own plight is a problem in itself. (And by homogenous I mean occupying the same patch of ground and subject to the same government.)
And my second question?
@twiliter:
This is a somewhat vague reply to my question about disparate rates of crime and academic achievement of 18-yr-olds. How are you suggesting this works? Biased teachers marking black kids down unfairly, so they don’t pass exams? Is that the actual mechanism that you are proposing? If not, what? If you put some substance into your claim then we can discuss the evidence for it.
Again, this does matter. If we’re going to rectify such disparities, then understanding the mechanism is crucial to correcting it.
If we merely bewail and virtue signal about such disparities, then they won’t be fixed. And that does not provide a path to equality, it provides a path to ongoing disparities covered over by quotas enforced by increasingly authoritarian DEI commissars.
Just a comment:
I do get frustrated by people’s avoidance of discussing these issues on the evidence and total lack of interest in mechanisms, prefering just to blame everything on “systemic racism”, as though that in itself is helpful.
It’s as though, if your car broke down, and you called in a mechanic to find what’s wrong with it, the mechanic replies: “It’s car-breakdown syndrome”, so you ask: “So what needs to be done?”, and the mechanic replies: “We need to cure the car-breakdown syndrome” but gives no detail on doing that other than repeating that this instance of car-breakdown syndrome needs to be fixed.
That answer is not strictly wrong (a broken-down car can indeed be said to have “car-breakdown syndrome”), it’s just completely unhelpful in getting the car working again.
For that we need a much more specific diagnosis. OK, maybe there are 6 different things wrong with the car, but we then need a list of 6 specific fixes. Just saying it has “car-breakdown syndrome” gets you nowhere.
twiliter @ 75:
Absolutely, the idea of systemic racism can be useful. It’s just that in order to be useful, our conception of it has to meet certain desiderata; e.g., fallibility and utility. If the way we conceive of systemic racism didn’t give us these, then we need to conceive of it differently.
It’s tempting to use a broad/metaphorical interpretation of “system”, but doing so undermines the purpose of talking about systemic racism in the first place. We end up with two entailments:
i. if systemic racism, then racism
ii. if racism, then systemic racism
The first we know because systemic racism is a subset of racism. The second results from the above syllogism. The problem should be obvious: racism and systemic racism are now logically equivalent!
This fails the fallibility test and the utility test. In order to maintain fallibility or utility, we must reject some aspect of the syllogism. The most obvious choice would be 2, the notion that people are part of the system for the purposes of our analysis. Without 2, we aren’t entitled to infer 3, but we regain both fallibility and utility, giving the concept of systemic racism real descriptive and explanatory power.
But we can’t have that power if we insist on holding onto the notion that people are part of the system. (At least within the context of analyzing systemic racism.) We can’t correct our misdiagnoses without fallibility, so we have to abandon the offending premise.
I’m a little busy today, but good points @86,87&88. Briefly I will say that I agree with the idea that ‘systemic racism’ is not simply quantified. I do argue that racist attitudes are able to be identified. If the problem comes from ignorance, fear, or indoctrination, then that’s where we may look for solutions. I don’t think we’ll find them by restating the problem from different angles, or denying that a problem exists. Thanks for the ideas, I’ll most likely have some time later to reply more fully.
Coel,
Of course the article I cited doesn’t detail all the evidence for the claims it makes. It’s a literature review; it provides citations to other work. That’s why I said it’s a good place to start. You’re in academics, right? You should know how this works.
As an example, in the excerpt I quoted, the authors say this (which you overlooked in your response):
The provide a citation (that number 27) to this article, which includes this table. From the table, you can calculate that about 29% of Blacks killed by police in the time period studied were unarmed, as opposed to just 19% of Whites.
So, there’s one piece of evidence for you. You can follow the links to further evidence if you like, but don’t just dismiss a whole field of academic literature as “theology”.
@What a Maroon:
Yes, I know how this works. But literature views should indeed summarise the actual evidence. Anyhow, well done for at least pointing to something:
First, these numbers (for both races) seem way too high. For example, the Washington Post database (link), which is widely regarded as pretty good on this topic, has only 6% as “unarmed” (7% if you exclude “unknowns”), there’s a button on the database for this. So, I don’t trust that table without looking into this way more …
But, let’s suppose that it is true that, of those killed by police, the ratio of armed/unarmed is different for blacks and whites. You cannot just leap from a disparity like this to assuming a cause! Yes, police bias could be one possible cause. Or it could behavioural differences between the two groups.
Indeed, we know that average behaviours with regard to the police are very different for different racial groups, because we know that the overall crime rate is very different! And, if the overall crime rate is very different, why would we expect the armed/unarmed ratio to be the same?
You need to ask this question before making any conclusion. Neither the review paper you linked to nor the paper it cites actually asks this question. They leap straight from “there is a disparity” to “this is systemic racism”.
Coel,
They used the Mapping Police Violence Dataset, and looked at data from 1/1/2013-10/13/2016. You can access the data here and recreate it yourself; you’ll notice that they include a field for “wapo_armed”. One difference between the datasets is that the Post has more “armed” categories, including toy weapons, staplers, broomsticks, etc., which all are coded as “Unarmed” in the MPV dataset. But even in the Post dataset, for the period covered there were 528 incidents in which they list “No Object”.
We would expect the ratio to be the same because that’s the null hypothesis. If it’s not the same, then you have to explain the difference. And regardless of the overall crime rate, we can presume that somewhere close to 100% of the people in the dataset were suspected of committing a crime, regardless of race, so “Black people commit more crimes” doesn’t seem like a likely explanation for that discrepancy.
@What a Maroon:
That’s a misuse of the concept of null hypothesis, which is about whether it can be shown to be rejected, but is not something to be accepted until shown otherwise.
Let’s make a comparison. 20-yr-olds have much higher car-accident rates than 50-yr-olds. And we know that that’s because 20-yr-olds have (on average) different driving behaviour than 50-yr-olds.
Given that, would we expect the car-accident ratios “caused by them”/”caused by other party” or ratios of “caused by speeding”/”not caused by speeding” to be the same for 20-yr-olds and for 50-yr-olds?
No, we wouldn’t. We’d expect that the same different-behaviours that are causing the overall difference in accident rates could or would also be changing the ratios of types of accident.
In the same way, if we know that a group has very different on-average behaviour with respect to the police, with much higher rates of interactions that result in death, then we would not expect ratios such as armed/unarmed to necessarily remain the same.
But, the more basic point is that we need to ask this sort of question in order to draw sensible conclusions. This is a topic of major importance for public policy, and nowadays there are legions of academics employed to study this stuff, and yet the evidence is poor quality with hardly anyone doing proper investigations.
You’re right that I misspoke about the null hypothesis. What I meant to say was that the null hypothesis is that there would be no difference in the ratio of unarmed to armed people killed by race. Given that there is a difference, and a large one at that, it needs to be explained. You think that the explanation is that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites; I disagree.
At this point, I don’t see any reason to continue the conversation.
@What a Maroon:
My suggestion was a bit more general: that the same differences in behaviour that are driving the very different rates of “getting shot by police” are also altering armed/unarmed ratios.
And I don’t claim to actually know that that’s the explanation, but nor has it been ruled out.
How about this:
We know that men get killed by police at about 10 times the rate of women.
Would you expect the armed/unarmed ratio to be the same for both men and women?
(Presuming, for the purposes of this question, that the police react the same to men and women.)
NiV @88 I’ll accept that analysis. I still think I’m rather oversimplifying things, but I do want to get at the meat of the argument, so to say, if we can collectively agree on what the argument is. I think there are some disagreements about what we’re talking about. The replies should address the questions or assertions in some kind of alignment. Otherwise we are discussing at cross purposes.
That being said, I’m pretty sure it was my assertion that racism lives in people and their attitudes toward people of races other than their own, due to the simple fact that *the infrastructure* of whatever ‘system’ we are talking about can be seen as mostly indifferent, absent the people affected by, using, subject to, or implementing said infrastucture, assuming the infrastructure in itself is deemed relatively fair. The body of law should theoretically be applied (in perfect execution) to everyone to whom it applies (which is nigh impossible), but if overt racism has been mostly eliminated in law, then we have to look elsewhere, like how the laws are executed (by people). I don’t think you can remove the human actions in executing justice from the system of justice (again, if that’s what we’re talking about). This is why I stress this assertion. Where there are no racists there is no racism. People write laws and make policy. I see it as a human equation. Coel charges me with vagueness, to which I plead guilty as charged. Sociology and psychology (the areas which I think this issue is properly addressed) are not exact sciences. Racism isn’t easily quantifiable either, as it lives in people’s minds. We see it in actions or expressions. This is hardly an exact science. We don’t see much of it in policy or law anymore, say the last 30 years or so (in the US anyway), because of the awareness of racism and the subsequent elimination of it in policy and law (for the most part). We can see it in people’s attitudes and actions fairly clearly. QED Scott Adams.
If I believe Scott Adams is a racist, the justification for this belief lies in his expression of his opinions. You can’t measure that in gravity, or space-time, or statistics or other mathematical equations, but only through behavior and actions (including speech acts). If I think Elon Musk is complicit as a racist apologist re: Scott Adams views, it’s because his very brief response was a claim of reverse racism and media bias. I agree with Coel about the spin put on this by the WaPo. Musk didn’t actually agree with Scott Adams. However the charges of reverse racism (in Musk’s response) can’t be dismissed as not racist. He didn’t need to agree with Adams, his statement can be evaluated exclusive of it’s reference to Adams’ remarks.
Coel @87 I like this comparison, it’s fun. If the car has a problem, at least we are acknowledging the car has a problem. That’s a good start. First we have to see that there is a problem, and not say it will fix itself, or the problem is trivial. It is however, completely beside the point to complain about the white or Asian neighbor’s car’s problems if we intend to find out what *our* car’s problem is. It’s also unhelpful to say that because the problem was made known by people who’s opinions we reject, that there isn’t a problem.
@Twiliter:
I’m getting slightly lost by the layers of metaphor here, but:
No-one is denying that there is a problem. There are big disparities in (to give two indicators) rates of academic achievement and crime rates between adolescents and young adults of different races in the US. That is causing big tensions and is a big problem. We thus need to figure out the actual causes and then see if we can fix and rectify them. I don’t think that the standard answers usually given by the left (“racism”, systemic or otherwise, and “poverty”) are that explanatory or helpful.
Coel @98 I agree wholeheartedly with that. Simply decrying racism has no explanatory power.
Yeah no shit but that’s a caricature.
This is why it might help to actually read something on the subject, but oh no, no need for that, because you already know you don’t disagree, so why bother with the pesky details.
Maybe, just maybe, the long long long multi-generational history of vindictive punishment for the crime of being enslaved has done so much damage that it’s not as simple as just pulling your socks up and doing your homework.
Indeed, and I would say the first step is to recognize racism as it happens, not in the media, but in your own life. It’s easy to see rich guys who live in insulated gated communities, who make racist comments that are reported in the media as racism, but this doesn’t solve anything. The racism that harms people doesn’t have to be high profile. Scott Adams’ comments probably only affected people’s reactions to him. It didn’t ‘fix’ anything. However, turning a blind eye to discrimination and letting it happen because you’re too ignorant to see it when it’s happening is where the problem actually lies. Musk’s reaction is particularly offensive due to his influential platform. Here is his opportunity to say these comments are racist and unacceptable, yet he blurbs about reverse racism and media bias. Tell me this guy isn’t a fecking idiot. Oh, and tell me in 280 characters or less FFS.
@Ophelia:
But kids born in the 2000s experienced none of that history! Kids are born anew, inheritance is Darwinian not Lamarkian.
And, further, your statement gives no account of the mechanism by which today’s kids are harmed by the history, and thus gives no pointers to fixing things!
If you want to argue something like: that long, long history of ill-treatment has led to a black-American culture that rejects anything associated with being “white” and thus rejects academic achievement, and that culture is then passed on to kids, who then don’t see academic achievement at school as something they should strive for, then go ahead and argue for this, because then we’d actually be diagnosing the problem in the here-and-now and getting pointers to what sort of things would fix it.
If, alternatively, you want to argue for some other mechanism, then go ahead and argue for it. (We know it is not just about income level, since we can control for that variable when making comparisons.)
Just pointing to a long history of oppression isn’t an explanation in itself.
To see that, let’s consider another group who have suffered centuries upon centuries of oppression in Christendom, leading up to the “there are no words bad enough” crime of the Holocaust (which is also vastly more recent than US slavery). Does that history mean that Jewish kids born in the 2000s struggle to pass math exams compared to kids from groups with no such history? No, it doesn’t.
It goes on and on, doesn’t it?
‘This is a topic of major importance for public policy, and nowadays there are legions of academics employed to study this stuff, and yet the evidence is poor quality with hardly anyone doing proper investigations,’ writes Coel above, without providing any evidence that this is the case (while, of course, always asking others to provide evidence and dismissing it when they do). If Coel is so concerned about these matters and so critical of those who are addressing them: if he knows so much about these matters, is as morally upright as he pretends to be, and is as gifted intellectually as he likes to think he is, then why doesn’t he do something about it himself? He might actually do some good. But, no, instead of conducting some investigations himself, he prefers to drone on and on on the internet. I wonder what his motives are. I wonder if he even knows what they are.
To begin with, though, he might get out of his box and read The Macpherson Report. He might look into the question of racism in the (London) Metropolitan Police. He might look into the matter of racial gerrymandering in the USA. He might look into the disaster in Flint, Michigan. He might look into a number of things in what Henry James called ‘the great shambles of human life’ — the mess that is reality. But, no, he will do none of this. He prefers a studied abstraction: a sterile and simplified present. It’s a safe place for him. He is deeply unserious, more interested in scoring points than anything else.
He appears to be very exercised about maths exams. And in this connexion he brings in a comparison between Black Americans (and perhaps Black people elsewhere) and Jewish people He appears to know as little about the history of Jewish people as he knows about the history of slavery or the history of serfdom in Britain. If he took the trouble to study a bit of history, he would find that the experience of oppressed groups can be very different. Oppressed groups are not just some sort of undifferentiated oppressed mass, as he appears to suppose. And in these very different histories, he would find some possible answers as to why certain things in the present are as they are.
He might even even read James Baldwin’s wonderfully intelligent books.
It seems that, for Coel, the mere abolition of slavery in the USA in 1865 wiped the slate happily clean. Of course, it did not. There were the massacres, the murders of Black politicians, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan… and Black Americans were finally, after years of struggle and suffering, given the right to vote in 1965, well within my lifetime, and twenty years after the end of the Second World War. No doubt Coel thinks that the passing of the Voting Rights Act wiped clean the slate whereon the history of those years between the abolition of slavery and the passing of the Voting Rights Act was recorded. All those slates! Wiped clean one after another, so that we may enter into the artifice of the present where bad things have disappeared, or should have; and if they haven’t it is due to the incorrigibility of certain groups of people and has nothing to do with us.
.
Scott Adams (Dilbert) on the subject:
‘As you know, I’ve been identifying as Black for a while. Years now, because I like to be on the winning team.
‘And I like to help. And I thought, if you help the Black community, that’s sort of the biggest lever, you can find the biggest benefit. … So I like to focus a lot of my life resources on helping Black Americans. So much so that I started identifying as Black, just to be on the team I was helping. …
‘I think it makes no sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. … That’s no longer a rational impulse. I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America, because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. I’ve been doing it all my life, and the only outcome is that I’ve been called a racist. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re white. … Don’t even think it’s worth trying.’
What ungrateful buggers all those inferior people are! We try to help, but…
Tim @ 103 – No no that’s not how it works – Coel gets to tell us what to read but Coel doesn’t have to read anything we urge him to read, because he Doesn’t Disagree.
@Tim Harris:
Everything you say about is misrepresentation. Every time you say “it seems that”, or equivalent, you are deliberately and dishonestly misrepresenting me.
@Opheila:
And that’s true, I don’t disagree! Things were indeed very bad in the past. You are welcome to keep recommending readings that demonstrate that Things Were Very Bad in the Past, and I’ll keep agreeing that things were indeed very bad in the past!
Is no-one interested in the situation and experience of kids growing up today? Surely that’s an important matter for public policy?
And a little something from Wikpedia:
‘The lynching of Michael Donald in Mobile, Alabama, on March 21, 1981, was one of the last reported lynchings in the United States.[1][2] Several Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members beat and killed Michael Donald, a 19-year-old African-American, and hung his body from a tree. One perpetrator, Henry Hays, was executed by electric chair in 1997, while another, James Knowles, was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty and testifying against Hays. A third man was convicted as an accomplice and also sentenced to life in prison, and a fourth was indicted but died before his trial could be completed.
‘Hays’s execution was the first in Alabama since 1913 for a white-on-black crime. It was the only execution of a KKK member during the 20th century for the murder of an African American.[3] Donald’s mother, Beulah Mae Donald, brought a civil suit for wrongful death against the United Klans of America (UKA), to which the attackers belonged. In 1987 a jury awarded her damages of $7 million, which bankrupted the organization. This set a precedent for civil legal action for damages against other racist hate groups.’
Michael Donald was studying at a technical college, which probably involved some maths, and working at the local newspaper, the Mobile Press Register.
If you dislike being misrepresented so much, Coel, I suggest you stop misrepresenting yourself.
And if the murder of Michael Donald was perpetrated too long ago to be relevant for you, Coel, there is always the murder of Ahmaud Arbery on February 23, 2020, and the attempted cover-up by the local authorities. But perhaps that is old history for you, as of course must be the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012 (and his killer’s getting off scot-free) and Dylan Roof’s mass shooting of Black members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015. Please tell us, where, precisely, does your cut-off point between present and past come?
@107 and elsewhere… So if you were born in 1999 or before you experienced the legacy of racism, but if you were born in 2001 you didn’t? Did racists vanish? Are black people born after 2000 no longer black?
Help me understand.
‘Kids are born anew, inheritance is Darwinian not Lamarkian.,’ says Coel. That is a silly half-truth. Human children are not like, let us say (to choose a sufficiently ‘low’ form of life – not that I have any liking for the categories of ‘high’ and ‘low’), the larvae of cicadas. Children are usually brought up for many years by their parents, well or ill (and no doubt Coel will be eager to inform us how bad the parents who belong to certain groups are); they are born also into particular social situations, as members of one grouping or another, into wealth, into poverty, or into something moderately comfortable in between; their parents have experience, that strange thing called memory that has to do with the past, and knowledge of the situation they are in; and these things are passed on to their children – of course their children have to experience things for themselves, but their parents’ influence is hardly negligible. The present is never a blank page.
That Charleston shooting…I read up on the murdered people for a post here, and it was an excruciatingly painful task. They welcomed Roof to the church when he came in, and urged him to move up and sit with them.
@Tim
There is no cut off-point between past and present.
The past does indeed have very big and very real consequences for the present.
I never said or implied otherwise.
The idea that I said otherwise is your silly (and deliberate?) misrepresentation.
You exemplify everything that is wrong with discourse today. That is, if someone is advocating something that you disagree with, you just personally attack them and misrepresent what they said.
It’s so much easier attacking a strawman, isn’t it? Saves you having to produce an actual counter-argument.
Thus, for example on another topic, it’s so much easier to dismiss “terfs” as bigoted and hateful, rather than having to produce an actual counter-argument.
Yes, it must have been an excruciatingly painful task. I was appalled by it – as I was by what happened to Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery. It is very easy for some people to forget, in an abstract cloud of supposed knowing and statistics, that it is real people who suffer and die.
I suggest you re-read your previous callow posts, Coel.
Tim @115 Yes and just hearing the accounts via wherever the information comes from is one thing, but I’m here to tell you that I have encountered more than a few racists in my time, and not just people talking shit. I could share a few stories, but I’m fairly sure anecdotal evidence would lack the academic rigour that Coel requires. It’s just so obvious to me because of my experience that racism is alive and well. Today. Right now.
@Twiliter:
OK, I’ll take a deep breath. And I’m going to presume that this is indeed a genuine request for me to explain. So maybe I have not been clear.
Let’s see if I can lay this out in steps:
1) The past in the US was very bad for black people.
2) The legacy of this is quite likely having very real and damaging effects on black youths today.
3) If it is having very real and damaging effects on black youths today then there needs to be a mechanism by which this is occurring! (Since humans are not Lamarkian.)
4) We need to know what that mechanism is in order to fix it (just as we need to know specifically what is wrong with a car in order to fix it; “car-breakdown syndrome” is unhelpful).
5) Specifically, we can ask: what are the actual specific reasons for why (to take two indicators) black-American kids have vastly higher crime rates (factor of 10 compared to Asian-Americans) and vastly worse academic performance. This question is crucial to the US today.
6) One possibility is that ongoing racism by white people is directly harming black youths today. If so, the remedy is stopping white people from being racist.
7) Another possbility is that the legacy of racism has left blacks with much worse economic starting points. If so, the remedy would be financial redress.
8) A third possibility is that the legacy of past racism has led to current black culture rejecting anything associated with being “white”, such that black youths tend to reject school and academic success and laws and the police, and thus current black-youth culture is leading to the very different outcomes compared to (say) Asian-American youths, who have the opposite culture. If this is the prime mechanism then the remedy is to fix black culture.
9) We need to know which of the above mechanisms (6, 7, 8, or other possibilities) are actually important in producing the disparate outcomes, because the remedies for each are very different!
10) There is little evidence that (6) is still true today. And we know that (7) is not the answer because we can control for family income in comparing black-Americans with Asian-Americans. Way too much of today’s “anti-racist” discourse just assumes a mixture of 6 and 7, when the evidence is against those ideas!
11) We need a straightfoward and evidence-based discussion of such issues — without personal attacks, misrepresentation and strawmanning, thank you very much Tim — because understanding the mechanisms is necessary in order to fix things!
12) Just repeating mantras of “systemic racism” sand avoiding discussing actual specific causes is as unhelpful as adopting “car-breakdown syndrome” as an explanation and refusing to enquite further.
And, lastly, no, I really don’t think I’ve been unclear on any of these things up thread, but c’est la vie.
Here again, there is much evidence pointed to for your (6 in this very commentary. None of which you’ve accepted (your (10 is a further dismissal). Do you think Scott Adams’ expression of racist ideas means he is not a racist? And further, do you think he’s the only one, or part of a trivial minority of whites? And finally, do you think racism as it is expressed and acted upon by whites has no effect on the black population?
I mean finding the mechanism and attempting a solution is all fine and well, but I think it puts the cart ahead of the horse if you think racism in whites is insignificant.
The bolded part is true for our chromosomal makeup, but chromosomes aren’t everything. Stress during pregnancy can have an effect on fetal development, and so can be considered Lamarckian. And those effects can be lifelong. So there’s one mechanism for you.
How about something a good deal more complicated than the dismissive “the legacy of past racism has led to current black culture rejecting anything associated with being “’white'” – like being thrown (in the good old existentialist sense) into a world where people like you were enslaved for three centuries and then extra-legally enslaved for a century more and none of this has ever been redressed, with the result that most people like you lack generational wealth, connections, clear paths to success and the like? What about the possibility that that would fuck you up? What about the possibility that that would get in the way of your success in school and thus your success as an adult? What if the whole ugly picture saps your motivation from the beginning in ways that aren’t all that easy to quantify or produce evidence for?
Maybe that’s not it at all. But if it’s not, why isn’t it?
Something else that’s disturbing to me is that a lot of people can’t even recognize their own racist attiudes. If what Scott Adams said is a solid 10 on the racistometer, then saying that black people commit more crime because that’s just the way that they are registers at least an 8.
@Twiliter:
I think that stuff such as Adams’s opinions on this have relatively little effect on 18-yr-olds ability to pass academic exams and on their crime rate.
Part of that is that, nowadays, it is a minority view that is not accepted by the mainstream. The fact that, as a result, no paper is now carrying Dilbert shows that.
Nobody said “because that’s just the way that they are”. And the fact that the violent crime rate among black-Americans is 10 times that of Asian-Americans is just a fact. Ignoring reality is not going to get you anywhere.
Indeed, fairly remarkably, the current homicide rate committed by black-American women is higher than that by Asian-American men.
Pretty sure I was the one that brought up incarceration rates in the first place, so I’m not ignoring the facts. In your Asian example, I’m not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make, but the history of Asian immigration to the US is a very different one from the history of African immigration.
Of course what Scott Adams said has little effect in and of itself, but this doesn’t entail a “small minority” either, most racists aren’t brazen enough to do their thing in public, unless it’s behind a computer screen.
@Ophelia:
Absolutely, we should indeed be considering this sort of thing!
But disparity in generational wealth is something we can control for (by comparing to other racial groups with the same economic status).
As for connections, well, a lot of Asian-American families came to America elatively recently, starting with few connections in America. So have other recent immigrant groups (including those from Africa).
As for clear paths to success, there has been rampant affirmative action for decades now.
So yes, we should indeed consider these sort of possibiltiies, but we should evaluate them on the evidence.
Yes, maybe indeed. And that possibility is much along the lines that I was suggesting. Now, suppose that indeed is a major factor. What, then, do we do about it? How do you re-motivate them?
Stats seem to show that Asian-American kids spend about 3 times as much time doing homework as black-African kids. Maybe that is indeed largely a matter of motivation.
What do we then do about it? (That’s an entirely serious question.)
Do we treat it as a priority to fix the demotivation (if so, how?), or do we (perhaps) say that, since it’s not their fault that they’re demotivated, we should let them progress with lower academic standards, admit them to university with lower academic standards, then graduate them with lower academic standards and then insist that employers take them in equal proportion, even if they can’t actually do the job?
This has been an absolutely fascinating conversation. Thanks, all.
Re “what do we then do about it” and “rampant affirmative action for decades now” and the comparison to Asian-Americans, some thoughts:
Identifying or recognizing a problem does not require the simultaneous creation of a solution. I have several friends who tend to jump to demanding proposed solutions very quickly, and it grates terribly.
Affirmative action is a partial solution with its own set of problems. Whether it partially worked or not, that is not proof that the problems it was intended to help resolve don’t exist. (What “it” is might be vastly different from program to program, also.)
Asian-Americans are different groups of people, with different cultures and different histories. That people embedded in those different situations might have different problems is not at all surprising.
I should note at this point that I disagree with trying to find single-point-of-failure problems, like poverty or motivation or discrimination. Lots of different factors contribute, even if other groups of people had one or more of those same problems and did better.
Lastly, re inheritance is Darwinian rather than Lamarckian, that isn’t true (as noted by others, but I’ll comment anyway). Look at all the laws regarding inheritance of assets, and you’ll find that people can pass along assets they accumulated in life and were not born with. Look at cultural inheritance, and you’ll see culture develops and accumulates and gets passed along. Surely you aren’t suggesting that the only characteristics of interest are biological.
Coel@125
Or maybe it’s that the black kids don’t have as much time to do homework.
Maybe they’re busy looking after younger siblings while their parents work . One can do some homework while looking after siblings, but you have to stop periodically to check on them. One may have to feed them, or put them to bed. Overall, it will take longer to get the homework done while looking after siblings than if you didn’t have those interruptions and distractions.
Or those kids have jobs, so their families have enough money to keep roofs over their heads and food on the table and pay utility bills. Can’t do homework while on the clock.
Or they have to walk or take a bus to get where they need to go. That can eat up quite a bit of time. Can’t do homework while walking. It’s not easy doing homework on a bus, especially of you need to write.
There are only so many hours in a day. And those kids need to eat and sleep, too.
‘What do we then do about it?’ asks Coel. Who is ‘we’? Ranks and ranks of Coels? Nice, liberal, well-meaning white people? Does ‘we’ include right-wing Republicans? White supremacists? Does it include non-Caucasian people? Since Coel has raised the question that he finds the most pressing, why does he not have the courage to come out and say what he thinks should be done? For, of course, in his meandering way, as he tries to trap others into his little box, Coel is back to his only obsession, which he has been hinting at throughout: ‘affirmative action’ in academic admissions and in employment.
Iknklast, above, spoke of her experience of working at an institution, the Department of Human Services in Oklahoma, where qualified black people were simply not hired; and there is that court case involving Tesla:
‘The California Civil Rights Department, formerly known as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, sued Tesla after a three-year investigation, alleging widespread racist discrimination at Tesla factories and facilities across the state.
‘The CRD alleged that Tesla has kept Black workers in lower-level roles at the company even when they have the skills and experience to be promoted to more senior roles; assigned Black workers more demanding, dangerous and dirty work in their facilities; and retaliated against Black workers who complained formally about what they endured, including racist slurs used by managers.’
@Sackbut:
I agree that lots of factors will contribute, and that any discussion tends to get over-simplified. But, we do need to try to identify the most important factors in order to try to fix them.
Of course not! That’s my whole point! Ruling out some factors helps to focus on the ones that do matter.
Sometimes people talk about “black experience of slavery”, but no-one alive today experienced that slavery. So, if that experience is having ongoing effects, then it is most likely through the effect on black culture.
And it is understandable if that history has led to a culture that then rejects things associated with being “white”, such as maths, science, and working hard at school. Indeed, the African American History museum put out a now-notorious poster saying that science, ideas of objectivity and objective truth where all aspects of “whiteness”. So were “hard work is the key to success”, “plan for the future” and “delayed gratification”.
This then leads to the idea that math is “racist” and needs to be “decolonised” and that black kids shouldn’t even be trying to do this stuff.
In other words, today’s “anti-racist” rhetoric is reinforcing exactly the attitudes that will perpetuate black lack of success! They are reinforcing attitudes that are exactly the opposite attitudes that Asian-American kids tend to adopt.
Today’s “anti-racist” rhetoric is thus doing the opposite of what you would want to be doing if you were actually trying to fix the problem, rather than just virtue-signal about it.
All along I’ve been trying to focus in on and identify the actual proximate causes that result in today’s kids born in the 2000s having wildly disparate academic outcomes.
Because only by understanding those proximate mechanisms can we then fix things. Do I really write so unclearly that this theme hasn’t been obvious?
Black-Americans are 13% of the population, and so Harvard ensures that the fraction admitted doesn’t drop below that figure. If they admitted students purely on academic merit alone that would drop to 1%. That’s a huge discrepancy.
Going forward, we can either just ensure equal outcomes by quotas, enforced by increasingly authoritarian DEI commissars, complete with taboos about questioning the system and ostracisation of anyone who does. Or we can try to fix the problem, but that will require understanding it.
@Karen the chemist:
Yes, maybe. So we can then investigate these things. Why would this be different for black kids than for Asian-American kids?
Well, it is not family income because we have statistics for that and can control for it in comparisons.
[A lot of Asian-American families are recent immigrants from relatively poor countries; China, for example, is still much poorer than the US. Thus Asian-American families tend to start with little. Their academic success is not about family income or intergenerational wealth.]
So maybe it is something else? Well, Asian-American kids are three times as likely to be living with two parents than black-American kids. And yes, living in one-adult families could will put more child-rearing responsibilities on older kids, agreed. So let’s discuss these things, and try to identify what the actual causes are and so figure out what needs to be rectified.
Coel on being told that his claim – that inheritance in human beings is Darwinian – is false: ‘Of course not! That’s my whole point! Ruling out some factors helps to focus on the ones that do matter.’
Slippery customer, ain’t he?
@Tim,
Once again I note a post that is merely a personal attack.
My claim that biological inheritance is Darwinian rather than Lamarkian is NOT false, it’s true. (Processes such as the Maroon pointed to are weak and short-lasting.)
And the fact that I was talking about biological inheritance is obvious from the context, which was:
“Kids are born anew, inheritance is Darwinian not Lamarkian.”
Note the word “born”. *After* they are born they are *then* influenced by culture. That was indeed the whole point of what I was saying. Indeed, that very comment then went on to consider the role of culture! (And note that I suggested that role of culture way back in my first post on this, #24.)
Do you really need this sort of thing pointing out to you in baby steps, Tim? Or are you quite deliberately misrepresenting?
OK, I do admit to getting frustrated by the sheer perversity of the replies to me (especially when accompanied by snide nastiness).
Trying to make this as clear as I know how:
Ophelia’s suggestion was:
… such that today’s black kids are “fucked up” and “sapped of motivation”.
If that is true (and yes, it may well be!), then, since kids born in the 2000s did not experience that themselves, the only plausible mechanism for this ongoing-effects-of-past-racism hypothesis, by which black kids are “fucked up” and “sapped of motivation”, is through today’s black culture, which is causing kids to reject attitudes that would lead to success.
Now, if that is indeed the case (and it may well be!), then the fix is to rectify those aspects of black culture that amount to the proximate cause of the ongoing harm.
However, that is roughly the opposite of what today’s “anti-racists” are saying and doing.
I tend to agree with Coel about some of the tactics used to rectify racism (by anti-racists) as being counterproductive, and I would argue that some are even inherently racist in themselves. However, I don’t agree that the solution of racism mostly lies in finding how to remedy the problem primarily within the black community, or trying to ‘fix’ the effects, in the criminal justice system, the education system, or elsewhere, without focusing primarily on addressing the cause. I don’t think a lasting solution can be had at all by trying to counter the effects, without first making an attempt to eliminate the ongoing root cause, that being the racists themselves. I agree also that virtue signalling doesn’t have much effect, or simply calling racists assholes (ask me how I know). These don’t do anything to educate, and are unpersuasive.
Sack @126 It is interesting. I enjoy confirming why I think what I think I think at least.
Coel,
First, if you’re going to refer to me, my ‘nym is What a Maroon, not “The Maroon” (though I also answer to Maroon or WaM).
Second, you asked for a mechanism that could explain how the effects of racism can affect children who aren’t directly exposed to it. I gave you one, one that’s been well studied, and shown to have lifelong effects on health, cognition, and behavior, and also one that points to some potential remedies. I don’t claim it’s the only mechanism, or that the remedies would be a cure-all, but surely it merits some attention. But it doesn’t fit your narrative, so you dismiss it as “weak and short-lasting”. I suppose in the grand scheme of things a life, or even a few generations, is short lasting (who remembers the slaves that built the pyramids?), but it strikes me that for one who claims to be interested in evidence-based solutions that shows a remarkable lack of intellectual curiosity.
Anyone who’s interested in a more recent survey of the evidence (with citations to the research) can find it here.
Who says that’s “the only plausible mechanism”?! Why would there be only one? Why say “plausible” when you mean “plausible to me”?
If in fact it’s true that it’s only “black culture” that takes account of slavery and post-slavery slavery via prisons and Jim Crow laws and the fact that there has never been any compensation or redress of any kind then what a massively damning fact about “white culture” in the US.
Also
Yes they did! That’s my whole point. They did experience being of that set of people who were forcibly (violently, in the literal not dramatic hyperbolic sense) subjected to slavery and Jim Crow. They did experience being of that set of people who have never been compensated for that history and its ongoing effects, and not only not compensated but blamed and harangued and punished for being scarred by it. You get annoyed by snippy replies, Coel, but I and I’m pretty sure the others get frustrated by your refusal to see this point and your insistence on blaming the victims for it.
Yes, it would be great if all people harmed by this arrangement could just say “oh well that’s the past, let’s forget about it, now what do I need to do to become a filthy rich corrupt real estate tycoon?” but most people aren’t resilient in quite that way.
@What a Maroon:
I’m happy to discuss the literature in defending my claim, though it would get into a lot of detail and diverge from the thread. In short, I claim that effects are weak, and vulnerable to HARKing, and to confounding factors such as genetics.
E.g., your review article says:
“We have shown that, within a normal population, the children of the most anxious mothers during pregnancy (top 15%), had double the risk of emotional or behavioural problems, compared with the children of the less anxious mothers.”
OK, so maybe anxious mothers have genes for being anxious and pass those genes on to the kids, who then have emotional problems.
The authors do consider this saying: “While genetic transmission and the quality of postnatal care are likely to contribute to some of these findings of association, there is good evidence that there is a causal influence of the mother’s emotional state while pregnant also.”
But then they don’t (in this review article) really say what that good evidence (disentangling from genetic effects) actually is. OK, so maybe it’s in the cited papers. But then you run into the fact that much of it is behind paywalls.
[Aside: I deplore paywalls to research that is both publically funded and of public interest.]
If you want to discuss it, can you point to a paticularly clear example where the underlying research paper is accessible?
@Ophelia:
OK, then go ahead and suggest other possible mechanisms. What’s the mechanism(s) by which the past is causing ongoing harm?
That seems a collossal stretch of the concept of “experiencing” being of a set of people. It’s like saying that white Europeans currently “experience being of the set of people” that the Barbary Pirates raided when they took of order a million slaves from Europe.
If you look into just about anyone’s ancestry, that will include large numbers of people who died from starvation or died horribly from then-untreatable illness, or were executed unjustly or were enslaved or died in wars or died in a fire or all sorts of dire things (more or less none of which was ever redressed). That doesn’t screw up a kid today, else everyone would be screwed up.
Jesus christ. Do you seriously think the issue of slavery does NOT cast a huge shadow? Do you view the Holocaust the same way? How about Stalin’s artificial famine in Ukraine?
Coel@130
Based on US history and on what other people have been saying in this thread, my guess is the long legacy of slavery in the US.
Coel @139 The most relevant current mechanism is the current bigotry. It’s not a marginal or trivial amount that can be dismissed as irrelevant.
@Ophelia:
Jewish kids born in the 2000s “experienced being part of the set of people” who were treated as literally sub-human and nearly exterminated from Europe.
Does that leave them screwed up, demotivated and unable to pass math exams? No, they’re fine and they do fine.
As a result of Stalin’s famine, are Ukrainian kids born in 2000s screwed up, demotivated and unable to pass math exams? No.
(Ditto Cambodian kids born in the 2000s re Pol Pot, Chinese kids born in the 2000s re Mao, Japanese kids born in the 2000s who “experience being part of the set of people” subject to nuclear war, et cetera.)
Yes, such things were hugely important parts of history, were formative of today’s culture, and they cast a long shadow on today. But that is not sufficient in itself to screw kids up (otherwise everyone would be screwed up, certainly Jews and Ukrainians, etc). Or, at most, it can only be a part of an explanation.
So there needs to be more to it than that. So, if it is the case that — as an understandable consequence of the history — black-American culture now tends to reject school, maths, science, academic success, laws, police, and anything else regarded (rightly or wrongly) as “white”, then we need to face up to that.
Ruling out certain explanations on ideological grounds as being “victim blaming” is not going to be helpful if the explanations are true!
@Twiliter:
OK, feel free to argue that (though it’s at odds with others here who are arguing that the legacy of past racism is more important).
But, I’m unconvinced that bigotry is prevalent enough to account for the disparate academic performance of black-American 18-yr-olds.
The biggest influences on school kids will be parents/families, peer group and teachers. There will be little bigotry from the first two.
As for teachers, well, school teaching is not that well paid in the US and is not a high-status profession, so the only ones doing it will be people with a strong ethos of wanting to help those kids. And anyhow, teachers are the vanguard of the woke. So, I’m unconvinced that any bigotry such kids encounter is a sufficient explanation. Though go ahead and argue the case.
[And it’s also not school funding, which has been pretty much equalised since about 1980, though indeed was very unequal in decades before that; and, as above, it’s not family income, since we can control for that in comparisons.]
@144 Of course, the legacy of racism has the biggest effect on the current situation of racism. Bigotry doesn’t come out of nowhere. Again, just because we arrived at this (somewhat improving) situation, that doesn’t eliminate the effect of current bigotry. I don’t understand your dismissal. I also don’t accept that since the Holocaust is over, that antisemitism has become trivial and dismissable either. It’s not logical to assume so.
Yes, bigotry, both past and present can be blamed for the situation in the field of education, but you’re wrong if you think parents, teachers, and peer groups are free from people who hold racial biases. Most of the racists I have come across learned it from their ancestors, or indeed from the promotion of it within peer groups. It gets handed down and distributed from one generation to another. The current generation is not immune. I don’t have to argue the case when it’s obvious if you have experienced it, or read accounts of it happening from credible witnesses.
@Twiliter:
I’m frequently perplexed by some of the construals being put on what I’ve said.
Well either the history has no effect as you claim, or it does. Here again, you can’t say Jewish history is the same as the history of blacks in the US. I think it’s an unfair comparison, but I stand by my point about antisemitism.
@Twiliter:
I never once said that history has no effect. Indeed I explicitly said: “such things were hugely important parts of history, were formative of today’s culture, and they cast a long shadow on today”.
What I did say, though, is that such events (e.g. Holocaust) do not leave later-born kids “screwed up, demotivated and unable to pass math exams”.
@148 Which is why I think the comparison fails if we are measuring racism in terms of academic performance. So is it therefore your conclusion that the effects of racism on the wider societal picture (if you concede that) leave academic performance unaffected? Why look there if you think racism has little effect? Is the shadow you admit to that selective?
The only thing I can reasonably infer from these assertions is that you think larger society is not responsible, through racism, either historical or current, for the acedemic performance statistics you’re putting forth as an example. You as much as said so already. That, combined with the assertion that the criminal justice statistics only reveal that black people commit more crimes, look like suspiciously prejudiced attitudes to me. All of these calls to look for explanations elsewhere do nothing to eliminate the most likely possibility — the effects of sustained prejudice and bigotry.
Why do we need to look elsewhere? And please don’t repeat that it’s a problem found and solved in the black community, I’m not prepared to agree that the black community is separable from wider society to the extent that we can place the responsibility entirely within it.
Well said, twiliter & Ophelia. I really should not bother with Coel. He constructs his arguments not to discover anything, but to arrive at the conclusion he has decided beforehand he wants. And he is thoroughly evasive, and I find his habit of denying what he patently has said or pretending that he was really saying something else — well, choose your adjective (I can think of many, none of them complimentary).
If one wants to make comparisons that may be helpful, I suggest that people should consider such matters as alcohol and other substance abuse as well as low educational attainment among First Nations peoples in the Americas and in Australasia. Simply Google ‘low educational attainment among First Nations peoples’ & ‘alcohol & substance abuse among First Nations peoples’.
That’s it. No doubt Coel will respond in his character as aggrieved victim. I’m not going to bother with him any more. I don’t think he is worth bothering with.
That’s an interesting comparison too. I was going to add to the the example of Sickle Cell Anemia on African Americans with the effects of alcohol on Native Americans as well (in addition to succeptability to European diseases) to point out where it’s important to recognize the differences in ethnicities. Not every example of acknowledging the differences is malicious, some of it is helpful.
And a book that may be of interest to inquiring minds:
The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval England, by Mark Bailey; Boydell & Brewer, 2014.
Sorry, but I felt that the following needed pointing out:
Coel:
‘It’s like saying that white Europeans currently “experience being of the set of people” that the Barbary Pirates raided when they took of order a million slaves from Europe.’
This is an extraordinarily foolish and ignorant thing to say, as Coel would find out if he bothered to read any history, and bothered to consider the fact that though there may well be descendants of European slaves in North Africa they are indistinguishable from the rest of the populations of the nations of North Africa; they were neither brought in in sufficient numbers nor treated in such a way as to continue to exist through time as a separate group that was regarded, because of enormously influential theories of race, as inferior and incorrigible, and still is by many racist white people.
And Coel’s comparisons between Jewish experience and Black experience are equally ignorant and foolish.
Here is a decent article from Brookings from 2016 about Asian-American scholastic success, and why looking at it simplistically is fraught with problems.
Asian-American success and the pitfalls of generalization
The article makes many other points as well. I mention this here not so much to explain why the African-American situation is different from the Asian-American situation, but to highlight the complexity of the problem, which is the real main point of the article.
Among those other points: Asians live in areas with better schools, compared to other ethnic groups. How about poor Asians? They, too, live in areas with better schools, compared with poor people from other ethnic groups. There are lots of questions that can be asked about the hows and whys, but surely this is at least partly explanatory for Asian scholastic success.
It is an interesting article; enjoy.
twiliter# I think it is worth considering the present situations of ‘First Nations’ peoples, and reflecting that these peoples and the Africans who were enslaved and brought to the Americas were all victims of European colonialism, as well as of the racial theories that accompanied it and still persist in many people’s minds. In particular, one might look into the question of policing in relation to Aboriginal children in Australia.
Not strictly relevant, but not strictly irrelevant – a paragraph from a Guardian article by Emma Brockes on the case of Alex Murdaugh:
‘That this story unfolds in the south, cradle of the good-old-boy network of near-oligarchical governance, is no coincidence. I happened to be in South Carolina last week and it’s very beautiful, but woo, to an outsider, it’s intensely weird. White tour guides lead white tour groups around downtown Charleston, cheerfully pointing out where enslaved people were sold, before pulling up at the gift shop. Plantation houses, mindful of how times have changed, invite visitors to consider a single slave dwelling on their properties, while advertising the grounds as the “most beautiful gardens in America”. Use of the passive voice – these houses are “witness to history”, according to the marketing bumf, which is certainly one way of putting it – is rampant. Many of the people Alex Murdaugh is accused of defrauding were poor, Black clients seeking personal injury compensation through his family’s law firm.’
Oh, and Sackbut, thank you for the article, which I read with great interest. I thought this sentence very relevant:
‘“If Asians can do it, why can’t you?” is the thought process lying not far below the surface of some commentaries on race and racism in the U.S. This is perhaps the most dangerous byproduct of the model minority stereotype, and a form of racism in and of itself.’
@Twiliter:
No, that’s not what I said. If, as I did indeed suggest: the past history of very real and very oppressive has resulted in black culture rejecting anything it sees as “white”, including success at school, and *that* now leads to worse outcomes, then wider society is indeed responsible, through racism, namely historical racism!
But there has to be a mechanism by which the legacy of the past or the presence in society of some bigots does then affect today’s teenagers.
You seem utterly uninterested in that mechanism, as though you’ve never considered the issue!
And yet understanding that mechanism is essential for designing any public policy that actually works and recitfies things!
@Tim:
That is most excellent news! Any chance you can keep to it?
@Sackbut.
You are indeed correct in pointing to these things:
So it is largely about motivation? So highly motivated parents pass on their motivation to their kids (though culture? parenting? genes?).
Agreed, there is. This is passed on by culture? parenting? genes?
Again, differences between group cultures seems to be an important factor in outcomes, as I’ve been suggesting.
If by “better” schools you mean better-funded schools, then that is not true.
If you mean “better” schools as in ones where the academic outcomes are better, then yes, that is very true.
So which way does the causation run? Just about every study of what makes a “good” school shows that it’s not actually the school, it’s the intake of kids!
Schools in areas with high numbers of Asian-American kids do better academically because high numbers of Asian-American kids go to them.
Sorry to write again, but I have remembered something from a few years back. I have Black American and West Indian friends & acquaintances here in Japan, and acted with them in a production of the musical version of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ a number of years ago. I had two small parts, that of Mark Twain himself and that of an Englishman. The director, an American woman, was extremely good and did not do what at least one big fairly recent production in America did, which was to make the musical ‘nicer’ and more ‘acceptable’ to white audiences.
The Black actors were much affected by the production, and I remember after they had finished rehearsing one difficult scene I remarked to one of the Black actors involved that it was all pretty harrowing. He replied, ‘Yeah, it takes you to places you don’t want to go.’ While rehearsing another scene, which involved the Black actors walking, chained, along a ramp at the back of a stage and singing a slave-song, a Jamaican actor had a panic attack, ran from the stage, and collapsed gasping and weeping and shaking. It was shocking, and I found myself weeping, too.
Another West Indian actor said to me grimly after a talk about slavery to the cast before rehearsals begun, ‘We know all this; we don’t need to hear it.’
Which is to say, the fact of slavery was naturally very much alive in the minds of these people. They knew very well what had happened to their ancestors.
If this is somewhat personal (and I could say more, since in my mis-spent youth I was friendly with the leader of a steel-band in London, and worked in factories and on building-sites with West Indians, with whom I got on very well – and also saw English racism at play first-hand), so be it. I feel, I am afraid, a great contempt for people who reduce everything to abstractions and have no sense of the concreteness of people, their heritage, their understanding of themselves, and their experience.
@Tim
No you’re not. Anyhow:
Emoting about an issue is all very well (even necessary and laudable), but also necessary is thinking.
You’re good at the former, not so good at the latter.
I make no apology for adopting an engineering-style “car-mechanic” approach, trying to analyse a problem with sufficient evidence-based rigour and specificity to actual understand how to fix it!
Too many are only interested in donning a hair shirt and emoting and virtue signalling.
I expected that if you did respond, Coel, to my last comment that something along those lines would be your response. You think too much of yourself. You do not think seriously, and clearly have small interest in seriously addressing the issues you like to talk about. Your heart is not in making anything better. What you are interested in doing (when you are not making ludicrous comparisons between the historical experiences of Black Americans and those of various other racial or religious groups, ludicrous comparisons between the Holocaust and slavery, or between the Barbary trade and the industrial slavery of European colonialism, and when you are not evading or avoiding legitimate criticisms) is attempting to score points, and circling constantly about a point whose existence you hint at but do not have the honesty or courage to specify.
@Tim:
No I don’t (or, at least, in relation to you, ok, guilty of that, yes, but then its hard not to), but overall I see myself as merely following the lead of sensible people who are trying to actually think about these things, people like Wilfred Reilly, Coleman Hughes, Roland Fryer, Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and their like …. people who have 600 times the insight of DiAngelo or Kendi.
Why drag in DiAngelo and Kendi? What have they got to do with this post? I’m not a fan of either of them, or of those wretched dinner party hustlers, so why summon them to make your point?
@Ophelia:
I drag those two in only because they are rather prominent voices in American discourse about race these days, to (in my opinion) the detriment of the discussion, whereas (in my opinion) it’s way better to listen to the others on my list.
I know they are, but citing them in this discussion implies that I’m a fan or that anybody who disagrees with you is a fan. DiAngelo and Kendi are not the only people who think racism failed to disappear in 1865 or 1965.
@Ophelia:
I didn’t mean to imply that you or anyone in particular was a fan. Some of my remarks are about American discourse in general.
Thus, for example, when I argued (up-thread) against:
“… the idea that math is “racist” and needs to be “decolonised” and that black kids shouldn’t even be trying to do this stuff”, …
I wasn’t implying that you or anyone here was advocating that (I’ve never seen anyone here do that), but it is an idea being promoted by too many CRT-spouting “anti-racists” who are in charge of kids’ education.
@Ophelia:
Just to add, since you asked what my mention of DiAngelo and Kendi had to do with this post …
The post started off with Musk’s accusation that today’s media has switched from being biased against blacks to being biased against whites.
A large part of that accusation is the mainstream media’s tendency to uncritically adopt DiAngelo- and Kendi-style simplistic analyses, rather than attempting to be balanced and objective. (Musk’s remarks were not narrowly about Scott Adams.)
Over recent years, about 90% of mainstream media reporting about gender ideology and about race has had a distinct ideological slant (as you routinely document regarding the first of those).
Coel @159 Doesn’t the assertion “…black culture rejecting anything it sees as “white”” imply that the racism we are talking about is actually coming from the black community? Isn’t this the same conclusion that Scott Adams came to when he called blacks a “hate group?” Don’t you see this as problematic?
What about your insisting “little evidence” for current racism and then embracing “historical racism” as the cause of this “rejection” by black culture (and assuming this is happening at all)? Thereby implying the legacy of white racism has somehow been largely eliminated, and left in it’s wake a culture of black racists? Don’t you see this also as problematic?
@170 “(Musk’s remarks were not narrowly about Scott Adams.)” Musk’s remarks were in direct response to Adams’ remarks. As I replied previously, Musk’s remarks can be evaluated on their own (lack of) merit as well. You bemoan simplistic analyses, yet I have never seen Musk comment in any other way. I doubt his ability to.
@twiliter:
No, they weren’t, they were an indirect response. In short, they were a response to another commenter, who had noted that the MSM were very quick to denounce such as Scott Adams, but very slow to make any negative comments at all about anyone black (such as analysing the poll to which Adams was responding.)
An example would be responses to the beating to death of a black man by five black cops for which the blame gets put on “white racism”. (I can point you to MSM articles saying that.) Another example is the amount of MSM coverage devoted to the Waukesha incident (supposedly the fault of an SUV!) compared to other incidents. MSM coverage is indeed not neutral regarding race these days (any more than it is regarding trans ideology).
@twiliter:
First, nowadays there is a whole academic movement called “critical whiteness studies” that is explicitly about “problemitizing whiteness” with a view to “dismantling whiteness”.
This is explicitly about overturning maths, science and notions of objective truth, which get labelled “white” and which need to be “decolonized” and replaced by “indigeneous knowledge systems”.
I’m not making this up. You can call this “racist” if you want, or “anti-racist” if you prefer, but both terms are not that helpful. And anyhow, rejecting these things only harms those who reject them.
As for what I see as “problematic”, well, what I see as problematic is attempts to slap labels on things as a way of shutting down straightforward discussion and evidence-based investigation of how things are, and doing so as a way of avoiding facing up to the fact that reality isn’t in accord with how an ideology says it is.
You’re not even being consistent within the same paragraph. *If* past racism has led to a damaged black culture today, then the “legacy of white racism” would *not* have been “largely eliminated”.
So that’s the goal? We should be neutral about race? What would that look like? Does it require being neutral about racism too? Does it require minimizing and ignoring historical racism? Does it boil down to “I don’t see color”?
@174 “*If* past racism has led to a damaged black culture today, then the “legacy of white racism” would *not* have been “largely eliminated”.” — Then does this mean your claim of “little evidence” is valid? I wonder if current racism can be detached from it’s legacy, even in theory, to form a coherent analysis. I just don’t agree that this big reversal you are talking about (media bias and reverse racism) are signs that racism is no longer happening. If anything, it confirms it.
@Twiliter:
The claim of “little evidence” was about racism acting today that is sufficient to explain the large disparities in things like crime rate and academic performance.
It was *not* a claim about current effects of the past legacy of racism.
We need to distinguish between those things because what to do about them is very different!
In the same way, treating someone for the effects of long-covid is not the same as measures to stop people catching covid.
@173 “An example would be responses to the beating to death of a black man by five black cops for which the blame gets put on “white racism”. (I can point you to MSM articles saying that.)”
Well, this is your example, not mine, and I am not a member of the MSM, and they don’t represent my views, nor do I subscribe to any “ideology” whatsoever.
@Ophelia:
First, the MSM should return to the distinction between neutral, factual reporting and advocacy. Reporting of and assessing how things are should indeed be neutral. Advocating policy for how to change things, and how things should be, is, of course, not neutral. That distinction is crucial, policy won’t work well if it is not rooted in reality.
Of course not.
Of course not.
In the literal sense, of course not. In the Coleman Hughes sense (linked to upthread) — which does not involve overlooking and ignoring racism! — then, yes, that is a good policy, amounting to treating people fairly and equally on their individual circumstances and merits.
@177 I don’t think the difference between “racism acting today” and “current effects of the past legacy of racism” is much of a distinction. Applied conceptually, they say so nearly the same thing as to be synonymous.
Well, yes, but that’s the issue. It’s not that easy to disentangle the two. It’s premature for white people to claim not to see color.
@twiliter:
No, they are very different because what you do to remedy them is very different.
The problem with your analysis (and the same applies to most mainstream analysis of this topic) is that the only thing you’re interested in is who gets blamed. And you’re right, from the vantage of who gets the blame, then yes, the above two are much the same.
From the engineering point of view of how do we fix things? they are very, very different.
See my covid analogy.
That really is the theme of this entire thread: my critics are continually asking “but who is to blame?”, presuming that the most important thing is virtue-signalling about blame, and getting annoyed that I’m not doing so, whereas I’m continually asking “how do we fix things?”, which is a question much more about mechanisms.
@182 If identifying racism and identifying where it happens is “blaming”, then ok, let’s call it that.
Here again, if we can’t get past identifying racism and where it happens, then talk about how to “fix” things are unwarranted. First we have to agree on where the problem is.
I can express my views on how to combat ignorance, xenophobia, indoctrination, greed, domination, or other likely causes of racism, which is where I think it lives, but not if you think it’s media bias, propaganda, reverse racism, etc. Is this not also “blaming?”
What twiliter said.
No it’s really not about blaming particular people. It’s not entirely about blaming, either, but I think I get what you mean. It’s about blaming or facing up to or admitting or regretting (etc) systems and ideologies. There is an element of blame or condemnation in the “how did they not see it???” sense but at the same time there’s the awareness that they were of their time and so would we have been (we honkies). It’s about “blaming” or naming the massive mistake (aka crime) at the root of the country. Yes sometimes that just becomes righteous indignation but I think most of us are well aware that we’re all products of our times. There’s also, at least on my part, massive irritation at how hidden the history is. The hell with Robin DiAngelo; Worse Than Slavery should be required reading in every high school.
You decline to read it because (you say) you don’t disagree with it, but if you don’t read it you don’t know what it says. It reports things I had no idea of until I read it. No clue. It’s a dossier of atrocities, war crimes [without the overt war], human rights violations on a factory scale. It rivals the horrors of Peenemünde.
@Twiliter:
You’ve argued that there is still a lot of racism in society.
OK, maybe there is.
But you’ve never given an account of how you think this works. Let’s sketch the argument:
Lots of white people, especially those in power, are racist. People like Scott Adams say bad things about black people. There is a big brouhaha and he’s dropped from all mainstream outlets. And … [several links in the chain of causation] .. and 15-yr-old black kids do worse in math exams as a result.
It’s those several links in the chain of causation that I’m not understanding. Can you sketch them out for me?
[I’ve given my suggestion, in terms of wholesale black peer-group rejection of anything perceived as “acting white” including trying hard and succeeding at school.]
What’s your suggestion?
Ditto to Ophelia:
If your argument is: slavery/after-slavery/Jim Crow/redlining led to … [several links in the chain of causation] … now affects black kids born in the 2000s such that they struggle to pass math exams, what actually are those links in the chain of causation?
We know that it is not intergenerational wealth, since we can control for that in comparisons.
And we can’t just assume that {past oppression} ==> {kids born long after are psychologically dysfunctional and do badly at math}, because Jewish kids born after the Holocaust are not dsyfunctional and are fine at math, nor are Ukrainian kids born after Holodomor dsyfunctional.
Indeed, the vast majority of events of genocidal magnitude (Holocaust, Holodomor, Armenian genocide, Rwandan genocide, Pol Pot’s genocide, Mao’s oppression, Stalin’s oppression, Somme slaughter, et cetera) do not seem to result in later-born kids being psychologically dysfunctional (regardless of whether such events are ever “redressed”, which they rarely are).
No-one here has even attempted to present even a sketch of the mechanisms here.
“What can we wonderful white warriors do to help the poor silly black community be unaffected by alleged racism?”
“Stop it!”
“You mean stop trying to help?”
“No, stop being racist! STOP IT! S-T-O-P, I-T! Stop it.”
Hat tip to Bob Newhart/MadTV
Well Coel, if you’re implying that black people are generally bad at math, then I could point you here. >> https://www.mashupmath.com/blog/famous-african-american-mathematicians
But I think we can skip trying to verify causal chains in non sequitur arguments. That’s my suggestion.
Coel, if you’ll accept ignorance as one possible mechanism, then I’ve suggested it a couple of times at least. The solution to ignorance is education. Of course this is an oversimplification. Yet, why complicate the matter?
Would you believe that some people don’t want to be educated?
Coel, a brief response to your #161 in reply to me. There is no point in more detail, since the conversation has largely moved on. But: I was pointing out an article, and I think it’s a good article, and I think you’d find it of interest. I think it made a lot of good points, and I quoted a handful of them. Feel free to read the article yourself. I don’t see that I need to go back to the article and quote more of it to answer your questions about what it contained and the basis for its arguments, since you can do that yourself.
Further along: you are claiming that you are not interested in blaming anyone, and only interested in figuring out how to fix things. I can’t square that with your insistence that we determine mechanisms for how racism has current effects on people. I can’t square that with the many arguments you have made that imply these problems are things the black communities are doing to themselves. If you really only interested in fixing things. why does matter? If you don’t want to assign blame, why assign blame?
I don’t think it’s a strange thing to say that black kids don’t feel motivated in math because they grew up in a culture (American culture, not simply black culture) that believes black kids don’t do as well as white kids in math, and this is partly reinforced by black adults who also grew up in such an environment, but also by white people. It seems a reasonable first approximation. There may be details, but that’s not the point, the lack of motivation is the point. Surely we don’t start from an assumption that black kids actually are not capable of doing math as well as white kids. Surely we don’t assume lack of motivation indicates lack of ability.
How do we fix this? Sending resources into poor school districts (many of which are overwhelmingly black) seems like a good idea. Mentoring seems like a good idea. Why is this not the discussion, rather than pushing back on definitions and evidence of racism, if what you are really concerned about is fixing things?
@Twiliter:
The fact that, *overall* black-Americans tend to do worse at math proficiency than other racial groups (and way worse than Jewish American kids or Asian-American kids) is a simple fact.
Denying reality isn’t going to get you anywhere. If you’re not aware of this straightforward facts then maybe you should broaden your reading beyond the MSM which tries to avoid mentioning such stuff.
And yes, all within-group disparities are wider than between-group disparities, so, yes, you can indeed find people at the high end of the distribution within all groups. That doesn’t change the overall picture.
Just for example (re maths SAT):
“The average scores for Black (454) and Latino or Hispanic students (478) are significantly lower than those of white (547) and Asian students (632).”
“Over half (59%) of white and four-fifths of Asian test takers met the college readiness math benchmark, compared to less than a quarter of Black students and under a third of Hispanic or Latino students.”
“Of those scoring above 700, 43% are Asian and 45% are white, compared to 6% Hispanic or Latino and 1% Black.”
Link.
I notice that you’re not even trying to have a sensible discussion about this.
Re: Sackbut #190:
I’m not trying to point to the thing that needs fixing for the purpose of assigning blame, I’m trying to point to the thing that needs fixing for the purpose of fixing it. It’s not me that is hung up on where to put the blame.
Nor do I.
A lot of times this thread, it seems that I point to something, and then someone else points to it as though it’s a rebuttal of what I’m saying.
Let’s suppose that motivation is a major part of this. So what do we do to fix it?
I’m suggesting that a lot of the rhetoric from the CRT “anti-racists” is the opposite of what we should be doing to fix it.
Yes, I agree. Mentoring is indeed a good idea (indeed, I’ve personally done it).
Absolutely, this sort of thing — actually fixing things — should indeed be the focus!
Why push back? Because just saying “it’s systemic racism”, and virtue signalling about that, doesn’t in itself achieve anything.
Pushing the diagnosis into particulars (maybe it indeed is largely about motivation, as I suggested up thread), does then point to appropriate interventions and fixes.
Sackbut @190 This >> “Surely we don’t start from an assumption that black kids actually are not capable of doing math as well as white kids. Surely we don’t assume lack of motivation indicates lack of ability.”
Well put, and what I was trying to say by the example I linked to.
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Coel, I am not ignoring the data, but neither are you accepting any possible cause, particularly existing racism, except when you’re placing it in the black community.
I’m pretty sure that you don’t know what I’ve read or haven’t, and just because some of the things I put forth can also be found being addressed in the “MSM” doesn’t mean that I’m simply parroting what they say or adhering to some ideological agenda. It’s a rather insulting accusation. Not that I’m insulted though. I’m not insecure about my education level or my ability to analyze concepts or express ideas about them. Additionally, a portion of the information we discuss here at B&W comes from the “MSM” so it’s unavoidable really.
Sensible discussions, in my view, don’t include trying to find causal chains in non sequitur arguments. This was my point exactly.
@twiliter:
I’m happy to consider it, but please sketch out how you think this works.
How does currently-occurring racism in American society act to cause black-American youths to have a crime rate 10 times that of Asian-American kids and much worse academic success (such that those scoring about 700 on the maths SAT are 43% Asian and 1% black)?
The effects you describe are largely a result of the legacy, and the legacy also explains the current situation of non-resolution. Do you have a competing explanation for this data that’s more plausible?
I also have one possible explanation, which also hints at a solution @189…
Mentoring is a great idea, and produces lasting results in individuals, but we can’t assume that a majority of individuals have access to, or are amenable to mentoring.
This is a tedious derail now (probably has been for too long already). This is not an engineering issue. It’s not about “fixing things” – although it would of course be nice if everything were suddenly “fixed.” It’s not about ticking boxes, it’s not about what “works,” it’s not about ignoring history in favor of repeating claims about crime stats and math class stats in response to moral claims. We’re talking past each other (and I’m apparently talking to no one). Basta.
Sorry for my part in it. It was feeling repetitive to me since last month, I should have quit then.
@Twiliter:
That’s not even an attempt at a proper explanation. And you’re continually flitting between currently-acting racism and legacy of past racism, and no those are not the same.
But you’re right, we’ve likely pursued this longer than is worthwhile.
@Ophelia:
You’re right, lots of talking past each other. But I’m perplexed that people are not interested in improving things going forward (aka “fixing things”).
No you’re not. You’re “perplexed” (or annoyed) that people don’t see Elon Musk’s tweets about Scott Adams as a way of improving things going forward.
Not at all, first Musk’s Tweets were not about Scott Adams (or only indirectly so), they were about how the media treats issues of race.
Second, I entirely see why people think Musk’s Tweets were not helpful. I consider that a large fraction of Musk’s Tweets are not that well judged and not particularly helpful. So?
The more important issue is the tribalism of the MSM reporting of such as Musk, as exemplified by the WaPo piece at the top of this thread (and I’m highlighting Musk mostly as an example of the wider issue of tribal reporting).
Contrary to the woke/MSM view, the world is not divided into people who are 100% good and people who are 100% bad, and the reporting should not proceed along those lines.
Apparently not everyone knows the meaning of the word “basta”. Anyway, apologies for my part in the tediousness.
You had no part in the tediosity. Coel of course is a gotta have the last word guy. Like a frazzled parent I feel like saying “Don’t make me close this thread.”