I don't bother too much commenting about the "race" issues currently dominating our discourse since I don't think the conservative position is offered in anything close to good faith. Maybe that's a mistake, but I'm tired of fighting against fake outrage. Why bother when you know that whatever arguments you bring to bear are pointless?
But let's take a short break from this weariness and at least ask a few questions about two of our current controversies. I apologize in advance for simply saying what I mean instead of adopting the currently fashionable vocabulary that values nuance above all and drains meaning from everything it touches.
First, put aside all the nonsense about "critical race theory," which is just a phrase conservatives have picked up without knowing what it means. (If you want to know, Wikipedia is a click away.) What is it they're really upset about?
The answer, I think, is not discussions of slavery or racism per se, but discussions that implicitly or explicitly blame white people as a class for it. Now, you might wonder who else could be to blame for it, but put that snark aside. The fact remains that conservatives don't want to be made to feel endlessly guilty about racism, and they don't want schools to make their kids feel that way.
Question: given this reality, should the rest of us stop trying to make everyone feel guilty about past and present racism? Is guilt an effective motivator for change in the first place?
Second, the modern progressive argument about race mostly revolves around systemic racism, the idea that racism is less about individual bigotry than it is about racism embedded in our institutions. A good example of this is the redlining of neighborhoods in the middle part of the 20th century, which prevented Black homebuyers from getting loans to buy houses in good neighborhoods. This is the kind of thing we should focus on, not on raking individual people who display racist behavior.¹
If this is the case, it would be handy to have good examples that exist today. I have ideas of my own about which ones are most important, but who cares what I think? It would be better to develop some kind of quasi-consensus about this. So: what are the three most important current examples of systemic racism that would help non-progressives to see what we're talking about? Leave your nominations in comments.
¹Although God knows we do plenty of this too.
I don't feel guilty. Do you?
I don't feel guilty, but I do recognize I have advantages AND disadvantages. So does everyone. But if you have black skin, they are far harder to overcome, or to capitalize on. That's real and I want to see it change.
Seriously, how do you figure that? Blacks are way overrepresented on TV and in the movies. Blacks can have their own specific political groups that are devoted to their racial/ethnic interests, etc etc. Hell, Oprah Winfrey owes a good measure of her fortune to White Suburban Women's desire to have a Black friend. (Not that she hasn't been a very shrewd business woman too.
Again, this isn't 1964 anymore.
Well look over there. A black woman with money! And there's lots of them on TV. Problem solved.
Apropos of nothing, I think the trumplicans' insistence that "librulz" are trying to make us "feel guilty" exemplifies the proverb about how "the guilty flee where no one pursues." Frankly, there's no reason why a student should "feel guilty" that Chris Columbus was a brutal monster more than half a millenium ago. How were they responsible? Feeling BAD about it is normal and (as a liberal, of course I'd say) the right way to feel. But "guilt"? Come on. Recognizing that other people in the past did bad things is nothing to feel "guilty" about, unless you personally made 'em do them. But a bad thing is a bad thing. Don't whitewash (heh!) it.
As Mr Drum points out, the societal biases that have been based on and driven by racial discrimination need to be pointed out; how else can they be dealt with? But the trumpified right don't want these violations of American values "dealt with" -- they're happy the way things are. They also don't want this unpleasant fact exposed by the educational system.
Except Cristobal Colon wasn't a brutal monster by the standards of his day. The Caribs were, however.
if there’s one thing the internet has taught me, it’s that the ability to write complete sentences is not at all a measure of the depth of the writer’s thought.
Yes he was. Read some history. Much has come out in the last 50 years, when Spain put its historical records from that period on the 'Net.
The irony is that this post was written by a dude that moved from very heavily black (for Southern California) Long Beach to virtually no blacks at all Irvine.
Having a hard time with the concept of systemic racism, I see.
Unless you were trying to say that zoning laws that exclude multifamily housing disproportionately affect blacks. In which case, good point.
LOL. Irvine, KD's hometown, is rife with multifamily housing.
That "for Southern California" is doing a lot of work there. Long Beach is like 15% African American. That's not "heavily black" at all. Now, if you were talking Inglewood, you might have something.
The entire state is like 6% black, so LBC is 2.5 times as Black. But then again, KD didn't move from Long Beach to Inglewood, or (where so many South Central Blacks have moved, Palmdale)...he moved to the Biege Chinatown/Whitetopia that is Irvine (one of the first ' master planned communities) in the country btw.
I "moved" from Long Beach when I was six months old. I've lived in roughly the same place all my life, at least as far as demographics go.
"What is it they're really upset about?"
I think we on the left tend to adopt a pretty cartoonish view of what they're upset about, because it's far easier to tisk tisk a neo-nazi than it is a white mom who doesn't want to send her kid to a school that is 80% minority/low income. Ironically there are just as any lefty parents in Portland and Connecticut re-segregating themselves so that their kids can grow up in an environment that resembles how they grew up.
Bam! You're cutting pretty close to the core, methinks.
I do think as lefties we need to take a hard look at "multiculturalism", and how we can make it workable without humans constantly wanting to re-segregate themselves.
It's interesting that while we push "democratic values" around the globe, we NEVER push multiculturalism. In fact we loudly cheer the opposite. Our dream solution for Israel? Obviously two states where each subculture gets to govern themselves. The Kurds? Get them their own country asap. In fact, is there any other country on the planet where the path to peace hasn't involved ethnically homogenous regions?
And for the many long established countries like Japan, do we tisk tisk them for being "Japanese supremacists" that jealously guard their majority cultures? Obviously not.
I suspect that our "melting pot" has somewhat worked up to this point because there was an expectation of assimilation toward a a somewhat common culture... and as the notion of assimilation is being replaced with a more concrete multiculturalism I wonder if this might be what is causing the wheels to come off of the bus. I dunno.
Bingo! 10000+
FWIW, I don't think the advocacy of secessionism is that consistent. I think it's case by case. I don't know very many lefties who are advocating for Quebec secessionism, for instance.
And while I know it's somewhat different, Brexit was a form of British secessionism and the left generally hated it.
I do think your larger point- that we don't necessarily think deeply enough about whether people should live together or apart- is true.
I feel like assimilation is a good thing to encourage. In addition to that, though, there should be a cultural of tolerance for those who are dissimilar, and there still needs to be well-organized intervention to help at least one large minority group whose ability to assimilate has been hampered by history and by white reaction.
For my first 5 years in elementary school I was in the smallest minority group at the school. Not many white kids in rural Maui in the 50s and early 60s. Fortunately Hawaii put a lot of state funding into the schools, so we had all the latest textbooks, good teachers, good science classes even in elementary school, etc.
Moving to Oahu, things got a good bit whiter - especially near the military bases, but whites were still a minority in government and a lot of other professions. The state made sure schools in poor/remote districts got good funding, good libraries, athletic equipment, etc. They also had a whole traveling teacher setup to make sure people even in remote areas got music lessons, sewing lessons, cooking lessons (and those all included the boys too), etc.
Boosting funding of schools in minority/low income levels with State and Federal support would, I think, be helpful - worked well for me in Hawaii.
I've heard from whites that grew up in Hawaii they faced discrimination, threats, and even occasional violence if they crossed undrawn lines or violated unwritten rules.
"People are saying..."
Education is a big one, but the community segregation that enables both differences in education and economic opportunity is probably the one problem the enables most of the other problems.
Unfortunately, it's also a hard one to tackle. You can combat obvious problems like ongoing redlining/lending issues, but it can take generations to undo the damage already done in the past, and if white people keep avoiding non-white areas, the problem continues. I'm not sure what the answer is.
Schools, cops, and the echoes of red lining (including generalized city-hate).
But 'conservatives' are pre-committed to rejecting each of those already.
Don't think breaking it down actually helps.
Example 1: Banks being tighter on loans to African-Americans because they know that the value of a home drops if it's bought by someone with dark skin. No one in the interaction has to be bigoted, they're all making "rational" economic decisions in the face of systemic racism.
Example 2: The NFL (and NFLPA!) assumed for decades that people with black skin started with lower cognitive function. This was used to determine compensation for TBI caused by concussion. This isn't ancient history, it started in 1998 and ended THIS MONTH. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1002627309/nfl-says-it-will-halt-race-norming-and-review-brain-injury-claims
Uh, the NFL didn't assume. The NFL actually administers the Wunderlich IQ test.
And, btw, this is totally common. I knew a person who was going in to have their carotid arteries cleared out of plaque. The surgeon insisted that a psychological exam be given in advance to guard against claims that the procedure injured my acquaintance's brain.
1. The Wealth gap
2. The Pay Gap
3. The quality of your school is determined by your zip code
The quality of your school is determined by the quality of its students and their families.
Two comments:
First, as a lifelong liberal, who also happens to be a middle-aged white male, I'm pretty much done with the arguments being made by progressives and those who have bought into critical race theory. I see it constantly on Twitter and also saw it personnally in a volunteer opportunity I was pursuing. "All white people are racist." "All institutions are racist." I see white social justice warriors tell other white people who push back on these statements that they don't have a right to speak on the subject since they are white. It's really getting tiresome and ridiculous. I simply am not personally responsible for things that happened 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago. Cause if that's true ... than the Democratic party of today is responsible for the Civil War, Jim Crow laws, and the slow crawl of civil rights progress in the 20th century. Does that make sense? No.
Second, I might agree that there is some systemic racism that still exists in this country, but far too many on the progressive side and the CRT's proponents all too frequently drop the word "systemic" and talk about racism. One of the current bible's on this subject, I forget the title, but it's the one written by the white woman, does this. After reading a few pages, I gave up. I'm simply not interested in reading "thoughtful" analyses of these issues when the author is incapable of making the appropriate distinctions.
Not all white people are racist. White people who are alive today are not responsible for the racist evils that existed in this country decades and centuries ago. And the only way we get together as a people is to recognize that we are people first and skin color is secondary. Unfortunately, the proponents of CRT seem to have flipped that equation upside down.
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We argue over snippets of history and cherry pick the things that outrage us
Most religions are against killing - yet religious wars (Christian or not) are some of the most violent in the worlds history.
We are against slavery of blacks - and should be - but ask the average person whats the difference between black slavery and chattel slavery and they look at you like you had 2 heads
or
What about the Chinese slaves (among others) who built the rail roads?
We SHOULD be talking about slavery - but without guilt. It's history and history can be unfortunate at times. WE need to look forward based upon the mistakes of the past
That means the real question becomes what can we do to insure fairness to all?
The Germans are embarrassed by Hitlers reign and are truly horrified by the Holocaust - but they teach it - warts and all. We need to teach about slavery about Jim Crow laws and ALL of that. But we cannot talk exclusively about Black enslavement because others were enslaved as well.
But GUILT is not something that should be impugned on US for the mistakes of the past. Put the guilt on us for OUR current mistakes - be they racial, educational fiscal whatever.
If we discriminate against anyone for any reason it's a bad thing.
So no more Critical Sex Theory, no more Critical Religion Theory, no more Critical Whatever theory