A couple of days ago I asked for the top current examples of systemic racism. As you might expect, the conversation in comments degenerated fast and there weren't very many candidates offered. For the record, though, here were the top four:
- Bank loans
- Education
- Criminal justice
- Environmental racism
This is just a quick list to let everyone know what the hive mind came up with. Obviously each of them could be worth a book on its own. But that's for later.
One of the books on education is Grading for Equity by Joe Feldman. If teachers actually graded students on learning instead of homework production, "effort" (whatever THAT is) and "participation" (ditto) then there might be a chance that kids and their parents would know they were learning the curriculum and not currying favor with the teacher or not.
Oh sure, because there’s never any problem with measuring learning.
Hmmm..."a problem with" means "might as well forget it?"
Progress must be VERY difficult.
Frankenberry is just po because he don' do good on tests. SAD!
Agreed. The history of the grading system used in secondary and post-secondary schools in the US is interesting, and there is a lot of info about it now. That's because it's one more artifact of standardization in the industrial model of schooling that, unsurprisingly, doesn't promote equity, racial or otherwise. Nor does it promote accuracy or transparency. And don't get me started on attendance and enrollment...
And you test learning how? By perhaps having tests?
Except that having tests is considered double-plus-ungood by most of Woke...
Thomas Sowell, as one conservative black intellectual, has a very sad biographical article about how the high school that he credits with raising him and a number of other african-american kids in NYC into the middle class and beyond was effectively destroyed in the sixties by the demand for "equality".
You can't have both education that takes the smarter minds further and faster AND education that insists everyone is equal and needs to be taught in the same way.
We'll leave aside Thomas Sowell, because his comments about his high school aren't relevant to this discussion of EQUITY (not equality) in grading. Your comment indicates that you didn't check out the book or Feldman's suggestions for secondary grading systems. I'm all in favor of tests --as a teacher I design standards-based tests on a regular basis, formative ones and summative ones. I also use other types of assessment.
If you're bringing up standardized tests, that's another discussion entirely, because teacher's grades aren't based on standardized tests.
In fact, what Feldman is proposing is a grading system based on learning objectives, which is much more rigorous, but also fairer. It contains a lot that conservatives would love, if they could get over their knee-jerk resistance to anything that smacks of equity. See https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/19/12/harvard-edcast-grading-equity
How many of these are examples of how poor people are trampled on? I ask because I just finished Arlie Hochschild's "Strangers in Their Own Land," and the oil and chemical industry in Louisiana seems pretty happy to pollute the crap out of any area populated with people, White or Black, who are too poor to effectively fight back.
This is exactly right. Its not that we don't have both actual racism and systemic racism, but until we move the political discussion towards class-ism I fear there won't be much progress.
The United States has a unique situation with African Americans in that for hundreds of years the venn diagrams of "racism" and "poor" overlapped exactly with respect to them.
Its not just that you have a group of people who have been historically disadvantaged economically, but that the same group of people, up until relatively recently, was legally kept in that disadvantaged state.
But plenty of whites are also economically disadvantaged. Plenty of hispanics are economically disadvantaged.
I think programs aimed at economic disadvantage as opposed to race have a better chance of actually being adopted.
The Powers That Be do not want any talk of class. Remember Occupy Wall Street? Well the corporate enemies of that movement want you to look at their rainbow logos and diversity trainings and forget about that.
Not that there's anything wrong with diversity and rainbows. But Big Corporate isn't on board because it's the right thing to do.
Very few programs are aimed at race.
And Republicans have spent decades opposing programs aimed at assisting the poor.
In the last couple of decades they have successfully convinced middle class and below whites that Democrats only care about race and gender politics and nothing about being the party of the working class.
That success really bugs me. Some have a good reason to vote R, but all of those who have lost their jobs as big US companies ruthlessly lay them off are certainly not such a group.
Take, for just one example, the soon to be unemployed people in Wyomings coal industry. Blame the Dems all you want for our damn environmentalism - but if you think the Rs are going to help you, well, you are indeed a sucker.
This is why Fox News spends so much time scaremongering about things like "critical race theory" and transgender bathrooms. If you can convince middle and lower class whites that the real threat is college professors and members of the LGBTQ community then they can scrape together enough votes to prevent things like spending on social services and taxing the rich.
+1000!
Yeah, in the EJ literature both race and class are generally found to be associated with higher pollution impacts. There is a quote that I am roughly paraphrasing about how "race is predictive independent of class, and class is predictive independent of race."
Heather McGhee's recent book "The Sum of Us" makes the great point that this is a perfect opportunity for solidarity, and that everyone would be healthier and better off if we eliminate pollution starting with the most polluted neighborhoods.
See also: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/James-Boyce-2/publication/264689671_Is_Environmental_Justice_Good_for_White_Folks_Industrial_Air_Toxics_Exposure_in_Urban_America/links/5dc8b83e92851c8180435a25/Is-Environmental-Justice-Good-for-White-Folks-Industrial-Air-Toxics-Exposure-in-Urban-America.pdf
Speaking from considerable past experience it's certainly true that poor people in general are heavily policed, polluted, casually educated, and underserved by financial institutions it's also the case that poor whites are given considerable deference vs. poor non-whites.
It's also the case that *institutional* racism is such that when Christian Coalition leader Randy Tate was elected to Congress, representing Washington State's virtually all-white, low-income 9th District he expressed total surprise to a reporter that the majority of welfare recipients were rural whites. His impression, like many others, had been that only "inner city Blacks" received welfare.
This had strongly influenced his stance against welfare. To the extent it's possible for a professional right-wing extremist to do so, once he understood that the majority of welfare recipients are white he actually moderated his opposition.
If Randy Tate was an isolated case we could disregard it. But pretty much everyone on the right from Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush to today's Tucker Carlson, Tom Tancredo, and of course Donald Trump also push the same narrative.
The irony (also in my experience) is that even very poor rural whites believe these things.
Can Arlie Hochschild credibly account for this mistaken but rather... well... institutional belief that "poor people" = "black people." If so then good for him. If not then he's missing a very large part of the story.
The economic elite do not want to be taxed to pay for other people. Their motivation is greed based for the most part. But a very effective way to stir up popular opposition to redistribution or other forms of economic support for the poor is to play on racism. Randy Tate may have been truly unaware of white poverty--I don't know anything about him. But I cannot believe for a second that Reagan, Bush I, Carlson, Tancredo, or Trump is. They know (knew) exactly what they're doing and they're just exploiting racial resentment with lies and distortions about who is poor in America.
Conveniently for them, Democratic politicians mostly play along with this, because they are as dependent on the economic elite for their livelihood as the Republicans. While the Dems generally don't explicitly foment racial resentment in this way, their stunning silence on class issues, with the exception of a handful like Sanders and Warren, assures that this distorted racial narrative goes largely undisputed in the national discussion on these topics. Basically, the Dems are just freeloading on the dirty-work that the Reps are doing here.
At the end of the day, both parties are allies of the ultra-rich in the ongoing, undiscussed, rampant class-warfare that is the US economy.
Oh. A Bernie Bro. That explains it.
Oh yeah, "the Dems generally don't explicitly foment racial resentment"
https://youtu.be/XbZ5SVMSAzs
Whites don't receive teh welfare; it's an earned benefit.
Well, once you have used racism to make one group of people especially poor, it's easy to maintain the racist outcomes simply by replicating the class structure generation after generation. This is why structural racism doesn't actually require racists to work.
Did anyone mention entertainment? Streaming services seem to be doing a better job of representing actual non-white experiences, but mainstream entertainment (television, movies) are still serving up largely stereotypical representations (both "good" as in manic-pixies, and plain old bad.)
Again this this sort of complaint that makes you look like a raving loonie, it's not helpful.
What ACTUALLY do you want, why do you want it, and how would you know when you have it?
Right now there are more movies and TV shows than anyone can watch in a lifetime. There are even more speciality movies and shows (black/gay/whatever) than one can watch in a lifetime.
So I can't tell what the real complaint is. Do people want $500M Avengers type movies that star only black people? (Black Panther wasn't black enough?) Do people not want to see billboards for movies with white people?
I am not trying to be a dick here. I understand the impulse to want to see "my culture, my interests" in media. What I don't understand (but what seems to be common) is continuing to complain about this even when there is, as a I say, already more of this material available than can be consumed in one life.
To me this feels like the kind of irrational complaint that kinda sorta made sense in the 50s, has been kept alive ever since then, but is now way beyond counterproductive because it simply does not make sense to most people.
I'm surprised that Urban Renewal/Interstate Highways didn't make the cut. In Washington DC the highways that were built ruined majority black communities and the Southwest quadrant of the city, a vibrant black working class neighborhood was bulldozed and brutalist apartment blocks were put up to replace the 19th century row homes.
Then there's the infamous Robert Moses. He built bridges in NYC so that buses could not fit under them to try to prevent the wrong folks from getting to the beaches easily.
I'm not sure Robert Moses qualifies as current. I remember driving to Jones Beach under some of those low slung overpasses, when I was a kid in the 1960s.
Moses is certainly not "current." His power faded in the sixties, and fifty years ago he was but a shadow of his former self.
Nevertheless, Moses was the progenitor of at least two generations of urban power brokers who have been, and continue to be, insensitive (to the point of being oblivious) to the damage they were doing to the people they ran roughshod over in the name of "progress." And Moses, in particular, seems to have had a streak of racial animosity mixed in with his general disregard.
Moses is long dead but his structures live on because we haven't kept current with infrastructure.
Annie, as you can see from my comments about Robert Moses, I totally agree with you. But I thought that was what Kevin's term "environmental racism" was about. I may be mistaken; it may be about something else entirely. But the title sure fits.
When I think of environmental racism I think of stuff like the local landfill being located in a historically black area of the county. Or a polluting bus barn for METRO being located right across the street from a low income housing complex.
(a) These are not "Top Four Examples of Systemic Racism" they are Top Four CLAIMS ...
You're not going to convince anyone if your starting point is a mere assertion without backup data.
(b) I suspect all four cases, when looked at closely, boil down to "Top Four Examples of why it sucks to be poor".
Which is a legitimate complaint. But it's not the complain being made, it's not the remedies being offered; and the complaint being made is unproductive insofar as it gets most of the world to go "piss off, we're sick of being told that we are to blame for bad things done by people 500 years ago".
I'm convinced they're some of the most egregious categories of systemic racism. Moreover, I care exactly dick about what you think, you being so ignorant you've never heard of redlining and all.
Go cry me a river somewhere else.
Do you know Maynard Handley personally? If not, how do you know he's never heard of redlining, or that he is ignorant?
He's making a fair point. Poverty and race are strongly correlated, and some of the things in contemporary life that disproportionately adversely affect blacks or other non-whites are just manifestations of economic inequality. Some are purely about racism. And most, I suspect, are a mix of both. But it's important to distinguish those things because the solutions to race and class based problems are different.
Do I need to know him better than I do now? No. And case you forgot or are unable to parse basic English or are pretending not to know he's a troll: After being on about Kevin supplying no 'evidence', he goes on to advance his own speculations ... without evidence.
Or is that not -- how did you put it -- a valid point?
If you want to accuse him of not knowing about redlining, or being ignorant, then you need to know him, or have some other established factual basis for supporting that accusation.
Trolling is in the eye of the beholder--so, no, I don't consider it a valid point. The term, as often as not, is used simply to refer to the expression of opinions disagreed with or disliked.
My point is that you are attacking him ad hominem and not replying to the arguments he is making. In my mind, that's a lot worse than trolling, however you might define the term.
Point One: I do know him. Point Two: He's a long term well-known troll. I'll forgive you to the extent that _you_ don't know him all that well, but that's it. Point Three: You need to read up on what ad hominem is. Hint: Saying I care exactly dick about his opinions is _not_ ad hominem. Point Four: Pointing out his inconsistent standards vis a vis himself and 'Kevin' is also not ad hominem. Point Five: I put 'Kevin' in quotes because he specifically said they were the collective hive minds opinions. Last I heard, Kevin is not a hive mind. Point Six: This loser _also_ didn't go back to the previous discussion before accusing Kevin of making an unsourced claim. Point Seven: Point Six goes back to the claim of ignorance; that was established in the post I responded to. Point Eight: You have no idea what you're talking about, and you won't change my mind until you address my previous seven points.
Are we done here, or are you going to actually say something worthwhile? Game. Set. Match.
Point Seven: Given all that, I have no idea what you're on about.
Really? You, Scent of Violets, know me? Because I don't you.
And you can call my criticisms of Woke "trolling" if it makes you feel better. But that won't change my mind or the minds of other people who criticize Woke not on the grounds you claim, but on the grounds that it's an intellectually dishonest, morally bankrupt program whose primary goal is to raise a very few at the expense of the vast majority.
So it was somebody else using your handle when Kevin was employed with Mother Jones? News to me.
More to the point, you didn't answer a single one of my points (I see someone else has already pranged you for attributing those top systemic racism categories to Kevin and a few more as well.) Also, no matter how much you try to make it happen, valid observations of your knowledge, reading comprehension, and logical inconsistencies is not 'woke criticism'.
Oh, and I'm neither 'woke' nor 'liberal', so you can't engage in your normal name-calling on that score.
Deal with it, troll.
Oh, one final point: no one was talking to you troll, nor trying to change your mind; as I said, your comments are worth exactly dick. _You_ OTOH, are trying to convince _me_ and others like me. So fuque off, you simplistic little troll. Did you really think anybody was going to fall for that one?
I didn't answer you points because I don't think they are serious and I don't think they are worth my time.
However I would raise the following issues for you to think about.
- You repeatedly call me a troll. What do you mean by that? I think you mean anyone who disagrees with you. In other words, you consider the very act of disagreement to be illegitimate speech.
If you don't think that is an accurate characterization, ask yourself what you'd consider non-trollish disagreement with your belief system to look like.
- I do not post here in the expectation that I will change your mind. I'm well aware of how rarely minds ever change, and just how small is the fraction of people who have ever changed their minds about anything over the age of about 20.
The point, rather is to establish Common Knowledge. I believe it is important, in the face of strong assertions as to the absolute truth of certain claims, to point out that, in fact, not everyone accepts those claims, and that those who disagree with them are not alone.
- You'd get a lot more from my comments if you actually read what I said rather than imagining you already know what I am going to say. Look at what I said here.
(a) I am referring to the state of the US TODAY. I am not asserting that issues of the sort being raised did not happen in the past; I am asserting that they don't happen today in the way that you claim.
(b) I am not asserting that various outcomes do not occur differentially across various groups.
What I am asserting is that TODAY these are better explained by poverty and culture than by the vague, undefinable term of "racism", and that dressing up this term in fancier language of "*systemic* racism", inventing a history of the world and theory of sociology based on this "systemic racism" (and little else), and asserting that any disagreement with this ideology is motivated purely by "racism", is behavior that I deplore even as I support many of the same political or moral goals as you.
And that is my primary point. One of the reasons I consider (and treat) Woke as a religion is that it behaves as one. Not only in the insistence of the catechism over anything as mundane as facts or reality; but also in the insistence that the heretic is a far worse enemy than the infidel or the pagan.
For Woke it does not matter that someone like myself (or say Thomas Sowell, or Clarence Thomas) mostly agree on where we want American Society to go; what matters far more is that the three of us disagree with Woke on some *precise* details of how to get there,
How is one to interpret such behavior -- absolute hatred for someone who in fact agrees with you on so much, but refuses to kowtow on certain particular points -- as anything but religious zealotry?
I didn't answer you points because I don't think they are serious and I don't think they are worth my time.
You didn't 'answer my points' because you were factually wrong, dipshit. I'm going to bookmark this little discussion for the next time you pop your tiny troll head up as an example of you talking smack and a person who is unable to admit they're wrong about the most concrete matters of fact. Now fuque offf.
Maynard, I have no idea what peculiar axe you're trying to grind, but read again the very short post Kevin wrote. These are not his claims; they are the results of his survey. Are you perhaps asserting that he made this stuff up without the survey data? Or perhaps you're asserting that you don't believe these were the results simply because he didn't publish the survey data in a table?
Meanwhile, your paragraph (b) seems to have gotten seriously off the track. OF COURSE there's a high correlation between "why it sucks to be a minority" and "why it sucks to be poor." Most of us have noticed that correlation and acknowledged it about the time we entered our teenage years, however long ago that was. For me it was 65 years ago, and it still seems very much the same now. But what the hell does that have to do with your last sentence? Nobody here in this discussion has mentioned anything about "reparations for slavery." It's about trying to do better NOW in areas like the ones Kevin mentioned.
Now, now, he thinks he's being an effective troll. Don't step on the little guys biggest ambition, his fondest dream. Well, not too hard.
lulz
As you might expect, the conversation in comments degenerated fast ...
The blog will be switching to Coral. Don't say you haven't been warned.
The trolls crawl in the trolls crawl out, they play pinochle upon your snout.
Related to bank loans, home sales. There is a lot of residential segregation...real estate agents, landlords do this intentionally or semi-intentially...mortgage qualification is more difficult for Blacks. Home sale prices are lower if a buyer (non-Black) perceives that home seller is Black; prices higher in same neighborhoods if buyer is Black. When I was doing some reporting on racial issues at decade or so ago, it was happening in a very liberal county in MA, though there was a lot of denial, or questions of subtle or "unconscious" racism.
Peace through superior firepower: Belief in supernatural evil and attitudes toward gun policy in the United States,
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0049089X21000727
Add housing to the list.
Also, I'd suggest "policing," though others might say it's covered under criminal justice. I'll say they're different because criminal justice is a system that (as the old Law & Order intro used to say) includes the courts. It deals with victims and perpetrators of crime. "Policing" on the other hand is about public safety. Anyway, a nuanced difference to be sure.
BTW, here a few links in support of those systemic racism categories.
On disparities WRT banks: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-08-16/the-dramatic-racial-bias-of-subprime-lending-during-the-housing-boom
On disparities WRT the justice system: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-020-0858-1
On disparities WRT environmentalism: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/reports/fossil-fuel-racism/
And that's just at the beginning of the comments. Yeah, certain people -- read trolls -- who are yapping on about lack of supporting evidence are just that -- trolls.
This sort of analysis is an appropriation and distortion of the term "systemic racism" formulated by critical race theorists. Critical race theory most emphatically does not say that the liberal order is fundamentally okay, but there are problematic institutions where racial disparities are created; but fortunately, well-meaning liberals are on the case fighting to reform those institutions. CRT says that liberalism itself is racist, and liberals casting around for well-meaning "reforms" in fact perpetuate racism. That's what "systemic" means in this context.
While it's illegal to discriminate in bank loans, are we to believe that bank workers secretly deny loans to some people because of their race? Are we supposed to believe that banks are discriminators who would turn down good loans even though they'll make more money? If so, we must believe banks are really dumb when it comes to making money on loans.
Now some will say that this is not the way systemic racism works. You have to ignore the motives of bankers. Instead it's claimed you must realize that for black and white applicants with the same qualifications, blacks get denyed much more often. Somehow the loan approval process has hidden mechanisms built in to target blacks for discrimination. The algorithms for picking who gets loans are racist. (That's a little strange since the algorithms were written to be sure not to discriminate, since that is illegal.)
What seems more likely than racist algorithms is that many researchers are not doing adequate adjustments in studies to compare whites and blacks with the same qualifications. Indeed some studies have concluded this is the case.
But I know my words above are wasted. CRT asks simply: are there unequal results? If the answer is yes, then you have found systemic racism.
Personally, I'm always a little suspicous when people claim something in the social sciences is "settled science".
While it's illegal to discriminate in bank loans, are we to believe that bank workers secretly deny loans to some people because of their race?
Yes. Yet another simple answer to a stupid question. And this happened long before there were 'algorithms'. I suggest you find another mechanisms ... especially when it's been demonstrated that with an identical profile, say human appraisers (this one was a recent news item) placed different values on the exact same house, depending on whether they thought it was black- or white-owned. Jeeze, doesn't anybody do research these days before shooting off their mouth?
"stupid question ... shooting off their mouth"
Please don't interact with me on here. Our interactions have always gone poorly, so it's pointless. I prefer to interact with people who don't constantly toss in insults.
"While it's illegal to discriminate in bank loans, are we to believe that bank workers secretly deny loans to some people because of their race? Are we supposed to believe that banks are discriminators who would turn down good loans even though they'll make more money? If so, we must believe banks are really dumb when it comes to making money on loans."
I think you need to read up on how real estate agents and bankers do, in fact, discriminate and get away with it on a regular basis. In the last financial crisis, tens of thousands of mortgages were written for underqualified borrowers and subsequently sold to be repackaged and sold again; a disproportionate number of the borrowers were people of color. This is common knowledge; I'm surprised you were not aware of it. And redlining is still going on, despite the laws, and that shouldn't surprise you, since enforcement is spotty at best. See
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/redlining-what-is-history-mike-bloomberg-comments/
And the legacies of past redlining haven't gone away either.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/redlining-was-banned-50-years-ago-its-still-hurting-minorities-today/
Eliminate most racism by getting rid of comments and social media!
Late to the party, but two great examples from healthcare were published recently, in NY Times and WaPo.
First, about sickle-cell, in NY Times. Turns out there is a simple, cheap, non-invasive way to screen for potentially devastating stroke in kids with sickle-cell. It is almost never recommended or followed up.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/23/health/sickle-cell-black-children.html?searchResultPosition=2
Second, kidney failure, from WaPo. Severity of kideny disease, and priority for transplants, is based on a formula that that explicitly adjusts for race, pushing Black patients down the line.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/black-kidney-patients-racial-health-disparities/2021/06/04/7752b492-c3a7-11eb-9a8d-f95d7724967c_story.html
In each case this is the result of choices that evaluated individually are not necessarily prejudiced, but in context perpetuate and amplify disadvantage.
Curious why Vote Suppression isn't on this list. It's systemic. It's racist. It's pervasive; and destructive. And currently it's the biggest problem and the source of it (corporate power/money over representative democracy) is clear.
Not sure how you are concluding "corporate power/money" is causing vote suppression. Trump, all by himself, has caused this. His Big Lie has caused millions of Americans to think that the voting system is very insecure, and out of fear or stupidity GOP politicians have been changing laws to make it supposedly more secure.
It's been documented that, for example, Koch money has been financing revanchist candidates' campaigns. Are you saying you have to show evidence for every large corporation and richy richer? If so, you're employing the "You didn't say your words right" style of argumentation. I had thought that beneath you ... but you learn something new every day, I guess.
"Koch money has been financing revanchist candidates' campaigns" you know that in 2016 Koch brothers supported Hillary Clinton over Donald trump, right?
It's evident that corporate cabals are using everything in their power right now including money to prevent ending the filibuster so that voting rights legislation at the top of the priorities list for Democrats will fail. Someone ask Biden. He'll tell you the truth about money in politics.