As I have written for some years now, the U.S. is moving rather rapidly to a much more diverse condition. Even a quick look at demographic data reveals the U.S. is rather rapidly becoming less white and more racially diverse. Whites are less than half the populations of Hawaii, New Mexico, California, and Texas. They are a minority in half the largest metropolitan areas. Over the next few decades they will become the statistical minority in the most populous states and all major metropolitan areas. No later than the 2040s Americans of color will be more than half the population. As we saw in the 2008 election an American of color was elected U.S. president substantially because he got the overwhelming majority of votes of African American, Asian American, Latino, and Native American voters. A substantial majority of white voters, in contrast, voted for his white Republican opponent. One significant question that these demographic changes raise is just how most whites will deal with this significant increase in racial-ethnic diversity in the future.
It is not just whites in white supremacist groups who worry about losing demographic position to those who are not white. Many other whites, leaders and ordinary citizens, frame these demographic changes as threatening. Interestingly, this concern with white population size relative to the racial others is not new, for the white racial frame has been concerned with such issues for centuries. Today, numerous prominent white analysts like Patrick Buchanan, a former Republican presidential candidate and media commentator, and Samuel Huntington, an influential Harvard social science professor, write from a strong white frame that accents the declining white percentage in the population as very negative for whites and the future of what they term “Western civilization.”
The American Prospect has an interesting summary piece by Rich Benjamin (see Jessie’s previous commentary on an interview with Benjamin here) on what he calls “whitopia,” the numerous places across the country where whites are fleeing in order to escape the diversity on the coasts and in big cities:
If so, you would join a growing number of white Americans homesteading in a constellation of small towns and so-called “exurbs” that are extremely white. They are creating communal pods that cannily preserve a white-bread world, a throwback to an imagined past with “authentic” 1950s values but with the nifty suburban amenities available today. . . . I call them Whitopias. . . . [These are] whiter than the nation, its respective region, and its state. It has posted at least 6 percent population growth since 2000. The majority of that growth (often upward of 90 percent) is from white migrants.
Benjamin quotes a number of whites as to why they are moving, with a general theme, as one put it, that “So many of the people that are here have come from areas where they have seen diversity done badly.” He also notes the work of Bill Frey (see here and here), who has for fifteen-plus years noted this white-flight phenomenon, work that I have also found preceptive and provocative. Benjamin also notes the pull of the whitopia areas, especially that they are already white:
The places luring so many white Americans are revealing. The five towns posting the largest white growth rates between 2000 and 2004 — St. George, Utah; Coeur d’Alene, Idaho; Bend, Oregon; Prescott, Arizona; and Greeley, Colorado — were already overwhelmingly white. … Americans associate a homogeneous white neighborhood with higher property values, friendliness, orderliness, cleanliness, safety, and comfort. …. Race is often used as a proxy for those neighborhood traits.
Actually the bits here about comfort and friendliness suggest that even Benjamin, an African American, is writing a bit unreflectively, indeed from a version of the white racial frame here. By “Americans,” he means white Americans, for overwhelmingly white neighborhoods can be decidedly unfriendly and uncomfortable (indeed hostile) to African Americans and other Americans of color. I was just in one such area this week lecturing, with some folks of color who do not exactly find the heavily white area comfortable.
Benjamin concludes noting the political implications I suggested above:
John McCain trounced Obama among white voters, 55 percent to 43 percent. Of the 245 U.S. counties that qualify as “exurbs,” McCain beat Obama in 209 of them, most often by double-digit margins.
Yet more evidence of just how racially polarized this “post-racial America” really is.
This is an important observation. For all the talk about diversity being our strength and the importance of tolerance, people still sort themselves by race whenever they get the chance.
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It is hardly only whites who are guilty of this, however the whites’ congregating probably stands out more for historical reasons and also because white neighborhoods have tended to be more desirable in objective terms — Benjamin’s “higher property values, friendliness, orderliness, cleanliness, safety, and comfort.”
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The question, I suppose is whether it’s a lost cause — whether it’s possible to have a very racially diverse society that is still a functioning democracy. Any opinion?
>I think it’s possible to have a very racially diverse society that is still a functioning democracy If we can get educational levels at a desirable constant for all races.
>If you have Huge differences in educational levels, this does not bode well for a functioning democracy. Everybody has to be on the same page here. People, I’ve noticed, divide more readily on the basis of educational level than race. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s been my personal observation.
>People feel comfortable with other people who they can communicate with effectively. They want to be understood. I know I’m talking about socio-economic class, but I think the economic part is not as important as the educational part. There are black people who’ve lived in my neighborhood for as long as I have..23 years. If they felt uncomfortable, they’d have left long ago. They feel comfortable because they are well-educated and thus, Everybody likes them. They feel socially comfortable.
> I’m not disputing Joe’s findings. However, in the cosmopolitan world we live in..education counts. People respect people who are Aware of the World outside the little coccoon they live in. If any group of people move into a neighborhood/group/ in which they can’t carry on a mutually comprehended conversation..that relationship is doomed. There is a need by all of us to be Understood. I think Education is the great equalizer. It’s our only hope really.
I read accounts of “demographic” diversity with care, as I question whether they mean much. Even if the US population becomes less White, power and wealth do not seem to be diversifying at the same rate or to the same extent.
I disagree that the term”Americans” is code for “White Americans.” POC apply those same descriptors to the majority White suburb where I live; it is definitely the perception to those POC living outside the suburb’s borders. And for those of us who are residents here, we know it is not all goodness and light but we put up with some of the less desirable aspects because of the desirable ones.
In addition, for those of us who are POC *and* who have class privilege, we are often better positioned than the small pockets of lower SES folks (Black, White and Hispanic) living here. There is even a name for these families: “apartment dwellers”–who are drawn to the better schools and better facilities, but who cannot afford to buy in this area.
Unfortunately, PPR Scribe, the research data show quite clearly that a great many African Americans and many other people of color find such overwhelmingly white places uncomfortable. Some POC may see them as ok, as you suggest, but most will not move to such areas unless there is a critical mass of AAs or other people of colork, bec. of white hostility. My analysis is based in these survey research data, not impressions.
I do not doubt that POC find “Whitopias” (love that term and will use it soon!) “uncomfortable.” I suspect that survey data will reveal similar perceptions among POC, however, about these areas as safer, cleaner, with better schools, and higher quality generally in facilities from grocery stores to libraries.
This is not my area of research, so of course I cannot discount your data. But just by the demographic trends in my own and surrounding suburbs I can assure you that POC have been moving here over the last 10 years or so, despite there not being a “critical mass.”
Perhaps the situation is different in areas that do not have a more diverse larger city close by, such as the case with some of the areas in the article.
Here’s an online audio interview conducted today with Rich Benjamin, author of Searching for Whitopia:
The C.O.W.S.
This is a Video of Rich Benjamin on Youtube traveling to Whitopia areas and speaking about white flight. Great Video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDuVG0IRGZQ&feature=PlayList&p=D1F5FBEBB48D9875&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=18
Is it this?
Or this?
Not sure it can be both.
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It’s not the “whiteness” that is desirable to people of color. It’s the opportunitity. Where pocs can build these types of communities and offer their children the same type of opportunities, we do. Ie, Atlanta.
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The rest is to everyone:
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It’s not race, it’s economics. What we have here is a confluence of different racial discriminations. Because whitopias are deemed more desirable, they cost more. On average, a black applicant for a mortgage, though, will be charged more on top of the increased cost. Add income discrimination and you end up with the average poc being priced out of these neighborhoods.
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Then, remember the for most white voters, increased taxes=increased social programs=money going to lazy pocs. So I’m not sure that in an integrated neighborhood where everyone could afford to pay higher taxes and have all the amenities these whitopias have, the electorate would vote for the higher taxes. Then, because the city doesn’t have the revenue, everyone complains about the cleanliness or crime or schools or whatever. But if they paid higher taxes, all that stuff could be addressed. So I don’t think that whitopias are “cleaner” because white people keep “cleaner,” and anyone who actually thinks that knows little to nothing of American history. They’re cleaner because the residents are willing to pay higher taxes. And they’re “friendlier” because white people perceive other white people as “friendly.”
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So it’s a confluence of things both real and imagined. But as for self-segregation among African Americans, if I may be so bold? We spend enough time in whitestan on workdays. Most of us see no need to come home to that. It’s not racist, it’s anti-racist. It’s a way to protect our psyches from racism. Now granted I, like most other black Americans, are distrustful of white people and doubtful of any genuine sincerity. (Like it or not, that’s how it is and how it will remain until white Americans actually demonstate genuine sincerity and desire for equality.) But I think one reason white people move to these whitopias is the other side of our motivation for self-segregation: they’re protecting their privileged psyches from the reality of equality. So long as white Americans can group off, they will and they’ll tell themselves it’s because their neighborhoods are cleaner, friendlier, etc, etc. But it’s really so they can keep telling themselves they’re better without facing the objective reality that they’re not.
No1KState, my question regarding Darin’s rather ironic comments here (as opposed to there) is…
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It is this?
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Or this?
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Of course at the time, I wondered why Darin essentially argued for grown azz [White] people to be considered/regarded as children in need of special kudos for finally demonstrating their ability to function on an adult level in this shared American society. Cheers, indeed.
A few data points to consider for folks who tend to lean to Darin-like presumptions:
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From a 2001 NYT article (“Analysis of Census Finds Segregation Along With Diversity”) regarding researchers who examined 2000 Census data:
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Couple that with type of neighborhood preference information has been out there, at least, over the past two decades or so…
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… and it’s clear the reality is different from the quaint beliefs some people tend to cling to. Of course none of the data above precludes the kind of economic motivations No1KState alluded to. And it would be foolish to ignore the housing markets and self-regenerating segregation that America’s not-so-distant (most) racist past built. So the very implication in Darin’s “people still sort themselves by race” meme is either blind or willfully ignorant of the institutional forces that have sorted people for the overwhelming majority of this country’s history and the impact of those forces on us all today.
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People are born into families and those families live in houses, etc. in communities and those communities often have at least some segregated institutions (e.g. schools and churches) whose racial composition can’t be separated from America’s racist/racial past, recent or distant.
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My mother went to a segregated high school. All my life, in every town I’ve lived in, I’ve learned about the side of town (often on a certain side of the railroad tracks) Black people were “allowed” to live in, to buy a house in, etc. Those communities don’t just disappear over night.
My question and answer would be: what (inherently negative) bearing does racial diversity have on democracy? I mean, let some racism deniers/minimizers tell it… Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, etc. all want the same things — good jobs, schools, etc., etc. — that there aren’t any separate “Black issues” or concerns that need to be address. Certain none that should be address or can’t address by race-neutral policies. That’s the kind of response we’ve had for years to so-called “race-based” affirmative action policies. A response that suggests that our democracy can function well and serve all people, regardless of their race, by treating us all like we are people discounted to this country’s racist history.
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Beyond that, I’d argue that the largely racial civil rights campaign of the 50’s and 60’s has made for a better functioning, truer form of democracy in this country. So, obviously, I don’t share your unchecked assumptions or your narrow views regarding the concept/principles of democracy.
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And how ironic. The eras when the U.S. was a blatantly white supremacist country apparently aren’t considered to be times when the country’s democracy failed to “function” properly, by Darin’s logic. It’s as if ‘democracy = White rule’ by his standards, cause everyone knows that there’s a huge unanswered question as to whether very racially diverse societies can maintain “functioning” democracies.
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I guess what Darin really wants to say, or what the logical extension of his begged question, is that we should know White rule/White Supremacy was and is the best thing for this country’s “democracy.” So, in this country’s case….
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White rule = functioning democracy.
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With the kind of reaction Pres. Obama has received, record death threats and all… I guess it’s easy to see how “very racially diverse” societies can have dysfunctional and unhinged (did I say unhinged?) elements.
No1KState, sorry it took me so long to get back. I don’t see any contradiction between those two statements. In fact, I wrote them both, so they must be consistent.
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(That’s a joke, in case it didn’t come through.)
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Here’s an interesting point: The absolute insistence among progressives on maintaining a monopoly for the public school system has solidified racial segregation in housing. If the only way high-income whites can guarantee a good “non-shared” environment for their children is through the house they buy, then they must bid up houses in their community until the price of the house includes the value of the school, too. If schools were paid by vouchers or were private (best), there would be less benefit to raising children in a particular neighborhood, so house prices would fall.
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As usual, the Law of Unintended Consequences will not be denied!
Nquest, the US was never a “blatantly white supremacist” country. Of course, the history of racial abuses is impossible to deny, but that doesn’t make the US “White Supremacist” at those times, it makes it “typical.” In other words, the racial issues here are the same ones we see everywhere and at every time when racial groups collide, and that includes collisions that don’t involve whites. One big difference lately, of course, is that the US has attempted to resolve its racial issues in a way other than one race wiping the other out. That’s been the usual approach throughout human history. (I don’t suppose you give western civilization any credit for changing that, do you?)
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Are there only two options?
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a) Unmitigated enthusiasm for the direction of racial issues in America today, or
b) White supremacy.
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Nothing else? No other options available? Listen, I’m expressing honest skepticism that the big, shiny diversity pizza we’re all supposed to want a bite of is going to work. If you can’t see the difference between that and being a white supremacist, then… Well, nothing. That would be par for the course, actually. I’ll just add “white supremacist” to the list of names hyperventilated in my direction.
@ Darin – Then doesn’t that mean that these whites who are looking for a “non-shared” environment are being racist or at the very least supporting a system of racism?
@nquest – I agree
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@ Darin – Actually, no. It doesn’t happen everywhere, everytime different races collide. The Americas is unique in it’s racialized slavery on the basis of superiority. Yes, other nations went on conquests. Persia, Rome, Egypt, Japan. Maybe Japan is the only other example of conquest based on notions of superiority. Other groups, including the Zulus, certainly felt “superior” and entitled compared to the peoples they overtook. And yeah, some may have been nationalists, ie “for the glory of Rome.” But Europe’s racial sentiments are fairly unique.
So yes, the US began as a blatantly white supremacist nation. And the extent to which it’s “typical” is simply that all of Western Europe was doing the same thing: racialized slavery, racialized genocide.
Even the Hutus and Tutsis got along until Germany got involved. Part of what made the Rwandan genocide so terrible was that in-laws and neighbors were killing each other . . . because they all lived together in a fair amount of calm if not true peace.
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I hardly think any serious anti-racist is interested in either choice. What we want is equal opportunity and equal humanity. That’s quite different from our current direction.
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If you are sincerely skeptical that we can actually be a great, diverse nation, you have to admit it’s only because white Americans can’t share. You can’t get around that. You admit as much all the time:
Rich people don’t have to price “up” to keep poor people out. White people price “up” to keep people of color out. The US hasn’t done anything to fix it’s racial problems that it wasn’t forced to. Black and white anti-racists forced the issue that led to the Civil War. Then neo-slavery ensued for another century. Activists of the Civil Rights Movement forced the hand of whites again; but, if you study history, you’ll see that once again white Americans only did as much as was necessary, then launched into a backlash for next decades up to the present.
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I do agree, though, that we need to change the public school system. I think we should move to some system like France’s where every student is assigned X amount of dollars, a voucher if you will, and the parents decide what school to send their kids to. If my local area is any indication, white people will still find away to segregate themselves into all-white enclaves. But integregation was only a means to an end, not the end itself. While, yes, there were some who thought something special would happen once white kids realized black kids didn’t have monkey tails after all. But there were others who only used it as a means to force the hand of the South: integrated schools are cheaper than schools that are separate and actually equal.
But as for US history and the realistic chance diversity could work, you do have a point. But please read carefully and don’t just presume you and I are saying the same thing.
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There are certain factors that sort of feed economic inequality. In places where there’s some sort of mineral wealth, inequality is very likely to occur. The second one I can’t remember, but the third is the only you’re interested in. In situations where there is ethnic heterogenity, inequality is likely to occur. I can’t remember why, but William Easterly explains it fairly well in “the white man’s burden.” But anyway, the US is unique in our situation. Let me count the ways:
1 – the South lost the war but won the peace. Is there any other time or place where one people group defeated another people group and didn’t rule with an iron fist?
2 – the slaves didn’t migrate together and build another country. We’re still here living with the descendants of the owners of our ancestors.
3 – the Native Americans are still here. Talk about reparations! Wow!
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So yes we have this diverse situation that lends itself to inequality. That doesn’t make it right. Especially when the disadvantaged keep trying to tell you things aren’t right.
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I guess the sort of logical fallacy, or rather, what I can’t make sense of as far as your position is that one moment, you deny the situation is as bad as what we make it out to be. The next moment, you’re leaning our your unscientific observations to “prove” that racial differences do exist and it’s wrong of us to insist that we see the same diversity in our top universities that we see in the general population. And the sort of “contradiction” in that is you say we’re exagerating inequalities while at the same time acknowledging that disproportions do exist. Is it that you notice the disproportions but don’t think it rises to the level of inequality? And even after you acknowledge something racist like whitopias, you excuse it. So we kinda end up in this circle where you say:
1 – things aren’t X (X being “racially unequal in an unjust manner”)
2 – things are Y, Y being “racially unequal” at all, but it’s okay because the races are naturally different. So we’re “unequal” but it’s just.
3 – then you argue things are Y, but it’s okay because white people are only being naturally human
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What we’re saying is that you have no scientific evidence that the races are naturally different, so #2 gets thrown out and the inequality becomes unjust. And as for whites being simply “human” in suspecting blacks are more criminal because of what they see in local news (more unscientific observations) . . . we end up with an unjust situation. So it’s kinda like: if Z were the rationalizations for the inequality, Y – Z = X
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So to kinda wrap this up, we can have a true democracy in our diversity if white Americans would stop being racially biased.
@ No1KState:
>Mentioning other countries who Use Slaves Today in 2009 does not diminish the horror of slavery practiced in America. However, I have always thought slavery was about Power. Stronger members of a society using weaker ones. There are 29 Million Slaves in the world today. Most of them are sex slaves, underage children sold into prostitution.
>Regarding Race Slavery Today: Also the Bantu tribe in
Africa enslaves the Pymgy tribe in Africa Today. The Pygmies are a shorter race of Africans and the Bantus can easily dominate them. This is domination based on race since one race is taller than the other and thus able to dominate.
>The Europeans used the Excuse of Race to enslave Africans. It wasn’t difficult to capture them off the Gold Coast of Africa though because African chiefs sold members of other captured villages to white men for guns. Africa has formally issued an apology to its nation and the world, by the way, for doing this for 350 years. So there is guilt to be ruminated over on several sides of this issue regarding the initiation of slavery in the Americas.
>However, white Europeans kept it going using all kinds of specious excuses such as 1.Blacks were genetically inferior and 2.the Bible refers to slaves so that made it ok 3. the slaves were better off with a master cause they wouldn’t be able to care for themselves if freed 4.slaves wouldn’t know what to do with an education if they had it etc. The fact is that it was about 1.free labor 2.free labor and 3.free labor and I suspect most Americans knew this.
>Though slavery was officially abolished in China in 1910,[102] the practice continues unofficially in some regions.[103][104] Slavery also exists in other countries across the world, including among nations within Africa.
>Groups such as the American Anti-Slavery Group, Anti-Slavery International, Free the Slaves, the Anti-Slavery Society, and the Norwegian Anti-Slavery Society continue to campaign to rid the world of slavery. Conditions that are considered slavery include debt bondage, indentured servitude, serfdom, domestic servants kept in captivity, adoption in which children are effectively forced to work as slaves, child soldiers, and forced marriage[105].
>More people suffer slavery than in the past but slaves are a smaller proportion of the human population. Slaves are cheap and can therefore be treated as expendable. Worldwide slavery is a criminal offence but criminal slave owners can get very high returns for their actions.[106] According to researcher Siddharth Kara, the profits generated worldwide by all forms of slavery in 2007 was $91.2 billion. That is second only to drug trafficking in terms of global, criminal, illicit enterprises. The weighted average annual profits generated by a slave in 2007 was $3,175, with a low of an average $950 for bonded labor and $29,210 for a trafficked sex slave.[107] Approximately forty percent of all slave profits each year are generated by trafficked sex slaves, representing slightly more than 4 percent of the world’s 29 million slaves.[107]
> In Mauritania alone, it is estimated that up to 600,000 men, women and children, or 20% of the population, are enslaved with many used as bonded labour.[122][123] Slavery in Mauritania was criminalized in August 2007.[124]
> In Niger, slavery is also a current phenomenon. A Nigerien study has found that more than 800,000 people are enslaved, almost 8% of the population.[125][126][127]
>Pygmies, the people of Central Africa’s rain forest,[128] live in servitude to the Bantus.[129] Some tribal sheiks in Iraq still keep blacks, called Abd, which means servant or slave in Arabic, as slaves.[130] Child slavery has commonly been used in the production of cash crops and mining. According to the U.S. Department of State, more than 109,000 children were working on cocoa farms alone in Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) in “the worst forms of child labor” in 2002.[131]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery
Maybe I should pick up a copy of Whitopia because in my mind, I could care less were people choose to live. If someone wants to moving into an all white, all black, all hispanic, all asian, all (fill in the blank) neighborhood, who am I stop them? As long as no one is being forced to live places where they do not want, it really is no-one else’s concern. Once again, maybe I need to read Whitopia to fully grasp this concept…
No1KState, I think you’re misunderstanding my use of the term “non-shared environment.” It refers to the environment not shared by siblings (i.e., peers, school groups).
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I think you guys are talking yourselves in circles. As Ellen correctly points out, slavery is first and foremost about economics. One group enslaves another because they think it will make them rich. The idea that anybody would import hundreds of thousands of slaves just to satisfy some sense of superiority is… weird. Besides, if that were true, we would have seen slaves elsewhere in the US. Or are only Southerners White supremacists?
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I don’t have to read the explanation in “White Man’s Burden” to understand why inequality occurs when there’s heterogeneity. Isn’t it obvious? The groups are not identical. They’re different, that’s how you know it’s heterogeneous, and that’s why they have different outcomes. I would think that’s tautological.
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I don’t think I ever said “inequality” is “right.” It just is. My point is that there’s probably very little anyone can do about it and that isn’t caused by a moral failing of those who have more. There’s inequality in societies with only one race, too. In fact, there’s inequality in the US among whites. I have very good explanations for that — using my “unscientific observations.” Do you?
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Anyway, Ellen is making my point for me by pointing out that slavery is really the norm, not the exception, when races bump against each other. The rationalizations probably change over time, but I assume that the temptation to take another bunch and make them work for the benefit of you and your bunch is pretty much universal. I’m not glad it happens, and I am glad it no longer goes on in the West (mostly), but I’m not exactly surprised by it.
@ Darin – “non-shared” refers to siblings. Okay. My bad.
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Racialized slavery is not the norm. Even free blacks during slavery were at risk of being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Some have even argued being a “free” black meant you were everyone’s slave, cause you had no protection. When groups come together, slavery is not inevitable.
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That said, you’re correct that people don’t enslave millions just to satisfy some notion of white supremacy. It is about money. Here’s the thing, though. When you have a system of labor where Europeans and Africans are both exploited, at some point, the oppressed will rise together. So what do you do to break up the rebellion? You give the Europeans freedom and tell them that because they’re white, they’re better than the Africans. So then that way, even poor whites have a reason to support racialized slavery. So, racialized slavery came about not to satisfy white supremacy; racism was used to rationalize slavery. The problem we have today is that even though slavery is gone, we still have these inequalities. And the way to rationalize the inequality is racism, and the way to rationalize racism is inequality.
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Read the book. Inequality is always due to moral failings and there is much we can do to fix it. Even when it arises organically because say one group owns the land with all the gold and the other group only has mica, it’s “moral failings” that the inequalities are continued. Take the US for example, part of our problem is that soooooooo many people are convinced that from Day 1, white people and white men in particular are the only ones, or the main ones, to have “built” this nation. That’s just not true. It’s moral failings that we continue to teach this, for example, those in Texas who want to remove Cesar Chevaz and Thurgood Marshall from their history textbooks. The only benefits they claim is that it will save space, and Chevaz was a marxist. Is that enough to justify that whatever the intent, following through will inevitably lead to notions of white superiority and undergird a system of white supremacy.
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And here’s the thing. Even if a white person, or when white people, start out with neutral intentions, once you’ve been told of the disparit impact, you’ve been told. To continue doing something with know results in disparit impact is intentional and a moral failing.
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As to a lack of moral failings on the part of the rich . . . right now today, the so-called “death tax” only applies to 1% or less of the population. Yet, these people have paid out big, big bucks to convince the rest of us that we have something to lose with the estate tax. You got Glenn Beck telling folks that healthcare reform is a form of reparations. That’s ill intent. You got Rush saying that referring to some essay written satirically is “okay” because “we know that’s what Obama thinks anyway.” That’s ill intent.
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All that is to say that when inequality arises, it takes ill intent to maintain it. Where there is no ill intent, the group with the gold won’t keep the group with the mica from discovering some way to make their mica as valuable if not more valuable than gold. That’s not what we’ve seen historically in the US. That’s not what we see now. The inequality in the US did not “just happen”; there’s tons we can do about it; not doing anything about it is a moral failing.
We’ve been around this loop before. I doubt I’m going to convince you.
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I’m not talking about slavery in only the US, I’m talking about slavery in general throughout human history. Racial slavery is very common. There are practical reasons for this (easier to identify who’s a slave) as well as deeper ones (we are probably more likely to enslave those who are not “our own”). It is only recently that any moral objection has been made to this.
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Inequality is *always* a moral failing? Really? Please tell me how the Asians in America have failed morally so we can begin agitating for reparations from them!
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If you don’t believe that the foundation of this country was built by white men, then I don’t know what to say. You might start by identifying the African and Asian nations that had democracy, freedom of religion, and freedom of speech in the 18th century. Any?
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I do agree with you that slavery and racism probably tend to support each other. This is a point that CS Lewis makes in “Mere Christianity”; once we wrong someone, we often find it easier to rationalize that wrong and continue doing it than to own up to it.
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Your story about who owns the land and the gold and whatever is quaint but I don’t see much overlap with reality, here. The history of humans is more of the strong *taking* what they want from the weak. It’s only the last few hundred years that we’ve seen any real change in that — now that trade has developed as a preferred method of acquiring wealth.
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As you know, I do not regard “disparate impact” as a helpful standard. It’s rarely used scientifically, although it often comes with a veneer of science.
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Let me see if I’ve got this right: opposing the death tax is a moral failing? Hm. I’m a much worse person than I thought! I oppose virtually every tax there is, but especially inefficient and envy-based taxes like that one. Do you understand the economic argument against the death tax? I assume not, since you’ve jumped straight to accusing Beck, Limbaugh, and me of bad faith since we all hate it.
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Inequality doesn’t “arise,” it just “is.” What do you think we should be doing about inequality in the US?
How can you contend that the country was built by white men and that inequality just “is,” but also contend that this nation wasn’t built on principles of white supremacy?
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If by “built” you mean the one who wrote the Constitution, yes. All white men, in part because they didn’t allow anyone else. We don’t know how much better the Constitution would’ve been had everyone been at the table. Also, these white men wrote in the Constitution that slaves would count as 3/5 of a person only for the purposes of giving the South more legislative representation. Only men could vote, and men who owned land at that. With all that in mind, do you still think this nation was not founded on principle of white supremacy?
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But that’s just the Constitution. Note that the very idea of a “constitution” is something learned from Native Americans, the Iroquois if I’m not mistaking. When it comes to the Revolutionary War, black men fought and died just like white men. They count, don’t they? And that’s not even talking about the economy and wealth built of the free labor of black people. Or the railroads built of the free labor of Asians.
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As for other nations practicing freedom of religion, speech and democracy? I guess one thing we need to point out is that many of the present day countries of Africa and Asia are based on boundaries created by Europe. So did Nigeria have democracy? No, but there was no Nigeria. And from what I remember of my college classes, I don’t recall the sort of persecution happening in those continents because of religion or speech that would happen in Europe. And while I’m not aware of place that had a 1 person, 1 vote political system, I do know that several nations had something approximating the Greek senate.
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By the way, it’s not as though the US had some 1 person, 1 vote political system during the 18th century either.
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The story I used was to describe a situation where inequality would arise organically. Not because of ideas of superiority or military advantage but because of what just was. Because if inequality arose because the strong took from the weak, that’s inherently unjust, that’s theft! Every example you use doesn’t involve inequality just “being,” it involves man inhumanity to man. As to Asians, if any support the current system after being told of the several undue advantages and disadvantages that go around, yes, they’re failing morally.
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Please read what I write and don’t presume to know what I’m “trying to say.” Pay attention to the words on the screen, please. Seriously. I’m not trying to be insulting, I think you’re doing more assuming than reading. Now, I don’t wanna get into the philosophy of the estate tax or any tax. So it’s not about the moral legitimacy of taxes per se.
Here’s the “moral failing” of the estate tax: the people who would actually have to pay, or rather their kids, aren’t interested in doing what’s best for the country or what’s just. They’re just greedy. What’s worse is that even in campaigning to end the tax, they’re not being honest. Ten of millions of Americans get riled up by the “death tax” as though they have to pay it and they don’t. And it’s not as though the people who have to pay the estate tax pretend anything is actually “fair,” they’re just greedy. Now, if you’re somehow subject to the estate tax, then yes, I think you’re being greedy, too. And greed is now and will always be a moral failing.
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I think in reference to Rush, I talked about his use of a satirical article, not taxes. And as to Beck, I think I talked about healthcare reform as a form of reperations. That’s just dumb on it’s head! How can it be reperations if everybody benefits? When he’s anywhere else, Beck’s open about being an entertainer and just saying wild stuff for the sake of it. At this point, his riling up irrational fear and paranoia for the sake of money. That’s greed which is a moral failing.
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There’re lots we could do in the US. Make sure the public system is spending an equal amount of money for the education of all children. We can enforce current laws against discrimination. We can put a stop to racial profiling. There’s a lot we could if white people and their enablers of color would stop either denying racism or rationalizing it.
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Disparate impact is an indicator that something’s wrong. It’s a legal concept. And I guess there’s no way for me to ask this without coming across as a smart-alek, but do you really mean for us to take you observations about Olympic sprinters seriously while you dismiss disparate impact?
So no, you’re not going to change my mind when you don’t have anything but logical fallacies; when you’re rationalizing people rationalizing racism. No, you’re not going to change my mind. You acknowledge inequality but not disparate impact? You say it’s the strong taking from the weak but nothing to do with a moral failing? There were plenty of people who objected to slavery during the time of slavery in the Americas. As to slavery throughout history, I think by and large, the slaves were raising moral objections. Just because no one listened doesn’t mean they weren’t speaking out.
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Rush and Beck are racist. Plain and simple. Don’t align yourself with them.
Oh! And again let me emphasize that here in the US, inequality has not and did not just “arise.” It was engineered and is now being protected. Minimun wage; healthcare for profit; current laws governing lobbying; the idea that a corporation is a person; all that protects inequality. ~ I may have more thoughts later, but I need to take this call.
No1KState wrote:
>’But that’s just the Constitution. Note that the very idea of a “constitution” is something learned from Native Americans, the Iroquois if I’m not mistaking.’
> I’m not disputing the legitimacy of Native Americans writing a document establishing certain laws etc. Many cultures did this for centuries! However, the American Constitution actually used the Magna Carta as a pattern:
>Magna Carta, also called Magna Carta Libertatum (the Great Charter of Freedoms), is an English legal charter, originally issued in the year 1215. It was written in Latin and is known by its Latin name. The usual English translation of Magna Carta is Great Charter.
>Magna Carta required King John of England to proclaim certain rights (pertaining to freemen), respect certain legal procedures, and accept that his will could be eaten Magna Carta was arguably the most significant early influence on the extensive historical process that led to the rule of constitutional law today in the English speaking world.
>Magna Carta influenced the development of the common law and many constitutional documents, including the United States Constitution.[1] Many clauses were renewed throughout the Middle Ages, and continued to be renewed as late as the 18th century. By the second half of the 19th century, however, most clauses in their original form had been repealed from English law.
> I’m not citing this to make a case for white supremacy. Just wanted to add this historical accuracy. Many cultures, including Asia, had similar pacts and documents. The colonists in America, however, did have this fairly old document to use as a guide.
>My feeling is that All Cultures contributed to America. This is so evident to me. White men conquered the continent and brought misery and disease to the native population. It was wrong of them to do this. It was also wrong of them to enslave black Africans and use them as slaves. How can we right this wrong and Move Forward? As I’ve stated before:education.
>I’ve seen great strides in academia regarding the acknowledgment of the culpability of whites and the tremendous contributions other races have made. The problem I guess I have with you No1KState is you are more to the Left than I am.
>You think Ebonics should be treated as a second language, not a dialect. You think American history books should be totally trashed and completely re-written, not amended. You think black Americans should be financially compensated for the fact that their ancestors were enslaved.
> You once said slavery practiced in Africa when slavery was practiced in America was ‘kinder slavery’. Honestly, No1, slavery is slavery. How can any form of slavery be kind?
>You are definitely more to the Left than I am. You are so intent on eliminating racism in America {and this is an admirable goal} that sometimes {to me} you come across as extreme. But that’s just me. I’m not the perfect human being, this is just how I see things.
>Once I said that Abraham Lincoln was liberal-minded ‘for his time’ and you scoffed at that also. Something like, ‘I hate when people say For His Time!’ I don’t really care one way or the other, but I just find it interesting that you attack minute things I say but never {just like jwbe} take on the Big Guys like Captain Chaos. Darin and I are Relatively Harmless compared to him. Yet you both avoid him assiduously.
>I believe in Affirmative Action and think it’s wrong that it was terminated. However, the reparations issue is pretty much impossible logistically. It would break the country. But then I don’t see how you’d even mind that.
>You don’t want to amend the structure, you want to Completely Dismantle it. This is an opinion and a particular viewpoint. I’m not saying you’re wrong and I’m not claiming I’m Moses and should deliver some edict about the future of mankind. It is however seeing the problems of racism from two different angles. Plus, you’re black and I’m not. So you’ve felt the sting of racism whereas I can only imagine it.
> Thing is, by 2050 whites will be the minority race, so it will probably be dismantled anyway. See? Poetic Justice prevails.
@No1KState:
I stated ‘the problem I have with you’ above. That was poorly worded. I don’t have a problem with you. You are entitled to your opinions. I should have written, ‘the reason we bump heads sometimes is because…’
Darin said: One big difference lately, of course, is that the US has attempted to resolve its racial issues in a way other than one race wiping the other out. That’s been the usual approach throughout human history. (I don’t suppose you give western civilization any credit for changing that, do you?)
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Regarding the question you placed in parenthesis, it’s obvious you don’t give western civilization “credit.” You’re the one arguing for what you claim is the “usual” (which, by definition-admission, means there were exception to the supposed rule) approach. You’re the one who waxed simplistic rationalizing the latest wave of White Flight as natural, normal… “usual” response… and then you leaped into the land of logical fallacy.
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Like a child, you figured the way to normalize this well documented, particularly White behavior was to claim “people still sort themselves by race whenever they get the chance” no matter how there was NO support for your theory in the OP and no matter how much you knew you weren’t going to even try to substantiate your claim.
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Asserting that, “It is hardly only whites who are guilty of this,” doesn’t do the trick. All you’ve done is present your inherently flawed FALSE CONSENSUS.
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Do yourself the favor and do what you claim you’d do a long time ago. Ignore my posts and spare yourself the embarrassing twists and contradictions you’re bound to make because you’re just not ready…
“You think Ebonics should be treated as a second language, not a dialect. You think American history books should be totally trashed and completely re-written, not amended. You think black Americans should be financially compensated for the fact that their ancestors were enslaved.
> You once said slavery practiced in Africa when slavery was practiced in America was ‘kinder slavery’. ”
First off, I didn’t realize we ever bumped heads. ???
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While I’m definitely on the left, I’m not sure where you got all the other stuff from. Ebonics treated like another languaged? Do you mean as in teaching “Ebonics” like we teach Spanish? No, that’s not what I think. I may have said that some linguists suggest Ebonics is a seperate language because some have. I don’t suggest “press 3 for Ebonics,” just that it deserves more respect than it currently gets.
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As for history? You may have read through my response to someone’s question on how to address the inaccuracies that promote racism where I suggest telling different time periods from different perspectives. Do I think we need to overhaul the “history” that’s taught today? Depends on what you mean by overhaul. I’m not suggesting we teach things that didn’t happen.
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Lincoln? I don’t remember that exchange, but I do know my general feeling is that he was racist and other people and event contributed to the ended of slavery besides the Emancipation Proclamation. So I do think people give him more credit than he deserves; or to put it another way, but not discussing the other people who contributed to the ended of slavery, we make it seem as though he was some messiah when he wasn’t. And I don’t like the “for the time” motif in general. Like saying something wasn’t racist or sexist “for the time.” Ask the women how they felt. Was Lincoln “liberal” compared to others of his day? Yes. But he was also conservative compared to others of his day.
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As to African slavery, what I probably said was that the Arab slave traders considered American slavery the worst kind and didn’t consider slavery in that region true slavery at all. At that time, slavery in that region of African would be more like an apprenticeship than slavery. And a person could work their way to freedom and gain some substantial wealth in their own right. That was never an option for slaves in the Americas. Also, in that region of Africa, the status of slavery wasn’t inherited; another marked difference from slavery in the Americans. So the racialized slavery of the Americas, where once it was decided to take slaves from Africa and not Europe . . . the only equivalent is the slavery of Hebrews in ancient Egypt. Not everyone believes the Egyptians ever enslaved the Hebrews which is why I don’t usually bring it up. But to make a point of reference, there is no comparison between what happened in the Americas and any other slavery ever. Moreover, when people say, “Well Africans sold Africans into slavery,” they need to understand that the slavetrading Africans didn’t realize what they were sending others into. Once they did, they wanted to stop. But the Europeans would say, “Either you kidnap from the interior or we’ll just take your tribe.”
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As to why I respond to you and not others? It’s because I think you’re reasonable and seem to be an ally. captiancaos is a bufoon, so I ignore him. I even ignore Darin unless he’s said something that’s either too ridiculous or offensive to ignore that day. I’m sorry it seems as though I’m nit-picky with you. Especially since I don’t take the time to fully explain what and why I’m making the point I’m trying to make. I have my own blog so I try not to right long posts unless I feel there’s no other way to get my point across. So perhaps I’m not expressing the totality of my thinking. Sorry. But it’s never been that I’ve had a problem with you. I never even realized we were bumping heads. I’m glad you told me. Now, I’ll make sure to give fuller explanations.
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The only “problem” I have with you is that you and jwbe can’t seem to get along. I’m not blaming you for anything, or her for anything. I completely don’t know who’s said what cause I generally skip through your exchanges. But seeing that you both want to see racism end, I’d think you’d get along better.
I’m expressing honest skepticism that the big, shiny diversity pizza we’re all supposed to want a bite of is going to work.
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What you expressed, as poorly thought out as it was, was presented as fact. Saying, “For all the talk about diversity being our strength and the importance of tolerance, people still sort themselves by race whenever they get the chance,” was your attempt to stack the question you eventually posed.
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Your idea is poorly thought out because you obviously can’t engage in a conversation on the very question you posed. Engaging would actually require you to directly address the points other people make instead of evading them.
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At issue here is your curious idea of what constitutes a “functioning democracy” and how racial diversity endangers it. You were challenged to make clarify your position but you chose NOT to. Instead, you completely manufactured this FALSE DICHOTOMY:
“Unmitigated enthusiasm”… WTF are you talking about? Quit telling on yourself and address the issue of whether the U.S. had a “functioning democracy” before the U.S. “attempted to resolve its racial issues” — i.e. some seriously tortured White racial framing, completely devoid of the historical context and forces that caused the resolution period(s) to come about.
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Note to Darin: Racial diversity, by definition, was the reason for the U.S. attempting to resolve its racial issues.
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So it’s clear you’re having a problem with recognizing how the U.S. not only can function with a racially diverse country but has functioned.
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Again, do yourself the favor of ignoring my posts. You of all people ought to know who “enthusiastic” I get when I smell the blood of other people’s (your’s in this case) INTERNAL CONTRADICTIONS.
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But go ahead, explain when the U.S. was and was not a “functioning democracy.” It’s pretty clear to me that the ONLY option you see as “functional” is the WHITE SUPREMACY option.
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Again, by the very manner in which you framed your question, it’s clear you’ve associated “functional democracy” with periods in American history that were not “very racially diverse.” It’s also clear that you see “the direction of racial issues in America today” (whatever the hell that means) as a problem in and of itself due to the mere presence of a “very racially diverse” population, I guess. The contributions of “western civilization” be damned.
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Darin, why don’t you just come out and tell the truth: White people (and you in particular) just don’t know how to act and are, in your opinion, bound to make the “usual” approach to racial diversity in “human history” repeat itself as the U.S. becomes, as you put it, “very racially diverse” because their/your sense of entitlement and power stands to be considerably less than it has been in the American past/history as the demographics change with Whites maintain a smaller majority or a mere plurality of the population.
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Only that kind of loss of population privilege would have you using this kind of framing: “Unmitigated enthusiasm for the direction of racial issues in America today.”
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Thou dost project too much. Your unmitigated, enthusiatic (and inexplicable) anxiety is showing. And here’s exhibit A:
Silly rabbit. Your first sentence in that post betray you and this “names hyperventilated in my direction” pity-party lie you’re trying to tell. You said, “Nquest, the US was never a “blatantly white supremacist” country.”
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Darin, your name is not “the United States of America.” But that’s okay. It gives me the perfect opportunity to confront you with the results of your thinking:
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“The eras when the U.S. was a blatantly white supremacist country apparently aren’t considered to be times when the country’s democracy failed to “function” properly, by Darin’s logic.”
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It’s clear to see that no name was “hyperventilated” in your direction. Only a direct front assault on the stupidity of your poorly thought out ideas.
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It’s not my fault that you “expressed skepticism” regarding “whether it’s possible to have a very racially diverse society that is still a functioning democracy.” It’s not my fault that your statement presupposes that the U.S. is and has been a “functioning democracy” and, according to your logic, especially so when it was not “very racially diverse.”
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It’s not my fault how you feel about yourself after I dissect your statements. You made them. If anyone called you a white supremacist in this thread, it was you. Again, you made those statements. You associated “functioning democracy” with relative racial homogeneity (White racial homogeneity, in this case). Not me.
It’s as if ‘democracy = White rule’ by his standards, cause everyone knows that there’s a huge unanswered question as to whether very racially diverse societies can maintain “functioning” democracies.
names hyperventilated in my direction
No1KState: If you are sincerely skeptical that we can actually be a great, diverse nation, you have to admit it’s only because white Americans can’t share.
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I guess that’s why Darin rails against the phantom “unmitigated enthusiasm for the direction of racial issues in America today.”
So the Iroquois and the Constitution.
They got the ideas in the Constitution from a number of places. The Magna Carta as you pointed out. But the idea that in building a nation, you write down the basic structure and laws, that they got from the Iroquois. It’s like if you learn how to build a house from Person A but Person B alerts you to the need for a foundation.
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I do believe reparations are in order. Even if we just start from 1945. African Americans have a disproportionate rate of poverty, and much of that is due to past racism and the inability to acquire wealth. And by wealth I don’t mean millions; I mean anything about debt. So that’s 1 point. I also believe there are ways to fund reparations without bankrupting the nation. That’s point 2. Point #3 is that if (white) Americans really believe paying reparations will destroy federal govt, the very least you can do is acknowledge that something is owed. Don’t do what the Senate did which was pass a nonbinding resolutioon apologizing for slavery with the footnote: this should not be used to argue for reparations. That’s just dirt.
No1KState Said:
> ‘It’s because I think you’re reasonable and seem to be an ally. captiancaos is a bufoon, so I ignore him.’
> Thanks No1, for really Everything you wrote. I feel better. Because I am a vigourous teacher of anti-racism to my students, and have been for years, maybe I get a little sensitive sometimes. I love being part of this blog. It’s very precious to me.
>Plus, I enjoyed your explanations. I always learn something from your comments. I didn’t know about the type of slavery practiced in Africa, for example. Sounds more like indentured servitude than slavery. And, obviously, the Racism issue wasn’t there and making people feel humiliated.
>As far as JWBE..who knows. I haven’t even skipped over there to read what she responded to me yet..probably angry with me..again. It doesn’t matter.
> Anyway, thanks very much for the response. I {like Mom} looked at your Blog. It’s Way Cool! You sure work hard. You are so dedicated. You really are a good human being No1. 🙂
@ ellen – Thanks! I’m glad we could work that out.
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@ Darin – I think I actually do see where you’re coming from. And I don’t think we’ve been using inequality in quite the same way. I agree there will always be some unequal distribution of wealth and resources. If Gordon is a better fisher than Duncan Hines, that’s no one’s “fault.” Generally there’s something Duncan can do better than Gordon and so it all evens out; but in the case that there’s not, there’s no reason to take from Gordon’s fish to give to Duncan’s fish so that they both have an equal number of fish. Maybe enough so that Duncan doesn’t go hungry, right? But nothing major.
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That’s not what’s happening in the US. What’s been happening in the US is something more along the lines of Gordon claiming that the entire pond belongs to him. It doesn’t. But he has a gun and charges Duncan a “one fish per catch” fishing fee. The Duncan finds better bait to make up the difference and once Gordon notices that, he charges a “bait using” fee. Meanwhile, when Duncan fixes his bait, Gordon steals fish; and when Duncan’s fishing, Gordon steals bait. Then years and years later, Gordon’s descendents congratulate themselves for having had such an ingenuous forefather and now charge 5 fish per catch and bait use fees for access to their wonderful pond.
The US is more like that that juse genuine know-how, more talent, whatever.
No1KState, I was a little worried about how I was going to respond to what you’d posted, since there was so much, but now I see your last post, and I’ll just respond to that instead.
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I’m glad you’ve put your finger on that distinction in the use of “inequality.” And I’m especially glad that you agree that IF person A has skills that person B does not, then person A may have a better outcome than person B, and that’s not a moral problem (as long as nobody’s starving to death or anything). Believe me, not everybody sees it that way, so that’s very solid common ground.
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You second point, about how inequality actually arises in America is more contentious. Surely there is an “endowment” effect, whereby those who have are at an advantage over those who don’t. However, I don’t think this is particularly important in explaining inequality either among or across races. Let’s talk about why.
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First, if Gordon has a pond he must charge for the use of it in order to pay the cost of capital. Nobody can afford to have an investment and not exploit it, agreed? What will he charge? Well, his price is dictated by supply and demand — the supply of ponds and competing goods (like woodland dells and rivers) and the demand for fish and substitute goods (like rabbits and deer). If Gordon charges less than his competitors, he’ll lose money and eventually go out of business; if he charges more he’ll go out of business almost immediately. What if Gordon tries to charge more to a subset of the market, defined not by their demand but by their race?
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He’ll go out of business in that case, too, since his competitors will get ALL the business from Duncan et al. The point is, in a free market, racism is bankruptcy.
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What about the bait charges? Well, it’s the same story. Gordon can charge no more and no less than the cost of bait. If he does either, he’ll go out of business. It’s not a question of sticking it to Duncan, Gordan really has no choice in the matter.
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So let’s say over time Gordan and Duncan manage to accumulate some wealth by saving some of the profits from their pond-management and fishing business, respectively. Why should the death of either of them mean that that savings is taken from them? Do you have kids? I do, and let me be very frank that one of my chief motivations in life is to give them as much as possible. If I owned a pond, the thing that would make me work hardest, would drive me to innovate and compete, is the incentive to give my heirs a good life. Take that incentive away, and I am much more likely to fill the pond in and travel around Europe once my youngest is in college. That makes everyone worse off — including Duncan.
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Where does this get screwed up? It’s gets screwed up when the government forces Gordon or Duncan to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do — possibly for reasons of “fairness” or “diversity.” Instead of competing in the market, which keeps prices low and production high, they begin to waste resources lobbying and complying with onerous regulations. This is a drain on everybody. Furthermore, the more powerful a government is the more likely it is to be at the service of the powerful in a society. So a big, powerful government is one of the ways that the rich thwart the ambitions of the poor.
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For the life of me, I can’t figure out why the bleeding-heart types are always so ga-ga over government. It’ll screw ’em every time.
Okay. I thought the whole Gordon/Duncan thing would work. You missed the point, which is that neither Duncan nor Gordon had any natural advantage over the other. Gordon just stole. Why I put in the thing about the pond and the gun, I don’t know. But they both had equal access to the pond. Gordon is just a bully.
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But whatever. Allegories don’t work if they’re not told well. The problem in the US is that the inequalities arise because one group is holding another back. There’s no just random assignment of talent, just theft.
And as for charging more because of race? You’re getting into affirmative action and seem to take the position that everyone starts from an equal position, which isn’t true. So why he’d charge more due to race unless he had a gun and the support of the discount-receiving race, I don’t know.
Right, I got that about the bully. My point is that if somebody is trying to hold another back because of race, if he’s being a bully, he’ll find himself out of business. I’m not thinking of affirmative action at all.
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The only way it can work is if there’s a general conspiracy of one race against another. And there is evidence of such a conspiracy, as you’ll correctly point out. However, my response is that when you evaluate the data — the actual data, not the anecdotes — it turns out that there are more plausible explanations than a racist conspiracy. Conspiracies are so difficult to sustain, anyway; we should all start out predisposed to disbelieve all of them, and only very strong evidence should convince us otherwise.
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I do not assume that everyone starts from an equal position. That’s not necessary for a market to function. The real beauty of the free market — the reason so many people want to come here — is that it gives those who have less a great deal of power. In fact, they’re equal partners in the market.
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It’s tempting to be envious and to nurse a grudge against the “haves.” We’d all like to believe that they got their wealth by exploiting somebody because it makes us feel better for not having what they have. But the fact is that in America far, far more people get rich by giving the ordinary Joes something they want at a good price than any other way. If you could really see how little power somebody like, say, Wal-Mart actually has, I think you’d be shocked. They’re completely beholden the the masses of customers the elites have so much contempt for, who will go someplace else the instant they believe it’ll be cheaper or better. They’re not powerful, they’re powerless.
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Another thing to consider is the huge mobility of classes within America. I forget the numbers exactly, but it’s something like this: somebody in the top 20% is more likely to be in the bottom 20% 20 years later than he is to still be in the top 20%. We don’t see the haves remaining constant over long periods of time.
No one’s arguing a “conspiracy.” We don’t think every Sunday, a white people join in some conference call on how to keep black people down. That’s not how racism works. But yes, there is evidence of group “bullying” that you have dismissed because the researcher didn’t take into account IQ. The strong enough evidence I have is my experience, “anecdotal” that it may be, that, for example, white people are not smarter than any other group of people. 17 years in our education system being either the smartest or one of the smartest in my class. Hundreds of classmates. Hours of “down time” spent with both white classmates and black neighborhood kids and church friends. There is nothing special about white people to account for their collective standing in our social economy.
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Yeah, we’re experiencing a time of downward mobility, largely because of the massive tax cuts and de-regulation. This downward mobility is a fairly recent phenomenom. But notice how everyone’s still upset with Wall St pay bonus, etc? The top 1-5% aren’t experiencing any downward mobility. And even they know it’s hurting the economy. It’s certainly destroying any idea of “meritocracy” and eventually, the people who innovate won’t be able to access the education or the resources to do so. When it comes to the estate tax, the govt isn’t asking for so much that it’s better for you to fill in the pond. Your kids will still get to live in the lap of luxury. Maybe the log cabin can only have 6 full baths instead of 6 and a half, but is that really enough for you European trip? And other people will have access to the capital and education they need to innovate and construct that extra half bath at a lower cost. Are you really in that tax bracket anyway? [Don’t answer. That’s personal, I know.] Cause if you’re not, you only stand to lose by supporting abolishing the estate tax.
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But anyway, we don’t believe white people can really call each other through soup cans. That’s not how racism works anymore than all men have to use soup cans to maintain sexism.
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Besides, you haven’t offered any credible alternative explanation as to the causes behind the disparate impact.
Do you understand the difference between “data” and “anecdote”?
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But listen, my point isn’t to make white people out to be so great. In fact, Northeast Asians have higher average IQs than whites — and better outcomes by many important measures. Remind yourself that you can’t just multiply your experience by 6 billion and assume you know everything about the world.
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You’re right about one thing, though: tax cuts and deregulation lead to downward mobility. This is an extremely strong effect, and one of the most important issues of the late 20th century. By cutting taxes and deregulating large segments of the economy, the supply-siders increased the downward mobility of the rich. And God bless ’em, too.
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I’ll ask you again if you are aware of the economic argument against the estate tax. Are you? Surely you understand that it’s possible to rationally oppose taxes even though you don’t expect to pay them. But I have to say, your attitude is alarming. You seem to be suggesting that I should favor any tax that won’t effect me directly! Why not just have 51% of us get together and vote to take EVERYTHING from the other 49%? What’s the problem with that? As James Bovard, has said, “Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner.”
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So I say there’s both an economic case and a moral one to oppose any tax — but especially the estate tax.
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I haven’t offered any alternative explanation? Really? Then what are we talking about, here? I’d like to see how you refute the explanations I’ve presented. You haven’t, you know. Other than to say you don’t believe them and you don’t like them. Here’s the problem you’ve got: My explanations are correct. They’re not *politically* correct, so you’re not exposed to them and you don’t know how to refute them. But in the real world, including the part of the real world where real science happens, we’re aware that there are differences between groups.
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How do *you* explain disparate impacts that go the other direction? How do you explain the outcomes for Asians and Jews? Are white supremacists biased in favor of them? You have to explain this, or you’ve got nothing.
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I suppose I’m using “conspiracy” a little like the legal definition, which doesn’t require explicit agreement among the parties as long as they act in concert. So whites working together to keep blacks down, even though they never discuss it, would be a conspiracy. It doesn’t happen on a large scale, and assuming it *does* happen doesn’t explain differences in outcome that aren’t already explained by other things.
No, I oppose abolishing the estate tax cause that will do more harm than good. You should stop presuming to know my logic cause I’m much better at that than you are.
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Do you understand the difference between data and anecdotes? I admit my experience is “anecdote.”
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Yes, white supremacists are in favor of some Asians and Jews. When it comes to Jews, you have to remember it’s effortless for Jews to “pass” as Anglo-Saxon unless they have some other marker. The only Jews who wouldn’t be able to pass is that group that remained in the Middle East and would look Arab, for example.
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If that’s your definition, yes, it’s a conspiracy.
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I have refuted your “evidence.” Namely that the Olympic sprints don’t count as “data.” You, on the other hand, have dismissed evidence because the researcher didn’t hold for IQ. Which is a culturally based assesment text of what the subject knows, not their ability to learn.
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On top of that, you’ve rejected evidence proving racial profiling and racial bias in the criminal justice system. The only evidence you have is “what if?” or that, for example, the irrational fear of black men as being abnormally criminal is understandable. You’ve never proven anything. You’ve only given weak excuses for not accepting the findings of scientific research and analysis; then complain about being lectured or preached to. So . . . what would you have an antiracist do?
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As to the high performance of Asians, that’s not my “specialty” if there were one. But I do know a bit. I know that white Americans often use the example of Asians to rationalize racism against other people of color. I know most of the high achieving Asians came to America for either education or work, which by that very nature means they’re smarter than the average bear. I know in other areas, Asians, even the North Asians, do describe facing discrimination. I know that there are some groups of Asians who didn’t come to America for education or work but rather to excape Laos or something, whose experience disproportionate rates of poverty. So these different outcomes aren’t explained by other factors.
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But we don’t need to go down that road again. I do wonder what you would qualify as evidence of racism. You don’t believe disparate impact is necessarily racially based. Neither do antiracists. So we study more to see what’s going on and for all the evidence we can show, you either dismiss it because the researcher didn’t hold for IQ even though the issue concerned manual labor and the researcher held for work ethic and personal likability. You dismissed evidence of racial profiling because the math didn’t “add up” to you, even though it did. You’ve also rationalized racial bias because it would be “human nature.” So with your constant references to Asians and the Olympics, the first case which actually disproves your overall point and the second which proves no point . . . what exactly do you need to see? The fact that the prison population is around 35%, give or take, African American even though the general population is only 13% African American doesn’t at least throw up red flags for you . . . or the fact that black children are routinely punished for often and more harshly than white children even though they misbehave at the same rate doesn’t at least throw up red flags . . . then I don’t know quite what to say to you. It’s not about being “politically” correct because aside from offensive name-calling, it’s been my experience, anecdotal though it may be, that most of what people are now calling “politically incorrect” is simply “incorrect.”
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And here comes the big “bomb” of a word that’s been sensationalized mostly by the people who have the most to gain by delegitimizing it. And please follow carefully. You accept that there are “differences” between the races even though there’s no evidence of these “differences”; from what I can gather of these “differences” IQ is included among them. So you think on average black and Latin people don’t have as high IQs as white and North Asian people, who are awfully fair-skinned, we should note. Sorry dear, that makes you a racist. And lets just say for the sake of argument that you don’t believe black and Latin people are less intelligent or more criminal (or faster or stronger or whatever), the fact that you sit idly by rationalizing and excusing racial injustice makes you culpable in a system based on the racial oppression, for lack of a better word, of people of color.
So you’ve weighed the costs and benefits of abolishing the estate tax and concluded the costs are greater? Tell me, what benefits to abolishing it did you consider?
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Leaving aside the absurdity of your assertion that Asians and Jews are favored, let’s just focus on the question of whether you can really call someone a “white” supremacist who wants both Asians and Jews to do *better* than whites. It’s crazy on its face. Do you really believe that? Jews are a favored group!? What planet are you living on? Maybe you heard about a little thing called the Holocaust. Yeah, Europeans really love the Jews. Please.
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You’re right, I do dismiss disparate impact studies that don’t control for relevant parameters. That’s how science works. Would it be more scientific of me to accept it regardless? Listen, if you’re so confident that IQ and other factors are irrelevant, then why are you worried about it? The cautious thing to do is to control for them, then show that they’re irrelevant. That’s what a real scientist — as opposed to somebody with an ax to grind — would do it.
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Prison population is my favorite “disparate impact” datum. Are you also alarmed at the blatant sexism? Men are wildly overrepresented in prison populations. What should be done about this!?
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Okay, you win. If believing that there are group differences among humans makes me a racist, then I guess I’m a racist. Whoop-di-do – you’ve now defined the term in a way utterly devoid of moral meaning. And be very careful: my case for moral equality (i.e., against racism) does not depend on the all races being identical. If yours does, you are going to find yourself painted into a corner sooner or later. Then what? Will you argue that some races are more equal than others? Or will you come around to my way of thinking?
I already mentioned the investment in other people and the maintainance of some sense of a meritocracy. What made the US such a vibrant economy in the past, aside from slavery and neo-slavery, is that anybody could come and work hard and create wealth. That doesn’t happen in economies where wealth is maintained in the hands of an oligarchy. Plus, it’s somewhat a basics of economy and politics: the rich only “give up” enough to keep the poor from rebelling against them and take “their” wealth. Early on, it was enough to tell poor whites that they were superior to all blacks. Now, the oligarchs have ordinary white people thinking they have more to lose from a progressive tax system than to gain, and that’s not even going into the racial component.
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Racism works in lots of ways. Having a preference for a certain race is just one way. Having an expectation of certain outcomes is another. The fact that there’s an “expectation” for Asians to be successful doesn’t disprove racism. What about the Asians who don’t show as well as the North Asians, who are lighter skinned and chosen for work or education immigration?
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As for Jews, I’m gonna have to write a lengthy piece to explain my thoughts. I hope you don’t mind. Is there anti-semitism in the US? Yes, I don’t deny that and in fact, if Jewish Americans were having the problems blacks and Latinos are having, I’d be blogging about that! If they are, they does concern me and it’s something that needs to be address. That said, a person can hide being Jewish; you can’t hide being black. So the fact that Jews can be successful in an otherwise anti-semitic environment doesn’t surprise me. What’s more, and I’m willing to be corrected, I’m sure anti-Jewish sentiment is on the same level as anti-poc sentiment.
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Let me also be clear about IQ. A person’s IQ level is more nurture than nature. So in this racialized culture and racialized economy, it doesn’t surprise me that white Americans demonstrate a higher IQ. That said, when it comes to the outcomes of students taking the same car repair class with the same professor, students who scored comparably on their tests and each just as likable as the other; when the white students are more likely to receive jobs and better paying jobs because the professor allowed the white students to access his network whereas this same privilege wasn’t granted the black students; it’s definitely more likely that the situation involved race and not IQ.
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So no, racism doesn’t always involve a moral component. If you read Newsweek’s article on racism in babies, it can arise as just a matter of human nature. Especially in the US where even black people have anti-black sentiments. Even Jesse Jackson Sr admitted to being more afraid of a strange black man than a strange white man. So no, it doesn’t always involve ill intent. Of the different times it does, ignoring those who point out is, to me, a moral failing.
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I guess I can agree that my case for moral equality does depend on the races being identical. And I guess you could argue that points me into a corner sooner or later. Of course, Abe Lincoln was a white supremacist and never stopped thinking whites were superior to blacks, so I don’t know how “small” this corner would be. That said, I’m not sure what you mean by “moral equality” cause you’ve definitely admitted that you don’t see the need for equality across the board. And I’ll point out that it’s you who ignore scientific evidence, not just IQs but also when it came to racial profiling and racism in the criminal justice system. I’ve noticed that you’re not so much a person of detail as you find any reason, however invalid, to ignore scientifc evidence. You even blithely accept the unequal consequences of the racial bias you do acknowledge. And I have to emphasis all that’s need for injustice to continue is for people to remain silent. You may be a really great person with a really great heart, but you’re “silent” as the devil!
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Moreover, you have no proof that the races aren’t identical. But we do have scientific evidence that in our culture, men are more physically violent. That’s why prisons are filled with men. Though I should note that most child abusers are women. The problem with the race demographics of prisons is that when you just take into account crime and not hold for socioeconomics, people of color still don’t commit so much more crime than white people to explain why they’re so many poc men in prison.
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In closing, may I ask Darin, do you read any studies and research, or antiracist opinions besides what you find here?
*I’m not sure antisemitism is a on the same level as anti-black bias.
Of course, Abe Lincoln was a white supremacist and never stopped thinking whites were superior to blacks…
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Ahh… Good ole Abe Lincoln. He’s one of the source of my ready & direct counter to Darin’s nonsense claiming “the US was never a blatantly white supremacist country.” A blatant lie if there ever was one. Lincoln’s also the source I used to clarify what I mean when I mention WHITE SUPREMACY (or white supremacist, in this case).
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In one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln said:
All that other David Duke, caricature “white supremacist” stuff both pales in comparison and functioned as little more than a selling point for WHITE SUPREMACY as the White race, as a group (as a general rule), being assigned, attaining and maintaining the superior, favored, privileged social position in society.
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The very fact that Lincoln was, more or less, politically forced to state his position on and pledge his allegiance to WHITE SUPREMACY is proof that the U.S. was, indeed, a blatantly white supremacist country. The 3/5 compromise is yet another proof-example that the U.S. was a blatantly white supremacist country. Justice Taney’s comment/ruling in the Dred Scott decision yet another proof-example wherein he traced the white supremacist nature of the country to its very founding:
And American history includes countless stories where this particular kind of American jurisprudence continued in the century that followed Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation up to an including the brutal killing of Emmett Till in 1955 where the all-white jury acquitted the murderers.
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That’s America’s WHITE SUPREMACY in a nutshell.
I forgot to add that it seems to me that Darin has this weird anxiety regarding diversity exactly because he views a “very racially diverse” society as one that not only threatens the “superior” social positions Whites (his apparent in-group) have enjoyed for centuries due to the “conspiracy” he always talks about or whatever… but because increasing diversity will increasing put to lie all his white supremacist-like theories about IQ’s, etc.
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But Darin is a dime a dozen type. So much so, I can’t even remember if it was him or some other run of the mill racist I challenged to be bold enough to talk about what their curious obsession with unprovable stuff like racial IQ differences.
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Note: Darin, always two steps behind, loves to mention Asian achievement but fails to account for the higher educational achievement of Black/African immigrants. By the nature of his logic, that alone debunks his clutched-teddybear IQ line of reasoning.
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I can’t remember if I Darin dodged this question out of the countless one’s he’s evaded since he started posting here:
If, by chance, the racial IQ differences exist, what bearing does and, more importantly, should they have in society as far as the government/social policy is concerned?
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I ask that because I can think of no other result to come from that kind of card-carrying David Duke type of white supremacist thinking other than Abe Lincoln’s kind of idea that Whites should have the superior position in society. If that’s not the reasoning behind the type of IQ obsession Darin et al have then I see no reason why any supposed difference in IQ’s among so-called races even begins to be relevant.
If you believe the rich “give up” just enough to keep the poor happy then I think you should read some basic economics. Some Milton Friedman, some Adam Smith. That’s just not how it works. Anyway, you’re missing the point about Jews (and you’re ignoring the point about East Asians). They’re not passing as white and being just as successful as whites. They’re far *more* successful than whites. Something like 35% of the Forbes 400 richest are Jewish. How do you explain that?
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You could be right that IQ is more nurture than nature. It is irrelevant. If IQ is even partly heritable, they we will see variations among groups whose genetic endowments differ, just as we see variations in 100-meter time, which is also partly nature and partly nurture.
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How do you know Jesse Jackson’s fear of black men doesn’tt involve any ill intent? Because he’s black? Well listen, nobody — except maybe Al Sharpton — has more incentive to hurt blacks than Jesse Jackson. His whole career as a race-mongering shakedown artist is predicated on blacks doing badly relative to whites. Maybe he *is* racist. Have you considered that?
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You keep accusing me of ignoring evidence. What evidence are you talking about? I’ve done my best to tackle head-on everything you’ve presented.
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I very little “anti-racist” opinion (assuming you mean the kind of books people around here write), partly because most of what I have read I find vapid, devoid of science, and willfully ignorant of reality. How about you?
@ Darin:
As a history major, I gotta agree with NQuest. He obviously ‘knows his stuff’.
> Lincoln thought slavery was an abomination. He saw a slave auction once in New Orleans when he was 21 years old, on his years on a barge up and down the Mississippi. He said it was the most horrible thing he ever witnessed. He also believed that each man was entitled to the food he worked for with his own hands, and should not be obliged to hand that food to someone else {slave holder}.
>Yet, he Never thought blacks were equal on any basis to whites. He did think that white men should hold the superior position to black citizens. He thought if blacks were freed, they would have a difficult time ‘adjusting’ {read between the lines folks} to free life. The implication was that blacks couldn’t learn as efficiently as whites and would be powerless to function in America.
>One of the major reasons he delivered the Emancipation Proclamation was to Inspire {true folks!} the Union army to keep fighting when they were Really Sick of the whole thing {the South was too by the way.} He thought if he gave the troops one more reason to fight {we’re Freeing a whole race of men forever!} they’d hang in there a little longer. But he had Serious Concerns about the consequences of freeing these slaves. He even came up with a plan to send them back to Africa.
> The whole Founding Fathers concept is about a group of men who really were {in my opinion} intellectual giants in some regard, but Totally Racists! They never considered the black citizen worthy of much consideration. The whole Declaration of Independence, beautifully worded document that it was, concerned itself with allowing White Colonists independence. And alot of this had to do with Economics.
> Black people were considered property, and that’s about it. The Constitution was a step forward from England’s tyranny but Hardly A Step Forward for Blacks in America.
> Summarily, American history was Technically Framed in a Racist Fashion. Reason being: blacks just weren’t considered at all. I still think James Madison, Alexander Hamilton..the whole gang {lol} were bright as hell..but Racists to the Letter. So make what you will of this information. Just throwing it out there.
>By the way, there’s this great book: Gone For a Soldier: The Civil War Memoirs of Private Alfred Bellard. This is a true diary of a private in the Union army found by Alex Thomas in his mother-in-law’s antique shop. He sent it to the Smithsonian for authenticity {paper carbon dated etc} and it was indeed original.
>Bellard describes in detail army life with drawings included! Bellard usually described freed black slaves as ‘contraband’. He saw many walking along roads heading north. He showed no compassion toward them at all. He showed no animosity either however. Just didn’t really concern himself.
>But, interestingly, he Never once claimed {and this book is 273 pages long!} that the men were fighting to free slaves..not Once. He joined in the first place for the adventure. The spelling is quaint also and typical of a man with a middle-class education {about 8th grade} of the period.
> One passage: ‘Close to our camp was the Washington Penitentiary and Lunatic Assylum in which the principle victoms seemed to be the Negroes. In an old tobacco crib, that stood on one side of the entrance was an old crazy negro woman who made night hidious by her yels and screems.Any of our men who happened to be posted at this place generally supplied himself with plenty of tobacco, melons or green corn, it being the rule when relieved in the morning for the sentry to bring in some provisions under his coat tail.’
>So? What about the ‘screems’ of that poor black woman? Amazing indifference as you can see to the Very Existence of black people. So casual. Just never entered the guy’s mind {I’m talkin’ throughout the Entire book} that an entire race of people were suffering and should anybody be concerned about this? He didn’t even acknowledge black people as People! I thought it was chilling myself.
>I found this diary very informative about the true psychology of a typical Union soldier. They were just kids out on a camping trip {my take} and never gave a thought to this Freedom For All meme. Hollywood wants you to believe they were all pledging allegiance and dreaming of a Slave-Free country. Uh..not really… if you read this book. ‘Soldiering agrees with me’, Bellard admitted to his parents, ‘but I do not agree with soldiering. There is a little too much risk for me.’ Sounds like a letter from summer camp.
@ellen – Very interesting re: this diary you cite above! . . . definitely cuts through the romaticized visions we like to present about the north’s battle for racial justice . . . aside from your points about the “adventure” of it all for particular soldiers, there were definitely economic incentives for the north to end slavery (more than their moral concerns) re: competing with the south’s industry via “free” labor.
Observation:
>I was driving to work today {teacher work day..kids off} and a car full of black teenagers with rap music playing Way Loud pulled up beside me at a light. Their windows were down and they were obviously enjoying being loud {this is a Kid Thing by the way..my son used to do this..so hold all judgments til I’m finished}.
>Then one of them said, ‘Lady help us!’ This was said in a car full of giggles. I think they expected the middle aged white lady to ‘just ignore them’ . But this middle aged white lady looked at them and made a laughing face as if to say,’Very funny guys!’
>Well, they were shocked or something. They really looked scared. They were probably not used to a middle-aged white woman being friendly to/with them. Especially as they were in their ‘Silly Teenagers Mode’. I actually ‘get this’ alot from black teenagers.
>Anyway, they rolled up their windows pronto. Why? I had this impulse to get out of my car and tap on the window and say, ‘Guys! Hey I didn’t mean to scare you!’
>But then I thought I’d look like a damn fool in the middle of traffic. Unbelievable cuz the white middle class would see Me as Being Threatened..but I Obviously Frightened them! I think they were so Shocked at having a white women ‘take a joke’..they thought I was a creature from another planet!
Any thoughts here? Darin? I’d like to see you take this one. Seriously, what do you think?
Yes, I read other articles besides what’s presented here and I’ve read enough to understand some basic economics. “Economics” may not work “that way”; but people do.
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You haven’t addressed discrimination we see in criminal justice or throughout primary education. You haven’t “tackled” those things. You haven’t “tackled” that white people have an irrational fear of black men. You certainly have no evidence for Jesse Jackson being a “race mongerer” beyond the ill-informed perspective of your personal, limited, and possibly privileged experience. You want me to take seriously your observations of Olympic sprintings while you ignore evidence of racial discimination in the job market?
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All you’ve ever had to offer as far as “evidence” is “if.” What if IQ is inheritiable? What if the races really are different. There’s no evidence for any of your propositions, yet you cling to them. As the saying goes, if “if” were a fifth, we’d all be drunk.
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Nquest ~ :sigh: Yeah.
Oh yeah! Darin there’s much more research and opinion than the administrators can fit here. We even know, as a fact, that if anti-immigrant sentiments are really reflected in the final version of health reform, and it includes instructions that only people with proper ID receive federally subsidized healthcare; around 2million African Americans will be unable to access healthcare insurance because due to past racism, they don’t have proper birth certificates or social security numbers.
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And by the by, Jesse Jackson (and ACORN) were among the very first to raise red flags about predatory lending; which we know for a fact disproportionately affected people of color. You claim Jackson and Sharpton benefit from black people doing badly; yet this doesn’t really explain why black people continue to do poorly compared to whites. For example, in 1967, the per capita income for black people was only 54% of what whites received. In 2006, it had risen to 58%. Was that because of Jackson and Sharpton? Or is there a better explanation?
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Now. As to why Jews make up 35.25% of the Forbes 400 richest?
And when we take into account that the Jews who made it to the US weren’t “ordinary” and that they can pass, there you go. Plus, again, racism/antisemitism doesn’t mean Jews can’t find ways to be enormously successful. Just as it doesn’t mean that the cream of the crop Asian immigrants you keep mention can’t be successful. One reason you should read up on antiracist “opinion” is so you can get a more thorough understand of racism and how it operates.
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Back to the Forbes 400, there’s only 1 black person and 2 hispanics. How do you explain that?
Sorry for the repeat posts! Just wanted to point out that 53.5% of the Forbes 400 were Northwest European.
Ellen, I’m not sure what the point of all that is. I don’t quite know why you’ve brought up Abraham Lincoln or the Civil War. I’m missing a step somewhere.
As for the founders, okay, they weren’t perfect. They wouldn’t get jobs on university campuses today, Obama wouldn’t appoint them to be Eat Your Vegetables Czar, or whatever. What’s my reaction supposed to be? Am I supposed to clutch my skirt and shriek, or is it okay if I still think the principles they annunciated led to a pretty amazing country? How many of us would prefer to live under a system other than the one developed by the Dead White Males? I’m not saying the founding fathers need to be deified, but a little respect is certainly in order.
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As far as I know everything you wrote about the founders is more or less correct, by the way. I’m not really disputing the facts, I’m just not sure what your point is. It’s tempting to judge by our own standards, but the proper standards should be a) their contemporary ones, and b) the overall standards of human history. By either of those, the founding fathers look pretty damn good.
No1KState, I think you’ve lost the thread of this discussion. You’re now arguing my side. How do I explain why there are so many Jews and whites, and so few blacks and Hispanics on Forbes? How do you think I explain it? I’ll give you a hint: It’s not white supremacy.
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I don’t use the fact that Jesse Jackson benefits from black suffering to explain why blacks do badly. I use for two reasons:
1) To point out how silly the standards are that you apply to judge whether somebody is good or evil.
2) To point out that he’s a buffoon and nobody should pay attention to a word he says.
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Pretty funny that you quoted Steve Sailor on the Forbes list, by the way!
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Ellen, I don’t get it. What is the point of that story? Black kids aren’t so bad after all? If you’re white and middle aged you can scare people by talking to them at stoplights? I’m sorry, I honestly don’t know what the point is. Maybe I should tell you some of my mildly amusing anecdotes about interracial interactions so we can all smile and say, “You know, inside, we’re all pretty much the same.”
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There’s a long lag sometimes between sending a comment and it going up. Number 54 was written before I saw 49-54.
Darin Said: ‘Maybe I should tell you some of my mildly amusing anecdotes about interracial interactions so we can all smile and say, “You know, inside, we’re all pretty much the same.”
Actually, since you’ve Never said we’re all pretty much the same..that would be a novelty for us all {for you to break out your Nice Guy Darin Twin} and tell us some of your interracial reactions wherein the above statement would be confirmed. In our dreams…
@ Darin:
I never said in my comment that the writers of the Declaration and Constitution were not brilliant and far-sighted individuals, regarding the future rights of White Colonists. In fact I specifically stated the reverse!
If you’ve ever studied the Declaration of Independence as a Literary Work, it’s fantastic. The wording is absolutely poetic by today’s standards. I wish all my students could write like that..actually I wish I could write like that!
However, They Were Indeed Racists. My point? Joe Eagin bases much of this blog on the fact that America was founded within a White Racial Frame. So, what did the Founding Fathers ever do to disprove this? Uh..nuthin’. If you care to comment here, feel free.
>Darin Said:Ellen, I don’t get it. What is the point of that story? Black kids aren’t so bad after all? If you’re white and middle aged you can scare people by talking to them at stoplights?
> Darin, you know you’re Being Facetious! Plus, you’re too intelligent to Not Get the Point. You darn well know what the point was! Black teenagers are so familiar with middle-aged whites either 1.ignoring them or 2.behaving defensive and ‘cautious’ in their presence that they are Stunned when a white lady actually smiles at them..even when they’re in their Silly Teenage Mode. These kids just didn’t know what to do..except roll up their windows.
>Please don’t take the ‘Gee..I don’t get it’ approach Darin. Cuz at this point I know you well enough to know you are Not this naive and obtuse. I’m not trying to be disrespectful, by the way, but sacrificing candor for humor is not cool all the time Darin.
Post 56: Some of my best friends are…
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No, I’m not talking about my personal experiences. I would have no credibility because I could just be making it all up to make a point. Besides, even if whatever I said were true, what would it prove?
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I truly don’t understand the point of the stoplight story. Are you saying white teenagers would act differently?
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Post 57: I was talking to No1KState, who seems to think that if the founders don’t meet his exacting standards then all of America is tainted — no better than Nigeria or Saudi Arabia. However, as significant as the Dec and Const are as literary documents, I’m talking about what they said, not how they said it. Happiness. Liberty. What other country takes those ideas seriously? In fact, you could argue (I would) that the ideas behind the founding were the basis for the changes that came 100 and 200 years later.
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“White-racial-frame,” “Schmite-schmacial-schmame.” What does that even mean? The founders didn’t include blacks in their vision. They were racists, by today’s definition. Do you think the Constitution is *still* racist?
1 – Again, Darin, you refuse to really understand how white supremacy operates.
2 – I was using Jackson to point out that racism doesn’t necessarily have ill-intent, as even he confesses to having irrational fear of strange black men. And let’s say he wasn’t Jesse Jackson but Jackson Jesse, a black man with an irrational fear of strange black men but no fear of strange white men? That’s racism and clearly no ill intent. And for the “buffoon” you think he is, he’s been awfully on point. Funny, though, that you decide he’s a bufoon but clearly have no evidence to refute him. All you have is, really, all you have to support your argument is your lack of understanding. All you have is looking at something and saying, “It must have a better explanation than racism” or “Maybe the races really are different.” You don’t read the research, only give it a cursory glance and question the math. And you can’t be a mathematician cause I don’t see how being black with help you in that field. [Remember you once posited that in your field of work, you’d benefit from being black. Even though as far as I can remember, you haven’t told us what that field is.]
3 – In my defense, I was just googling to see where you got your info. I didn’t realize that was Sailer and didn’t realize until just now that he’s racist. What’s funny is that you knew he was racist and yet quoted him as evidence against white supremacy. So lets nail this thing down. You don’t know anti-racist research, but you do know social analysis done by racists. Jesse Jackson is a buffoon, but this Sailer guy is worth quoting. You suggest I read some basics of economics, but you haven’t read William Easterly. You believe in the inherent differences between the races, even though there’s no evidence of any inherent difference between the races . . . what does this make you, again?
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You know, I think I finally understand how you operate. You’re invested in disproving white supremacy, even when your argument is white supremacy. I originally thought you kept coming to this site because you really wanted to do the right thing should someone be able to convince you. I was wrong. You come here because so long as you can read the posts and comments and raise even the slightest doubt, your world is okay. So you even question the assignment of moral failings even when I’m pointing out that a person doesn’t have to have ill intent to be racist. You’re actually worried that we might be right. Hey, hey, I can sympathize. There are moments when I fear that maybe Africans really aren’t as bright. You know the difference between you and I? I’m arguing that we’re all the same. I’m not arguing that we should assign human worth basis on one attribute or another; I’m arguing that all races have the same attributes in the same amounts. Yeah Darin, I think I get it now.
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@ Nquest – I think once before Sotomayor was confirmed that I put this argue before our acquaintance – accepting that there really are differences between races, isn’t it problematic that the distribution of social wealth is based on how well all the other races measure up to just one? Speed isn’t given the same status as IQ. Right? Moreover, how can it be that we live in an equal world, an economic world devoid of ill-intent, that started with ill intent? You know what I mean? How is it that a group of men can take land from one people group; enslave another people group; only involve the men of their in-group in writing law; and that country not begin in group supremacy? Or, once acknowledging the inequity of the beginning of our economy, how is it that no inequality would remain after nothing has been done to correct the initial inequality?
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And to think, this whole exchange started because I challenged the orthodoxy that everybody thinks white neighborhoods are cleaner and friendlier while simultaneously, everybody self-segregates.
Refuse to understand? That doesn’t sound like me. How about “refuse to accept” your description?
Regardless, Darin’s idiotic cherry-picking of what they call a self-selected group — i.e. (certain) Asian-Americans/Asian immigrants whose academic achievement levels are 2nd to African immigrants — falls flat and fails because he uses a small, perhaps elite, subsection of that group to compare with an entire group (African-Americans) with all its subgroups, elite and non-elite alike.
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Obviously, Darin would rather compare apples with oranges than make legitimate comparisons. Then, again, there’s nothing legitimate in Darin comparing any group to African-Americans when the group(s) do not comparable experiences to African-Americans. Notice, how Darin doesn’t compare African-American achievement to that of, say, Native-Americans (which still wouldn’t be compatible in terms of comparing like-groups but its far closer than the made popular by generations of racist Asian-American model minority meme).
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Also, regarding Jews… There’s a bit of self-selection there, as well. Beyond that, when President Washington is on record giving more than a vote of confidence to the Jews of Newport (“To Bigotry No Sanction,to Persecution No Assistance”)… I’m just saying… there’s no comparison there and there’s a lot to the notion of “How The Jews Became White.” That and the marked differences in the nature and growth of the ethnic enclaves of European (and Asian) ethnic groups in America, including Jews, and communities African-Americans formed. Think the destruction of “Black Wall-Street” in Tulsa.
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Of course, Darin is welcome to produce comparable histories for Jews/Asians in their American experience.
@ Darin – No, it’s understand. I can understand a great many things even if I don’t accept them. I feel it’s important to at least know the basics of the theory. You refuse to understand antiracism. You say “accept” because you reject what you think is our agenda, but you clearly don’t understand and don’t want to .
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@ Nquest – Thanx.
Nquest, I make it a point to ignore everything you say, but I accidentally read you last post because I thought it was somebody else. (Nice to see that your record of misunderstanding, misstatement, tendentiousness, flippancy, and non sequitur is progressing. Good job.)
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Listen, it’s wholly irrelevant if the histories of Asians and Jews in America are not as bad as blacks. The point is, their histories are worse than whites’, yet their outcomes are better. You seem to have a strange concept of the effect of racism: at low levels, it helps!
@ Nquest – I’m noticing some evasion and logical fallacies. You?
Don’t just share a high-five and not highlight out my numerous evasions and fallacies for the benefit of everyone else. By all means, point them out!
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If you can.
Your selective data with northern Asians and Jews. You assumption that racism will work the same in all place at all times with all people. You haven’t said what you would consider evidence of racism. You have explained, for example, how people can have irrational fear of black men and that not result in unjust disparate impact. You haven’t proven that there could be other explanations for the disparate impact we see in housing, lending, education, employment, income, criminal justice, etc and so on besides anti-black and anti-latino bias. You haven’t explained how this country wasn’t founded in white supremacy. And keep in mind if you respond, that I have more than just a superficial understanding of history and the different studies, some not even discussed on this blog, that indicate racial bias.
Selective use of data. Well, it’s true I have selected data that make your argument look bad. Is that what you mean? I don’t think I’ve assume racism must work the same way all the time, but shouldn’t the sign at least be the same? I mean, how can White supremacy hurt some non-Whites (Blacks and Hispanics) and help others (Asians and Jews)?
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Evidence of racism? My door is wide open — I believe racism is extremely common, it is part of the human condition. That’s not a high standard at all. I suppose the problem you have is that I have a much higher standard for evidence that racism explains differences in outcomes for different racial groups. I think I’ve been pretty clear, though, about what it would take: Show me some analysis where the difference in outcome remains after relevant differences in raw material have been controlled for.
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I also believe that disparate impact is extremely common. In fact, I think disparate impact is the rule rather than the exception for most social policies and programs. However, I don’t believe that disparate impact alone is evidence of racism. Same problem.
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Is it really up to me to prove that there *could* be explanations other than racism? This is a great example of why I have such low regard for the so-called science that gets brought up around here. You’re the one making an assertion: that White racism explains differences in outcomes. I, as your opponent, don’t have to prove anything. It’s up to you to prove it. Of course, that’s not what you all do; you start with your assumption and ignore any evidence to the contrary. It’s a great case study in confirmation bias.
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This bit about the US being founded in White supremacy is just so stupid. I mean, even if it were true, you’d still have to explain why it matters today.
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I don’t know. This doesn’t seem to add up to evasion. You’re unhappy that I’ve rejected your assertions, but I have presented reasons why, and I’ve suggested ways you could make your point convincingly.
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How about fallacy? Let’s talk about those examples. And spare me your credentials. I’m interested only in your arguments.
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All right. We’re running onto the second page. You can have the last word.
How gracious of you.
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Lots of Asians would dispute your claim that racism helps them. I’m not up on Jewish American issues, so I can’t speak to how they would feel about your assertion. But again, Jews are pretty much white now. So their outcomes are somewhat irrelevant unless as part of the discussion, it’s pointed out that: 1 I’m not sure the economic status distribution of Jews who came to America would equal that of other whites; 2 centers of Jewish prosperity haven’t been destroyed by the state; 3 I’m pretty sure Jewish soldiers in WW2 received the grants and loans they were entitled to.
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I say “selective” because you’re not including all Asians into your assessment, only the group that has had some economic success. Moreover, you ignore the racial profiling they endure as drivers. Personal finances isn’t the only measure of racism.
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We have done just that – showed evidence where other relevant factors were controlled for. Back to the example of the car repair class, the researcher held for grades, work ethic, personal likability. You question her findings on the basis of IQ even though I’m not sure IQ makes a difference when it comes to fixing cars, and that’s not mentioning the problems with IQ tests. The researcher held for grades which would be the most relevant and accessible indicator of mental ability as concerns car repair. Then, of course, there was the time you rejected the ACLU’s analysis of racial profiling on the basis of math (And you were wrong about the math.) even though judges across the country have accepted their analysis. Even Scalia had to agree with racism across the country has sufficient to require that Sec 5 of the Voting Rights Act remain in place. What do you know that he doesn’t?
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Yes. If you come to a blog that discusses a particular topic, and you disagree with that particular topic, it’s incumbent upon you to prove your case.
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Here’s where I find problems with your logic. You accept that lots of Americans are racist, but refuse to consider what would be the practical consequences of this bias. We do know that most white Americans have some level of anti-black bias. What do you think happens when these people act as teachers or cops or loan officers?
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By the way, racism in America isn’t just human nature. It’s nurtured by our media and politics and education.
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It’s not about credentialing. It’s that I fail to see how you deem yourself “knowledgeable” enough to reject our assertions when what we bring to the discussion exceeds exceptable limits for comment threads. We’re here all working from a base of knowledge that includes data, research, and studies that can’t all be piled into one blog. So you come demanding we prove something to you, when you don’t know all the relevant info, instead of your proving your case to us? Why should we give you the benefit of the doubt? When you first began posting, I entertained your demand that we prove our case to you on the basis that we are burdened with proving our case to the rest of America. But now you come across as entitled. Yes, it’s up to you to prove that there could be other explanations besides racism when you voluntarily visit a blog called racismreview that’s administered by social scientists. Sociology started as a case study of the rate of black crime in Philadelphia. The whole point is to find the cause of disparate impact, not just the disparate impact itself. And that you seem intent on thinking we take disparate impact alone as sufficient evidence of racial bias indicates to me that you’re not interested in the actual findings. Moreover, if you really were interested in finding whether or how much impact racism has, you’d actually read books on the subject. But not reading the books and not knowing the facts allows you to say that their could be other causes. You don’t describe these causes or explain what’s really happening. You just hang onto the possibility so that you can sleep well at night.
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To be more specific, here’s what I mean by “evasion.” If white people see other white people as friendlier than people of color, how do you think they’ll describe whitopias? How can everybody think whitopias are friendlier and cleaner but people of color would prefer to segregate themselves with other less friendly and less clean people of color? Knowing that white people think people of color are abnormally criminal, what do you expect happens when a jury is supposed to decide each case on the merits of that particular case? Acknowledging the widespread myth that the black community doesn’t value education, what do you think happens when it comes time to place students on academic tracks? What’s your explanation for the fact that black children are disciplined more often and more harshly than white children even though they misbehave at the same rate? And even accepting the disparity in crime rate without holding for socio-economics, how do you explain that the number of blacks and latins in prisons outpaces even the rate of crime?
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As for the founding of this country. I’m really interested to know what you know that indicates that the founders of this country and writers of the national and state constitutions did not have preserving the superior position of whites compared to blacks. And if you concede that the nation was founded in white supremacy on the basis of its relevance today, here’re two present-day issues: 1 – You think it’s important that people be able to leave an inheritance to their kids. What about all the wealth that was intentionally kept from black Americans even after slavery that hasn’t been passed down?; 2 – What do you imagine would be the consequences of leaving children with the an incomplete and therefore inaccurate picture of history? Do you think they’ll judge each individual on the content of their character without regard for the color of their skin?
Do you want me to respond?
>Darin, I’d personally like you to address the accumulated wealth meme. This is a Big Deal Darin.
> It means every generation of black Americans has to start from scratch. That ain’t easy! While white Americans usually leave {for centuries} Something to their progeny, blacks have been unable to leave anything to children due to initially slavery, then neo-slavery, Jim Crow and blatant and demeaning discrimination up until the Civil Rights Movement {which was a Start..but hardly is the work finished}, then after that surreptitious discrimination..which actually hasn’t been so Surreptitious!
Yeah, I noticed you talking about that somewhere else, too. Although accumulated wealth is certainly a big deal for the people who accumulate it, I don’t believe it’s a big deal for the economy overall. My understanding is that accumulated wealth is dissipated quickly, which ties in with the point we talked about before regarding income mobility.
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So I doubt that so-called accumulation of wealth has any much affect on the differences in wealth between Blacks and Whites, and I assume it has virtually no effect on the differences in income.
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Here are some data suggesting the kind of thing I’m talking about, though not exactly (from “The Decline of Inherited Money,” WSJ; Jan 4, 2008):
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1. According to a study of Federal Reserve data conducted by NYU professor Edward Wolff, for the nation’s richest 1%, inherited wealth accounted for only 9% of their net worth in 2001, down from 23% in 1989. (The 2001 number was the latest available.)
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2. According to a study by Prince & Associates, less than 10% of today’s multi-millionaires cited “inheritance” as their source of wealth.
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3. A study by Spectrem Group found that among today’s millionaires, inherited wealth accounted for just 2% of their total sources of wealth.
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Do you have evidence to the contrary?
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Where I think inheritance matters is in the incentives is creates. A “good” tax, to the extent there is such a thing, is one with the following characteristics:
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1. Efficiency – does not create disincentives to work and invest, especially at the high end.
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2. Fairness – does not single out groups for disproportionate taxation; does not tax money more than once; does not tax money not being “used” in some way.
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3. Certainty – cannot easily be avoided and does not create incentives to waste money avoiding taxes.
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The death tax fails miserably on all three counts. It’s a bad tax, and the only reason anybody likes it is envy. Class warfare. It’s not pretty, it’s humans at their worst.
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So listen, it’s one thing to suggest a plausible mechanism for racism to affect outcomes, which you have done in this case and many others. But then you have to present at least a little evidence that it’s actually working that way.
Darin Said:Do you have evidence to the contrary?
>Hell Yeah! Most of my middle class friends are Left Money and/or Real Estate by parents on their death. We’re not talkin’ millions..but anywhere from fifty thousand to three hundred thousand ain’t bad either! Keeps the wolves away, doesn’t it?
> First, the only evidence you cite is regarding the Donald Trumps. Who said anything about millionaires? I’m talkin’ upper middle class whites. Almost all upper middle class elderly whites own homes, have some savings etc. So, their progeny inherits this. Not astrophysics Darin.
>My ex-mother-in-law’s husband was a doctor. He already passed away. I won’t get diddly of that stuff, but my husband will when his Mother dies. Then, my children will inherit some of this when my ex dies.
>As far as ‘blowing’ your inheritance. If you’re stupid you do. If you’re a smart money manager, you can make it grow.
> You need a course in Money Management Darin. For a smart guy, honestly? That last post was fairly naive. With all respect. Didn’t mean to sound mean, but I was very surprised at how naive you sounded. Do you know what a bond is, by the way? Or the difference between a derivative and an initial public offering? What does NASDAQ stand for? What’s the difference between a stock and a mutual fund?
>The point is black citizens won’t even Have the Opportunity to Use the above Knowledge!
> If you scratch your head at all this, you definitely need to read some financial advisory books.
Here’s proof of what Ellen discusses:
http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/the_destruction_of_the_black_middle_class
There more here: http://www.alternet.org/workplace/70694/
Whether or not you respond is up to you. But I’m glad you opened the door for more engagement. After reading this article (http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2009fall/2009fall_sen.php) I thought maybe I had been too hard on you. (Nquest, just, give me a moment.) Here’s some of the article:
Now, of course, we’re working on the assumption that all stats and data should be the same across the race, holding for relevant factors, of course. So when we talk about disparate impact, we don’t just mean that we see different outcomes; we mean we see different outcomes even after holding for relevant information. For example, we see different outcomes in academic tracking even for students making similar grades and similar standardized test scores. So what’s the explanation? Educators use the same standards for all students. So before you go there, the only way IQ comes into the picture is if teachers are making independent assessments, and studies already show an unfounded bias for whites. After interviews with teachers around the country, researchers consistently find that children of color are not placed in the proper tracking because teachers assume that because of parental attitude or time, the students won’t be successful. Now you can argue that it’s the teachers’ job to make these assessments with students’ best interests in mind. But the problem is simply these assessments are based on racial stereotypes and not children’s abilities. So these assessments are unreliable; especially since findings have also shown that coming from a single-parent home doesn’t negatively impact black children as much as white children (There are different explanations for this.). We also know that white children are being placed in tracks that would be too hard because of these same racial biases and sometimes, parental intervention. (Let’s not get into why white parents would feel more comfortable doing that than black parents. That involves discussing the history of school integration.) Now, I’m not going to ask you to explain that but just so you know, the whole thing of black kids not valuing education is overblown to the point of being mythical.
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So lets keep this simple. If you respond, please respond to the quotes from On the Issues Magazine and/or explain this to me: black children are punished more often and more harshly than white children even though they all misbehave at the same rate. Researchers held for relevant information: socioeconomic status, racial demographics of the school, etc. I have my own personal anecdote regular readers are familiar with. If there is an alternative explanation, not just the abstract possibility, for the disparity we see in school discipline, I’m left grasping at straws as to what it could be.
Hey all,
I’m new to this group and have tried my best to skim the posts. I think its a really fascinating discussion. My primary comment is for ellen says. I believe that there really, truly is a wealth gap and that wealth gap and the demographics of that wealth gap show that wealth is heavily and disproportionately skewed in favor of whites.
But from an anecdotal perspective, i also know that many POC families are small business owners. I agree with Darin that the estate tax is not good tax policy. I think we probably disagree about why.
Harry Alford, Jr., the long-time President and CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce has argued that abolishing the tax will enable African-American families to build wealth, which they can pass on from generation to generation, as other Americans have done in the past. Repealing the Estate Tax, he says, “will start to create a needed legacy and begin a cycle of wealth building for Blacks in this country.”
Overall, the estate tax generates less than 2% of the federal budget. As a source of revenue, it really doesn’t serve the purpose of economic redistribution at and hurts small business.
In fact, the primary interest behind maintaining the estate tax are life insurance companies who fleece small business owners (POC or White) for “second-to-die” life insurance policies and irrevocable trusts to help family businesses avoid the tax and pass the business on to their kids. Why should POC family businesses have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in premiums over their lifetimes just to pass their wealth on to their kids?
Just not fair.
I encourage you to check out http://www.youtube.com/ettruth
No1KState, The punishment of Black versus White school children is just not that interesting a topic to me. Maybe it’s true, maybe it’s not. I have no idea. But it’s not obvious that it’s relevant. By “outcome” does any of us have in mind that kids should get detention at the same rate? I doubt it. We’re talking about things that matter, like income, wealth, jail, illegitimacy, and so on. So what if I just take an Alford plea on the misbehavior of school kids? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alford_plea
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I agree with you that there may be different flavors of racism that are possible. But I don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the question of whether racism does or doesn’t affect outcomes. The facts are still the same: When you control for IQ, most of the differences disappear in many of the outcomes we’re actually interested. Once that fact comes to light, the rest of the discussion is radically changed. It becomes a moral point only, and I suspect that you and I would find ourselves on much the same page then.
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Let’s say we could somehow agree that Whites’ racism is not the cause of Blacks’ performance. Then there would be nothing left but for us to agree that using the phrase “nappy-headed hos,” as Imus did, is in poor taste, is unflattering and unkind to Blacks, and has no place in civilized discourse. We’d be best friends.
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In the long paragraph above, you mentioned standardized test scores. I’m pessimistic. The trend lately is to water down standardized tests so that they are less reflective of underlying intelligence and are based more on subjective criteria — which helps to minimize the gap in performance between races. It’s interesting, really. When the SAT began, it was called the “Scholastic Aptitude Test,” and its purpose was to identify kids who were smart but who never had a chance because of poor schooling or whatever. Diamonds in the rough. However, it turned out that an aptitude test produces a disparate impact, and this dispersion is a function of how closely the test measures aptitude rather than something else. So the better the test, the more stark the difference.
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What was the response? Well, they changed the name of the Scholastic Aptitude Test to simply SAT. They re-centered the scoring to wash out the high end performers, where the gaps are most stark. They added a subjective writing section, which is just embarrassing and has no place on that test. So much for standardized testing. Clearly, the only way the diversocrats will be happy is if there is no disparate impact. You can’t have everything.
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It’s hopeless. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/429fmcim.asp
Ellen, sorry, I misspoke again. What I meant to say is:
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Do you have any evidence to the contrary BESIDES YOUR OWN PERSONAL EXPERIENCE?
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I promise, for every anecdote you can come up with for one side of the issue, I can come up with one for the other side. We’ll never get anywhere that way!
@ Darin:
You wanted Evidence instead of My Own Personal Experience? Please read on:
No1KState gave us a Perfectly Valid Study. To Wit:
>In Being Black, Living in the Red {this is a book} Dalton Conley, director of NYU’s Center for Advanced Social Science Research, showed that white families, on average, had eight times the Acculumulated Wealth of black families who earned the same, and that remained true even when you adjust for education levels and savings rates. It is, as Conley told me in an interview last year, “the legacy of racial inequality from generations past.”
>Crucial to understanding how that impacts economic mobility is the concept of “intergenerational assistance.” That’s just a fancy way of saying that your chances to advance economically are very much impacted by whether your family can help with tuition payments, a down payment on a house or seed money to start a business.
> Having financially ‘comfortable’ families of origin makes a huge impact on a person’s eventual life time money. For example, my Mom and my ex-husband’s Mom chipped in when we bought our first house. My Mom and Dad paid for my college education. My ex-husband’s Mom co-signed on a big construction loan my ex needed to build a multiple-unit housing project.
>This was all years ago. But what if we had to foot all those bills ourselves? You’re obviously extremely intelligent Darin, even if I don’t always agree with you. The phrases you use, command of the language, historical references… lead me to believe you didn’t exactly grow up in a poorly educated home of origin, or {I’m guessing} in poverty for that matter. So, why does this whole concept sound so Foreign to You? I don’t understand how you Can’t understand this.
>Did your parents help/pay for totally/ college expenses? Did your parents/in-laws ever help you financially? Did they ever co-sign on a loan? Will they Probably leave you money when they pass away? Well, there ya go! Family money begets family money. My daughter’s in-laws are Always giving my daughter and her husband..all kinds of stuff! Like a trip to Europe for their honeymoon!
> These people aren’t wealthy..just upper middle class Americans who’ve worked their whole lives and now they can help the ‘Kids’. {Must be Nice! lol}
>I, by the way, am not so lucky these days. That’s why I have to work 7 days a week. But that’s OK, cause I love teaching. But the point is..if you throw Racism into the equation all those Cool Compiled Money Perks that white people take for Granted would not be there Darin. With all due respect.
@ Darin:
‘Structural racism is the cumulative effect of the racism of multiple institutions over time.’ No1KState wrote this in one of her comments.
>I really don’t think you can dispute that black citizens have been subjected to the above Darin. It’s not about being Overtly Racist as in making Rude Comments to black people. It’s about changing the underlying structure that white America has held dear {many times subconsciously} for so long, it simply appears ‘normal’. Racism is so entrenched in American White Thinking we don’t often even see it.
> For hundreds of years, white America didn’t even acknowledge the existence of millions of black people except for a brief nod..’oh them!’ I personally am totally against the elimination of Affirmative Action. It gave so many black Americans a first chance to climb out of repetitive poverty.
> As a teacher, I would like to believe that if all my students ‘just work hard’, everything will turn out like we’re back in Kansas and home at last. But, I know it’s not nearly that simple with black kids. Doesn’t mean I won’t push them to achieve and ask them to Believe in Themselves.
>But, of course, I wonder what disappointments they’ll encounter because of the pain of racism. With the best of intentions, they’ll Still be subjected to cruelty and pain that they never deserved or anticipated.
Diversity, I tried that once. It worked well for the first 2 months until my apartment got broken into by an “African American”, car got broken into by an “African American”, neighbor got robbed at gunpoint by an “African American”, class mate got raped by an “African American”, pizza guy got robbed at gunpoint delivering me a pizza by an “African American”.. I tolerated it for 5 years to finish college, then moved back to rural “white” America and guess what? There hasn’t been a murder this year, pizza guy hasn’t been robbed, don’t have to lock my doors because nobody will mess with anything, don’t lock my car doors… ; just the same way life in rural “white America has been for the previous 23 years of my life. You can keep your “diversity” I will keep my possessions, life, family, money, and all other things that hold value in my life.
Oh, for crying out loud! Not another simple disparate impact study. Don’t you have anything else? Listen (I’m holding my hands up to my mouth like I’m yelling for this next part):
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I already know White people have more money than Black people. I am not disputing that. What I am disputing is your EXPLANATION for this discrepancy.
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You’re right, I didn’t grow up poor. On the other hand, I got exactly zero financial assistance from my family once I left home. I paid my own way through school. I paid for my own house. I expect my inheritance to amount to my share of my parents’ house — which is worth approximately nothing and will come too late in my life to make any difference anyway.
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As for my in-laws, well, we’re helping them out as best we can. But we’ve got our own bills to pay, so they have to fend for themselves mostly.
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There’s one anecdote for you (and far more personal information than I ever planned on sharing here — I think I’m warming up to you, Ellen). Does it have any effect on whether you believe my argument? It shouldn’t.
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Do me a favor. At least acknowledge that you have understood my point about the difference between a plausible mechanism (i.e., families “freezing” wealth through inheritance) and evidence. I just want to be sure you get the distinction, not trying to hit you over the head.
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Stop lying. Right here in this very thread I convinced you to stop embarrassing yourself by responding to my posts (#11, #27 and #29) because of how I easily I find the errors in your logic, if not outright contradictions in your statements which is the very reason why you conveniently ignored my first post (#9, not to mention #10) on this thread.
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Be honest. You don’t respond to, engage debate/discussion on, points you know you can’t even pretend to contend with which is why you abandoned your phony appeal for opinions on the question of “whether it’s possible to have a very racially diverse society that is still a functioning democracy.” The best you could do once I addressed the fundamental problem with your “honest” but demonstrably problematic and unfounded “skepticism” was whine because I offered my opinion directly disputing yours up to and including the underlying assumptions involved in you framing the question you did.
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Note how you simply can’t deal with the clear implication in your original question — i.e. the U.S. was a “functional democracy” in periods when its “history of racial abuses is impossible to deny”, in periods before the US “attempted to resolve its racial issues.” Something that’s counter-intuitive on its face, you know, since you placed “racial issues” (racial diversity as the racial issue of the day, according to you) at the center of the discussion of what constitutes or contributes to “functional democracy”, negatively or otherwise.
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And clear proof that you’re subject to say anything then drop it (abandon it) when you can conveniently ignore the logical traps you lay for yourself is this latest piece of bs:
… which is directly at odds with your rhetoric in Post #68:
In other words, I understood the idiot’s point you tried to make all too well. Of course, that’s exactly the reason I encouraged you to stop responding to my posts because I simply won’t ignore any of your CONTRADICTIONS, doublespeak and other assorted nonsense you say when you feel its convenient.
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Hell, you can’t even keep your sh*t straight for 4 or 5 posts — i.e. per post #68, you made the histories of Asians and Jews in America COMPLETELY RELEVANT because they always were relevant to the kind of argument you’ve been trying to advance.
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Beyond that, it’s clear to see how the histories of Asians and Jews in America is COMPLETELY RELEVANT to the question of how/why WHITE SUPREMACY (WS) impacts groups like Blacks and Hispanics in ways different from Asians and Jews. Of course, I’ll remind you how the idea that Asians are “helped” by WS while still experiencing racial discrimination is DOA.
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I repeat… “the idea that Asians are “helped” by WS while still experiencing racial discrimination is DOA.”
Darin Said: ‘Do me a favor. At least acknowledge that you have understood my point about the difference between a plausible mechanism (i.e., families “freezing” wealth through inheritance) and evidence. I just want to be sure you get the distinction, not trying to hit you over the head.’
Darin, honestly, I’m having a ‘Duh’ moment and am asking you to rephrase this please. Cause I cited No1KState’s book about this phenomenon: Being Black, Living in the Red by Dalton Conley. This reference is {obviously} not anecdotal even though the rest of my comment was anecdotal.
Ellen, okay, maybe you meant your reference to that book to be an argument from authority. If so, that’s great! We’re now at least at an impasse. Of course, I am far too jaded by the my exposure to that kind of scholarship to be convinced by this reference, but still — progress is progress!
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Or are you saying that No1KState is Dalton Conley, the author of “Being Black, Living in the Red”?
>No Darin. No1KState is Not Dalton Conley. {By the way, No1 is a woman.}
> And yes, I meant that book to be a reference since you asked for one…although {to me} it’s like asking me to prove that the sun rises in the east. Of course white people have more accumulated wealth than blacks.
>They haven’t had to combat racism, had many more opportunities to earn money, been exposed to better education {Brown vs Board of Education was only passed in 1959} etc. It’s like..what’s to dispute?
> By the way, it did take some courage to say all that stuff about your personal life on the net..I give you credit for that! That was brave. You do hang in there Darin!
Wait, was the point of the book reference that White people have accumulated more wealth than Blacks? Yes, I know. How many different ways can I say it? I know Whites have more money than Blacks. That’s not a contested point. We’re arguing about WHY. You have a theory: Racism. I don’t buy it.
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Regarding your last point, — like I said, you’re getting to me.
@ Darin:
I know I’ll regret asking this but, what’s Your Theory on why whites have more accumulated wealth {this is across generations remember!} than blacks If Racism doesn’t explain it?
Okay. I’m not sure I know why Whites have more accumulated wealth than Blacks do. I believe I know why Whites have larger incomes than Blacks, and I assume that the reasons are highly related, but I can’t claim to know the answer for sure.
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What I do know is that there’s an elephant in the room, and that elephant is IQ. There is reams of data over decades showing that there is about a one standard deviation difference in the mean IQ between Blacks and Whites. This difference is true in Africa, it’s true in Europe, it’s true in America. It’s true when you account for income, diet (mostly), and any other factor you care to mention.
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Now, when you control for IQ, you find that the income gap virtually disappears. In fact, in some cases, it actually reverses — meaning that for a given IQ, Blacks actually earn more than Whites. (This is not surprising, since there’s been a huge effort to recruit capable Blacks to elite colleges and into high-paying fields.) I can’t say for certain that the difference in wealth between Blacks and Whites is a function of this IQ difference, but it seems very likely. So likely that I would probably disregard any study that does not address it explicitly. Maybe that analysis would show that IQ is not relevant to accumulated wealth, but I doubt it.
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We’ll probably spend the next year arguing about whether IQ tests are racist (they’re not) or whether they’re relevant (they are) and whether IQ is nature or nurture (it’s both). This is probably the most politically incorrect fact there is, but it’s a fact nonetheless. All the progressive social scientists in the world haven’t been able to change it, and believe me they’ve tried. It’s stubborn, it won’t go away.
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All right, let me have it.
What type of intelligence do IQ tests measure for?
@ Darin:
>I’m not going into a laborious rebuttal here. The main reason is that in all my years of teaching, I Just Haven’t Seen It. If I had seen a deficit in IQ between black students and white students, I would’t be so averse to being truthful as to ‘hide’ this observation. It’s just not there in my experience.
What I’ve seen:
> 1. Black students with supportive parents in All Situations {that means middle class or living in housing projects} do just as well as white children in All Situations.
>2. When some black students reach the teenage years, even if their elementary performance has been Very Good, their grades start to slack off If They Start Associating With Other Teens Who Aren’t Supervised By Parents.
>This is an environmental problem. I can’t tell you how many black Moms I’ve listened to as they bemoan how they can’t control their {mostly male} black teens. And, you guessed it, most of these Moms had their hands full with full time jobs, and were trying to maintain a single parent household with no present father. You try doing that! It’s virtually Impossible!
>3. Black students from homes with 2 parents Maintain their good grades from elementary school through high school. They go on to college..and that’s all she wrote. The black family{I’ve mentioned them before} who lives 2 houses down from me, saw their children get bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees..and they’re probably working on their doctoral thesis as we speak.
> So yes, Darin. It’s about Environment. It’s not some innate evil little gene that keeps black people from performing up to the standards of whites.
>We probably have about 20 black families in our neighborhood of 400. 3 of the children in these families were in my son’s circle of best friends growing up.They were absolutely Model Kids..I have ta say! Really great children.
>When my kids were teens, they started ‘acting out’ because that’s when my ex and I divorced. Gosh..maybe this supports my theory? At any rate, they’re doing very well now because my ex-husband put his foot down with them numerous times..even though he wasn’t living here.
>If he hadn’t done this..I have no idea how my son would have prospered. I credit my ex for guiding my son {with a sprinkling of a kick in the pants sometimes} when he needed it.
>That’s why I’m a Big Believer in Saying No to Kids When They Need it..merely Feeling Sorry for them Won’t Cut it..Teens Need That Brick Wall from a Parent/ Authority Figure Once in Awhile wherein they understand That Some Absolutes are Required!
>Now, both my children are doing Really Great if I do say so! My daughter was give 3 post-graduation Awards from her college as Alumni of the Year in her particular department cause of the tremendous success she’s had with her career.
>My son works 12 hours a day{he graduated from a community college..and that was one of the didn’t-get-fixed consequences of the divorce..cause he’s very intelligent} , has a lovely girlfriend {whose a teacher like me}, and runs marathons ‘for fun’. Gosh..even when they were so rebellious as teens? Yes, Because My Ex Helped Me!
> That IQ meme has been your particular Best Buddy for months now. That Charles Darwin Racist { from a scientific stance..I mean the Natural Selection and Evolution From ‘ape-like’ animals was fantastic, but the rest was Extremely white European Racist twaddle} also tryed to sell that superior races Cure-All Elixar. It just doesn’t work If you Allow For Environment Darin. No contemporary scientist takes this last racist bit by Darwin seriously at all.
>Descent of Man, Chapter Six: On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man, On the Birthplace and Antiquity of Man
> ‘dreams of a future for mankind when the Black Races of Man, {caps mine} as well as the mountain gorilla of Africa, will hopefully become extinct, thus enhancing the chances for the evolutionary advancement of the more “civilized” races of man’
>also states that both blacks and Aborigines occupy a sub-species between white Caucasians and Baboons
>he did not observe that they were “endangered species”, he encouraged extinction
>At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated.
>The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the Negro or Australian and the gorilla.”
> Anyway, it’s all about Nurture not Nature Darin. My humble opinion..but shared by Most of the Educated Sections of planet Earth.
http://ministries.tliquest.net/theology/evolution/Darwin%27s%20Racism.html
Distance88, the better the IQ test, the more heavily “g-loaded” it is, meaning it measures general intelligence. It turns out that general intelligence is the trait that correlates with all the outcomes we’re talking about. The multiple intelligences idea is mostly a nice idea to make people feel like their kids are special snowflakes.
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Ellen, the experience you describe is completely consistent with what I’m talking about. And for the record, I NEVER used any term remotely like “superior race.” I don’t talk that way because I don’t think that way. The quote from “Descent of Man” is not my words, either. I never said anything about “sub-species,” or “extermination,” or who is civilized and who isn’t. However, that this is your reaction (and you’re one of the more level-headed ones) explains why there’s never any honest talk about this issue.
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Your comment that your views are shared by “Most of the Educated Sections of planet Earth” is just silly. It’s irrelevant, of course. Science isn’t a democracy, we don’t vote on truth. But your implication is that I am somehow uneducated because I see it this way. That’s totally backwards. I’m pretty comfortable that my education about, and certainly my understanding of, this topic holds up pretty darn well around here.
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Like I said, your experience is consistent with what I am describing, but you should be careful not to assume that your experience is representative of the whole human race. I’m talking about averages across millions of people, not the 30 who happen to be in your class this year. (There are all sorts of selection problems with our own experiences.) By the way, my personal experience does not bear this out, either. The reason might be that the people we all interact with have already sorted themselves to some degree. So the Blacks and Whites we interact with are not a random sample.
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The social science seems to suggest that the “nurture” part of IQ is somewhere between 20 and 60 percent, probably closer to the low end. Of course, IQ by itself does not fully predict outcomes, so there are all sorts of other parameters that matter, too — the “Big 5” traits, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
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And luck, I suppose.
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All of these, like IQ, are partly heritable and partly learned. A good rule of thumb, I believe, is 50/50. One very interesting phenomenon is that the 50 percent environmental effect seems not to relate to the home environment. In other words, once your parents’ genes are taken into account, their influence on you as an adult is very small. This is extremely surprising, of course. It’s hard to believe, but it’s another one of those nasty data that just won’t go away.
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Anyway, since home environment has little effect, that means that a kid’s peers have a huge effect (the “non-shared” environment). This is exactly what you’re getting at when you talk about the mother’s who can’t figure out why their kids act the way they do. And this is why the negative culture so many Black kids find themselves in is so harmful.
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A final point. The fact that certain heritable traits have a predictable effect on outcome does not mean any one person’s lot in life is determined. We’re talking about averages. But does mean that “Whites are racists” is not a good explanation for why Blacks have so many worse outcomes than Whites do.
I only read Darin’s immediate response to my last post. So if I repeat someone or something like that, my apologies. I did skim through a few of the others and to that point, jd must’ve chosen a bad neighborhood to live in. That jd experienced crime in his/her “diverse” neighborhood has nothing to do with race and everything to do with economics. To wit, data from police and FBI indicate that white people are much, much, much more likely to be victimized by white criminals than by black criminals.
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@ Darin – What happens in school discipline is a microcosm of what happens in the real world. So no, you don’t get to rest on an alford plea. However you feel about standardized tests, that’s what teachers are supposed to use in deciding academic tracking. I think I did quote “that looking only at income misses a crucial part of the story.” Also, lots and lots of reviews indicate that even holding for downpayment as %age of loan, credit rating and scores, etc, blacks with higher incomes were more likely to be given subprime loans than whites of lower incomes. What does the level of IQ have to do with wealth accumulation, income, housing, crime, etc? Where are the studies that prove your point? And so your parents didn’t help you pay for college? Did you have to work to help pay bills back home while you were in college?
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Any evidence of racial difference in IQ is unreliable. I’ll just mention 2 reasons: 1 – Stereotypes about a group can’t be used to rationalize individual outcomes. 2 – We know that because of past racism and the inability to accumulate wealth, blacks have a disproportionate rate of poverty. We also know that the stress living in poverty produces effects brain development. We also know that poor, urban environments have toxic levels of lead.
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And since it’s right above, there’s more to racism, institutional and otherwise, than just “whites are racist.” I repeat, even Jesse Jackson, whatever you think about him, has an irrational fear in regards to strange black men as opposed to strange white men. But since you mentioned it, all studies and research on the issue indicates that whites are racist. And seeing that whites make up around 75% or so of the US population, it’s hard to imagine that racism not having practical consequences. For example . . . well, school discipline for one. All else in life being the same, children who are disciplined more receive less and lower quality education. Children who receive less and lower quality education have worse results as adults. Now, if blacks are more punished more often and more harshly as students, who do you suppose happens to these adults and how do you suppose it affects the collective averages? And if need to be specific, for the same misbehavior, black children are more likely to be punished, and in when both black and white children are punished for the same misbehavior, black students receive the harsher punishments.
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If you can easily imagine the consequences of alleged racial differences in intelligence; why can you not imagine the consequences of whites thinking blacks are less friendly and more hostile? And, for that matter, not as intelligent?
Hmmm . . . if not “whites are racists” as an explanation, how about “our society has been and continues to be structured around white supremacy” (this is of course the result of white decision-making, but perhaps this gets at the matter more readily). I have some comments about the IQ thread that I’ll save for below, but I would hardly call IQ the elephant in the room for explaining the source of racial disparities, particularly if the topic is wealth. Even if/when this construct we call IQ (and obviously there is much to critique here . . . again, more below) explains some variance in racial disparities across any number of issues, there almost always remains very significant amounts of variance unexplained.
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OK – so on to wealth and the source of racial wealth disparities, which is the subject of my own research. Income and wealth are actually less correlated than might seem likely – they are correlated of course, but according to the significant research available on the topic, the correlation is weak at best. One of the most interesting findings of the Dalton Conley book that’s been cited above is that whites at all income levels own greater wealth than blacks. (Indeed we will do well to focus less on the super wealthy or even very wealthy per se in this discussion – which I think Darin far above introduced a few stats about how folks in the upper SES percentiles accrued wealth in recent years – and look at folks living a more “standard” “American-dream” type-scenario.) Conley finds that even among families earning $10,000 or less per year, white families have significantly greater assets (albeit meager). (As an aside, another excellent book quantitatively analyzing racial wealth disparities is Oliver and Shapiro’s – now in it’s 2nd edition – “Black Wealth/White Wealth.”)
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In my research I trace the mechanisms by which families have intergenerationally accessed “capital” of all sorts – material, educational, social, etc…Wealth is one of the most important economic indicators to study – generally speaking, but also specifically from a racial disparities standpoint – because (1) unlike income, wealth represents a surplus resource available for improving life chances, accessing opportunities, securing economic security, etc.; and, (2) it has the capacity to represent the inequality from the past, and gauges not only contemporary disparities, but also suggests a future pattern of inequalities. I want to be clear, too – when we are talking about wealth we do not have to be talking about huge amounts of excess resources – wealth refers to any assets, includes owning a home, and “small” financial gifts (as Ellen said above – getting a loan from a family member for putting a down payment on a house or to weather a time of crisis, having college paid for, etc.) – we often discount these kinds of things when we talk about wealth, but these are key ways that people are able to leverage better opportunities for themselves and their families (e.g., by moving to a “better” neighborhood, accessing better educational opportunities, etc. – again, this relates to the (1) point above).
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So, what accounts for contemporary racial wealth disparities? There’s much to say, but let me detail a few key mechanisms here. Historically speaking, white Americans have had access to many wealth-generating opportunities that were not available to people of color. Consider the Homestead Act for example – signed into law in 1862, formerly landless Americans could essentially squat on land, files some papers, and get 160 acres of land. 1.5 millions Americans got access to Homestead land, creating immediate upward mobility. Although the law was not explicitly racialized, it was administered in a racialized fashion such that Homestead families were almost exclusively white. Researcher Trina Shanks quantitatively estimates that the projected current-day beneficiaries of this single Act ranges around 46 million – that is, close to one quarter of the current U.S. population over the age of 25 has ancestors who were homesteaders. Such work concretely illustrates how the privileges and discrimination of the past reach into contemporary society – notably, many states had their own homestead acts.
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Another seemingly non-racial example concerns “open” government programs of the 20th century, like the labor laws of the New Deal and Fair Deal and the GI Bill of Rights. Re: the New Deal and Fair Deal provisions, although not explicitly racialized in their writing (i.e. “blacks are excluded), lawmakers deliberately excluded categories of work – domestics and agricultural laborers – that they knew blacks were heavily represented in to ensure their exclusion from these social welfare benefits. Perhaps most critical was the GI Bill of Rights, often credited as having created middle-class America. Despite universal eligibility for GI Bill benefits, through which millions bought homes, attended college, started business ventures, and found jobs, the legislation’s administrative responsibilities were deliberately delegated to the state and local level, where, particularly in the segregated South, white officials engaged in blatantly discriminatory practices against black veterans (see Katznelson 2005). Additionally, African Americans were largely restricted if not outright banned from using their college vouchers to attend predominantly white colleges and universities, even outside of the South; and, demand for placements in historically black colleges and universities far, far exceeded capabilities. Katznelson cumulatively estimates that well over $100 billion in benefits was transferred almost exclusively to whites through the “affirmative action” social progressive policies of the mid-twentieth century. Significantly, these policies not only excluded African Americans, further prohibiting any attainment of social equality, but actually exacerbated the gap between blacks and whites, through the latter’s facilitated capital accumulation – material, cultural and social.
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The FHA, created during the New Deal programming, also facilitated vast homeownership opportunities for white families (before the FHA’s loan terms, owning a home was the privilege for mostly elites) – while shutting out most black families through institutionalizing redlining (which pretty much ensured most blacks were shut out of loan opportunities) – indeed, between 1936 when the FHA was created and 1962 (when redlining was finally outlawed) the federal government financed $120 billion in new housing (the birth of the suburbs) – any idea how much of that money went to white families? NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT . . .
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These are just a handful of examples of structured, institutional racialized privileges that assisted in the creation of white wealth through capital accumulation – material, educational, social (there are many more, and note, I have not even touched on the wealth accrued by whites, derived via black labor during slavery.) So, perhaps if there’s an elephant in the room with you, Darin, this is it.
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My research specifically links these kinds of structural/institutional matters with how they play out in individual family intergenerational histories. I find that white families, often even without themselves engaging in any explicit racial animus, can directly trace the wealth accumulation through these kinds of threads – so, e.g., a typical (abridged) story might goes something like “my family acquired land through the Homestead Act – we were able to work the land, and eventually my parents inherited it. They sold the land and used the money to start their lives together (buy a home, start a business, etc.). Because my parents were financially stable from this they were able to fully finance my college education” etc., etc. . . . you get the idea. The histories of black families in my research rarely follow this kind of trajectory – when they have been able to acquire assets, it is almost always through unusual circumstances (more to say here, but the post it already getting too long),
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In regards to social capital, it’s worth mentioning too how significant social networks are in gaining access to opportunities, and because our social networks tend to be highly racially homogenous, whites tend to pass opportunities throughout their social circles. E.g., as was typical of many histories I’ve gathered, one respondent discussed how, when his father needed a loan, a good friend’s father was president of a bank and “fudged some numbers” so he would qualify, and then gave him a job at the bank to ensure he would be able to pay the loan. Indeed, research documents that most jobs are accessed through key social networks. Because of our access to key positions of power whites have much greater access to passing these kinds of opportunities through our networks – and what seems a non-racial and non-malevolent phenomenon actually has tremendous racialized outcomes.
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I’ll just close with a few thoughts on IQ – I know when we corresponded in a previous post, Darin, you cited that most of your evidence came from The Bell Curve. I must ask if you are familiar with Stephen J. Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man? If you are not, I would encourage you to read it. The emergence of intelligence testing and the construct of IQ actually derived from the early “scientific” efforts to rank the “races of man” and prove biological racial difference, and thus support biologically deterministic arguments that defended racial disparities as something derived from nature rather than as a result of what were the OBVIOUS practices of racial oppression occurring in our earlier history. Science was enlisted to justify such disparities in outcome. One of Gould’s most interesting findings, however, is that the scientists he examines were often unaware of the ways in which their biases were influencing how they conducted their research (i.e., they were not masterminding the use of science to cover their racist tracks, so to speak – they were, no doubt, though, influenced by the social context of the time). It’s a fascinating read. Nonetheless, Darin, why you remain so committed to differences in IQ as the holy grail of explanations for racial disparities is puzzling at best (you seem like a smart guy, and this just seems like a broken record now that’s beneath your own smarts), and dangerously troublesome at worst.
No1KState, I know you’re beyond convincing. I suppose my best hope is that somebody whose mind isn’t already made up will read what I write, read what you write, and be convinced that I may be correct.
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You can choose to disregard IQ testing if you want to. Explaining IQ away has a long, tired history, so you’ll have good company. But you’ll be wrong, just the same. Sure, the tests aren’t perfect. Sure, there’s probably room to improve them. But this gap is significant (1 SD), consistent (always and everywhere), and persistent (for at least 50 years without much change). It’s probably just a fact, and we’ll all be better off the day we stop pretending otherwise and start talking about what the implications are.
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As I have noted about a thousand times: Yes, you’re right. Environment *does* affect IQ. The point isn’t that IQ is fully heritable — it isn’t. The point is that it’s *partly* heritable and partly due to environment, the goodness of which is also correlated with IQ.
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It may be hard to imagine racism (which I’m sure does exist everywhere) not affecting outcomes. Yet that seems to be the case, at least in present day America. When you try to quantify the affect of racism on income, prison, illegitimacy, etc., it turns out to be small, zero, or positive. That’s just how it is, whether it’s easy to believe or not.
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It would probably be easier for us to have this conversation if we had started talking about Whites only. Leave race out for the moment. Would it shock you to learn that IQ predicts income for Whites?
I misspoke above. My understanding is that IQ does not explain differences in prison rates. I should have focused on income, which is the one I’m most sure of.
First, co-sign Jenni.
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Murray’s research is not unrefuted. There are several factors he leaves out such as wealth accumulation and nutrition. And trust, I read through a lot of articles. Even those who tend to agree with Murray and even agree that “political correctness” should not influence science admit that his hypothesis is still as of yet unproven.
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But lets assume it is. It still does not account for the differences in outcome in criminal justice; school discipline; academic tracking; income, promotions, and raises; housing; lending; employment; college graduation rates, etc. White men with only bacholor degrees still have on average, higher incomes than black men with graduate degrees. White-sounding names get more call backs for jobs and housing than black-sounding names. All things being equal, all things being equal, a white male applicant with a criminal record is just as likely if not more so to get the job than a black man without a criminal record. It certainly doesn’t explain, or even justify, why in our public school system, only 80cents is spent on educating black children for every $1 spent educating white children.
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Besides that, we have a documented history of racism. Since the end of legal discrimination, African Americans have closed the gap in a number of success measures. Also, we know that just because something is illegal doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
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So, assuming the real implications of IQ, as a society, we haven’t yet rid ourselves of anti-black racism. Let’s get rid of the racism first, then we can discuss IQ.
Oh yeah. High IQ doesn’t correlate with high income, anyway.
No1KState, most of what you said there isn’t really false, it’s just way overstated. You’re right, none of this is “proven.” It’s pretty hard to prove this sort of thing, since there are lots of confounding variables. But the data are awfully strong, so let’s say it’s “very likely” that what I’m saying is true.
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Of course, the standard for what I’m asking from you — to quit calling White people racists simply because Blacks make less money — is much lower. I’m suggesting only that you should be giving Whites as a group the benefit of the doubt, out of good, old-fashioned Christian charity, supported by the preponderance of social science.
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Your whole second paragraph is like a mini survey course on bad faith. I never said IQ predicted all those things — in fact I explicitly excluded some, such as criminality. Furthermore, many of them are not part of our discussion, such as incomes as a function of education. And finally, some of them are indirect measures only, such as call backs. You’ll forgive me for suspecting that when the main thrust of the discussion becomes more than you can handle, you start with the laundry list of grievances.
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You’re right. We have a documented history of racism. It goes back at least 5,000 years. In America, we’re lucky, though, that all the racism doesn’t seem to affect income very much. So that’s one blessing we can all count. Do you count it as a blessing?
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I agree with you that the legality or illegality of racism is largely irrelevant. What matters much more is the social pressure. I think this is the area where there has been huge progress over the last, say, 50 to 100 years. It’s not acceptable in polite company to be overtly racist (except in Black company and towards Whites, of course). Social norms are such that Whites bend over backwards to accommodate Blacks — college admissions, contracting, hiring decisions, etc.. This is largely a good thing, but it’s gotten out of hand. It’s one thing to say that you shouldn’t treat somebody badly because of his race. It’s quite another to say that if somebody has a bad outcome it must be because of racism. And it’s not bad just for Whites; it’s bad for Blacks, too.
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Finally, you say you’re familiar with this topic and you make reference to “Murray’s hypothesis.” I wonder, what exactly do you think his hypothesis is? Do you think it has anything to do with what I’m saying? Just saying the name “Charles Murray” is not enough to make any point at all.
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Really? IQ doesn’t correlate with income? That’s about the silliest thing I’ve heard from you. Here is a link showing the correlation between national average IQ and per capita GDP. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IQ_and_the_Wealth_of_Nations
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Here is a link to Murray’s “Income Inequality and IQ.” If you scroll to the fifteenth page of the pdf, you’ll see a graph showing the trend in median income for quintiles of the IQ distribution as the NYSL cohort ages. Needless to say, the higher the IQ, the higher the median income, once the subjects reach adulthood. http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040302_book443.pdf
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Here’s an blag post from Gene Expression noting in passing that the correlation of IQ to income is 0.27 (i.e., not extremely high, but measurable) http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2008/07/inheritance-of-inequality-big-insight.php. (I assume this is US only, but I’m not sure.)
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And so on. This is just what I found with a quick google search. I’m sure you can find more.
Hmm . . . Well, that’s more evidence for racism than for your proposal of IQ. I repeat, we don’t just say because there’s disparate outcome, there’s racism. We don’t believe that just because someone had a bad outcome means that experienced racism. That you continue to hold to that notion is a bit of bad faith. I mean, are you seriously asking me to disregard all the studies on the racial attitudes of whites to assume that so many of you are not racist that racism no longer negatively impacts the lives of people of color? You’re kidding, right?
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If IQ only effects such a narrow strip of outcomes, then it’s much more likely than racism is having a negative impact on the lives of people of color and not the level of IQ. For example, the decision and ability to move to whitopia has nothing to do with anyone’s IQ. I read the Charles Murray/AEI report yesterday before I commented. Even accounting for IQ doesn’t explain the racial disparity in income even for the same jobs. Even Murray brings up other factors. So when I said “Murray’s hypothesis,” I kinda meant it as a short hand for the idea that IQ not race explains inequality. And just about anybody else who discusses IQ as it relates to race is referring to Murray and his book THE BELL CURVE. The problem with that is even Murray doesn’t account for all the ways racism impacts a person’s life beyond income and how racism in other areas can affect income. He admits that IQ isn’t a simply explanation for income inequality. He says modest statistical correlation can have a huge social impact and IQ is just a piece of the puzzle. Well, race/racism has by far a stronger statistical correlation and is a much bigger piece of the puzzle than IQ. Especially since the only measure of “smartness” we use is education and grades. We can only guess at any one person’s IQ; and we already know as fact that this “guessing” will be influenced by racial bias.
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So no, IQ doesn’t correlate so strongly with income that people with high IQs necessarily have high incomes or that people with high incomes necessarily have high IQs. I thought we were talking about individuals and racial groups in the US, so whatever you find about national IQ and GDP is irrelevant.
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No, I don’t forgive you for thinking I’m making a laundry list of grievance. These grievances have been discussed before, some in this thread. Moreover, we can’t talking about income and IQ without talking about other factors affecting income. It’s curious that your whole basis for ignoring the impact of racism is that IQ has a modest statistical correlation to income, as though income is the only thing racism would impact. As though income is only impacted by racism. It’s also curious that all of a sudden, you know how to use “google search.” And if you did, then I know you found more than just that report by Charles Murray sponsored by a conservative think tank, one that supported and continues to support the war in Iraq. I know you found more cause I found more just yesterday. So I know that you found any number of reports refuting any attempt to tie race and IQ to income. And since you know how to use google search, maybe you will use it to find all the ways in way a person’s race is a much more correlated to outcomes than their IQ in the US.
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You’ll also find a number of studies and reports on racism and bias against people of color. So don’t get me wrong. I can sympathize with not wanting your people (group) to be racist; but I don’t want mine to be dumb. And there’s certainly more proof of the impact and legacy of white racism than there is of blacks and low IQs. Earlier, I even quoted a guy who argues it’s not present racism but the legacy of past racism that’s having such a great impact. If you had actually done then what you’re asking me to do now, you’d know that. I should note that while I disagree with him on the impact of present racism, no one, not even Murray, would question his numbers relating to inheritance and wealth.
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Lastly. I don’t know what all-black groups you’ve been in where explicitly racist things were said about white people, but we’ve got plenty of evidence of the things white people say about black people when they feel safe. There’re at least 2 books on white racism when white people are in private. That’s not mentioning that ignorant stuff they’ll say to the black people they don’t see as “black.” I guess the difference is we may think y’all are crazy for bungy-jumping; we definitely think y’all need some work on disciplining your kids; but that won’t affect white people’s income. And I’m sorry. But the assertion that racism is only okay when black people are in private and being racist towards white people is especially offensive since there have been thread discussions (here’s one: http://www.racismreview.com/blog/2009/07/20/the-white-racial-frame-a-reprise/) on the preponderance of anti-black jokes white people have but so relative few anti-white (if any that I know of) that black people. Now, do we complain about anti-black racism when we’re together? Yes, but I hardly think that qualifies as anti-white racism.
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So. There’s tons of evidence of anti-black racism, both public and private. such that it’s much more likely that racism is impact the life outcomes of black people than IQ. You once asked if only white people could be racist, and to that I’ll say no. But seeing that black people make up only 13% of the general population, and we have never attempted to be a dominate minority like the whites of South Africa, there’s not enough of us or a legacy of anti-white racism that it affects white people any day of the week. White people aren’t bending over backwards to ensure equality. In fact, just a few months ago, white men who’re members of one of the most powerful bodies in the world, and one that’s 99% white, got up in arms about the one Latina Supreme Court nominee’s comments about a “wise Latina.” As though the Supreme Court still wouldn’t have 7 of 9 white members and Clarence Thomas.
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I stand by what I said yesterday. Let’s end the negative impact of racism first, then we can talk about how to handle IQs.
So many of us? What are you talking about?
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Anyway, like I said, you’re un-persuadable, so it’s hard for me to see how dis-entangling my arguments from the many arguments you seem to be having with somebody else will be very productive.
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By the way, I’m not talking about racist comments in private. I’m talking about overt, explicit, and public racist comments made by Blacks against Whites that go unremarked by anyone. (Except conservatives, of course.) Do you really want me to start cataloging them for you?
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Your last statement is pretty silly. What if the problem isn’t racism? We spend all our energy stamping out every last bit of it, and nothing gets any better. Why not start by asking what the causes of the problem ACTUALLY are? I’m suggesting that the causes you assume — White racism — doesn’t work very well. Are you even interested in considering alternatives? By the sound of that statement, it’s clear that the answer is No.
1 – Yes, catalogue them please.
2 – Yeah, I’m open to hearing other explanations. That’s why I think it’s so important to keep free breakfast and lunch programs; and a strong social safety net. But here’s the problem with IQ. No one suggests it explains the disparities in the US. There’s much more evidence of racism. Just cause you don’t know all the evidence or find reasons to dismiss it, doesn’t mean there’s no evidence. It just means you ignore it.
Oh. And I take exception to this idea that I’m so stuck on one answer, I’m unwilling to hear anything else. You’re the one who’ve dismissed evidence of racism on the basis of your bad math. You’re the one who doesn’t read anything on racism besides this blog and come to it with ill-informed opinions about whites bending over backwards when it comes to hiring and college admissions, etc. On the other hand, I actually took a few hours to study up on the scholarship and debate about IQ levels of different racial groups. And I can say it doesn’t explain the disparities we see in income. It doesn’t explain the disparities we see across the board. So please disabuse yourself with this self-congratuating idea that I’m being close-minded. All you have is “what if.” No one of what you suggest is proven; but anti-black racism is proven. Take some time to read up on the studies about racial disparities in the US and get back to me.
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Now, I’m sorry I keep assuming you’re white. That’s the so many of you I had in mind. But honestly. With all the incidence of racism we see publicly and that are admitted to privately, what’s ridiculous is suggesting it’s not affecting the decisions people make in other areas of their lives.
Hey, I think I’ve seen that rock before!
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Listen, here’s the nut as I see it: We agree that racism is real. We agree it’s widespread. We agree it’s basically bad. We disagree as to whether it’s significant in explaining the differences in some outcomes between Blacks and Whites in America.
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I don’t imagine another lap around the track is going to change any of that, and the discussion just sort of devolves from here. Shall we give it a rest?
That’s up to you. I was hoping for the list of racist things black people say in polite company. But other than that, if you wanna stop with the personal insults, then sure, we can give it a rest.
Sorry, guess it’s up to me. Here’s scientific finding disproving your assumptions about the acceptability of racism in polite company:
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So, don’t feel pressured to respond. We don’t have to go round and round. I can sympathize with the need to hold on to your ideas about the impact of racism. But I have evidence for my position whereas you have . . . good faith in the inferior intellect of black people.
@ Darin – You dismiss the significance of racism in explaining disparities in outcomes – You also admitted above (in response to ellen) that you didn’t know what the source of the racial wealth gap was (assuming it’s not connected to racism). I spent the time to write a post detailing some actual evidence connected to institutional/structural racism, which you have nothing to say to? You must wrestle with this data if you plan to, in good faith, dismiss the role racism in producing disparities.
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If your goal, in examining how racism does (or does not, in your estimation) influence racially disparate outcomes, is to search for culpability at the hands of racist “boogeymen,” then as others have said before, you might come to the conclusion that the effect of racism is minimal. That’s not to say there is not PLENTY of evidence to defend that this has an impact, but because of the way in which white privilege is embedded into the customary operations of institutions (in often times seemingly “non-racial” ways – as in my examples above), and on the level of normal every-day individual actions (e.g., through racially heterogeneous social networks, again, as I discussed above, among other examples), this is really the holy grail to understanding the material advantage of whiteness. White people need not engage in racially hostile behavior to derive the benefits of whiteness (as the wealth examples I provide clearly demonstrate).
Here’s an article about a study that found that prejudice, just plain old prejudice, accounts for 25% of the wage gap.
I guess I better emphasize that while differences in workers’ skill levels accounts for some of the gap, educational inequality and other forms of discrimination account for the rest.
This may be important to, as I was wrong to say that white people . . . well, to some extent when it comes to being in polite company, white people do bend over backwards not to appear racist. Just intuitively, that’s a bad idea. If you’re not racist, just be yourself. And if you say something untoward, we know what you meant. We’re not going to “pop you one.” Just intuitively, you only work to appear one thing if you’re really something else.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/10/081006092518.htm
I hope it’s okay, admin. I’ve been hooked on science daily since the post on discrimination and mental health.
Jenni M., I admit I didn’t read your post very carefully. It was too long for me — my attention span is very, very short! — and I was dealing with somebody else at the time. I wish I had paid more attention.
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I commend you for recognizing that the issue is more complicated than it seems at first blush. Income and wealth are not the same thing. I admit that I don’t have the energy to investigate the various possible links you suggest between racism and wealth. So instead I’m going to summarize the reasons I doubt that racism is a good explanation, and maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about it.
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The point here is not to change your mind, but to make a good faith demonstration that I’m not simply ignoring your point and that I believe I have a rational basis to doubt your conclusion. Fair enough?
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Point 1: At the upper end of spectrum, transferred wealth might be a big deal. If you’re a Walton, that matters quite a bit. I’m not at all sure that it matters as much at the lower ends. The statistics I’ve seen seem to suggest that there’s a lot more mixing than the Marxists might like to admit.
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Point 2: Accumulation of wealth depends on more than simply income, as you point out. In fact, most millionaires in America did not get that way because they made a lot of money. They got that way because they SAVED a lot of money. Now, deferred gratification is one of those behavioral traits that tend to vary among groups. Possibly with, IQ (i.e., I would expect smart people to be better at saving), but possibly independently, too (i.e., my grandfather saved because that’s how he was). So I’d like to see how the saving habits affect wealth, even for a given income.
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Point 3: As you point out, it’s possible that there’s a head start affect for some groups (Whites), but I’m just not convinced that matters all that much. For it to be a significant factor, you’d have to show that not only do Whites inherit their wealth, but there’s a compounding effect as generations progress, which increases or maintains the gap between Whites and Blacks. That’s implausible.
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It’s good that you’re considering effects other than racism that might affect wealth, such as income. But it still strikes me as a pretty superficial treatment. You appear to be ignoring differences in behavior, with the lone exception of racist behavior, of course.
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A final point to remind us why this discussion matters. There is one important compounding effect: the overall growth of the economy and the productivity of labor. Tinkering with that is super-risky. Let’s stipulate that past policies explain some of the difference between Black and White wealth in some parts of the country. It probably does, after all. What’s the right response to that? I say that it’s better to let a few families of former slave-holders keep their ill-gotten gains than to risk the future prosperity of the vast majority of us who have nothing to do with that. Including Blacks.
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In other words, if you want to improve the wealth of Blacks, you don’t start by making it more costly to become and remain wealthy (i.e., inheritance taxes, capital gains taxes, high marginal rates, etc.). I suspect that much of the push for these taxes stems not from rational economic or even moral reasoning, but from envy. That’s a bad basis for policy.
Okay…I’m de-cloaking once more to say this: I’m astonished that some here are STILL engaging Darin. He can’t see what he intends not to see. You could write the truth in bold black letters on his face, chest, arms and legs … and he would still not get it. He simply doesn’t want it!
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But then, perhaps you’re all contending with Darin for the sake of some quiet readers – on the fence, so to speak – lurking silently on this site.
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Jenni, No1Kstate, Nquest, Seattle, Jwbe, Joe, Jessie, Tim and a few others .. much thanks for what you do.. keep telling the truth.
@Just Me!–
You’re absolutely right. And personally, I hope you stay uncloaked. I was willing to give Darin the benefit of the doubt for awhile (primarily because his circular logic was successful in clouding me from his actual beliefs). But a clear M.O. has emerged: whenever presented with solid, actual evidence that runs contrary to his conjecture, Darin makes hollow statements such as “glad to see you’re paying attention” and “I admit I didn’t read your post carefully” and “I don’t have time to investigate X…”
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He keeps claiming some rational, objective measure as a basis for what he believes, but this magical, empirical evidence he cites remains mysteriously unknown.
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@Darin–
if your attention span is as painfully short as you claim, how is it you can hold it together long enough to post such lengthy, pre-meditated comments? And frankly, if your arguments weren’t so humdrum and tasteless, they would make a fine addition to my ham sandwich (they’re Swiss cheese, you dig?)
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Like Hal9000 said (and Just Me! implied)…”This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Goodbye.”
@ Just Me!: Well, like 88, I sort of gave Darin the benefit of the doubt. But like 88 points out, he doesn’t engage factual evidence contrary to his predetermined opinions. But more than that, he blithely ignore any common sensical evidence, for example, what about the wealth lost to the black community due to Jim Crow? Not to mention that factual disparity in the distrubution of the New Deal funds or the GI Bill and FHA/VA backed loans. Not to mention that it’s documented that the black community loses millions each year due to prejudice alone. Or the fact that all race save at the same rate, that’s a fact. But even when you find and show evidence that directly disproves his hypothesis concerning IQ, he ignores. A cursory glance at the numbers lets you know that even after accounting for whatever effect IQ may (but probably doesn’t) have, the numbers concerning income remain disparate. And for all his “knowledge” of how taxes and inheritance affect the wealthy, he apparently hasn’t even skimmed over info that would describe the effect inheritance has on the rest of us. Like the fact that due to inheritance, a white couple making $15K or less is more likely to own a home than a black couple making $65K or more. And with the crash of the subprime market which aimed disproportionately and illegally at the black community, we’ve lost millions maybe billions of accumulated wealth.
But basically, I guess it’s hard to resist responding because his arguments are premised on so, so many factual inaccuracies. I’m no economics virgin. The rich did okay during the 90s and any other time period prior to the laughable laffer curve. During the Bush years, there was wealth redistribution upwards. Why the assumption that wealth redistibution downwards is undeserved? Cause when it comes to the inheritance tax that only affects less than 1%, the actual truth is that without some tax (which even Warren Buffet endorses), the country has to disabuse itself of the myth of meritocracy.
I mean, where’s jwbe? Every since I read that the wealthy in Germany were petitioning to pay higher taxes for the next couple of years, it’s really hard to listen to and watch Americans argue on behalf of the rich, as though the past 8 years didn’t happen.
>I mean, where's jwbe?
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what would you like to know?
Um . . . Well, I guess, how does it feel to have the rich of Germany actually WANT to help others? What's the political ideology, for lack of better words, that would drive them to their current position? And, what's your opinion of the conservative view of taxes here in the US versus the group of rich in Germany who petitioned to pay more taxes?
I can't remember where you're from. I don't know why I want to say Germany. So . . . what country are you from?
>I can't remember where you're from. I don't know why I want to say Germany. So . . . what country are you from?
I am German, Bavarian to be specific:-)
>Well, I guess, how does it feel to have the rich of Germany actually WANT to help others? What's the political ideology, for lack of better words, that would drive them to their current position?
Germany is in some aspects just different than the US. This starts that most Germans don't believe the myth that Germany would be a meritocracy. I think on average Germans know that the right connections are more important to be successful than actual hard work. There is also somehow a different understanding of democracy and solidarity with also the opposition courageous enough to use the right of free speech.
Those wealthy people petitioning for paying more taxes (wealth tax) are only 48 people so far, I don't know if they will be successful, but about 50 % of Germans are with them. But probably not the center-right Merkel government.
>And, what's your opinion of the conservative view of taxes here in the US versus the group of rich in Germany who petitioned to pay more taxes?
There are some things of America I admit I just don't get so really, because some actions of conservatives in America are just so stupid that there is [for me] no other explanation than plain stupidity or a childlike inmaturity and I wouldn't know how to explain to children that affordable healthcare or a welfare state is a positive thing for example. The one video I posted once here on another thread seems to address this level.
And every state/nation can only exist because people pay taxes. And I think the more people have to live on welfare the more fragile a nation becomes in every aspect.
Got it! Thanks.