quote:Even if today we could honestly say that all racism or discrimination were gone, we'd still have a huge debt that we owe to black America from keeping them down for so long.
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Re: white people being set on fire by black people...it took how long for that event to be picked up and investigated seriously by police? How disinterested was local media?
So, yeah. Just for that case, you gotta drill deeper.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: And rather than being "complicit", they could simply believe in what they were doing.
Right. But that's a different thing. I'm saying that you could have an entire media empire running a known and calculated system designed to lie to people, and not have intermediaries really in on the truth of what you are doing. It is fairly easy to do.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Re: white people being set on fire by black people...it took how long for that event to be picked up and investigated seriously by police? How disinterested was local media?
So, yeah. Just for that case, you gotta drill deeper.
Not really. I think you've unconsciously shifted the context of why I brought that up, which is understandable 'cause it was like fifty posts ago.
I wasn't saying "look look it's totally equivalent."
I brought up the white kid getting set on fire as a comment on your claim that the Shirley Sherrod debacle was the biggest "scandal of black -> white racism" lately. Because that claim, specifically, rang false to me.
I wasn't implying that the fire incident was 100% comparable to the incidents you mentioned... and I don't think it is! In fact, I explicitly acknowledged in that same post that there are probably a lot more white -> black racially motivated crimes than vice versa, though in hindsight I don't know if that's true. Certainly, whether there are more total crimes of that nature or not, there are definitely more of them that are scandalous in their details.
Rakeesh, I know the last time you saw that incident brought up on Hatrack, the context was an attempt to draw equivalency between that and the Trayvon Martin incident, but I wasn't the one to draw that equivalency. I think your recollection of that context influenced your assumptions in this case.
Anyway, I don't have any particular desire to defend terrible police practices.
But I do sort of question the idea that such things only happen to minorities. Bad cops treat people like crap, and they're very, very rarely punished for their behavior. I occasionally read Reason (shocker, I know) and they have a regular feature every issue devoted entirely to ridiculous injustices perpetrated against people of all races by government officials, mainly cops.
I wouldn't be surprised if the data shows that more of these injustices are perpetrated against minorities, either. It seems totally unsurprising to me that there would be huge overlap between the cops that are racist assholes and the cops that are power-tripping unjust assholes.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: Okay, this conversation has moved all over the place, and I only have internet for a few minutes.
But systemic racism does exist in America. You only have to look at the data concerning hiring practices, to say nothing of racist sentencing guidelines for drug law violations.
I've seen some interesting takedowns of the "racist sentencing guidelines for drug law violations" idea. But I want you (or someone else who cares to, since your internet is spotty) to clarify what you mean first, so I can locate and dust off the appropriate response.
...Or concede, I suppose, if I'm assuming incorrectly and there is no viable response. I hope you know I'm not even remotely opposed to conceding when I can't find anything to criticize in someone's argument.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: There are more black men in jail today than there were enslaved in 1863.
Yeah... more black men out of jail, too. More black men in general, really. And more people. By a factor of about 100, I think.
Honestly, Lyr, this looks like a really absurd, disingenuous, nonsensical soundbite statistic designed to shamelessly grab attention. I'm surprised you'd use it.
quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: We're living out the legacy today of hundreds of years of state-enforced and society-created racism against black Americans. Even if today we could honestly say that all racism or discrimination were gone, we'd still have a huge debt that we owe to black America from keeping them down for so long.
Assuming this is true, I wonder: How do you pay down that debt? Usually, when I see people talking like that, what they seem to be saying is that the solution is to incur an inverted form of debt... which they don't call debt, because it's "justice" for a previous generations transgressions.
The problem is, if we really enact stuff like that, then generations from now the people getting their "justice" won't care what it was in retaliation for. They'll just care that they're being artificially pushed down, and they'll hate it as much as anyone would. Seems like a pretty crummy solution to me.
And that's not even touching how much I rankle at the collectivist notion that one member of a socially constructed group should pay a penalty for the actions of another member of that group. But I assure you, there is a great deal of rankling. Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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On drug sentencing, there is a discrepancy in sentencing guidelines between crack and powder cocaine. The two drugs have the same effect but one is used more heavily by black Americans the other by white Americans. And the sentencing is hugely different- like if if you have crack cocaine you would have to have 100X as much powder to get the same punishment. This would be a lot like saying you get a different punishment if you drink beer versus liquor. Sure, the blood alcohol content is the same, but if you got there through a vodka it is somehow worse than having same BAC but drank beer to get it.
I believe when Lyrhawn talks about paying penalty for the centuries of discrimination, it is mostly about providing more opportunities and assistance, not punishing the other side. Instead of looking at say black people living in higher amounts of poverty and saying well, they must just be inferior (culturally or biologically or whatever other reason), you look and say white flight, defunding of public schools, etc lead to this condition. What can we now do to fix it? Maybe we can increase funding of public schools, provide extracurricular activites, pass laws against predatory lending practices (payday loans anyone) and enforce them, etc. For someone starting out with nothing, success is much more difficult. A lot of people dismiss the need for providing assistance by claiming if people "choose" to succeed they will. For a hundred years, society did its best to make sure blacks could not succeed. Now that they are an impoverished people, dismissing their poverty as a choice is pretty disingenuous.
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: And rather than being "complicit", they could simply believe in what they were doing.
Right. But that's a different thing. I'm saying that you could have an entire media empire running a known and calculated system designed to lie to people, and not have intermediaries really in on the truth of what you are doing. It is fairly easy to do.
Both are plenty reason why Dan's extreme statement about everyone having to be lying scumbags isn't true. I just picked one.
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quote:I brought up the white kid getting set on fire as a comment on your claim that the Shirley Sherrod debacle was the biggest "scandal of black -> white racism" lately. Because that claim, specifically, rang false to me.
It's without a doubt the scandal that is actually known to more people-one of the requirements for a scandal, actually. I didn't mean it was worse than a kid getting set on fire (though to be clear, when I last looked at that story, weeks ago, many of the facts weren't in, and much of the source was the child's mother, not an unimpeachable reference), just that if you wanted to go big racial nastiness news, then you're always always always (if you're honest, that is-general 'you' here) going to find more white---->black than the other way around.
I've never been able to understand why anyone can't accept that, if they've got even a passing knowledge of how long it actually takes societies and cultures to really change. To hear so many people tell it, nearly half a millenium of racial oppression and hatred has just about been successfully overcome in a tenth of the time.
quote:But I do sort of question the idea that such things only happen to minorities. Bad cops treat people like crap, and they're very, very rarely punished for their behavior. I occasionally read Reason (shocker, I know) and they have a regular feature every issue devoted entirely to ridiculous injustices perpetrated against people of all races by government officials, mainly cops.
Well, Dan, it's good to question ideas that nobody has put forward, I suppose. That paragraph I quoted, by the way, is the sort of thing I and others were getting at: in many conversations, you can't seem to bring up, "Hey, we've got some really nasty racial unpleasantness cropping up here in this business or this police precinct or this school, we need to talk about it," without someone chiming in, "Hey, bad things happen to white people too!"
It's an implicit insistence that the 'race question' in this country is as harsh on whites as it is on minorities. I don't insist that was your carefully considered intention by raising those points, but that is the effect.
quote:Assuming this is true, I wonder: How do you pay down that debt? Usually, when I see people talking like that, what they seem to be saying is that the solution is to incur an inverted form of debt... which they don't call debt, because it's "justice" for a previous generations transgressions.
Assuming which part is true? That there is a debt, or that the legacy Lyrhawn mentioned exists?
quote:The problem is, if we really enact stuff like that, then generations from now the people getting their "justice" won't care what it was in retaliation for. They'll just care that they're being artificially pushed down, and they'll hate it as much as anyone would. Seems like a pretty crummy solution to me.
Here is the actual problem, it seems to me: when we're talking about white people, even a whiff of articial down-pushing is utterly reprehensible and ought to be fought against to the limits of our civil powers. When, on the other hand, it's a minority being artificially pushed down, (or for that matter a woman)...strangely the talk quickly changes to discussing how much progress has been made, it's not fair but patience is needed, and oh by the way bad things happen to white people, too.
As for sentencing disparities...well, I'd love to hear some of your takedowns. They'd have to be magnificient rhetorical judo I think, to rise to the level required by things such as this: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/race-and-death-penalty-north-carolina . That took about five seconds on Google, and I'm definitely just scratching the surface.
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Lifting someone up does not have to mean pushing someone else down. We tend to see it that way too often.
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: On drug sentencing, there is a discrepancy in sentencing guidelines between crack and powder cocaine. The two drugs have the same effect but one is used more heavily by black Americans the other by white Americans. And the sentencing is hugely different- like if if you have crack cocaine you would have to have 100X as much powder to get the same punishment. This would be a lot like saying you get a different punishment if you drink beer versus liquor. Sure, the blood alcohol content is the same, but if you got there through a vodka it is somehow worse than having same BAC but drank beer to get it.
Yeah, that's a big one that gets touted. Thanks!
Do you know when, and why, and by whom, harsher punishments for crack cocaine were implemented? Or is it just a given that it was done as a racist maneuver to put more black people in jail?
If it wasn't a bill passed to keep down black people, then isn't it unfair to characterize it as an example of system(at)ic racism?
To be clear: I don't deny that the effect of it is unfair, but as an advocate of small government I'm also all too aware of how often well intentioned laws have unintended negative consequences. I think minimum wage laws are deeply unfair to poor, young minorities, for example. But I don't think they are a viable example of racism, because their intent was very different than their result.
quote:Originally posted by scholarette: I believe when Lyrhawn talks about paying penalty for the centuries of discrimination, it is mostly about providing more opportunities and assistance, not punishing the other side. Instead of looking at say black people living in higher amounts of poverty and saying well, they must just be inferior (culturally or biologically or whatever other reason), you look and say white flight, defunding of public schools, etc lead to this condition. What can we now do to fix it? Maybe we can increase funding of public schools, provide extracurricular activites, pass laws against predatory lending practices (payday loans anyone) and enforce them, etc. For someone starting out with nothing, success is much more difficult. A lot of people dismiss the need for providing assistance by claiming if people "choose" to succeed they will. For a hundred years, society did its best to make sure blacks could not succeed. Now that they are an impoverished people, dismissing their poverty as a choice is pretty disingenuous.
Spending general tax money to benefit only a specific subset of society is, in effect, a punitive measure against anyone not of that group. Do you see why I would say that?
That being said, of course, we do it all the time anyway. And I certainly think that if we're going to create preferential laws they should probably benefit the most impoverished or disadvantaged people, rather than the way it is now, where they mainly benefit middle class.
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quote:Yeah, that's a big one that gets touted. Thanks!
Do you know when, and why, and by whom, harsher punishments for crack cocaine were implemented? Or is it just a given that it was done as a racist maneuver to put more black people in jail?
If it wasn't a bill passed to keep down black people, then isn't it unfair to characterize it as an example of system(at)ic racism?
To be clear: I don't deny that the effect of it is unfair, but as an advocate of small government I'm also all too aware of how often well intentioned laws have unintended negative consequences. I think minimum wage laws are deeply unfair to poor, young minorities, for example. But I don't think they are a viable example of racism, because their intent was very different than their result.
I...wait, what? No, in order to be racist one of the requirements is not, "Mwahahahaha! I shall use my fat cat friends to enact laws to keep the darkies down! Bwahahaha!"
Under the reasoning you're using, the cop who, say, shoots a black guy a dozen times going for his wallet but who waits an extra second for the white guy, just as an example, well of course he's not going to think of himself, to himself, as a racist. He's not going to think, "This black guy is more dangerous and more likely to be carrying because he's black." He's just going to be more on edge, most likely, except for the really distinct racists who used to wear sheets.
Likewise with this law. Obviously no legislator anywhere would say something like, "Crack is used more often by blacks, and it's important that we punish blacks for using the same drug in a different form." No. They're just going to view crack cocaine and the crimes associated with it as more dangerous, more of a problem. They're not going to think of that guy in the office who has the sniffles a lot and is pretty twitchy as being as much of a threat, though of course by spending more money for the same drug they're actually providing more support for the drug trade.
If your requirement for something to be racist is explict, acknowledged racism right up front, then it's no wonder you don't see it as often as others.
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quote:I brought up the white kid getting set on fire as a comment on your claim that the Shirley Sherrod debacle was the biggest "scandal of black -> white racism" lately. Because that claim, specifically, rang false to me.
It's without a doubt the scandal that is actually known to more people-one of the requirements for a scandal, actually. I didn't mean it was worse than a kid getting set on fire (though to be clear, when I last looked at that story, weeks ago, many of the facts weren't in, and much of the source was the child's mother, not an unimpeachable reference), just that if you wanted to go big racial nastiness news, then you're always always always (if you're honest, that is-general 'you' here) going to find more white---->black than the other way around.
I've never been able to understand why anyone can't accept that, if they've got even a passing knowledge of how long it actually takes societies and cultures to really change. To hear so many people tell it, nearly half a millenium of racial oppression and hatred has just about been successfully overcome in a tenth of the time.
... Was this directed at me? I'm really baffled. I mean, you quoted me, so I assume it was directed at me. Except...
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: But even so, I agree with you that more of the crimes still occur in the opposite direction.
quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: I wasn't implying that the fire incident was 100% comparable to the incidents you mentioned... and I don't think it is! In fact, I explicitly acknowledged in that same post that there are probably a lot more white -> black racially motivated crimes than vice versa, though in hindsight I don't know if that's true. Certainly, whether there are more total crimes of that nature or not, there are definitely more of them that are scandalous in their details.
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: ... just that if you wanted to go big racial nastiness news, then you're always always always (if you're honest, that is-general 'you' here) going to find more white---->black than the other way around.
I've never been able to understand why anyone can't accept that...
One of these things is not like the others. I'm just going to assume that everything after the bit about Shirley Sherrod wasn't directed at me after all, and was you going on a soapbox that the issue made you think of. Which is totally fair, I'm not stranger to that.
(Good point on the Shirley Sherrod issue, by the way. You're right, that was a bigger scandal in the media, though in fairness political stuff often is.)
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:But I do sort of question the idea that such things only happen to minorities. Bad cops treat people like crap, and they're very, very rarely punished for their behavior. I occasionally read Reason (shocker, I know) and they have a regular feature every issue devoted entirely to ridiculous injustices perpetrated against people of all races by government officials, mainly cops.
Well, Dan, it's good to question ideas that nobody has put forward, I suppose. That paragraph I quoted, by the way, is the sort of thing I and others were getting at: in many conversations, you can't seem to bring up, "Hey, we've got some really nasty racial unpleasantness cropping up here in this business or this police precinct or this school, we need to talk about it," without someone chiming in, "Hey, bad things happen to white people too!"
It's an implicit insistence that the 'race question' in this country is as harsh on whites as it is on minorities. I don't insist that was your carefully considered intention by raising those points, but that is the effect.
I think you're reading that implicit insistence because you have the idea already in your head that the only reason someone could say something like that would be to make this point.
But it's not.
The reason I think things like that are worth observing, is because it provides additional context. Let me give an example. (Made up percentages in the example used for rhetorical purposes only)
If we hear that 35% of all black Americans are in prison, that sounds like there could be racism at work. We don't actually know, though, based on the data. We need to explain the data. And if someone were to point out that 30% of all white Americans are in prison, that gives us more context. That will help us reach a more accurate explanation.
To assume that this person is just trying to create more equivalency is to assume ill intent for no good reason. They could very well acknowledge that the 5% discrepancy is still very important, and an indicator of racism at work.
quote:Assuming this is true, I wonder: How do you pay down that debt? Usually, when I see people talking like that, what they seem to be saying is that the solution is to incur an inverted form of debt... which they don't call debt, because it's "justice" for a previous generations transgressions.
Assuming which part is true? That there is a debt, or that the legacy Lyrhawn mentioned exists?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:The problem is, if we really enact stuff like that, then generations from now the people getting their "justice" won't care what it was in retaliation for. They'll just care that they're being artificially pushed down, and they'll hate it as much as anyone would. Seems like a pretty crummy solution to me.
Here is the actual problem, it seems to me: when we're talking about white people, even a whiff of articial down-pushing is utterly reprehensible and ought to be fought against to the limits of our civil powers. When, on the other hand, it's a minority being artificially pushed down, (or for that matter a woman)...strangely the talk quickly changes to discussing how much progress has been made, it's not fair but patience is needed, and oh by the way bad things happen to white people, too.
Is this just more soapboxing, or should I respond?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: As for sentencing disparities...well, I'd love to hear some of your takedowns. They'd have to be magnificient rhetorical judo I think, to rise to the level required by things such as this: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/race-and-death-penalty-north-carolina . That took about five seconds on Google, and I'm definitely just scratching the surface.
Man, I really want to believe that you're arguing in good faith, but you make it hard sometimes.
Lyr specifically mentioned racist sentencing guidelines for drug law violations. And I responded that I think that issue isn't as clear-cut as he implied.
If you want to bring up a different example of proposed systemic racism, that's fine, you can do that, and I can respond to it or not or whatever. But to imply that what you've posted here is in any way actually a response to what I said is really disingenuous. I don't think it was intentional on your part, for the record. But it's still a bit frustrating.
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quote:Yeah, that's a big one that gets touted. Thanks!
Do you know when, and why, and by whom, harsher punishments for crack cocaine were implemented? Or is it just a given that it was done as a racist maneuver to put more black people in jail?
If it wasn't a bill passed to keep down black people, then isn't it unfair to characterize it as an example of system(at)ic racism?
To be clear: I don't deny that the effect of it is unfair, but as an advocate of small government I'm also all too aware of how often well intentioned laws have unintended negative consequences. I think minimum wage laws are deeply unfair to poor, young minorities, for example. But I don't think they are a viable example of racism, because their intent was very different than their result.
I...wait, what? No, in order to be racist one of the requirements is not, "Mwahahahaha! I shall use my fat cat friends to enact laws to keep the darkies down! Bwahahaha!"
Under the reasoning you're using, the cop who, say, shoots a black guy a dozen times going for his wallet but who waits an extra second for the white guy, just as an example, well of course he's not going to think of himself, to himself, as a racist. He's not going to think, "This black guy is more dangerous and more likely to be carrying because he's black." He's just going to be more on edge, most likely, except for the really distinct racists who used to wear sheets.
Likewise with this law. Obviously no legislator anywhere would say something like, "Crack is used more often by blacks, and it's important that we punish blacks for using the same drug in a different form." No. They're just going to view crack cocaine and the crimes associated with it as more dangerous, more of a problem. They're not going to think of that guy in the office who has the sniffles a lot and is pretty twitchy as being as much of a threat, though of course by spending more money for the same drug they're actually providing more support for the drug trade.
If your requirement for something to be racist is explict, acknowledged racism right up front, then it's no wonder you don't see it as often as others.
I see what you're saying, to an extent. So minimum wage laws are racist? I'm not sure, more on that below.
The context I was referring to, by the way: Stronger sentencing for crack cocaine came about as a result of studies showing worse addiction problems and more violent crime associated with it, particularly violent crime in black communities. I have no idea how accurate those studies were. Not very? But regardless, HR 5484 passed with overwhelming support from the black members of Congress.
If something is passed with the intent of helping black people, and it hurts black people, you're saying it's still racist. Okay.
But it seems like such a case is significantly different than something that is passed because of, say, a subtle, unconscious, irrational dislike/fear for black people. Much less an overt one.
A cop who tends to assume black people are more guilty, and arrests them more often, but doesn't do so explicitly, is still racist. I agree with that. But what about a cop who wants to help black people, and spends a disproportionate amount of his time in black neighborhoods, and so his arrest record is largely made up of black people?
It seems really weird to say those are both racist.
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quote:Spending general tax money to benefit only a specific subset of society is, in effect, a punitive measure against anyone not of that group. Do you see why I would say that?
That's a knife that cuts both ways. Laws and practices that have disadvantaged blacks, benefitted other members of society. If blacks are continuing to suffer because of past racist practices, the the rest of society is continuing to benefit because of past racist practices.
Certainly you understand market economics well enough to know that if one group of people is excluded from the labor market, the result is going to be higher wages for everyone else. If one group is excluded from buying houses, the price of houses will be lower for everyone else. If some group of people is excluded from going to the better schools, there are more resources available in those schools for everyone else.
Racist practices that hurt black people didn't just arise out some sort of irrational pointless xenophobia. Black people were penalized by the system to provide a benefit to white people. And just as black people continue to suffer financially and culturally because of those historic practices, white people continue to benefit financially and socially because of those practices.
It's not a question of penalizing people for something that was done by a previous generation. Because of explicit racist practices of the past, we white people continue to have a head start in life. If you are a white American, regardless of whether you are rich or poor, chances are nearly certain that you would have been worse off if black Americans a generation ago had had all the same opportunities as while Americans did.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: If you are a white American, regardless of whether you are rich or poor, chances are nearly certain that you would have been worse off if black Americans a generation ago had had all the same opportunities as while Americans did.
So prosperity is finite, and in order for one person to succeed, someone else will necessarily fail?
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Only one person can have a given job at a time, yes.
As for drug policy...yeah. Black congressional support is very meaningful, because of course it's not like a kiss of death to be 'soft on crime', especially back then, right
Shall we talk more about good faith, Dan? I do think you're arguing in good faith, but some of your claims are just exasperating. Like when you suggested people were claiming bad things happen only to minorities. As for studies...how many studies were done of white collar drug use, and of the crimes then committed with those drugs? Just as a for example.
To illustrate my point, really take a moment and think, and then ask yourself the question: would you rather be caught with an ounce of cocaine as a white man, or an ounce of crack as a black man? Seriously. Imagine you're trying to advise someone who gets to pick how to arrange their own details to give them the best possible chance of being sent to a rehab center vs state prison.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Only one person can have a given job at a time, yes.
And there is a finite number of possible jobs?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: As for drug policy...yeah. Black congressional support is very meaningful, because of course it's not like a kiss of death to be 'soft on crime', especially back then, right
This ties back to my cop example.
If a cop is "tough on crime" and arrests lots of criminals, and a higher percentage of criminals in his area are black, he's going to arrest a lot of black people.
Does that make him racist?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Shall we talk more about good faith, Dan? I do think you're arguing in good faith, but some of your claims are just exasperating. Like when you suggested people were claiming bad things happen only to minorities.
I didn't intend to suggest people in this thread were really claiming that. I absolutely see why you took it the way you did, though. I should've chosen my words more carefully. I think that the next paragraph I wrote in the same post clarified my position somewhat, but I understand why the first part bothered you so much you didn't notice the second. Sorry about that!
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: As for studies...how many studies were done of white collar drug use, and of the crimes then committed with those drugs? Just as a for example.
That's an interesting question. Was there a rash of drug-related violent crime amongst the upper class in the 80s? I don't remember one, but I may be mistaken.
I think, both then and now, that most people see nonviolent white collar drug crimes as less bad than violent drug crimes perpetrated by/against the poor.
Do you think that's wrong?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: To illustrate my point, really take a moment and think, and then ask yourself the question: would you rather be caught with an ounce of cocaine as a white man, or an ounce of crack as a black man? Seriously. Imagine you're trying to advise someone who gets to pick how to arrange their own details to give them the best possible chance of being sent to a rehab center vs state prison.
Well, I think I read that they are repealing the harsher sentencing guidelines for crack. I skimmed it, because the articles were google failing to find me data on HR 5484, so maybe I misunderstood.
Even assuming that's true, it'd probably be better to be the white guy with coke. I just... I don't understand why you keep saying things like this to me. Well, scratch that. I think I do understand, it's just annoying.
I think you have a side in this issue, man. So when someone disagrees with you on anything in this sphere of discussion, it's hard for you not to automatically lump them into the other side and then roll out all of your arguments against the other side.
Except... I'm not really on the other side in that way. I'm voicing specific criticisms, but it's a mistake to extrapolate my entire position from those. So questions/arguments like this just seem like non sequiturs to me.
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: If you are a white American, regardless of whether you are rich or poor, chances are nearly certain that you would have been worse off if black Americans a generation ago had had all the same opportunities as while Americans did.
So prosperity is finite, and in order for one person to succeed, someone else will necessarily fail?
Dan, This is simple supply and demand economics. It's exactly the same principal you just used to claim that minimum wage laws make it harder for black people to get jobs. You can't have it both ways. You can't simultaneously argue that artificially raising prices is going to reduce demand and at the same time claim that artificially reducing demand won't have any affect on prices. Either there is a relationship between prices and demand or there isn't. Pick one.
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I'm not sure I understand, Rabbit. Your fixation on describing both issues as "simple supply and demand" seems oversimplified and confusing to me. Let me try to parse it.
So, you're saying my argument is that minimum wage laws reduce the "demand" for low-skilled workers by artificially raising the "price" of those workers, right? That's roughly accurate, I think. If someone can only bring $3/hour of value to your company and you have to pay him $7, you're not likely to hire him.
And the second part of your argument is... government keeping black people from getting jobs is artificially reducing the "demand"... and "demand" here is standing in for the pool of available workers, right? So that will increase "price," which is a stand-in not for the price of goods, but the price of labor. That is, with less competition for labor, wages will be higher. Right?
So therefore, by keeping black people out of the workforce, you increase the wages of white workers. Therefore, if black people had been allowed into the work force a generation ago, then on average they'd have been getting higher wages, and white people would have gotten lower wages. So black people would be wealthier now, and white people would be poorer, or as you put it: "worse off."
Did I understand you correctly? If so, I will respond further.
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Holy crap, this topic has blown up since yesterday. Figures, you sleep and go to work and then you miss all kinds of things. Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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Heh, sorry, I think that's partly my fault. I've had to be in the office all day today and yesterday to help facilitate an event, but I have very little to actually do. Going slightly stir crazy, and posting like mad. Posts: 3580 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote: I think, both then and now, that most people see nonviolent white collar drug crimesasless bad than violent drug crimes perpetrated by/against the poor.
The vast majority, more than 75%, I believe, of drug related crimes for which people are currently incarcerated are for non-violent crimes.
In other words, millions of black people are being arrested under the guise of fighting violent crime but are not actually violent.
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Dan_Frank, Your summary of the supply and demand economic issues are superficially accurate but are so grossly over simplified that I don't think they are a reasonable spring board for further discussion.
This is a question that has been studied very thoroughly. We don't have to speculate based on simplistic economic models. Racial discrimination in American has been and continues to be economically beneficial to white Americans.
We've had this debate before and I think its counter productive to continue it. The idea that "black culture" is responsible for all the disparities that exist between blacks and whites in America is inherently racist. It's a way to say you think blacks are poor because they are inferior without feeling like your a racist bigot.
And I know that will sound like I'm attacking you. I really don't mean to but I can't find another way to say it. I think nearly everyone is racist to some degree. I've spent the past 5 years living in a majority black country and I have been repeatedly forced to confront some of my own deeply buried racial prejudices. In a society like ours where racism is considered to be a horrid evil, it's very hard to admit to your self that you have racist attitudes. It's much easy to rationalize it away than to confront it.
It's sort of ironic in a way that one of the biggest barriers to really overcoming racism in the US today is that "Racism" is so vilified that no one is willing to entertain the idea that they might be racist.
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quote: I think, both then and now, that most people see nonviolent white collar drug crimesasless bad than violent drug crimes perpetrated by/against the poor.
The vast majority, more than 75%, I believe, of drug related crimes for which people are currently incarcerated are for non-violent crimes.
In other words, millions of black people are being arrested under the guise of fighting violent crime but are not actually violent.
Yep!
That's true, and horrible. Do you think that's the (conscious or unconscious) goal of the war on drugs? Or the reason it's persisted?
Because I certainly think the war on drugs is indisputably "racist" in the same way that minimum wage laws are. That is, both of these things disproportionately hurt poor black people. And I'd be very happy if we ended them.
But I don't think the primary impediment to ending the war on drugs is lingering implicit racism, any more than that's the main reason nobody wants to repeal minimum wage.
I think the biggest impediment is a very explicit and widespread disdain for drug use and support of drug prohibition. (And widespread, explicit support of making sure "everyone who works is not in poverty", respectively.)
What do you think?
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quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: Dan_Frank, Your summary of the supply and demand economic issues are superficially accurate but are so grossly over simplified...
I'll take it!
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: ...that I don't think they are a reasonable spring board for further discussion.
Well, shucks. Will you mind if I continue anyway? (edit: I hope not! Since, uh, I kind of did.)
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: This is a question that has been studied very thoroughly. We don't have to speculate based on simplistic economic models. Racial discrimination in American has been and continues to be economically beneficial to white Americans.
I don't think "speculation" is the right word. It's certainly discussion, though.
I'm a little confused. You say it's been studied very thoroughly. Sure, but that doesn't mean there are definitive, undisputed conclusions of these studies. Do you understand the studies in question? Do you just pretend that there aren't multiple schools of economic thought debating these issues?
Why would you put your trust in one side of a debate if you don't actually understand the debate itself? And if you do understand, then why blow off the discussion by simply reasserting your conclusion as if it were evidence?
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: We've had this debate before and I think its counter productive to continue it. The idea that "black culture" is responsible for all the disparities that exist between blacks and whites in America is inherently racist. It's a way to say you think blacks are poor because they are inferior without feeling like your a racist bigot.
By "black culture" we actually mean the urban lower-class subculture that is predominantly but by no means exclusively comprised of black people, right? Assuming agreement on this...
Are you saying it's racist because it ignores other factors? (In which case I would agree, by the way: I don't think I've ever said that "black culture" is the only reason why there are any disparities. And if I implied it, it was just sloppy posting on my part.)
Or are you saying it's racist to propose that "black culture" itself is in any way negative or a contributing factor to widespread problems among black Americans? (In which case yeah, I disagree, and I don't see how you've proven it's racist. I think there are huge flaws in "black culture." There are also huge flaws in, say, "hippie culture," or "upper-middle-class hipster culture." Those subcultures are both dominated by white people, but I don't think that makes me racist against white people, either.)
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit: And I know that will sound like I'm attacking you. I really don't mean to but I can't find another way to say it. I think nearly everyone is racist to some degree. I've spent the past 5 years living in a majority black country and I have been repeatedly forced to confront some of my own deeply buried racial prejudices. In a society like ours where racism is considered to be a horrid evil, it's very hard to admit to your self that you have racist attitudes. It's much easy to rationalize it away than to confront it.
It's sort of ironic in a way that one of the biggest barriers to really overcoming racist in the US today is that "Racism" is so vilified.
Don't worry, I'm not offended. You'd have to try a lot harder than that.
What I was going to say, by the way, is something like this:
Racial discrimination has been beneficial to white people in relation to black people, certainly. But there's a difference between shoving someone over so that you have the highest vantage point in the room, and, say, climbing a stepladder. (Or perhaps climbing onto that person's back, to put, say, slavery into this analogy. Though even then I'd question it, the seen economic benefits were large enough that it'd be a harder sell)
The problem with saying "white people's wages are higher, so they are more prosperous," is that this ignores the fact that competition fosters greater success. By artificially keeping generations of black people out of viable workforces, white people got better wages (and black people substantially worse wages), but the damage down to the overall wealth of society is basically incalculable.
It's a similar argument to the one that talks about how impoverished Americans today are inconceivably wealthier than the rich of 100 or 200 or 500 years ago.
I probably would have also thrown in some stuff about cost of living settling around the wage median of white people, resulting in an insubstantial increase of their quality of life despite increased pay, and mainly just resulting in a drastically worse quality of life for the black people making so much less than the white median.
Again, no question that policies like that did huge damage to black people, but I think the "benefits" to white people and society as a whole are far more tenuous. They require a very narrow interpretation of prosperity.
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quote:Okay, let's unravel this a bit more. Is this because black women, in general, don't fit your standard of beauty? That is, the simple fact that they are black? Your standard of beauty, on some level, really does value lighter skin?
This is kind of a weird thing to be discussing, and in retrospect I'm kind of wishing I hadn't brought it up. But anyway, it doesn't really hinge on skin color (from what I can tell). I think it has more to do with facial structure. I don't think I'm alone in this; you'll notice that quite a few of the black women who are held up as "sex symbols" in the mainstream media (Beyonce, Viveca Fox) tend to have narrower noses and straighter hair than the typical African American woman.
(This was pointed out to me by one of the grad students in our program, who works on the ethics of race as applied to sex. I probably wouldn't have picked up on some of these things about my own preferences if I hadn't talked with him about it.)
Anyway, for that reason I would be very surprised if these racial preferences didn't hold up even controlling for body weight. But I don't have empirical proof of that ready to hand.
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quote:... Was this directed at me? I'm really baffled. I mean, you quoted me, so I assume it was directed at me. Except...
I realize that Dan, but you're sending some distinctly mixed signals here. On the one hand, you acknowledge racism is still more common and damaging (well, sort of) from blacks to whites. On the other hand, you suggest with a question that unless something is clearly intended as a racist policy, it's incorrect to label it racist. You talk about the damaging effects of some economic policies, such as minimum wage, but then also assert through questions the frankly baffling notion that prosperity isn't limited.
I do apologize for my heated tone, and I acknowledge that I have been, but man, it just really seems like your own personal thoughts on what is and isn't racist or prejudiced or biased are just...squishy. Really squishy.
quote:If you want to bring up a different example of proposed systemic racism, that's fine, you can do that, and I can respond to it or not or whatever. But to imply that what you've posted here is in any way actually a response to what I said is really disingenuous. I don't think it was intentional on your part, for the record. But it's still a bit frustrating.
One way you posed your challenge could be read as strictly about drug sentencing guidelines, and that is the literal meaning of what you said. So my mistake-I thought you were taking a broader stance. I can't help but wonder, though, what's the point of discussing racism in the criminal justice system if we're not going to be talking about the entire system?
quote:A cop who tends to assume black people are more guilty, and arrests them more often, but doesn't do so explicitly, is still racist. I agree with that. But what about a cop who wants to help black people, and spends a disproportionate amount of his time in black neighborhoods, and so his arrest record is largely made up of black people?
It seems really weird to say those are both racist.
Please bear my response in mind, with respect to your feelings about my disingenuousness, Dan. The only way this can be a valid comparison is if you were to examine only that police officer's arrest record-if you were to cherry pick things quite blatantly, avoiding all of the good work he did, all of the black victims of crimes he helped and protected, and examined only his arrest record on racial grounds. If you're going to examine his arrest record on racial grounds, you need to examine his record on racial grounds, and see what can be discovered.
quote:And there is a finite number of possible jobs?
This has been addressed, but...yes. I mean, obviously. (I do wonder if we're going to wade into some semi-libertarian anarcho-capitalist utopian ideals here, though, with respect to finite vs infinite prosperity...)
quote:That's an interesting question. Was there a rash of drug-related violent crime amongst the upper class in the 80s? I don't remember one, but I may be mistaken.
I think, both then and now, that most people see nonviolent white collar drug crimes as less bad than violent drug crimes perpetrated by/against the poor.
Do you think that's wrong?
I think that people do see 'nonviolent' white collar drug crime as less bad than violent urban drug crime, yes. I think that's a bad assumption most people make, though. Yes, that given white collar worker will often (though not always) get his stuff from, say, a buddy in the office with a connection. It's friendly business between those two.
Where does that buddy get his stuff, though? He doesn't just flip to the narcotics section in Sharper Image, he goes to one of his connections, and the further down the line you go-sometimes not far at all-the less friendly and the more violent things get. They're all connected, even if the white (guy) collar addict in the high rise didn't have to brave hoppers and searches and hustlers and junkies and needle-littered alleyways to get his fix. That money he spent (a higher price for a smaller amount of drugs, by the way) will eventually find its way into the same hands who, as likely as not (actually more likely than not) are utilizing some pretty horrific violence in their day-to-day.
On another note, yeah, I think that the revulsion for inner-city drug crime isn't just because of the more publicized violence involved in it. I think it's not just because people are worried about violence that the office worker will be more likely to be sentenced to rehab probation and the homeless needlehead will be more likely to do time at a state prison.
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quote: The vast majority, more than 75%, I believe, of drug related crimes for which people are currently incarcerated are for non-violent crimes.
In other words, millions of black people are being arrested under the guise of fighting violent crime but are not actually violent.
This bears discussion, too. I mean, a whole lot of discussion if we're going to be talking about drug policy. (To be clear, I don't suggest you were unaware of this, Dan.)
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quote:Okay, let's unravel this a bit more. Is this because black women, in general, don't fit your standard of beauty? That is, the simple fact that they are black? Your standard of beauty, on some level, really does value lighter skin?
This is kind of a weird thing to be discussing, and in retrospect I'm kind of wishing I hadn't brought it up. But anyway, it doesn't really hinge on skin color (from what I can tell). I think it has more to do with facial structure. I don't think I'm alone in this; you'll notice that quite a few of the black women who are held up as "sex symbols" in the mainstream media (Beyonce, Viveca Fox) tend to have narrower noses and straighter hair than the typical African American woman.
(This was pointed out to me by one of the grad students in our program, who works on the ethics of race as applied to sex. I probably wouldn't have picked up on some of these things about my own preferences if I hadn't talked with him about it.)
Anyway, for that reason I would be very surprised if these racial preferences didn't hold up even controlling for body weight. But I don't have empirical proof of that ready to hand.
Interesting. Sorry to press you on something that made you uncomfortable! Hope you don't mind if I reply.
I think that this topic strays into some really complex issues that aren't nearly as easy to control for as you seem to think.
Beauty image in this country is so deeply and fundamentally screwed up and subjective, even completely setting aside the issue of race, that this is fraught with complications.
I mean, yeah, I see what you're talking about, certainly. The most prevalent image of beauty does involve a thinner nose and straighter hair. Of course, broad noses and naturally frizzy hair also aren't the exclusive purview of black women.
Typical standards of beauty also tend to involve many other traits, like puffy lips and even specifically shaped bodies that could be said to be associated with a specific ethnicity. Is that ethnicity always "white?" I mean, in terms of facial structure and subtleties like that there are significant common differences even between "white" ethnicities, like Scandinavians, Italians, Greeks, etc.
Certainly, some beauty standards have racist elements. No question. I'm reminded of a host of video game mods that are supposed to make specific characters more "attractive" and frequently just make them more "generic Caucasian," which is heinously bad. But to say that this is a deep underlying principle throughout all American (or Western in general?) standards of beauty seems like a stretch to me.
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quote:... Was this directed at me? I'm really baffled. I mean, you quoted me, so I assume it was directed at me. Except...
I realize that Dan, but you're sending some distinctly mixed signals here. On the one hand, you acknowledge racism is still more common and damaging (well, sort of) from blacks to whites.
"Sort of?" Let me be unequivocal about it then. Of course it is!
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: On the other hand, you suggest with a question that unless something is clearly intended as a racist policy, it's incorrect to label it racist. You talk about the damaging effects of some economic policies, such as minimum wage, but then also assert through questions the frankly baffling notion that prosperity isn't limited.
Couple of things.
Not all questions I ask are assertions. Okay? What's more, if you treat every one of them as questions, then I promise I will get to my assertions when needed. Skipping the step of actually answering a question, and instead assuming it's a veiled assertion, will lead to more misunderstandings. Just so's you know.
Also, I thought I clarified this already, but I must've failed. Let me try to be even clearer. This: "unless something is clearly intended as a racist policy, it's incorrect to label it racist" does not accurately represent my opinion at all. Discard that notion.
I could broadly categorize laws that cause social distortions across racial lines into three categories:
1: Explicitly racist laws. That is, laws expressly passed to help or hinder one race over another, and don't pretend otherwise. Like segregation. I would also add lots of the twisted punitive "benefits" we inflict upon Native American tribes. Overall I'd say these laws are mostly gone from society. The only ones that remain, I think, are the ones that are supposed to "help" specific minority groups. Like the aforementioned benefits for Native Americans.
2: Inexplicitly racist laws. This would be laws passed for some supposed general purpose, but which can easily be argued to have unconscious motivations based in fear or hatred of one or more minority groups. We could put the AZ anti-illegal immigration law here. You would probably put voter ID laws here, and though I'm less convinced of that, it's fine for the sake of this discussion.
Some of these laws still exist. What laws qualify as this is, however, much harder to determine decisively. Debates rage over laws like these, with one side decrying hidden racist agendas and the other side insisting that the overt, explicit agenda of the law is the only agenda.
3: Laws with good intentions and unintended racist consequences. These can sometimes be hard to clearly separate from 2, I think. But in order to believably assert that they are really 2, I think you sort of need to strip away context and cherry-pick how you present the actual decisions that went into passing the laws. The obvious example of a 3 law that isn't asserted as a 2 law by any significant group is the one I've mentioned several times: The minimum wage.
I think you were under the impression that I was denying the existence of category 2. Is that fair to say? I was probably unclear.
My argument earlier was really just that harsher sentencing guidelines for crack cocaine is an example of 3, rather than 1 or 2. I imagine you think it's clearly 2, but my opinion is that the history surrounding the passage of HR 5484 throws that claim into serious question.
As for the prosperity stuff... I'll save that for further down.
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I do apologize for my heated tone, and I acknowledge that I have been, but man, it just really seems like your own personal thoughts on what is and isn't racist or prejudiced or biased are just...squishy. Really squishy.
No apology needed.
I think "squishy" probably ain't a bad descriptor anyway. At least as I'm interpreting the word. That is, hard to pin down precisely, sort of amorphous, etc.
I think racism in the modern age is often (not always!) a very squishy subject.
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:If you want to bring up a different example of proposed systemic racism, that's fine, you can do that, and I can respond to it or not or whatever. But to imply that what you've posted here is in any way actually a response to what I said is really disingenuous. I don't think it was intentional on your part, for the record. But it's still a bit frustrating.
One way you posed your challenge could be read as strictly about drug sentencing guidelines, and that is the literal meaning of what you said. So my mistake-I thought you were taking a broader stance. I can't help but wonder, though, what's the point of discussing racism in the criminal justice system if we're not going to be talking about the entire system?
No, that's totally fair! It's relevant, you're right.
My issue was that you were bringing up another element of the justice system as a "gotcha," or at least it seemed that way to me. I'm trying to maintain several different arguments with numerous people, and I have limited bandwidth, so it seemed unfair to assert that I claimed I could take on potential racism in the entire justice system, which is what it seemed you were challenging me to do.
It's a worthy discussion to have, I'm just not sure I can do it till more progress is made on the issues already raised. Does that make sense?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:A cop who tends to assume black people are more guilty, and arrests them more often, but doesn't do so explicitly, is still racist. I agree with that. But what about a cop who wants to help black people, and spends a disproportionate amount of his time in black neighborhoods, and so his arrest record is largely made up of black people?
It seems really weird to say those are both racist.
Please bear my response in mind, with respect to your feelings about my disingenuousness, Dan. The only way this can be a valid comparison is if you were to examine only that police officer's arrest record-if you were to cherry pick things quite blatantly, avoiding all of the good work he did, all of the black victims of crimes he helped and protected, and examined only his arrest record on racial grounds. If you're going to examine his arrest record on racial grounds, you need to examine his record on racial grounds, and see what can be discovered.
Right. So, I think this issue has been clarified with some of my statements above, about the categories of laws and such.
Yes/No?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:And there is a finite number of possible jobs?
This has been addressed, but...yes. I mean, obviously. (I do wonder if we're going to wade into some semi-libertarian anarcho-capitalist utopian ideals here, though, with respect to finite vs infinite prosperity...)
Well, you might say so. I wouldn't call 'em utopian at all, though, nor specifically anarcho-capitalist. Libertarian/Republican perhaps, in the sense that the "ideal" in question is just... capitalism.
At any given time there's a finite number of jobs that can be done by people... because there's a finite number of people.
But, at any time, any given person can create a job where none existed before. And, yes, literally create prosperity out of nothing. That's... I mean, that's how capitalism works, man. The reason we're more prosperous today than we were 200 years ago isn't because we have more currency. It's because new value has been created.
And yeah, this is quite relevant if we're talking about how prosperous white people are because of keeping down black people. Again, they are more prosperous than black people because of keeping down black people.
But to assert that they are more prosperous than they would have been had they not kept down black people is not only fundamentally impossible to prove or disprove (which makes it a bad theory already), it also denies the fact that all those oppressed black people could have been generating so much more new value (which benefits everyone in society) had they been more free to engage in business and entrepeneurship.
I dunno, you tell me: Was that too anarcho-capitalist and utopian for you?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote:That's an interesting question. Was there a rash of drug-related violent crime amongst the upper class in the 80s? I don't remember one, but I may be mistaken.
I think, both then and now, that most people see nonviolent white collar drug crimes as less bad than violent drug crimes perpetrated by/against the poor.
Do you think that's wrong?
I think that people do see 'nonviolent' white collar drug crime as less bad than violent urban drug crime, yes. I think that's a bad assumption most people make, though. Yes, that given white collar worker will often (though not always) get his stuff from, say, a buddy in the office with a connection. It's friendly business between those two.
Where does that buddy get his stuff, though? He doesn't just flip to the narcotics section in Sharper Image, he goes to one of his connections, and the further down the line you go-sometimes not far at all-the less friendly and the more violent things get. They're all connected, even if the white (guy) collar addict in the high rise didn't have to brave hoppers and searches and hustlers and junkies and needle-littered alleyways to get his fix. That money he spent (a higher price for a smaller amount of drugs, by the way) will eventually find its way into the same hands who, as likely as not (actually more likely than not) are utilizing some pretty horrific violence in their day-to-day.
I agree with you. People have a strong tendency to bias towards what's readily seen. In general, Seen vs Unseen is a commonly lamented problem in libertarian circles, and it applies here, too. The causality of violence in the inner city drug trade is much easier to see than that of white-collar drug trafficking.
Which is why I don't think I agree as much with this:
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: On another note, yeah, I think that the revulsion for inner-city drug crime isn't just because of the more publicized violence involved in it. I think it's not just because people are worried about violence that the office worker will be more likely to be sentenced to rehab probation and the homeless needlehead will be more likely to do time at a state prison.
Above, we just determined that there is already a clear and understood explanation for the disparity that doesn't rely on assuming unconscious racism. So, while unconscious racism certainly exists and could be a factor for some people, why assume it's a major one?
quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh:
quote: The vast majority, more than 75%, I believe, of drug related crimes for which people are currently incarcerated are for non-violent crimes.
In other words, millions of black people are being arrested under the guise of fighting violent crime but are not actually violent.
This bears discussion, too. I mean, a whole lot of discussion if we're going to be talking about drug policy. (To be clear, I don't suggest you were unaware of this, Dan.)
Does it? I mean, that's the War on Drugs. It's terrible. It shouldn't exist. What's more, prohibition of drugs shouldn't exist. It results in atrocities like no-knock raids. Heck, some 10-15% (I wanna say 13%) of drug crimes are for pot alone.
The thing is... I guess I just don't see the racist motivations you seem to see. It seems like the War on Drugs is pretty solidly in category 3, to me. Our society is really concerned about drugs. Our society has lots of stupid priorities. This is just one of them.
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Being about to go to bed, and on my mobile, I'll just address two small parts of your post: yes, society is 'concerned' with drugs (though so far, not in any way likely to be seriously effective at undermining their use). But that concern is expressed in different ways. The sleazy guy at the office slinging powder or pills, we're concerned that he stop, though we're likely to stop him with prison for less time. His buyers, we're concerned with them stopping, and man it's awfully important they get help sometimes, because addiction is a disease.
The crew that owns a corner for a given month, THEM, we're almost universally angry about. Those guys, man, lock 'em up and throw away the key. Their buyers, it's of the utmost urgency we get 'em off the street and keep 'em off, and if they didn't want to go to prison they should've thought of that before becoming addicts. Anyway, there's programs in prison, right?
Clearly you don't see these two different, very real trends as a significant sign of racism. Alright, fair enough. As for me, though, well it becomes difficult for me to regard my own anecdotal experience as the open and shut it the nature of my experience itself may be the symptom. Put another way? Who do you go to if you're trying to discover racism? Do you simply ask the majority, "Hey, do you negatively prejudge the minority based on their race as a matter of course?" No. You need to ask the minorities[/], more often than not.
As for prosperity...*sigh*. Yeah, sure, any individual does theoretically have the [I]capability to create a job where none existed before. I have the damn capability to go out and win the lottery tomorrow, or to beat a black belt in a fist fight. Both require some of the same things, though: extreme luck. And before you start talking about how I could study hard with Cobra Kai or something if I want to beat that black belt more reliably, bear in mind: very few opportunities come with their very own time machines and save points with which to be reliable.
For most everyone else, the bank is only gonna give out so many loans. The good neighborhood only has so many apartments left to rent. The good school only has so many places available. The jobs that don't involve hot vegetable oil only hire so often and so many.
Deep down, you recognize all of this-I can say that with authority based on another of the answers you gave. You know which color you'd rather your skin be when you go to an interview, and you know you'd rather be Dan than Darnell, even if it's only by just a small margin.
If that answer is only by a small margin to you, the member of the majority, which is likelier? That you're (or anyone) is an effective observer of things like pervasive entitlement and rewarding? Or that perhaps you don't always recognize it when it happens, because we all remember affronts or perceived affronts more than gifts or help? It's older than Shakespeare.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Deep down, you recognize all of this-I can say that with authority based on another of the answers you gave. You know which color you'd rather your skin be when you go to an interview, and you know you'd rather be Dan than Darnell, even if it's only by just a small margin.
I may respond to some of the other stuff you said another day, but for now...
This is true. Of course, I'd also much rather be Dan than Rakeesh, despite the fact that you probably have a better formal education than I do, better long-term career prospects, and probably make more money. I'm kind of fond of being me, after all.
Seriously, though, I'd also rather be Dan than, say, Cletus (a.k.a. a poorly educated, lower-class rural white guy). That doesn't mean that the Cletuses of the world are the victims of systematic and pervasive oppression.
On average, there's more racism towards black people than there is towards white people. Or even more generally: On average, black people have it worse than white people. That's an example of an inequity.
Here's another inequity: On average, people born poor have it worse than people born middle class. If Darnell is growing up in the suburbs, I'd almost certainly rather be Darnell than Cletus. Hell, for that matter if Darnell's growing up in a decent suburb and his parents have some college money saved up, I'd rather be Darnell than Dan! Except, you know, the whole fondness for being me thing.
Anyway, I'm getting a bit off track. I guess it just boils down to this: the existence of inequity doesn't indicate the existence of systematic oppression to me. Nor does it make me want to attempt to fiat away that inequity with special rules and laws that are, themselves, not really very equitable or egalitarian.
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What would indicate "systematic oppression" to you, or make you think it's worth acting to address?
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quote:Originally posted by Dan_Frank: Here's another inequity: On average, people born poor have it worse than people born middle class. If Darnell is growing up in the suburbs, I'd almost certainly rather be Darnell than Cletus. Hell, for that matter if Darnell's growing up in a decent suburb and his parents have some college money saved up, I'd rather be Darnell than Dan! Except, you know, the whole fondness for being me thing.
Anyway, I'm getting a bit off track. I guess it just boils down to this: the existence of inequity doesn't indicate the existence of systematic oppression to me. Nor does it make me want to attempt to fiat away that inequity with special rules and laws that are, themselves, not really very equitable or egalitarian.
I'd like to recommend a powerful documentary that made me look at systematic racism in a new light. RACE - THE POWER OF AN ILLUSION, especially episode three: "The House We Live In." I haven't been able to find all of it online, but here is a clip, and here is the transcript. The clip touches on the main points, but it is worth checking your library to see if you can find the full documentary.
Basically, following WWII, we had the GI bill and FHA loans to make buying a house a possibility for the average American. But the FHA determined housing values based on, among other things, race. If you were buying a house in a black or a mixed area, you couldn't get a loan. So black people were relegated to renting. In 1968, with the Fair Housing Act, the racial language was struck from the official laws. At that point, unscrupulous real estate agents would go door to door in white neighbourhoods warning residents that their neighbourhood was becoming integrated, and would they like to take cash for their house. So we have white flight. And because all of the white people moved out at once, this depressed home values. To this day, we still have unofficially segregated neighbourhoods, and housing values are higher in white neighbourhoods than they are in black neighbourhoods. And since most of our wealth is in our homes, white people still have a higher net worth, on average, than black people.
The documentary says it better than I do; I'm posting a block quote from the transcript. Dalton Conley is a sociologist.
quote:NARRATOR: To glimpse one of the far-reaching consequences of racial inequality, you need only consider one statistic: comparative net worth or wealth. If you add up everything you own and subtract all your debts, what's left is your net worth.
CONLEY: Today, the average Black family has only one-eighth the net worth or assets of the average white family. That difference has seemingly grown since the 1960's, since the Civil Rights triumphs. And is not explained by other factors, like education, earnings rates, savings rates. It is really the legacy of racial inequality from generations past. No other measure captures the legacy, the sort of cumulative disadvantage of race, or cumulative advantage of race for whites, than net worth or wealth.
NARRATOR: Even with the same income, white families have on average twice the wealth of Black families. Much of that difference lies in the value of their homes. But what happens when we compare families along the colorline who have similar wealth?
CONLEY: When you make the right comparison when you compare a Black kid from a family with the same income and wealth level as the white kid, um, from the similar economic situation, rates of college graduation are the same; rates of employment and work hours are the same; rates of welfare usage are the same. So when we're talking about race in terms of a cultural accounting of these differences or a genetic accounting of these differences, we're really missing the picture, because we're making the wrong comparison.
quote:This is true. Of course, I'd also much rather be Dan than Rakeesh, despite the fact that you probably have a better formal education than I do, better long-term career prospects, and probably make more money. I'm kind of fond of being me, after all.
This is, again, not a valid comparison. I wasn't asking about who you would rather be individually. I think being Denzel Washington might be pretty spiffy vs. being, say, Bubba McTrailerpark appearing on an episode of Cops. That doesn't get at the kind of thing I'm talking about, though.
quote:Seriously, though, I'd also rather be Dan than, say, Cletus (a.k.a. a poorly educated, lower-class rural white guy). That doesn't mean that the Cletuses of the world are the victims of systematic and pervasive oppression.
You're absolutely right. That in and of itself doesn't mean Cletus is a victim of systemic and pervasive oppression. But seriously, Dan, guess what you'll find if you look back into the medical care and education background of the Cletus Clan. And I don't just mean how hard they tried in school, but the actual quality of their school.
If you were a betting man, and you were compelled to wager, would you wager that the sort of fellow you have in your mind's eye when you mentioned Cletus came from a solid, well-staffed and funded school with good family involvement in his education? Or would you wager on his coming from a failure factory sort of school? I know which I'd wager on and, again, given your answer above I'm pretty sure I know what your answer would be too. This isn't itself a sure sign of pervasive and systemic oppression, but it's certainly a good reason to look for it!
quote:Anyway, I'm getting a bit off track. I guess it just boils down to this: the existence of inequity doesn't indicate the existence of systematic oppression to me. Nor does it make me want to attempt to fiat away that inequity with special rules and laws that are, themselves, not really very equitable or egalitarian.
At this point, like others, I just have to ask what would serve as an indicator for you. This will sound snarky and it is, but I don't mean it to be insulting aside from being a zinger, but what would it take? A city council that held meetings in white sheets? A governor who openly decries miscegenation? A police chief known for dropping racial slurs? I mean you said, or suggested (and yes, yes, it was just a question, but c'mon, why did you ask it?) that we shouldn't think of something as racist without its having distinctly racist intentions, so I have to ask again, what would it take?
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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Dan_Frank Give me a bit of a break here, I just got my internet back and I'm catching up on a few days worth of arguments.
quote: This is also basically the reason I say the problem isn't "systematic." It's not because I don't think it's a serious problem. It's because the system, the only system in society with real, cohesive, collective power... that is, the government... isn't enforcing racist policies. Both sides can quibble over what they see as exceptions (righties might say affirmative action, lefties might say voter ID)... but the deep problems, like income inequity, aren't being forced on the populace by "the system."
Income inequality is very much a product of the system. Let's leave out slavery for a minute, we can even leave out the entire 19th century if you want, and just cover stuff that happened in the last hundred or so years. The government was the primary participant in a systematic widespread act of economic warfare against America's black population. Things are better today than they were even 20 years ago as far as hiring practices go, but we're still living with the fallout. You can't correct a system that fundamentally broken without corrective measures. Imagine if all your life you were filling two cups of water, but you filled one 10 times faster than the other. Then one day you decided to fill them both at the same speed. One cup would still have ten times as much water as the other one, and filling them as the same rate only keeps the unfair unequal status quo. You have to do something to bring the less-full cup up to snuff.
quote: Yeah... more black men out of jail, too. More black men in general, really. And more people. By a factor of about 100, I think.
Honestly, Lyr, this looks like a really absurd, disingenuous, nonsensical soundbite statistic designed to shamelessly grab attention. I'm surprised you'd use it.
Yes, it's an attention grabbing statistic, but your rebuttal misses the point. It's still a HUGE disproportionate number of black men!
quote: Assuming this is true, I wonder: How do you pay down that debt? Usually, when I see people talking like that, what they seem to be saying is that the solution is to incur an inverted form of debt... which they don't call debt, because it's "justice" for a previous generations transgressions.
The problem is, if we really enact stuff like that, then generations from now the people getting their "justice" won't care what it was in retaliation for. They'll just care that they're being artificially pushed down, and they'll hate it as much as anyone would. Seems like a pretty crummy solution to me.
And that's not even touching how much I rankle at the collectivist notion that one member of a socially constructed group should pay a penalty for the actions of another member of that group. But I assure you, there is a great deal of rankling.
Well let's back up for a second, are you saying it's NOT true? Are you denying that there was a governmentally-enforced reign of racial terror and discrimination perpetrated against African-Americans? Because if you don't even believe that, then we have a whole separate argument to have before we can get to how we fix it.
How isn't it justice? We have a system of justice that provides for redress against wrongs and subsequent remuneration to make up for those wrongs. Black people have been discriminated against and intentionally kept in an unequal state for hundreds of years, and our government did that. Now it's our duty to fix it. It's our job as a society to teach our HISTORY to ourselves and our kids so we understand what we did and why it was wrong, and why there's a need to fix it. You at this very moment are benefitting from the system that produced this inequality. So am I. So are a lot of people. I don't have a perfect solution myself, but if it means special hiring and other privileges for black people, I'm fine with it. I'm also fine with massive social spending in inner cities to help fix them as well. We broke it. There's no statute of limitations on systematically keeping a race of people down.
quote: Spending general tax money to benefit only a specific subset of society is, in effect, a punitive measure against anyone not of that group. Do you see why I would say that?
I'm not sure if that matters. Society committed a grave injustice, and it should have to pay for it. If you want to call that punitive damages, then let's pay them and try to move on.
quote: But I don't think the primary impediment to ending the war on drugs is lingering implicit racism, any more than that's the main reason nobody wants to repeal minimum wage.
I don't either. But when people (like you have done) use the "violent crime" language to make it sound like black people brought it on themselves, you're totally missing the point. You also have to get into sentencing practices to see the meat of where people find racism in the system. An generic 18 year old white guy and a generic 18 year old black guy are statistically unlikely to get the same treatment in court for the same offense. And of course, the generic white guy is less likely to get arrested in the first place.
And I'm not sure what your minimum wage law thing is all about. First of all, $3 an hour in America would net a black worker $6,200 a year. You can't live on that. I don't even think that's halfway to the poverty line. How does that do anything but trap them in an even worse cycle of poverty? The reason black Americans aren't in a better position today, by and large, than they were 100 years ago is that hiring practices trapped them in unskilled labor while the good jobs fled to the suburbs. You think if we eliminated minimum wage laws, unskilled labor would come back to the inner city and pay enough to allow them to survive, let alone thrive and improve their situation? I don't see how the economics works on that.
quote: Here's another inequity: On average, people born poor have it worse than people born middle class. If Darnell is growing up in the suburbs, I'd almost certainly rather be Darnell than Cletus. Hell, for that matter if Darnell's growing up in a decent suburb and his parents have some college money saved up, I'd rather be Darnell than Dan! Except, you know, the whole fondness for being me thing.
Anyway, I'm getting a bit off track. I guess it just boils down to this: the existence of inequity doesn't indicate the existence of systematic oppression to me. Nor does it make me want to attempt to fiat away that inequity with special rules and laws that are, themselves, not really very equitable or egalitarian.
So you're saying we do have to have the bigger discussion about historical acts of racist oppression in this country? Because you seem to be entirely uninformed about what was going on in the post-WWII era (to say nothing of what came before). What Amilia is hinting at is just the tip of the iceberg. The two practices she's talking about are called redlining and blockbusting. Redlining was the FHA practice of creating racially segregated neighborhoods in which blacks could not get a loan if they wanted into a white neighborhood. If they could get a loan at all, it was only in a neighborhood designated for black occupancy, which were often the oldest parts of a city with the worst housing code violations. Blockbusting was a practice largely committed by real estate agents themselves. Like Amilia says, they would go door to door in white neighborhoods trying to scare white families into selling low before the blacks moved in and killed the market value of their houses. Once a few families sold, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy that led to a mass selloff, after which real estate agents would sell all the homes to black families for more than the whites sold them for. Turnover could happen in as little as weeks in whole neighborhoods. Real estate agents would also practice "steering" where they refused to show homes in white neighborhoods to black families, even middle and upper class black families. And that's just one issue. I haven't even touched on hiring, police brutality, welfare policies, education, health care, or a host of other issues. Do I need to?
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:I'm not sure if that matters. Society committed a grave injustice, and it should have to pay for it. If you want to call that punitive damages, then let's pay them and try to move on.
The funny thing is, it would be apparently unjust to have the side which benefits from the system of inequality put forth resources to fix that problem. Well, alright, nobody here had slaves, of course. So we really shouldn't do that, because it'd be wrong.
On the other hand, it's also (maybe, I really can't quite parse some of Dan's mixed signals here) unjust to have the side which suffers from this same system, well, suffer from it. And...well, they just need to deal with it, I guess. Government ought not to address the very real problems they face in a proactive way, because being proactive means a moderate inconvenience to the other side. At no point do the people who have been historically victimized ever actually get government on 'their' side. The closest they get is to have government on 'the people's' side, and they're permitted to be considered a part of that group, finally.
And so while the group which was discriminated against must suffer many generations of injustice to overcome this problem, the group which discriminated must not be held to account, because of course they're the current generation, not the ones who actually did it.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I felt that way for a long time myself. I always said that I wasn't even born when these things were going on, and for that matter, half my family wasn't even here, they were in Canada when it was going on. But that was naive and ignorant.
I've spent the last year studying this specific issue in depth, and I realize just how wrong I was.
It doesn't matter anymore which specific people did it. They did it on behalf of the government, and the government is still around, so the government needs to make up for its past mistakes. This wasn't an historical accident. It wasn't bad luck that put black Americans were they are. It was designed. It was deliberate. And it was the government.
One of the most interesting things that legal scholars point out when discussing the Brown decision is that most of the time, when the courts find that a wrong of that type had been perpetrated, they would order some sort of corrective measure. Sometimes that means awarding damages, or simply ordering someone to bring something up to code. But SCOTUS didn't do that in Brown or in the less well known Brown II. They basically just said, "Oh yeah, it's unequal, sorry about that. At some point in the not so distant future, you guys really need to fix that, but we won't say when." It was by all accounts a half measure that solved absolutely nothing.
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I once sat in on a hiring committee. Equal numbers of male and women were brought in for the interview. All the female candidates were found lacking (they didn't seem serious enough, they were too positive to truly understand the ramifications of the problem, they didn't act experienced enough, all very fuzzy reasons). In the end, of the five openings, four were filled with men. This was in a science field were gender inequality is common. When I commented that this seemed a little sexist, I was told the head of the hiring committee was a woman so clearly sexism could not be real. Not one of the reasons given for eliminating the female candidates was that she was a woman or even that she might someday have kids. Clearly, no sexism existed. It just happened to be that 4/5 of people hired in an already gender skewed department were men. No ones fault, no sign of a trend, nothing like that. Just the better candidates were men.
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I was too lazy to do the math so I wrote a little sim program to see how likely that is, given random distribution of "qualification", and 10 candidates of each gender.
Turns out to be about 16.5% after a ten million runs of the sim. So assuming I didn't screw up somewhere, its not out of the realm of possibility, but is a little bit unlikely.
The above isn't intended to prove or disprove any assertions in your post, I was just curious what the chances really are, and thought I'd share what I found.
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: I once sat in on a hiring committee. Equal numbers of male and women were brought in for the interview. All the female candidates were found lacking (they didn't seem serious enough, they were too positive to truly understand the ramifications of the problem, they didn't act experienced enough, all very fuzzy reasons). In the end, of the five openings, four were filled with men. This was in a science field were gender inequality is common. When I commented that this seemed a little sexist, I was told the head of the hiring committee was a woman so clearly sexism could not be real. Not one of the reasons given for eliminating the female candidates was that she was a woman or even that she might someday have kids. Clearly, no sexism existed. It just happened to be that 4/5 of people hired in an already gender skewed department were men. No ones fault, no sign of a trend, nothing like that. Just the better candidates were men.
That said, in situations like this it is always hilarious to discover what happens over a thousand such modeled incidents when you test this versus a situation wherein the applicants are tested blind by the employers (i.e., there's some way to test them for their qualifications without knowing their gender, etc)
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I'm not saying there wasn't any sexism going on in that meeting, scholarette, but just because you thought something was happening doesn't make it so. You can't police another person's thoughts. Unless someone told you they weren't hiring them because of their gender, they aren't doing anything wrong. I agree that women deserve just as much of a chance as men, but unless you're a mind-reader, everything you are suggesting is pure conjecture on your part.
Posts: 1324 | Registered: Feb 2011
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I don't understand how what you're saying fits, Jeff. Hasn't it been about, what, a generation or more since anyone would say directly, "I didn't choose her and I did choose him because he was a man and she was a woman." Along racial lines, we're careful to train people not to say that, very careful. Is all that's necessary to be un-racist or un-sexist to not openly state a racist or sexist idea?
Scholarette didn't say that the only sign was that 80% (in equal applicants) of the positions were filled by men. She also said women were rejected for trivial, vaguely stated reasons. So I guess I'll just ask you the same question I asked Dan: if you were attempting to get work in a science-related field as she described, which do you think you'd really prefer if you were a woman: an in person interview, or to be based exclusively on your experience, references, and accomplishments where they only knew your name to the first initial? Bear in mind for the purposes of this question, the only factor is what would influence your chances to get this job, knowing nothing else about the people hiring.
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Dan_Frank I'm very disappointed. I have to wait two whole days to get into this kerfuffle because my internet is down, and then you make me wait all day to read your response!
I demand a thoughtful, lengthy response by tonight!
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: I don't understand how what you're saying fits, Jeff. Hasn't it been about, what, a generation or more since anyone would say directly, "I didn't choose her and I did choose him because he was a man and she was a woman." Along racial lines, we're careful to train people not to say that, very careful. Is all that's necessary to be un-racist or un-sexist to not openly state a racist or sexist idea?
You misunderstand. I wasn't saying that they weren't being sexist. I was saying that there wasn't enough evidence to say that they were. Furthermore, there was certainly not enough evidence to make a legal case out of it, if anyone wanted to take it that far.
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It depends entirely on how accurate scholarette's analysis was of the reasons the women were rejected. If, as she says, the reasons women were rejected were vague and frivolous (and I haven't met her, but from posting here I haven't known her to be given to flights of whimsy or hyperbole), then actually that would serve as a pretty good indicator. That is the question you should be asking-'could you be more specific about why the female applicants were rejected, and did any of those reasons exist in the male applicants?'-rather than rushing to the 'we can't know for sure/this isn't proof' style of thinking.
I think if you asked an actual woman who works in the sort of area scholarette is talking about, not ask a man, "Hey, seen any examples of sexism?'-then you would likely encounter a perspective of 'yes, that is absolutely possible, and has happened to me, in fact'.
Anyway, if scholarette's encounter was not just isolated but an example of how things go there, it absolutely is enough to start talking about sexism. There's this very odd attitude in this country, for one with so much racial and gender turmoil in its very recent past, that unless there's a cross burning or some starched white sheets involved, the burden of credibility in public opinion is still almost always on the side of the establishment. It's not one that's really earned, so far as I can tell, but it's supported by these implied or outright stated notions that unless someone is an openly virulent racist or sexist, we shouldn't even talk about them with them.
On another note, 'the leader of hiring is a woman, therefore sexism isn't a problem' is also a warning sign.
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