Awkward Conversations We Have Had

I once heard Julian Bond tell a similar story. On an airplane, he was talking with the White guy sitting next to him . Where you from, etc. At some point in the conversation, each silently came to the realization that they shared a common ancestor a few generations back. The rest of the flight was a bit awkward.

To the list of medicinal uses of marijuana, it appears we can add: eases the pains and social anxieties linked to uncomfortable history of enslavement and exploitation.

My husband has a very common last name among black people – (he’s white.) He was TA in a class with a very talented African American student (an MD taking film classes!) who shared his last name – she informed him that this particular name was common among slave traders and hence became common among slaves, as the traders gave their name to “their people.”

And here’s Oprah, who learned that racism and negative perceptions of black people is not isolated to America http://ind.pn/14s582A

“And here’s Oprah, who learned that racism and negative perceptions of black people is not isolated to America http://ind.pn/14s582A”

Judged by the color of her skin, and not by the content of her bank account. I’m practically bristling with indignation.

Mistaken identity. The store clerk look at her and, based on his experience, concluded that she is probably not well off enough to shop there. For this story to be about racism, the clerk would have to refuse to let her in because she is black. But there is no doubt that had she pulled out her platinum (or whatever metal billionaires get) amex card, he would’ve immediately kissed her ass.

The fact is that she can shop there. But most people indeed can’t. What about them?

The store clerk look at her and, based on his experience, concluded that she is probably not well off enough to shop there.

I realize that this probably won’t get through, but this actually means that this story is about racism. The clerk’s “experience”, in any plausible sense of the term, has shit-all to do with it; the clerk’s preconceptions and prejudices, on the other hand, are doing a whole lot of work. See also, Coates and his son, Gates, etc., etc.

MCJ – I’m never sure whether you’re claiming that racism doesn’t exist, or that it does exist but doesn’t matter, because classism is just as bad anyway. (Not that the second position seems to make much more sense…)

But there is no doubt that had she pulled out her platinum (or whatever metal billionaires get) amex card, he would’ve immediately kissed her ass.

One might also add that before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, white merchants, innkeepers, etc. routinely excluded blacks from many stores etc., despite the fact that the blacks were willing and able to pay. Only a jejeune Marxist, or a libertarian, would imagine that money is always the decisive factor.

before the Civil Rights Act of 1965, white merchants, innkeepers, etc. routinely excluded blacks from many stores etc.

It’s my understanding that this most often occurred because state laws forbade merchants and inkeepers to serve both black and white customers, not because the merchants were unwilling to sell to blacks. Is there any reliable evidence one way or the other? Say, a study that looked at exclusion by merchants in states that lack such laws but were neighbors of states that had them?

How does the clerk know? It’s not like Oprah showed up in sweat pants.

I remember a few years ago O. Winfrey had Found Racism in a store in the Champs-Elysées. Same story, as far as I remember. I was surprised back then : luxury shops shops around there need, like, cater to, Africa’s One Percenters (and One Percenters from everywhere, yes).

I think – at least for the C-E episode – she showed up in sweat pants, and expected to be famous.

Yes, it is terrible thing to have people confuse race for class.

I think – at least for the C-E episode – she showed up in sweat pants, and expected to be famous.

You know, if you read the damn article, you’d find out what she was wearing. Not that that is the least fucking bit relevant, I might add.

Shelby @ 17

It’s my understanding that this most often occurred because state laws forbade merchants and inkeepers to serve both black and white customers, not because the merchants were unwilling to sell to blacks. Is there any reliable evidence one way or the other?

An elderly friend of mine, a privileged Jew, just a few days ago, told me a story about how he was stationed, for basic training, at Lackland AFB, in Mississippi during his brief time in the service. This would have been in the early 1960s or so, I guess; he told me, but the detail skipped out on me. He, and his best friend at the time, who was an African-American, stepped out the gate of the base, home to ~17,000 airmen, and walked into a pizza parlour — this, again within a block or two of an airbase with a population of 17,000! — and sat down. They were ignored, and my friend, finally asked for service. The apparent owner walked out from the counter or kitchen, came over to their table, looked my friend over, pausing for dramatic effect, and then, said, emphatically, gesturing to my friend’s black companion, “Him I have to serve; you, I don’t.”

They departed the restaurant, and never left the base, again.

Hey js 23, nice to meet you.

As we are on the subject of reading, relevance, etc : the “C-E” in my comment stand for “Champs Elysées”.

“And every middle class black person, male or female, has had taxis drive on by.”

While that may well be true, it is also the case that taxi drivers are often immigrants, and in many cities more likely to be black than their passengers are.

Anarcissie’s comment at https://crookedtimber.org/2013/08/08/everybodys-racist/comment-page-2/#comment-477212 could have some relevance for this question. There is a difference between the attitudes “blacks are likely to be poor” and “black ought to be poor”, and while some people agree with both of them it is not obvious that the Zürich store clerk did. Institutional racism, perhaps, but not necessarily personal.

the “C-E” in my comment stand for “Champs Elysées”.

Yeah, I got that. The relevance of this fact to anything beyond its own quiddity still escapes me, unfortunately.

js 31
The relevance of this fact to anything beyond its own quiddity still escapes me, unfortunately.

It escapes you! Damn!

Ah well. Thanks anyway for sharing what you got and what you didn’t, and all.

28: “So this high-profile incident comes as the Swiss debate these “draconian restrictions” on outsiders.”

Only outsiders from poor African and Asian countries. Oprah and Bill Gates and Robert Mugabe are still welcome to bring their lovely money.

In the Oprah handbag incident, I agree with the popular opinion that the Swiss person was racist*, and I also agree with MJC’s sentiment that Oprah sucks, and rich people suck, and expensive handbags suck.

*She’s racist for assuming black=poor. She did still try to serve Oprah (with a cheaper bag) and there’s no reason to think she dislikes black people (depends what she thinks of poor people I guess). Refusing to show the handbag was rude because you should show your customer whatever fucking handbag they want to see no matter how poor they are. I think the woman would have been happy to show Oprah or Tiger Woods or Robert Mugabe the handbag once they explained how fabulously wealthy they were.

Ronan, never underestimate stupidity.

Personal stupidity perhaps, not systemic racism though? Once you earn your first billion you’re on your own, surely?

I never said race doesnt come into it. I think it does, all the time.* Im saying *this time* it probably doesnt/or why should I care?

*Equally in leftist circles

Race itself does come into this, as a consequence of black people being on average much poorer. That is why poor Oprah has to suffer: because she looks just like poor people look. So, what do you want: to force everybody not to notice that she looks like one of the poor people? Good luck.

Gonna regret this but: MCJ would you similarly argue that it’s not a problem if blacks get stopped and searched 10 times more often than whites because they ‘look like criminals’ or lose jobs to less qualified white applicants for this reason? It’s not racism, just heuristics I assume?

It was $38,000 bag, she wanted to buy.
“A few people took the part of the crocodile, whose skin had been used to make the bag in question.”
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss_news/Oprah_Winfrey_accuses_Zurich_boutique_of_racism.html?rss=true&cid=36643840

engels, for the searches: I can’t vouch for all 100% of the cases, but yes, it has to be a big part of it. I’m sure men are are also stopped much more often than women, and 25 year olds much more often than 65 year olds.

For losing jobs, I don’t know. Post a link.

What is your explanation for the searches, and for the Oprah story, by the way? What had happen to the store clerk in Zurich; how did he become an evil person? And how did you manage to avoid becoming one?

Speaking of awkward conversations, I spent a night in jail recently. (Nothing serious, just an unfortunate intersection of my own stupidity with the stupidity of the NYC police.) So I got driven in a squad car from the station to the little court in Red Hook, and on the way the two cops up front were discussing politics. One of them, I guess, had been watching some video about “the Obama Conspiracy,” and they were discussing the various forces he was supposed to answer to. Sure, Obama was bad, one of them said, but he was nothing next to Lincoln. Lincoln was the worst president ever. The slaves never had the right to become citizens, Lincoln just worked it that way “to create more votes for the liberals.” It was the biggest fraud in history.

Now, it may be that when these cops stop a black man, they have only a heuristic interest in his race. But it also may be that they don’t entirely forget that he’s a fake citizen, who only has rights because of a liberal trick.

Sure, I’ve been in all white unions (on the fringes) when the word n****r has been used freely. Or spent time with friends on the dole who have talked about ‘Nigerians’ getting all sorts of (non quantified) benefits. Got into taxis where they have told me to ‘keep it in the country’ etc
I agree racism exists, but not in high end Swiss boutique fashion shops..I dont think you could find a store which caters for the rich that holds explicitly racist policies in western Europe

“I agree racism exists, but not in high end Swiss boutique fashion shops.”

So you don’t think racism exists among the rich as well as the poor?

I think Western societies do in a whole lot of ways that affect people who arent Oprah Winfrey

“The storekeeper might well be a decent person, he just showed some prejudice here. ”

Where did he get that prejudice? And, if I’m not wrong to assume that you would never refuse to show the $38,000 purse to a black person, how did you manage to avoid getting this prejudice?

I was actually annoyed enough by the sweat pants thing to try to figure out how it got introduced. I googled around for both stories of Oprah confronting shopping racism in Europe, and the sweatpants thing just wasn’t there. For the incident in a Hermes shop, some people said that she tried to get in after it was closed (but still open for a private event) but no versions of either story say that she was plainly dressed.

As far as I can tell, it became a trope in this thread with Corey @ 12 writing “It’s not like Oprah showed up in sweat pants” and then yabonn @ 19 writing “I think – at least for the C-E episode – she showed up in sweat pants, and expected to be famous.” Which is a classic reversal that happens in stories involving black people. One of the famous psychology experiments I remember reading about is that if you show people a picture of a white man on a subway holding a knife and threatening a black man, then ask people to redraw the picture from memory, a large percentage of them will redraw it with the knife in the black man’s hand.

To JS – I think that if a really rich black man (say Michael Jordan) went public with the diss he got for being considered too poor to look at a particular product in a Swiss store, we’d be livid with the Swiss – the entire nation. Oprah ignites different passions, it seems.

[All I can say – the near west side of Chicago was transformed by Harpo Studios – and I’m sure they’re really missing Oprah in the ‘hood. She has an economic impact that one cannot underestimate. Swiss were stupid to do so.]

You know what’s funny e’erybody? This is still about 1000X more pleasant than when I either a) post about feminism or b) post about some other shit but get threadjacked. That’s because none of us is black in America so we don’t really have to care all the time every day, right? We can just care sometimes, when we feel interested.

This times 100. Belle, I am grateful for nearly every word you write, but especially for these.

Belle #48 — I have not read any fiction in 30 years and I don’t have a TV but thanks for referring me to Sady Doyle because I watched a short clip of GoT on YouTube and I imagine she’s got it right. The only awkward conversation I had with a black person was awkward for him not me, because he thought I had to be a privileged prejudiced white kid but I never was. But he was a very cool guy who’d read Malcolm X and quickly recovered his cool. Consequently we got stoned on the rooftop of an old Bell Telephone building in Camden N.J. in the humid late summer evening sun, ignoring our swingshift janitorial duties (he had been hired under what was called in those days “reverse discrimination” policy) and discussing how fucked up the world is, getting totally wasted while overlooking the skyline of what was and still is one of the most horrifying urban wastelands.

This whole sweatpants business (however apocryphal) got me thinking (not for the first time) about the profound advantages of my own WASP background. No real wealth in my family history, mostly farmers and teachers and social workers and the occasional mid-level business person or doctor. But deeply engrained in my sensibilities: I can walk into any store I like, dressed in jeans and t-shirt with my hair dirty, examine the goods and expect to be treated respectfully (assuming I treat others respectfully). And I have done just that, visited very expensive stores the way I visit museums, just to look. (Or, in the case of clothing stores, to feel. I love to feel fine fabrics and examine well-made clothes.) No clerk has ever treated me with anything but the respect due any customer, and not just because I was always polite and carried myself with a certain self-assurance (which I am sure Oprah also did), but because I did so while being white.

That was towards js’ comment, and I’m not trying to be ‘smart’.

But Oprah not getting a bag in a Swiss boutique is more than likely a perceived class issue, not race.

And on what basis is her class being inferred, do you think?

If Oprah’s intention was to show that there is still racism in Europe she could have done it in a way that made sense. She could have pointed to the immigrant camps in Greece, the militarised Med, the ‘Burqa Ban’ in France, the murder of Marioara Rostas (and the lack of public outcry) in Ireland, the rise of the far right in England..there are any number of examples, continent wide, but recognising them would have involved putting herself outside of the context of US racial politics, and making it *not* about her
If her intention was to highlight that she was offered a less expensive bag in a millionaires boutique, well that’s kind of ridiculous. Millionaire boutiques have any number of reasons for offering you a less expensive bag, and really, so what..?
Oprah wasnt profiled and shot because of her race in Florida, she was offered a less expensive bag after Tina Turners wedding in Switzerland for reasons we cant ever really know..and..eh

“the point is for a bunch of trolls to hate on an uppity black woman. so let’s all not play.”

Okay I’m done. I won’t comment on it again. Fwiw, imo, the point is that race is not the best explanation for staff attitudes in European boutiques. Maybe a bit of an explanation. Mybe none at all. Who knows.

Clicking through on the Oprah link, it says the clerk told her that that bag was too expensive, so she should get this other one.

It’s not at all clear that this had anything to do with race. She might well say that to everyone who asks about the $38k bag, or about similarly priced items. It might have been a sales tactic: try to goad the person into buying the bag just to prove they can afford it.

she could have done it in a way that made sense.

Ain’t possible. Remember: racists are racist, thus prejudiced, thus ipso facto irrational. To a racist, no demonstration of the problems with racism will “make sense”.

Let’s not be ridiculous. It’s a matter of race. Like Meredith, I’m a scruffy middle-aged white male and I’m accustomed to deference from sales personnel. No one would ever try to talk me out of a purchase from a presumption that I couldn’t afford it, and why should they? They can assess my ability to pay before I walk out of the store with the goods.

Nothing but prejudice could lead a salesperson to prevent a sale. It’s not out of the question that the clerk thought the firm would not want its wares associated with someone so obviously undesirable.

Ronan(rf), she replies blushing (and I am old to be blushing): I took all your comments about the Swiss clerk and so forth as insistence that people understand the sophistication, and the economic realities, of high-end European shops. And felt free to respond to them with quick building on rather than needing to reassure. Just as I think bad Jim knows I am female, so his “like Meredith” clause is askew — but not. I enjoy so when as male and female we really are one!

You can’t be serious, bad Jim. How many $38,000 purses have they let you handle recently?

Tell you what: go walk into a Ferrari dealership, and demand a test-drive of their $500,000 model. They are just going to hand you the key because you’re white, I’m sure. And a 500K car to the average car is still nowhere near to 38K purse to the average purse.

“Sure, I’d like to think a clerk in a high-end store, like some latter-day Baucis or Philemon, would be gracious to a bag lady walking in”

This scenario is not nearly as absurd as Bruce Wilder seems to beleive it is. Several years ago, I did booth duty at an industry expo demoing a high end enterprise solution – $ 1M for four CPU’s kind of deal – & prior to the expo had to attend training on booth etiquette . We were told in no uncertain terms to never jump to any conclusions based on the appearance of a prospective customer – the training even had a skit with one actor-as-customer in business casuals and another in full debauched Axl Rose costumery the point of which was to demonstrate that the pair might well be a bedraggled silicon valley billionaire with his hired hand neat-freak CTO in tow. I imagine this sort of thing is even more common in high end swiss boutiques where french techno-folk rock millionaires & balkan warlords & turkish drug dealers etc buy expensive shit for their big haired girlfriends who probably don’t look like commentator Meredith .

We have so many Tesla sedans running around town that they may not even qualify as status symbols for long.

Truth to tell, I’m roughly the kind of guy who could be in the market for a Ferrari. Oprah, likewise, is roughly the kind of gal who would be in the market for an insanely expensive purse. Our outward signifiers differ most signally in terms of race and sex, and it’s left as an exercise to the student to determine which is the likeliest explanation for disparate treatment.

Nobody’s ever tried to stop me from buying something because they didn’t think I could afford the purchase. I’m physically unprepossessing, stooped, scraggly and snaggle-toothed, perhaps respectable since spectacled, not much to look at. Oprah’s fat and black. I’m confident that the difference in our respective treatment owes more to the color of our skin than our wealth.

The assumption that a person could not afford a $38k purse, even if they’re shopping at that kind of store, is pretty reasonable just on a probabilistic basis without regard to who the person is. Most of the clients would not be billionaires; there just aren’t that many billionaires. For someone who is on the edge of being able to afford it (a group who would massively outnumber the billionaires who could easily afford it), telling them “no” is good sales tactics.

Rich Puchalsky 59

For the incident in a Hermes shop, some people said that she tried to get in after it was closed

So you find O. Winfrey has stamped her feet and yelled racism because another luxury shop didn’t behave Winfrey enough …

no versions of either story say that she was plainly dressed

… but that doesn’t matter, because sweatpants! On a trope!

As far as I can tell, it became a trope in this thread […] Which is a classic reversal that happens in stories involving black people.

And we all know sweatpants are the tool of the racist.

Well damn. Busted.

But, Mr Puchalsky, I don’t care about the sweatpants. No one cares about the sweatpants – except you. And even then, I suspect it’s not true love. I suspect (with no psychology experiment to back this feeling, I admit) that you only care about sweatpants because the enable you to find all the racists in the comments. Actually, I don’t think you really love the sweatpants. You are _using_ the sweatpants, Mr Puchalsky.

And it’s not very nice.

I went to UCSD with a white red head named Tyrone Jackson and a black guy named Patrick Mahoney who were in the same social circle. The number of times those two names got mixed up was amazing (and often repeatedly by the same people).

“That’s because none of us is black in America”

and you make that assumption based on .. ?

Being a brown person with a funny name in non-English-speaking continental Europe I do have to wonder some of the time how I would be treated if I didn’t speak with an obvious North American English accent. I know I am recognizable by how fast store clerks switch to English (if they know it) when they hear my accent in the local language. And also, the fact that I speak textbook-with-mistakes local language, instead of any kind of “learned on the job” language.

Is “Mao Cheng Li” the latest incarnation of Abb1/Henri Vieuxtemps/Data Tutushka?

I’ve assumed so for a bit. Ronan isn’t though, I don’t think.

@95

>>I really think you need to start bringing in some evidence to support your whole “Southern white people are not racist, you vile calumniatrix” thing. Or even anecdotes?

Guilty to proven innocent.

Anecdotes? Rarely met one that hasn’t been somewhat fabricated. How about looking for useful data. There is plenty to examine. At the end of the long day, as I see it, one’s racist posture can be measured by ones proximity to the despised. Proximity in habitation, in the schools, at the workplace, in blood, in the heart. Hey, for a start, examine your own Facebook friends roster

I mean, seriously, only the best oppressors live in proximity to the “despised.”

The formula’s mighty convenient for slavers.

” as a mix of dime-store Marxism and racial know-nothingism”

Is this a reply to me, perchance? Sorry, it’s getting hard to follow. I don’t know what any of this has to do with Marxism, but I did ask, repeatedly, to explain what people mean when they accuse that clerk of racism, thinking that perhaps we are talking about the same thing using different words.

PS. Racial know-nothingism? Heh. I like it. It’s me alright.

@107

>>Well, not only that, it’s a fancier way of staking the claim that Southern whites love blacks more than the North does, because they love real black people while The North only loves Abstract Black Person As Rights-Bearing Entity

No, it is an oblique way of saying that, in my estimation, all commentators here are racist to the core. Deal with it.

I did ask, repeatedly, to explain what people mean when they accuse that clerk of racism

That she discrimated against a woman (decided not to sell her something) because of her race?

I may be wrong but I think you’re agreeing this happened, but you’re also claiming it wasn’t racism because the underlying reason was that she associated being black with being poor. Supposing that to be true, for most people it doesn’t change the fact that it is racism.

Argh. Let’s try that again.

Thirty percent (30%) of Americans polled by Reuters do not even have an acquaintance (e.g., a co-worker) of a different race or ethnicity.

It may be prejudice on my part, but I would not blame the sales clerks of boutiques and the bouncers of nightclubs for the snobbishness of the 1%. Those who serve the rich know who to exclude if they do not want their clientele to move on to Dubai, London, New York, or wherever to do their partying and shopping. After all, how can the elite feel exclusive if not by excluding, better still, have others do their excluding for them?

Ain’t possible. Remember: racists are racist, thus prejudiced, thus ipso facto irrational.

I disagree. There is “statistically rational” racism. If I’m going to interview a number of candidates for a job that requires good facilities with English and I have a large number of applications, I’m going to be picking 1 in 10 to interview anyway. By systematically excluding non-whites (in a high immigration community), I’ve increased the the chance that a random candidate has good facilities with English.

I’ve also done evil.

If we are going to tackle racism, pretending there’s never gain for the individual simply makes us look silly. We need to acknowledge that personally rational action can absolutely be socially damaging.

West@111

On the one hand, you are clearly correct. Certain actions can be rational, yet have racist or racially disparate effects. And these actions are often taken because they benefit those doing them.

On the other hand, prejudice, whether in greater or lesser amounts, is not really a rational thing. It comes more from the “gut” than anything else, and as such is more often “rationalized” rather than “adopted rationally” (if that makes any sense). It is seldom possible to persuade someone to abandon their prejudice by rational arguments. People can and do change, but prejudice is usually something that diminishes gradually over time, and is lessened more by experience than rational argument.

“I may be wrong but I think you’re agreeing this happened, but you’re also claiming it wasn’t racism because the underlying reason was that she associated being black with being poor.”

You are not terribly wrong. “Poor” is “not super-rich” in this case. And “a combination of characteristics, one of them her skin color” instead of “being black”.

“Supposing that to be true, for most people it doesn’t change the fact that it is racism.”

Fine. A gross trivialization of the concept IMO, but if this is indeed how most people feel, they should have it. I hope it’s still more controversial than you think.

A short PETA film hosted by Joaquin Phoenix:

It comes more from the “gut” than anything else, and as such is more often “rationalized” rather than “adopted rationally” (if that makes any sense).

It absolutely makes sense. My response was a reaction to the “I’m not irrationally prejudiced, therefor I can’t be racist” attitude that is very common. It’s also why I’m not part of the “free-market will solve racism” Libertarian crowd.

There was intense debate of racial issues in the decades either side of WWII which culminated in a decisive victory for the anti-racist side. Overt racism became taboo thereafter. Now the great benefit of a taboo is that it enables the winners of a morally loaded argument to sit back, put their feet up by the fire, and enjoy the fruits of their labours without further disturbance. The great problem of a taboo is the same: it causes those victors to immediately cast aside all the reasoning and argumentation that brought about their success in the first place. Some of the posts on this thread make this problem manifest.

Serious problems may result from this, in particular as a new form of racism is slowly taking shape that is highly resilient in the face of moral condemnation alone. It results from population genetics directly instead of from political wish fulfilment couched in terms of pseudo-genetics. Its resistance stems from the fact that, when subject to criticism, proponents can figuratively speaking point to a slide rule and say “it’s not me saying it, it’s this”.

These two examples (1, 2) are to be found on the PBS website. They concern Sickle-Cell Anaemia, a severe condition reducing sufferers’ Darwinian fitness to zero but one that confers upon carriers (non-symptomatic people having one copy of the Sickle-Cell allele) strong resistance against Malarial infection. The gene responsible is common where ever malaria was historically prevalent; for the purposes of this argument, it may be considered a racial trait.

The authors of the PBS pages would probably be appalled at the idea that they’ve advanced racist claims but this is indeed what they have done. It should be pointed out, however, that rather than constructing a racist position without valid scientific, social or medical motivation they have instead arbitrated between two arguments each of which is racist in one form or another.

The first argument is that populations with elevated levels of the sickle cell gene are somehow diseased: that the elevated prevalence of the gene is a form of sickness in the population. The counter-argument, outlined above and known as heterozygote advantage, counters this by pointing out that the population is healthy and that sickle-cell anaemia sufferers simply drew an unlucky ticket: their tragic loss is the gain of the population at large. The benefit of malaria resistance (accruing to the 12-14% of the population that are carriers in some malaria zones) counter-balances deaths due to unlucky inheritance of copies of the gene from both parents (resulting in death of around 1 in 200 people born in some localities).

The stock response to such claims is that race is a political invention rather than a scientific idea. This is correct on a technical level but its political relevance is to be doubted. Those who attempt to employ racist arguments for nationalistic or tribal advantage are naturally already comfortable with the idea of race as a political idea. Their interest in the debate is not primarily scientific. The ‘race as a political construct’ objection is therefore politically fruitless. To the racist agitator, the question of whether the target of his attacks is defined by the geography of his African roots or the resultant skin tone is immaterial: he only cares that his gun is pointing at his chosen target.

The wider implications of Sickle Cell Anaemia as an example (like many of the other examples mentioned on the PBS website, e.g. PKE prevalence in Ireland and Scotland) are limited but this won’t always be true in practice. To take a particular example, a 2006 paper by Cochran, Hardy and Harpenden (Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence, Journal of Biosocial Science 38 (5), pp. 659–693) made claims with potentially explosive implications for modern manners with regard to race issues. Their views have not gained widespread acceptance among specialists and it is the nature of the dispute and the reasons relevant experts have failed to make certain relevant observations that are obvious and incontestable that are of interest to me here.
The empirical basis for the claims of Cochran et al is uncontroversial, whatever its scientific merit. Ashkenazi Jews score higher on IQ tests than other populations and carriers of genes associated with certain disorders (including Tay-Sachs disease, Niemann-Pick syndrome, Gaucher’s disease) common in among Ashkenazim score higher again.
So much for the empirical foundation; on the other hand IQ test performance is admittedly scientifically questionable. To take the stock objection once again, it’s not clear what it might mean seeing as IQ tests are not a natural phenomenon. Also once again, this is correct in a narrow sense but irrelevant. The objectivity of the tests is not in doubt: contestants all take the same test and endeavour to score as highly as possible. Though qualitative interpretation of the results is impossible because the standard is arbitrary (i.e. the IQ test is essentially arbitrary), this doesn’t alter the objective fact that carriers of, for example, Tay-Sachs disease score more highly. The standard is arbitrary but the result is not. In other words, problems in translating the results into real-world implications shouldn’t be confused with an absence of real-world data.
Eliminating that objection opens the way to the issue of substance: are Cochran et al right or are their adversaries? Cochran etc claim the prevalence of these genes in the Ashkenazi gene pool results from natural selection and speculate as to the reasons. Their adversaries (from what I’ve gathered, most or all specialists in the field) claim to have proven this claim incorrect, putting forward other causal explanations (e.g. genetic drift or founder effect).
Luckily, this dispute can be arbitrated without any specialist knowledge.
An anomaly exists: the three named conditions (Tay-Sachs disease, Niemann-Pick syndrome, and Gaucher’s disease) are all lipid storage disorders. Though each results from a different gene (they’re causally unrelated from the point of view of individual medicine), they’re symptomatically very similar; each relates to lipid storage in the brain.
Cochran etc attempt to explain this anomaly and they may be correct or incorrect. On the other hand, their detractors’ arguments cannot explain the symptomatic relationship between causally unrelated conditions each of which confers an IQ boost. Genetic drift cannot explain it. Founder effect, i.e. particularities in the very small Ashkenazi survivor population after the medieval purges can, but only pushes the question of causation backwards in time rather than resolving it; what is it that caused this improbable anomaly among the medieval survivors?
Analogously to the sickle-cell anaemia argument above, it’s also worth pointing out that the choice here is not between racist and non-racist arguments but of which racist argument to accept. Cochran’s argument is in essence that Jews are more particularly (to choose a value-neutral adverb) evolved. His opponents conversely claim that the Ashkenazi Jews carry more genetic defects than other populations. Barring refuge in semantics, each argument is somehow racist. The horns of this dilemma are only two among many that lie ahead in the coming years and decades.
When the political right recovered its balance after losing the race argument both scientifically and socially, one of the first angles it chose for renewed attacks was the straw man argument that ‘it was society’s fault’. Starting in the 1980s, this travesty of the nurture side of the nature-nurture debate came to be relentlessly lampooned in the right-wing press. The taboo surrounding genetically deterministic argumentation then caused a peculiar turn of events: left wingers got baited into defending a straw man invented specifically in order to discredit them by their political opponents.
The debate had moved from disputing racist assertions to disputing the existence of any genetically determined differences whatsoever between individuals. It’s not necessary to enter into this argument to observe that a) it’s a tactical error to get involved in an argument on terms of your adversaries’ choosing and b) whatever its scientific merits, denial of the existence of all genetically-determined individual differences is a very broad claim, a claim unnecessarily broad to counter the specific and rather shallow brickbats being thrown by the right.
Though the idea that this self-inflicted wound results from the existence of a taboo against racism (albeit one that has righted at least some wrongs and opened opportunities for people previously unjustly denied them) is contestable, the need to retain in the coming years a capacity for sharp and detailed analysis of questions like these is not. It is unreasonable to hope that continuing developments in genetics will be wholly without political meaning. For example a structuralist would point out that an argument that might, like Cochran’s, be called pro-Semitic is likely to re-emerge later in an anti-Semitic form. To be pro-Semitic is furthermore to be anti-everyone else.
The political right accepts by its very nature the idea that some people are better than others. They have always been and will remain comfortable, obliquely if not directly, with racist claims. It is of great importance that the left exhibit sufficient moral courage to tackle such morally loaded questions with equal equanimity.
The politics of tribe and nation are making an unforeseen comeback. Common today are uncivil and brazen attacks on, for example, Muslims, Roma and Southern- and Central-Americans that were unthinkable twenty years ago. More importantly, the demographics of the reactionary element have been transformed. By the early 90s they were a dwindling and elderly band. Nowadays, they are youthful and growing. Do not rely on hope alone or on unsupported moral condemnation to ensure that the political exploitation of national and racial ideas, or any resulting horrors, is a thing of the past.

@Tom West

I agree. I pretty much acknowledged that already.

However dealing with, say, Tay-Sachs carriers is not the same as comparing separate populations, however selected. The former compares individuals within a population, the latter compares distinct population groups.

If I’m understanding 133 correctly, the argument is: “Science! has identified some correlations between specific genes and diseases; therefore, people who think discrimination based on the social category of race is problematic should worry.”

I’m not worried. Not about that, anyway.

Tom West, I first decided against commenting on your 121, but since you replied to me here it is: IMO, you shouldn’t worry about the race of you applicants, and read their CVs instead.

A discussion of what you call “statistically rational racism”, aka ‘profiling’ would be interesting, but it’s too late here and I’m not quite sober.

In short: you can be against it, and you can forbid it in the official functions (probably a very good idea, in most cases), but I don’t think you can force private individuals to suspend their common sense where their personal interests are involved. For as long as there are identifiable characteristics that can be profiled, no one will be able to force you to, say, pick up a hitchhiker who looks dangerous to you. It’s a losing fight and not a smart one, to denounce people for following their rational impulses.

To white liberals with little intimate experience of them, negroes are forever strange and other. Perhaps you s’hould sleep with a few. It might help.
Same with others as well: maybe you’ll accept that Zionism is racism after shring a bed with an arab.

The monumental ignorance of feminism contained in this argument is really something remarkable.

The assumption that fucking X precludes regarding X as strange and other perhaps…

To the people uming and ahing over the apparenrly mysterious motivations of the Swiss shop assistant – maybe, just maybe, Oprah Winfrey is a better judge of her own lived experience than you, random white blog commenter.

I’m not quite sure what this is supposed to mean in this context. I’m perfectly willing to take Oprah’s word for it on what she said and did, how she was dressed (if you consider that relevant), and what the clerk said and did — at least, unless the clerk steps forward with a differing account, which seems unlikely in this case.

But because Oprah lived through the experience she has some special insight into what was going on in the clerk’s mind? Not unless she wants to come out as a telepath. She has to infer the clerk’s state of mind from her words and actions the same as anyone else, and if those words and actions are ambiguous, different people may come to different conclusions and the only one who can really *know* is the clerk herself. (But she might lie to make herself look better, so you can’t just take her word for it either. If she was even identified and willing to comment, which AFAIK she isn’t.)

I’m inclined to think the clerk probably did jump to a wrong conclusion based partly, or even chiefly, on Oprah’s race. Which would certainly involve some racist beliefs or attitudes. But if I drew a different conclusion from the same facts as Oprah, I don’t see why I shouldn’t be willing to state and defend it. Oprah has unique information (unless she shares it) on her OWN mental state at the time of the events. Not anyone else’s.

Unless you just mean “you can’t know as well as Oprah does how these events made Oprah feel”, which is certainly true, but not so relevant to the subthread.

Shrimp? Really?

Hey, you want to fire this up?

“(I’d suspect Ronan, too, but s/he’s too stylistically different).”

Ehh, na.
I am a little embarrassed, however, at having tried to sell myself as some class of authority on sales practices in Swiss boutiques, or more generally on racism in Europe. I’ve never even been to Switzerland, afaicr
Still think the Oprah situation is some weak tea though.

To further on Fu Ko @77:

“But there is another explanation. On Facebook, Margaret Shenton – a friend of a friend – offered a Zambian perspective. I don’t know Margaret, but she allowed me to share her reactions:

It is a con…. They play this trick all the time hoping that you are a purse-proud Arab, Congolese, Nigerian, Rwandese with largesse who will throw up a tantrum saying, “Do you know who I am and how much money I have, I can buy you and your entire shop.” Good that Oprah didn’t rise to the bait.

Racism? Maybe. Profiling? Definitely. I would guess that, statistically speaking, a very well-dressed black woman coming into an exclusive Zurich shop is not unlikely to be a wealthy African.

From a game theoretic point of view, then, the shop assistant’s strategy is not stupid. If the customer is, in fact, too poor to afford the purse, then she has lost nothing. If the customer is rich enough to afford the purse, and insists upon buying it to demonstrate that fact – well, the assistant might have offended someone, but she’s still sold a purse worth tens of thousands of dollars.

I don’t know what the right explanation is. But as an economist, I always prefer explanations that don’t come down to “people are stupid.” ”

from: http://worthwhile.typepad.com/worthwhile_canadian_initi/2013/08/oprah-winfrey-victim-of-racism-or-marketing.html

“From a game theoretic point of view, then, the shop assistant’s strategy is not stupid. If the customer is, in fact, too poor to afford the purse, then she has lost nothing. If the customer is rich enough to afford the purse, and insists upon buying it to demonstrate that fact – well, the assistant might have offended someone, but she’s still sold a purse worth tens of thousands of dollars.”

But she also (in the way the scenario actually plays out) misses out on the commission involved in selling a 31 grand ? This is obviously someone who put a lot of time and effort into building a career in high end retail, who has dealt with rich people from all walks of life throughout her career. Not sure why she would put her career under threat just for the larf
Winfrey clearly used her immense wealth and privilege to attack a shop assistant on spurious grounds (linking it to a racist incident in a NY shop but without explicitly saying it was racist)

Indeed, to carry it a bit further, temperature scales are “data.” If you tell me it’s 10 degrees Celsius outside, I don’t know what that means. I’m used to the Fahrenheit scale. I know ’86’ is warm, 100 is hot, 32 is cold, 10 is very cold (well, to me). Does 10 Celsius mean hot, cold, warm, very cold, cool? I don’t know, because I can’t interpret it. It’s meaningless to me without interpretation.

So with “intelligence.” What does it mean? The insight of Aquinas? The wisdom of Augustine? The logic of Godel? What is it, and how is it measured? When you tell me a certain identifiable class of people (Ashkenazi Jews) score better than almost any other group on an IQ test, what you’ve told me is that Ashkenazi Jews are very good at discerning the correct answers to an entirely arbitrary set of questions. You haven’t tole me that they are quantitatively smarter than anyone else, because I don’t know how you quantify “smarter” (i.e., intelligent). It is date “from the real world” that they answer the questions more accurately on the whole than other groups; but how do I interpret that data?

Interpretation is the inescapable issue. Data without interpretation is meaningless.

First, thanks Belle for your posts – they are brilliantly written and a great expression of lived experience (isn’t that something we on the left are supposed to take seriously?).

Since the thread already has been derailed, my two cents on the Oprah issue:

1. cent, regarding “yes there is racism, but not in this case”: So why waste so much time speculating about what that sales person was thinking? I can see why Rush Limbaugh does it – b/c he wants to distract the conversation from what is important about it, which isn’t a billionaire’s feelings, but – racism. But all the commenters here who I completely believe when they say racism is a very serious issue, why would you analyze this single case to death, instead of just saying “yes, whatever the case in this single instance, this is the kind of expression of racism that is just depressingly common (believe me, it is), so what do we do about it?”

2. cent: relatedly, this whole speculating about an individual incident also does a real disservice to the sales person in question who may well have been a victim of a misunderstanding based on language issues, not being a native (American) English speaker.

godoggo @ 159
That’s the way to do it, I think, but the “big bazillionnaire taking a dump on clerk, thunderous applause” angle of the thing makes me bite the walls. Some people are Wrong on the Internet.

christian_h @ 158
what is important about it, which isn’t a billionaire’s feelings, but – racism.

I’ve… seen things you people wouldn’t believe… [laughs] I have seen the Not-Oprah saying in a link above that she, in fact, didn’t behave as Oprah does. I have seen the Out-Oprah, and guessed all the laws that such discrimination would break in Switzerland, but won’t be applied, because of course the Bully shall be paid in humiliation and publicity. I have seen all the anti-racism associations in Switzerland, not-waiting for O.W. support, because they are not as dumb as the average internet poster. I have seen the huddled masses of the black millionnaires, free at last of the tyranny of racism in 1%er shops. All those… moments… will be lost in the stupid….like [coughs] tears… in… rain. Time… to sleep…

currently sitting atop paynic’s twitter account:

I mean, the tricky part isn’t the existing wealth and privilege, but justifying the nepotism and hereditary aristocracy the next hegemony desires as always. Jaden and Willow Smith, Kennedy to Japan, Chelsea Clinton, Obama daughters.

The Waring posts are worth studying. Just folks folks, oh great-grandaddy used to have his railroad car, but nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen. Cause misogyny and racism. Don’t ask about my island.

Well, yikes, I think the Jaden Smith thing above is an example of the limitations of these sort of conversations among white people about racism. I’d speculate that people who support Black autonomy would feel different about Smith’s wealth, but that’s all I can do.

OK, I apologize for offensive comment above.

White people don’t go out of their way to have awkward conversations with me. In the past, my most interesting conversations tends to be with Asians who think I’m part East Asian. Hardly awkward, though.

I’m a little amused by the Oprah thing. As someone who’s into tea, particularly puerh tea, I know that I will not ever have regular access to the best tea, even if I had the megabucks. You have to know someone, and be friendly with them to get such things. And I think that’s true of most categories of the best things. The idea of some fancy schmancy bag with the designer’s name all over it repulses me. Any product that has to be tattooed with marketing, by definition, cannot be among the best, or even a good value.

shah8 173

A _little_ amused? Come on, the thing is irksome, but apart of that, hilarious. It’s The Onion in the news. There :

”
Racism rises its ugly head in Switzerland! Black billionnaire shown mere millionnaire bag in boutique!
Totally not southern redneck US people on the internet deplore the sad state of the conversation on race in Switzerland : “Because of the country history, they never had a real desegregation”. Clerk apologizes for her lack of sensitivity, says she just hadn’t realized that her grand grand father might have owned Oprah’s grand grand father, hadn’t recognized Oprah, me speak no good English, stop hurting me please please.

Filthy rich black people over the world extend thanks and support to Oprah Winfrey, regain hope, wonder if maybe the stuff at Petrossian last time was maybe a bit stale, hhhm.
“

Although I tend to acquire from accents, I always get it, so why not everyone else?

34: This, would be fascinating with context. Was it an act of astonishing humanity, or ‘we cant maintain this system, time to make a run for it’ ?

I’m not sure of his motives, but from context I think it was the humanity thing, because surely if he’d just wanted to make a run for it he would have sold them off rather than freeing them?
Or maybe he just hated his in-laws, and this was his way of spiting them.

When people complain about immigration, immigrants and minorities, they complain about their culture, customs, and religion, not the darkness of their skin.

But *which* immigrants and minorities are they complaining about? Is there just as much complaint about French or English immigrants? (Swedes and Danes, maybe, if there’s rivalries going back centuries…)

People can say that they acknowledge that race is unscientific, and still freak out *more* about immigrants that look different than themselves and perhaps not even notice the ones that are so similar you don’t recognize them at a glance when you pass them on the street.

“. They all say that italians in Switzerland are not perceived positively; recently the Swiss chose to limit the number of italian workers admitted in Switzerland. ”

And which nations workers pray tell are perceived so much more positive that their number has been limited more than the Italian number. Ah right none, since Italian worker have the same preferential threatment as all other EU workers.

PS – … of whatever complexion

… and, I guess it follows, of whatever gender.

@rmj, 159

I think that in mentioning IQ I obscured the core idea more than I revealed it. It’s not a necessary component of the argument.

Certain autosomal recessive disorders exist at elevated rates in certain populations, e.g. Phenylketonuria (e.g. Irish), Sickle Cell Anaemia (e.g. West Africans), Tay-Sachs disease (Ashkenazi Jews). The choice is between A) these populations being diseased or B) homozygote advantage implying that the population has adapted to some stress. Each explanation is can be fairly characterised in common English as racist, regardless of the scientific worth of the term because .

But in the particular case of Ashkenazi Jews — leaving aside all questions of IQ — there exists another piece of microbiological evidence: the existence at much elevated frequencies of genes associated with symptomatically related but causally independent conditions in one population. It’s not necessary to accept the explanation of Cochran et al for this phenomenon to observe that this anomaly demands an explanation. Several of these conditions are moreover associated with brain chemistry.

I should mention that these genes possess no fixed or objective fitness on their own. At low frequencies, their impact on health will be statistically negligible. Only as the frequency of occurrence increases does the impact grow (S=1/(4f^2), S=fraction of sufferers; f=fraction of carriers; that’ for the population in question, but for a confirmed carrier, S=1/4f).

But I’m going to get off the fence. According to Steven Pinker, “Though never exceeding 3 percent of the American population, Jews account for 37 percent of the winners of the U.S. National Medal of Science, 25 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in literature, 40 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, and so on. On the world stage, we find that 54 percent of the world chess champions have had one or two Jewish parents.”

These are likewise all arbitrary standards, but then any test of human achievement is ultimately arbitrary — the olympic games, accountancy examinations, musical ability. There’s very little subjective about the results of any of these tests, however. In fact it’s difficult to imagine a standard more objective than a scientific award. I already acknowledged the difficulty in interpreting any of these observations in a materialist way; this problem does not render such tests meaningless, however.

I’m not nearly so enthusiastic about IQ as Pinker; the field is seriously tainted by dishonest studies funded by openly racist groups. J Philippe Rushton lead one such group and was quoted on Cochran here by National Geographic. Rushton and his cronies have a standard MO: insert raw racism in non peer-reviewed journals, then cite themselves and each other in less disreputable venues and obscure the origins of their data with a view to laundering it. The likes of Rushton were pariahs just a couple of decades ago. Not so today, it seems.

There was no assumption that Winfrey was poor, *at most* just that she wasnt rich enough to buy the most expensive bag in the shop – this might be store policy, a general prejudice with the shop assistant, racism, the handbag makers policy (who only want to see a specific ‘type’ of person wear the bag) etc
In only one of those scenarios is it the shop assistants moral failings that prevented Winfrey getting the bag
On the other hand it could have just played out like the shop assistant said..a misunderstanding? Winfrey looking for a fight? Who knows..
Any normal reaction would be to say it to the person serving you, at most to their manager, but taking it directly to the media, with no clarrifications, no warnings, and putting her job in jeopardy? I cant see how thats justified
Winfrey could have taken it up with high end retail or high end fashion in general, but she didnt, she took it up with a specific person and decided to use all of her resources to paint the woman who served her as a racist, so why should we automatically believe her interpretation? Her issue wasnt with the shop or the industry but with an individual and she offerred that individual no opportunity to defend herself so, personally, I call bulls**t

There was no assumption that Winfrey was poor,

Not sure how you know this, Ronan, but to be clear I haven’t expressed an opinion on Oprah v. the Swiss clerk, only on Mao Cheng Ji’s view that ‘statistically rational racism’ isn’t racism.

If that’s the case it would be still be an assumption about socioeconomic status based on race so still racial prejudice but as I said I don’t personally know or care about the details of the incident (far less want to defend OW against your moral critique of her subsequent behaviour in 188…)

@hix 143
I never said that the Swiss have a worse opinion of Italians than of other europeans, as I said I (italian) never felt discriminated in Switzerland.
I only reported the summary of the interview as reported by the italian newspaper. According to that summary , the clerk stressed the fact that she is italian, as if that was a proof that she couldn’t be racist. Since that is quite weird (a lot of italians are racist), I tried to work out what was the logical connection, and the only explanation I can think of is that many italians believe they suffer from some ( very mild) discrimination in Switzerland.

Ronan: “But she also (in the way the scenario actually plays out) misses out on the commission involved in selling a 31 grand ?”

Maybe she did miss out on _this_ commission (which can be known only after the fact). But that does not imply that it is not a good way to get the commission on average.

Wow, it so’s great to see that Belle is Back, and that in response the entire CT commentariat has turned out to greet her.

As an American who’s lived her entire adult life in a European country famed for its hospitality to strangers but which actually practices strong stereotyping of strangers, I had pretty much the same experience (mutatis mutandis) as OW about twenty years ago. Searching for a chest of drawers for Child #2’s bedroom, I entered a store in the furniture district. The owner saw me looking at a white laminate piece and helpfully remarked, “This piece is too expensive for you.” Why? I was dressed in blue jeans and had a foreign accent – he just assumed (i.e. took a mental shortcut, which is basically what stereotyping is) that (a) I was an economic immigrant from the former USSR (the furniture district was home to thousands of them) and (b) I was too poor to buy a laminate chest of drawers, given the blue jeans attire.

Point being, Europe is not the USA, and negotiating the particular class/racial stereotypes of European countries (individually – they each have different ones) isn’t as easy as it seems from the outside. I am still caught off guard by local prejudices.

OTOH, I have a positive anecdote to relate. Child #1 has been working for a NYC agency for several years, and has been taken under the wing of his supervisor. He’d been working there two years before I realized (via a particular event the boss attended) that the boss was black. The boss had overcome his prejudice against having a white male under his wing, and the child himself didn’t think his boss’s race was even worth a mention. Child #2 is having similar experiences in Baltimore.

Point being, they grew up in a country that doesn’t display the specific form of racism-cum-classism that characterizes the US (though their native country displays plenty of other prejudices, including open sexism), so they simply don’t have it, and their black colleagues and bosses sense this. You really have to grow up in the US (Illinois for me, grandparents from NC/WV replete with all the relevant prejudices) and then live somewhere very different to appreciate how profoundly racism is embedded in the fabric of American thinking.

P.S. Belle: Hmm, I see you still recall that GoT thread (as do I), and yep, this one has been way pleasanter, at least so far. Kind of reminds me of one of my favorite stories about the late Shirley Chisholm, who once noted that she had faced far more discrimination because she was a woman than because she was black.

People can say that they acknowledge that race is unscientific, and still freak out *more* about immigrants that look different than themselves and perhaps not even notice the ones that are so similar you don’t recognize them at a glance when you pass them on the street.

There’s a fair amount of freaking out in this country at the moment about eastern European immigrants, who don’t look that different from the natives except for having much shorter hair and being surrounded by a +3 Aura of Plumbing Excellence.