That’s Racism, Everybody!

There aren’t racist people, only racist acts.

And I promise to read Balko from now until Romney passes the Guaranteed Income for All Act (Romn-econ, the press will call it) if you give some examples of how the yam crate-labels are racist.

sometimes daylight burglaries
Something that’s true but surprises a lot of people is that a very larger percentage (maybe a majority- I’m too lazy to look right now, but a larger percentage anyway) of burglaries take place in the daytime. Why? Because people are more likely to be home at night, and burglars don’t like to run into people. Also, it’s not suspicious to be walking around in the day. That means that even if more burglaries take place in the day, it’s almost certainly not the case that someone you see walking around in the day is more likely to be a burglar, because there are more people around. This is a long-winded way of saying that it takes a _certain_ sort of person to start getting suspicious in the circumstances in this case.

There aren’t racist people, only racist acts.
What would this mean? Does this apply to clumsy people, thoughtless people, kind people, etc? If so, even if it’s true, it’s probably not that interesting (it would be a misleading way to say something.) If not, why this particular case?

Balko is a tough case. I read “The Agitator” blog all the time and I think it’s fair to say that Balko is one of the best out there on civil liberties. Brutal cops, the idiotic drug war, militarization of law enforcement, capital punishment, (apartheid) South Africa style incarceration, d0mestic police-state tactics in the GWOT, etc., he does it all. But the right-wing, Cato Institute-style conservatism leaves me cold. What part of “Social Compact” don’t libertarians understand?

Belle, as usual, is dead on.

Did Steve Sailor really take that many jobs all by himself?

Matt,

Short(-ish) answer: a “racist” act is one committed out of conscious or unconscious bias, prejudice etc. demonstrating bigotry toward a particular race. If I spit on a person of another race because he shouldn’t be walking on the same side of the sidewalk as me, that’s racist. If I mean to spit in a trash can and it accidentally hits a black person, that’s not. More importantly, it’s not the same act.

I’m not sure what you’re getting at with “thoughtless” and “kind” people. Some of that is dealt with in the post (well-rounded person and all that). I don’t know, maybe you can provide ones you’re thinking of that are grey, but for the most part racist acts are pretty black and white (that’s what the last link in the post is getting at).

Long answer: To make sense of this, consider the opposite. Let’s say that to be racist meant that you had racist thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. Racist cognitive states. Some are conscious, some are self-identified as being racist, some are not. Sometimes those translate into action, sometimes not.

Well, what follows? If that were true, then everyone on Earth would be racist, and we would only be able to speak of degrees of racism.

Now, this might be true from a purely descriptive standpoint. (I don’t think we have the technology or philosophical sophistication yet to determine whether it’s true, but it’s plausible it’s true). But it doesn’t match, at all, the way that “racism” functions in our discourse. To be guilty of “racism” is to be guilty of something coherent enough and uncommon enough that society can identify it and have “racist” and “not racist” be meaningful categories. “Having unconscious prejudicial bias against people with outgroup distinctions” satisfies neither of those criteria. “Acting on that bias” does.

Now, there might be some worthwhile application of the term “racist” to broader abstractions of social groups that wouldn’t turn on whether a specific act by an individual was racist. Fer instance, if you live in a society in which the economy completely depends on slave labor to harvest a crucial crop, and all the slaves are a different race than the non-slaves, it could make sense to think of anyone living in that society as being “racist”, even though they themselves don’t commit any “racist” acts. I’m not sure how much water this argument holds, but it sounds plausible.

In any event, I don’t think that’s the argument you were making, and even if “racist” can apply to social groups like that, it wouldn’t have any bearing on the appropriateness of referring to individual people as “racist”.

V@6:
Zimmermann is Hispanic himself and thus, exceedingly unlikely to hate Mexicans as a class

I’d like to introduce you to my Father-in-law, Mr. Sanchez who has on more than one occasion ranted in my presence about Those Mexican Immigrants, repeating GOP talking points and all. He has separated in his mind himself and his family from those Others. I have yet to impress on him the fact that Rush and the gang don’t make a distinction between him and those Other Mexicans.

How to Tell People They Sound Racist” is relevant here, in particular, why the “What they did” conversation is more useful (by being harder to derail) than the “What they are” conversation.

I’m just trying to understand.

I really don’t think you are, you know.

Data, just out of curiosity, do you have a moustache of any kind? Do you expect radical changes in the international political environment in the next six months?

“Our blog is just drinking a cup of coffee, and making plans to kiss…Clive Owen? I may need to re-do the polling on this one.)”

I always saw it more as spooning Anthony Hopkins, fwiw

I should really really stop looking at the evil, makes me have to lie down watching the blood beat in the capillaries of the back of my eye computer.

You really really should, that’s awful. Can’t remember if I’ve asked before, but have you tried melanin-coated computer-reading eyeglasses? My life partner now swears by them for computer use and bugs me to get a pair, but any tint in the lenses makes my pupils dilate too much, so no go for me. (Also, I have no idea if there’s sound scientific principle behind the melanin tint for glasses or not, and am an unreliable resource for that kind of thing; uh, I once believed the anti-static wrist straps that don’t run a wire to anything actually worked.)

I was defeated.

But in the best possible way.

30: and not, Is he a RACIST? So what if he is?

It is, and was, very important for legal reasons.

Jeralyn Merritt

But it seems the state has probably foreclosed a conviction on a federal hate crimes charge. With state investigators swearing under oath Zimmerman said “punks” instead of the alleged racial slur, even if others disagree, there’s no way it will pass the proof beyond a reasonable doubt requirement for a hate crime conviction.

To be accurate, some people have talked about repealing the SC lyching law. Not repealed yet.

It is, and was, very important for legal reasons.

Sorrrry, no! A non-racist can commit a hate crime. And as for that slam-dunk ‘goons’ cover story, Zimmerman began the commission of a hate crime the moment he decided to give chase to a black kid under the racist presumption that that kid was a criminal.

I understand you’re thrilled to have any excuse to celebrate a state-sanctioned murder of an undesirable — good to know who you’d really like to see be first against the wall, by the way — but that’s no excuse to come slobber on us. Newsmax totally needs your insight and acuity on this one; go have fun with your friends.

Merp at 9-
Thanks for your long reply. I’m not 100% sure I understand your position completely. My position is that it’s perfectly coherent and right to talk about both acts and people as racist, and that the connection between the two isn’t (always) linear. That’s so with many things- being kind, careless, a jerk, clumsy, brave, etc. You can do a kind thing without being a kind person, for example, but doing kind things isn’t _merely_ evidence of being a kind person. Being a racist person is a bit more tricky, of course, because many of the racists “acts” are mental acts that may not have obviously external features. (If, for example, I think that blacks or most hispanics are genetically inferior to whites, even if this doesn’t show up in any straight-forward way in my behavior, I’d be a racist.) This is to say that being a racist is a character trait, and it comes in degrees, as do (probably) all character traits. Character is a tricky thing- much harder to make sense of than most people have thought (though less than some think now.) But, it doesn’t seem implausible (the opposite, really) that we can think of both individual acts that are racist and a person having a racist character, just as we can with other traits of the sort I’d mentioned.

I can’t tell for sure from your account whether you’re committed to the view or not, but I’d also reject the view that racism must be “in the heart”, as people who write on this stuff say. That is, it need not be a cognitive (not fully, anyway) or intentional trait. The philosopher Tommie Shelby has done excellent work on this, if you’re interested.

I think there is some senses in which we might truthfully say that some societies are more racist than others- for example, if one society has many more racists in it, and these racist elements are considered okay, that would be a more racist society than one lacking these traits, even if this society didn’t have formal discrimination. But a society that had formal discrimination would also be racist. This seems uncontroversial to me, though often enough unhelpful, since it won’t tell you a ton about individuals in the particular society.

have you tried melanin-coated computer-reading eyeglasses?

I don’t even see melanin.

“(And it is good of you to take time out to ask the redundant question at the start.)”

If the question is “redundant,” wouldn’t it have to be at least the second question? If it were to redund, there would need to be a first dunder, right? A quick search through thesaurus.com doesn’t really come up with a better word – not baseless, superfluous, inapposite, spurious, unwarranted, needless . . . can’t really come up with the word you’re looking for, but I get where you’re headed.

In short, pleonastic can be subsituted for redundant in most cases, except when somebody is being fired.

emmanuelgoldstein,

Maybe it’s cuz I ain’t had caffeine yet but I don’t see any warrants to the claims and distinctions you’re making.

1) Needlessly-snide remarks aside, your first objection relies too much on the one-sentence summary of what I’m saying. “There are no racists, only racist acts” = “We can only call identify as racist things which actually happen; we can’t call having unconscious prejudicial bias against people with outgroup distinctions racism.” Using the definition I want to use, we can still call people who do racist things “racists”, just as we talk about “painters”, “boaters”, “gamers”, etc. There’s still a question of “where do you draw the line; what’s the statute of limitations on calling someone a racist”, but that question exists under the definition you want to use, too.

2) “Only when someone has a stable tendency to experience racist emotions, enjoy cognitive states with racist content or affect, and act on them etc. is that person properly called a racist.”

That applies to everyone ever. We all have a “stable tendency” to experience racist emotions, have racist cognitive states. It’s hard-wired into our brains. That’s my point. This distinction is not a distinction. If your point is that someone has to enjoy their racism for it to be racism, that eliminates the good portion (majority?) of racism which is unconscious/not self aware.

That gets at a point I was driving at but didn’t explicitly state: we can’t judge internal cognitive/emotional states, can we. We can’t possibly think that Jones over there is secretly thinking racist thoughts and getting off on them, look at the way he wears his tie and is drinking his coffee, I just know he uses the term “Macaca”. There’s like a triple-bind in your attempted definition here. If you say “racism is cognitive thought/emotion”, everyone everywhere is racist. If you say “racism is cognitive thought/emotion that acknowledges/takes pleasure in making bigoted outgroup distinctions”, a big chunk of racism is defined out of existence. If you say “racism can be unconscious cognitive thought/emotion that makes bigoted outgroup distinctions”, not only are we back to calling everyone racist but no-one can be accused of being racist under this definition. It’d be like a Monty Python sketch. “You’ve just had an unconscious cognitive thought/emotion that makes bigoted outgroup distinctions.” “No I haven’t.” “Ohp you did it again!” The only way out of this thicket is to focus on acts.

Matt,

I don’t think there’s anything more to add, let me know if you think there is. I’ll just say I completely agree that racism doesn’t have to be intentional, and that we’re in agreement on the society stuff (I threw that into my last comment more as a precaution than anything).

We all have a “stable tendency” to experience racist emotions, have racist cognitive states. It’s hard-wired into our brains.

What nonsense. Speak for yourself.

Well, certainly all foreigners have that hardwired tendency.

Matthew 5:43-47.

There is something seriously wrong with someone’s thinking when they get pwnd by JC, 2000 years ago.

“Be ye perfect.”

Michael

GI traditionaly refers to US Army. If your dad was in the Airforce the GI refernce could be a reference to members of a different military branch vs a racial reference.

Merp 46, without googling, I’ll take your word for it, that humans are hard-wired to associate and form groups. But does it mean that everybody who is not in my organization’s staff directory, or all those with passports that don’t look like mine are a different race?

(sorry to people who view this as a derail)

Brief history:

1900s era social scientists theorized/observed preferences/bias for people associated for one’s own group, with group being loosely defined – nation, race, neighbors, class, wearing the same hat.

As psychology began to become more systematized and revolve around cognitive processes people began to more systematically investigate the mechanisms and extent of the preference/bias. It’s able to be manipulated (ie, the factor that triggers preference/bias is able to be changed, the magnitude is able to be changed, etc.) but important things to remember is that it’s widespread (everyone does it all the time) and inherent (people can’t help doing it).

Proceeding decades saw lots of exploration as to the racial component of ingroup outgroup distinction and preference/bias for one’s own group. Findings were that, like other distinctions and preferences/biases, those based on race could be manipulated . But, racial distinction and preference/bias was also widespread, inherent and often acted as a “baseline” distinction (ie, if other distinctions can be made people make them, but people nearly always make racial distinctions if possible).

The rise of computers and brain imaging lead to more fine-tuned investigation of racial ingroup outgroup detection and preference/bias. People classify racial categories quickly and unconsciously, make unconscious and automatic decisions based on racial stereotypes, have specific regions of the brain that are activated in racial distinction/preference/bias that are not activated in other ingroup outgroup distinction/preference/bias, etc.

These processes are variable but everyone has them, like visual acuity or sensitivity to smell. They also have correlations with other cognitive processes – levels of self-esteem and empathy, for example, are correlated with how prevalent these processes are – and the chemical pathways that seem to regulate these processes are involved with all kinds of things – for example, oxytocin seems to regulate both distinction and preference, and oxytocin levels are associated with a myriad of other effects. But, however these processes are actually run in any given person, she still has them.

So, overall, it’s accurate to say people are hard-wired to make ingroup outgroup distinctions and to assign preference/bias based on those distinctions, but racial distinction/preference/bias is a specific subset of that phenomenon which has its own characteristics.

“I wish people would stop being so confused all the time.”

I love this sentence!

Thanks for making me smile!

Acticle is great too.

Are we going to end up back on the savannah here? But seriously, Merp is ably if unwittingly demonstrating the problems with thinking about racism as primarily a psychological or character trait.

And yes, of course there are racists. They are those people that (a) belong to the privileged “race”-group, and (b) more or less consistently act in ways that discriminate against or exhibit animus towards members of less privileged “race”-groups just as such. Problem with thinking about race as just a character trait is that it’s then all too easy to forget about (a). And then you start getting the “Blacks can be just as racists as whites” nonsense. And from there it’s a short step to Merp’s in-between-the-out-group-ism, or whatever he or she is on about.

Please. The stuff I’m talking about has nothing to do with evo psych. There’s a line of evo psych reasoning that wants to try and explain the results I’m talking about, but the theorizing and documentation of these processes was developed completely separately from that stuff.

Plus, guess what: I agree with you! There are racists! And what we call racists and racism shouldn’t have a psychological basis! Because we all have that basis! That’s my point!

Ugh. I still haven’t had caffeine. Maybe that’s why I’m having problems getting my point across. See y’all later.

Otto @52: Racism or more accurately racial discrimination is the differential and unequal treatment of people based upon their membership in immutable groups based upon ancestry.

Seems exactly right, though perhaps one might want to specify that “unequal” means, or generally means, “inferior.” The important point Otto makes is that racism is a matter of “treat[ing] entire groups of people defined by descent from specific cultural groups in ways that restrict their rights, privileges, power, and opportunities relative to other such groups.” It’s a policy. Offensive or merely tasteless talk may imply a frame of mind that may imply readiness to endorse such a policy. But it diminishes the force of the word — as well as producing unnecessary defensiveness and resentment on the part of people who might otherwise be reasoned with — to apply it broadside to loose remarks or casual attitudes or even cultural stereotypes.

Misprint: Otto’s definition of racism, not Data

Radley (54.): do you think that if there had been a rash of burglaries committed by white people, and Zimmerman saw a white teen, he’d have called the cops and followed him? Somehow this never seems to happen. Even though a lot of crimes (and not just of the white-collar variety) are committed by white people, I never read in the paper “Police ordered [random white dude in the neighbourhood who may just have committed the crime of hanging out in his own backyard] to stop and when he failed to do so, shot him dead”. Or “shop keeper shot white teen in the back of her head in dispute over bottle of soda”. While the corresponding thing happens to black kids in Southern California, for example, with depressing regularity.

So in practice, this profiling you approve of in certain circumstances is never innocent. It is always informed by the racist structures – legal, ideological, economic – that shape society. It therefore amounts to racism, no matter what the person doing the profiling thinks they’re doing.

Others say they simply don’t like the odds of having to take them to more dangerous areas of the city, where it’s also difficult to find a passenger going back to Manhattan.

Oh, well then, nothing at all racist in the assumption that any black people hailing a cab in Manhattan probably live in a scary low-income ghetto in the Outer Boroughs. I’d say the cabbies are off the hook.

geo, I will repeat your quote again:
“Racism or more accurately racial discrimination is the differential and unequal treatment of people based upon their membership in immutable groups based upon ancestry”: the word “race” does not appear.
Which country you are born is “membership in immutable group”, and, for *most* people, it is “based upon ancestry”; and this for countries with “ius soli” laws: the “ius sanguini” is even more clear-cut, in that I can drop the qualifier “most”.

Anyhow, those were 2 examples off the top of my head: I am sure you can think of many more reasons why Otto’s is, essentially, playing Humpty-Dumpty to fit his agenda.
And the word “usually” in the ancient regime example is a bit weak: what about “almost exclusively”? And the word “parvenu”, which quite contradicts “newly-created nobles enjoy the same privileges as those of ancient lineage” (but I would ask to the historians among the commenters).

The 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) defines racial discrimination in the following words:

_In this convention, the term ‘racial discrimination’ shall mean any distinction, exclusion, restriction, or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life._

Manta, you truncated the quote: it’s “membership in immutable groups based upon ancestry.” What country you are applying for a visa from is not logically –since you seem to be playing some odd logical game — dependent on your ancestry. Discrimination based on country of origin is just that — discrimination. Possibly invidious, possibly not, depending on the rationale.

What is Otto’s “agenda”?

Oh, well then, nothing at all racist in the assumption that any black people hailing a cab in Manhattan probably live in a scary low-income ghetto in the Outer Boroughs.

Look, it’s not the assumption, it’s the odds, like I said. If you are dealt a king and a 7 in blackjack, there is no assumption that the next card is higher than 4, but still you stop. What’s an alternative explanation?

And geo, do you think that literacy tests for voting laws in US were not racist, because based on literacy (normally, but not always connected to race), instead of race?

76 His agenda is to stop people from talking about actual existing racism, and instead to try and formulate some general theory of: “what counts as racism”, something of interest only to him.

Otto, I completely agree with your points @79: but they seem to flatly contradict the one at 73, which posits that discrimintation based upon (among other things) descent and national origin are racism: if, say, Germany gives German nationality to children of German parents, it is discriminating based on national origin.

Germany was long accused of racial discrimination for giving citizenship preference to ethnic Germans from the USSR over ethnic Turks born in Germany. But, if you read the whole ICERD it specifically deals with the issue of immigration and naturalization.

_Nothing in this Convention may be interpreted as affecting in any way the legal provisions of States parties concerning nationality, citizenship or naturalization, provided such provisions do not discriminate against any particular nationality._

The 1965 International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) defines racial discrimination in the following words:

But racial discrimination is not necessarily the same as racism (at least as I understand the word): that Lautenburg Amendment, for example, as well as Soviet practices implemented in response to it, can be reasonably viewed as merely a tactic in the cold war context, that has absolutely nothing to do with racism (again, at least as I understand the word).

To me, racism is an irrational attitude. Is that not what it is?

And yes, of course there are racists. They are those people that (a) belong to the privileged “race”-group

Come again?

Do Indian or Asian immigrants get a free pass at being racist because they don’t belong to the privileged race? Is Zimmerman by definition not a racist because he is part Mexican? You explicitly give a free pass to blacks being racist, but I don’t see how that’s not simply the bigotry of low expectations.

You want to exonerate the resentment of the oppressed race but you end up exonerating the racism of the oppressed race. Those two are not the same thing — and your definition ends up being rather stupid.

we are now reasonably expected to believe that Zimmermann (a Hispanic himself) hates Mexicans?

I don’t have any intelligent point to make about Zimmerman himself, but the above comment is astonishingly ignorant on a great many levels:

1. Zimmerman’s mother was (is?) Peruvian. While the weirdness of the US ethnic categories may categorize both Mexicans and Peruvians as “Hispanics,” it is not at all unusual for people from different countries to hold deeply rooted prejudices about each other, as this thread amply demonstrates.

2. Every country with which I am familiar has deep social-class and ethnic distinctions *within* the country. This is certainly true across Latin America (though I know little about Peru in particular). For example, many Latin Americans of indigenous heritage immigrate to the US after being forced off their agricultural land and then finding the urban centers in their home countries decidedly unwelcoming.

Therefore, it is not only possible to find people from any given country who hold deep, abiding, and ugly prejudices about others from their country, but in some situations in the US it can be frighteningly common. (One of the most frequent examples is the difference between international students and working-class immigrants from the same country — it is not uncommon to find that members of the first, very privileged, group may hold others in contempt.)

And that doesn’t even get into religious bigotry.

3. Finally, of course, there is the concept of internalized racism — sometimes referred to colloquially as “self-hating…”

In short: Yes, it’s totally possible for someone who is (arbitrarily assigned by outsiders to) Group X to hate (other members of) Group X.

Do Indian or Asian immigrants get a free pass at being racist because they don’t belong to the privileged race?

No, because they can behave in a racist manner towards members of “race”-groups relatively less privileged than they are (as a “race”-group in a given context). Happens all the time of course. What’s nonsense is so-called “reverse racism”.

Late to the thread, but those who have trust issues with Balko’s libertarianism should try Jeralyn Merritt’s TalkLeft blog. I don’t think you will find much difference in their perspectives on this case.

Belle, about those yam crates, you could donate them to the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia:
http://www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/

Belle, thank you for this post. This is exactly right, and needed to be said.

Sure, Watson, what you’re describing sounds like a case of “race”-based animus (though, to be honest, I’ve no idea what the fuck you’re talking about). In a racist society (i.e. a society where the classifications of race categories, and which such category one falls into, have significant material consequences for individuals that fall into one or another of those categories), you’re going to get cases of such animus. E.g., and more frequently, you get tensions or antagonisms between Black and Latino communities even though neither is obviously more privileged than the other.

The point is that if you want to talk about racism as a social or political problem (and there’s no point to talking about racism otherwise), then what matters are the prevalent, historically informed structures of privilege that govern or are operative in that society (not all such structures of course, just the ones relevant to the construction of race categories). As soon as you lose track of these particular structures of privilege, you’ve lost track of racism. I mean, this is so fucking obvious, part of me can’t believe I have to type it out. But then, yes, welcome to the Internets!

(This answers Alex K. too. Not sure why he thinks I was defending affirmative action. Not that I wouldn’t–I happily would! But that wasn’t my point above.)

js is equivocating. Presented with examples where groups he favours have displayed what looks like racist behaviour, he asserts that the only useful definition of racism is as an attribute of the privileged and, as these groups were non-privileged, they cannot usefully be called racist.

I think that lets the majority of the world’s racists off the hook far too easily. Class and gender both really matter; there are plenty of white folks who could never credibly be called privileged. So is js prepared to be consistent and claim that it is of no use to describe, say, white trash as racist? So maybe we should claim Southern lynchings were not racist – it wasn’t the C0lonel in the Plantation house that led those.

Of course it is notorious that racism is much more common among the poor than the rich, because they’re the ones whose position is most threatened by other poor people. If you travel the world you’ll find plenty of poor racists of all races.

I’ve really got no dog in this fight – I live on the other side of the world – but from this distance Radley’s post @54 absolutely nails it. True, I’ve seen enough of coppers – both in my own and other countries – to find it easy to believe in their incompetence. But Belle has really let herself down by joining the lynch mob without waiting to find out what actually happened.

(Shoot. There was supposed to be a blockquote and italics around the word I added, since I wanted to go a step further than Consumatopia. Sorry for confusions.)

Desperately belated reply to James @51 [why are there so many comments? Doesn’t anybody do any work?]:

My Dad always called the airmen GIs. He was in the Army Air Corps before there was a USAF.

Here’s the thing: In the United States today, black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites. Median black household income is about 60 percent of white household income, a gap that has not changed in 30 years; only 60 percent of black kids finish high school, compared with 90 percent of white kids; and so on. And in most parts of the country, there continues to be very sharp pattern of residential segregation. Not to mention the rather vast literature showing that between otherwise identical job candidates, a black one is much less likely to be interviewed or offered a job, than a white one.

Faced with these facts, you have to choice to conclude that either there is something very wrong with the way our society treats black people, or there is something very wrong with black people themselves. As a matter of logic, it must be the case that either anti-black racism is widespread, or anti-black racism is correct. (Or both.)

There are a few Derbyshires who are willing to go ahead and choose door two. But the more common thing is to avoid the issue, either by shifting the discussion to such a level of abstraction that social reality disappears; or by admitting the existence of racism in principle but invariably denying its existence in any particular case. A variation on this is to deny that anything except pure, motiveless animus counts as racism; if someone can offer any rational basis whatsoever for differential treatment of black people, then it’s not racism.

The blunt fact is that America is a country where the life chances of a black person are much worse along many dimensions than a white person. These disparities have not gone away since the end of formal segregation; in some areas, like the criminal justice system, they’ve gotten worse. All the huffing and puffing about in-groups and-out-groups and the awful thing someone told you some black guy once said, won’t make those facts go away.

But Belle has really let herself down by joining the lynch mob without waiting to find out what actually happened.

Zimmerman is not being “lynched.” He is standing trial for shooting an unarmed teenager dead. Had the “lynch mob” not screamed bloody murder over this case, there would be no trial at all.

The lynching analogy would be idiotic in any context — in this particular context it’s nothing short of grotesque.

Certainly one can believe that the press has behaved horribly; that Zimmerman is entitled to a fair trial; that false accusations have been made regarding Zimmerman; and that the balance of evidence suggests Zimmerman killed a harmless kid in part because he was black. There’s nothing contradictory in any of that.

As a matter of logic, it must be the case that either anti-black racism is widespread, or anti-black racism is correct. (Or both.)

No, these are not the only two possibilities. Every capitalist society has the underclass, can’t function without it. And once you are there, it’s very difficult, almost impossible to climb up and out. Members of the underclass commit more crimes, go jail more often, and, by definition, their income is low.

For historical reasons backs are represented disproportionally among the underclass in the US, but that, in a sense, is just a coincidence. If you take all the blacks out of the ghetto and move them out to suburbs, some other people will populate the ghetto. They will have the same income, same crime rate, same incarceration rate, same SAT scores. They will become easily identifiable by some characteristics (accent, mannerisms, hairstyle, tattoos), and eventually they will become a ‘race’. Middle class people will fear and loathe them. At that point, what have you achieved, really?

JW Mason really nailed it. Thank you, JW.

JW Mason: As a matter of logic, it must be the case that either anti-black racism is widespread, or anti-black racism is correct. (Or both.)

If, as Otto has been patiently pointing out, racism means that “different ‘racial’ groups receive differential and unequal treatment from the state and other institutions of power,” then something else may be the case (and is, in my view). The legacy of past racism — slavery and discrimination (both legal and informal) — is enormous. It entails widespread poverty, educational deprivation, and other cultural and psychological disadvantages among blacks. These disadvantages persist even in the current (indeed longtime) absence of slavery and legal discrimination — just as the disadvantages of extreme poverty or social dislocation persist among whites whose ancestors were not enslaved or legally discriminated against.

The solution? Attack informal discrimination, to the extent feasible (legal discrimination too, to the extent — though negligible, I suspect — it exists in the US), and — far more effective and important — directly address the disadvantages entailed by poverty and educational deprivation. Obviously it is not just — or even feasible — to do the latter only for blacks. So do it for everyone: ie, social democracy.

Social democracy: better* for blacks**.

*”Better” than what? Affirmative action, educational multiculturalism, diversity programs.
** Which blacks? Disadvantaged blacks. Affluent, educated blacks only need anti-discrimination laws, along with continuing efforts, public and private, to raise consciousness about informal discrimination, to the extent that can’t be addressed by anti-discrimination laws.

How is this: “Affirmative action, educational multiculturalism, diversity programs.”

Not the same as this? “continuing efforts, public and private, to raise consciousness about informal discrimination, to the extent that can’t be addressed by anti-discrimination laws.”

@felwith: So there is a distinction to be made here. Affirmative action could mean targeted recruiting, but in practice it usually means giving blacks a boost in admissions and hiring procedures, often very substantial. (The Michigan Law School case involved a 20 point bost, where 100 points guarantied admission.) Pretty clearly, that’s treating people differently based on race, which I used to think we all agreed was bad.

Felwith @121: Are you suggesting that affirmative action, educational multiculturalism, and diversity programs are preventive rather than remedial measures; ie, that they’re meant not to redress either the broad effects of historical abuse (which is what social democratic policies are for) or the specific effects of individual victimization (which is what anti-discrimination policies are for), but rather simply to promote racial comity (which is what I meant by raising consciousness)? If so, I think you’re mistaken. Those policies are pretty clearly meant to be remedial. But if you’re looking to remedy the problems of economically and educationally disadvantaged blacks, I don’t think affirmative action et al are very effective, compared with broadly egalitarian tax, full-employment, educational, and health-care policies.

@Watson: Well, if you ever figure out a way to balance an unbalanced scale while making identical changes to the weight of both sides, feel free to share.

@geo: Affirmative action is a necessary supplement to anti-discrimination policies. I suppose you could just institute the policies without checking to see whether or not they’re effective, but that seems silly. And yes, I do think educational multiculturalism and diversity programs are preventive, in that it is more difficult to develop or maintain prejudices in diverse environments. I think it’s wrong to treat racial prejudice as something that was created solely in the past and now needs only to be cleaned up. New sources are always possible, and vigilance against them is necessary.

NB – 128 was addressed to Salient.

felwith: Not sure what you mean by “I suppose you could just institute the policies without checking to see whether or not they’re effective, but that seems silly” or why you think affirmative action is a necessary supplement to anti-discrimination policies. If we can prove discrimination, then we should remedy it, and anti-discrimination laws and policies provide the tools (or should). In the absence of discrimination, the way to help blacks who need help is to help them directly, by addressing their economic and educational disadvantages, along with everyone else’s.

felwith: it is easily possible to have discriminatory outcomes without provable discrete discriminatory actions, or if there are such actions, then ones with no appropriate remedy … The only way you can find out is by checking your outcomes, which is the central point of the affirmative action doctrine

Are you saying that unless the racial/ethnic proportions among doctors, lawyers, poets, butchers, and all other occupations — as well as all tax brackets, advanced degrees, and any other significant social category — exactly, or even broadly, mirror the racial/ethnic composition of the population, then we can presume racial/ethnic discrimination, without having to identify it in specific cases? And that, assuming this lack of proportional representation is how we want to define discrimination, the best way to address it is not to eliminate large discrepancies in the resources that poor/ignorant and affluent/educated people can bring to competing for whatever social prizes they desire (which is one part of the social-democratic solution), as well as making sure that the satisfaction of basic human needs (education, health care, shelter, retirement security) don’t depend on success in that competition (the other part of the social-democratic solution), but simply to distribute the prizes in more racially equal proportions, leaving fundamental distributional inequalities intact and indefinitely bracketing questions of merit and desert?

If so, why?

“I agree with Radley Balko on this one. Zimmerman’s trial seems pretty politicized.”

I agree, Balko made a decent case above that no-one, from what I can see, apart from Amanda at 91 and Fanon at 94 has made a serious attempt to challenge

Felwith, addressing educational inequality doesn’t mean giving the poorest performing segments automatic A’s. It means making them earn A’s. Otherwise the grades mean as much as economic stats of Soviet Russia.

Salient, Jews become doctors at high rates. This is because it is a very prestigious occupation for a Jewish person among other Jews. Does this mean that other groups are being discriminated against, simply because Jews just want to be doctors more than members of other groups do? Why are there no Muslim pig farmers?

You also don’t get democracy, or liberalism. Democracy does not mean a balkanization (or Lebanonization) of civil society on ethnoracial lines. It means that individuals will have a sphere of freedom as individuals, and they can be particular in a different sphere of freedom. “Be a man in the street, and a Jew [or Christian!] in the home”. And that demands treating people as individuals, not members of ethnic castes. The instant someone is told “No, we have too many like you in this school” it’s a clear sign that their freedom and individuality is not being respected.

Finally, people demand rights not on the basis of their numbers. If there was only one man with green skin in the world, he would deserve just as much consideration from society to be treated independently from his skin color as if there were millions like him.

And postscriptively, one man one vote does allocate power in numerical proportion to the number of men you have. Furthermore, the policies you describe were present in the 1920’s, in the form of the quota. You support anti-Semitic policies: from ignorance I hope, and not from knowledge of the history of what you propose.

broadly fair and broadly proportional

If this means that the distribution of social power (ie, money) and political power (ie, votes and voice) can only be broadly fair if it’s broadly proportional among identity groups, then I agree. If it means that the distribution of, say, physics professorships, medical degrees, poetry prizes, and other things that are, or ought to be, accorded not (like power) in virtue of citizenship alone but rather in virtue of merit, can only be broadly fair if it’s broadly proportional among identity groups, then I don’t agree.

Democracy is equality in respect of social and political power. It has nothing to do with merit — we don’t have to earn basic economic security or political participation. Doctors, professors, and poets have no right to greater economic security or political influence than anyone else. What they should have (for our sake as well as theirs) is greater scope to exercise superior abilities. That’s the proper reward of merit.

the reasons for continued racial inequality in the US as well as other places is not because people openly espousing Nazi like theories of white supremacy control the levers of power. It is this combination of continued racial inequality, official endorsement of equality, and lack of cartoon style Klansmen racists that causes severe cognitive dissonance in many liberals.

No, I don’t think this is true. I think most liberals — certainly almost all organized liberal political groupings — understand that it is perfectly possible for racism to perpetuate itself without Nazis and Klansmen, and that we have to look for ways it might be operating that aren’t immediately obvious. The equation of racism with “cartoon style Klansmen” seems to me to be almost entirely a phenomenon of the Right (including of course libertarians.)

All this trying to get into peoples heads is an impossible waste of time.

Wasn’t that the point of the original post? Racist just describes a pattern of behavior. Like, for instance, Zimmerman’s.

…I typed up a godawful long response but am feeling a bit apprehensive about my crapping on a whole bunch of CT threads with something I brought up sort of wildly out of the blue (especially Belle’s thread, it feels like her threads are derailed more frequently than others, and it was a damn fine OP, and the topic feels way more tangential outside the specific context of constructing Utopian visions).

I guess the tl;dr’d version is:

(Sebastian) Democracy does not require attending to over-representation, it requires attending to under-representation, and mostly to chronic systemic under-representation. The former can exist in the absence of the latter, basically due to error tolerance allowances.

(geo) I don’t know quite what you have in mind with “greater scope to exercise superior abilities” but it sounds like we agree in spirit (except I’m pretty leery of rewarding merit with anything other than admiration)

(Watson) Don’t expect me to respond to any further provocation.

[For those who have no idea WTF that’s about, Watson makes sure to use the “Salient, [obvious statement I wouldn’t dispute made to look as if I disputed it]” sentence structure in every goddamn reply to me since we had a conversation about how demeaning I felt it was. It’s been about eighteen months of this shit now. He knows I find it degrading and disrespectful and harmful to discourse, and acts accordingly.]

geo:

I love social democracy as much as I imagine you do, but it seems to me like you’re pushing a “It’s not about race, it’s about poverty” line, which can’t possibly be right. Just symptomatically, everything suggests that poor blacks get treated very significantly differently than poor whites by the cops and the criminal justice system. As JW Mason suggests above, upwardly mobile poor whites get treated differently by real estate agents, new neighbors, etc., than upwardly mobile poor blacks. Everything, and I mean absolutely everything, suggests that white vs. black race consciousness is extraordinarily deeply embedded in American society. I simply don’t see how abstract from this when thinking about how to move to a more just society.

(Given the right definition of “class” and a suitably sophisticated argument, I would agree that it is almost entirely about class under the right definition, but frankly I’d think my life’s work mostly done if I could come up with this argument.)

js: poor blacks get treated very significantly differently than poor whites by the cops and the criminal justice system … upwardly mobile poor whites get treated differently by real estate agents, new neighbors, etc., than upwardly mobile poor blacks

Yes, absolutely. But isn’t this just what anti-discrimination policies are for?

I’d think my life’s work mostly done if I could come up with this argument

Don’t give up!

Under-representation of a group cannot exist without over-representation of some other group. You are mathematically not correct when you say the former can exist in the absence of the latter, so I don’t understand the distinction you are trying to point to.

Error tolerance, maybe chosen to be proportional to the size of the subpopulation.

I think that’s defensible. The marginal utility of introducing another person of a given subpopulation diminishes. So, maybe a subpopulation of 80% could hold only 60% of the Dr positions and that’s basically ok, not worth worrying much about, but a subpopulation of 25% holding 5% of the positions is much more worrisome. (Broadly speaking.) Generally I’d say we want to see some combination of chronic and systemic under-representation before resorting to state coercion. This necessitates some qualitative assessment and judgment, as how much variation from perfect proportionality we’re willing to shrug off will depend on context.

In less stark circumstances, we can resort to ordinary social coercion, encouraging the people around us to look for ways of inviting greater participation from under-represented identity-groups, maybe even exerting some peer pressure at opportune times. Happened on CT, IIRC — I remember a persuasive and really rather inspiring couple of posts by Ingrid, on refusing to attend professional conferences that don’t have a reasonable amount of female scholar participation. Notice there is no government coercion or even involvement in that proposal, but it’s very democratic in letter and in spirit. I’m not sure if Ingrid’s posts on autism would also be technically pro-democratic according to my definition, but they certainly strike me as implicitly democratic in spirit. My own personal instincts say, let’s reserve appeals for state coercion for the truly worst and most systemic cases of under-representation. Ordinary social pressure and professional commitments are quite powerful tools; we needn’t try to fix everything, or even most things, through state coercion.

…I should probably leave it there, though. (My apologies for bombing your thread, Belle.)

Data@115 and Geo@119, I disagree. To me, your position comes down to saying that we should fight against injustice in general without fighting against any injustice in particular.

I don’t believe that because capitalism also creates hierarchy and inequality, the extreme degrees of differences in life chances between races, and the way race structures so much of social life in this country, is inevitable. There is evidence all around us that the harm and injustice due to American racism goes well beyond that “required” in any sense by capitalism. Certainly no other capitalist society seems to need anything like the misery factories that we call our prison system.

Data Tutashkhia would, I suspect, look at the end of apartheid in South Africa and say, Eh, there’s still a top and a bottom, now there’s a few more rich blacks, who cares. Geo I’m pretty sure would not. So the question I pose to him is, if you agree that the struggles against some specifically racial hierarchies were among the great moral and political victories of the 20th century, even if they did not lead to socialism or even social democracy, why are you so confident that there is no more progress to be made on that dimension? Some people, you know, were saying things a lot like your 119 in response to the fight for black freedom in the 1950s and 1960s. You wouldn’t have. Would you?

It seems to me that capitalism, like other systems founded on hierarchy and coercion, always has a top and a bottom; but it is nonetheless true that the fight against oppression in general always has to take the form of a fight for and with the people who are on the bottom right now. That’s how progress happens, not from some philosopher-king aloof from any particular interest.

Finally, it’s worth noting that pretty much every organized political group on the left — every group that is actually working to move us toward social democracy, as opposed to piously wishing for it — from the anarchists to the Democratic Party, considers race to be central to progressive politics, and make at least some effort to be racially inclusive independent of class. Now, you might say they are all brainwashed by political correctness … but, no.

(Incidentally: abb1 = Henri Vieuxtemps = Data Tutashkhia. Right?)

Democracy—the resources of power and privilege apportioned with broadly fair and broadly proportional inclusion of all widely recognized identity groups, especially of those identity groups whose relations are broadly contentious

Oh, crikey, wtf? ‘Democracy’, of course, means nothing but “rule by majority”.

Ironically, in a society as preoccupied by meaningless racial and ethnic identities as American liberals are (and I can think of at least one), racial/ethnic minorities would be crushed mercilessly. Pretty soon they would be forced to pledge allegiance to the main ethnic group, and their high birth rates would be commonly described as ‘alarming’, and a ‘grave threat’.

Well, if the existing percentages of Jewish and Asian-American doctors are sacrosanct, then we need to give up on attempts to correct for socio-economic as well as racial discrimination. After all, how unjust would it be for someone to be denied a chance to go to college because their parents were *too* successful?

Social Democratic and Socialist states are not magically free of racial discrimination. In fact in many cases they are every bit as bad as the worst capitalist states. Both Western Europe and the former Soviet Bloc had plenty of instances of official and unofficial cases of racial discrimination. The differential treatment of groups is not necessarily connected with capitalism. Placing almost the entire Korean population of the USSR under ‘administrative exile’ in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 1937 certainly in my mind (I know nobody else here thinks the USSR was capable of racism) certainly meets the definition of racial discrimination.

I’m under the impression that there are liberal arguments against racism, and also socialist arguments against racism which are different and reject the liberal arguments, and in addition there are left-wing anti-liberal (or socialist) arguments against racisim (that is, unlike socialist anti-racism, they oppose liberal anti-racism on specifically anti-liberal grounds and without substituting a better anti-racism). Most (not all) of the arguments against liberal anti-racism I’m seeing here are of the latter variety.

Of course, there are also liberal (or neoliberal) arguments against anti-racism, of the kind you might expect to see in the Weekly Standard.

When you treat racism (irrational), racial discrimination by an authoritarian state (political), and profiling by private individuals that takes race into consideration (perfectly rational) as one and the same, the discussion becomes utterly meaningless.

“Error tolerance, maybe chosen to be proportional to the size of the subpopulation.

I think that’s defensible. The marginal utility of introducing another person of a given subpopulation diminishes. So, maybe a subpopulation of 80% could hold only 60% of the Dr positions and that’s basically ok, not worth worrying much about, but a subpopulation of 25% holding 5% of the positions is much more worrisome.”

Again, I’m not sure how that works out with respect to real world affirmative action. If you have a college admission and you are going to use affirmative action to ‘increase an under-represented subpopulation’ that means that you MUST discriminate against a member of an over-represented subpopulation purely on the basis of her race/ethnicity. That is how affirmative action works. In discussions of it, we always pretend that such discrimination is small or slight, but in the actual context of college admissions it ends up needing to be huge and enormous (the difference between straight A’s and straight B’s, or larger than the difference between earning the highest possible SAT score and the lowest possible SAT score, to use two hyper-clear examples from the Michigan admissions case).

So in concrete terms, we have to find ways to screen out Asians and Jews in medical school. Considering the large percentage of Asian-Americans intimately involved in the US slave trade, that hardly seems a method designed to promote social justice.

If you have a college admission and you are going to use affirmative action to ‘increase an under-represented subpopulation’ that means that you MUST discriminate against a member of an over-represented subpopulation purely on the basis of her race/ethnicity.

No. When the subject of “affirmative action” (a thing that basically doesn’t exist) comes up, people suddenly adopt a completely abstract and unreal view of the labor market that they would never hold in any other context.

The implicit assumption here is that all possible candidates are considered, ranked by a clear, objective set of criteria, and then the top ranked N are hired. Thus, the only way to change the composition of the hires, is to discriminate, i.e. to prefer a less qualified candidate to a better qualified one.

Hiring in the real world is not like this.

Everyone knows that there are many, many filters on the way to getting hired — especially in a credentialed profession — most of which have nothing to do with qualifications. At every stage of the process family resources, personal connections, social capital, and sheer luck come into play. Everyone who has ever applied for a job (or better yet, hired for one) knows this. yet somehow they manage to forget it when the subject of “affirmative action” comes up.

160, I already answered that, see 148. To despise people for being black, that’ racism. To suspect that a black teenager in a hoodie who you’d never seen before in your neighborhood might be a hoodlum, that’s profiling.

And when you proclaim that profiling is racism, people get the impression that you are a hypocrite, and tune in to Rush Limbaugh.

(oops link fail.)

Back to the Zimmerman case, Balko deserves a bit more slack than he is being given here. He has literally spent a large portion of his career exposing railroading and helping (often black) defendants avoid railroading. This case (at this point in it) could fairly characterized as involving a racist police department failing to adequately investigate a homicide, and then when exposed for being a racist police department, trying to make up for it by immediately railroading the suspect.

I personally think, from the information I have seen, that Zimmerman was racist as hell, and is morally guilty of some form of murder. But that is no excuse for using railroading techniques just because your racist police department has to overreact to being exposed.

Balko is protesting the railroading techniques being employed against Zimmerman. From Rush Limbaugh that would be objectionable, because he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about railroading techniques, he just wants to pour gasoline on the racial fire. But from Balko, who has a LONG record of pushing back against crappy police and prosecutor tactics, it isn’t.

“Everyone knows that there are many, many filters on the way to getting hired—especially in a credentialed profession—most of which have nothing to do with qualifications. At every stage of the process family resources, personal connections, social capital, and sheer luck come into play. Everyone who has ever applied for a job (or better yet, hired for one) knows this. yet somehow they manage to forget it when the subject of “affirmative action” comes up.”

I’m not denying any of this, but I’m affirming the nasty and unjust nature of using race as one of the filters. You shouldn’t be screening out Jewish and Asian doctors just because there are ‘too many’ of them. If you screen out blacks just because you don’t like them you are racist as fuck. If you screen out Jews and Asians just because there are ‘too many’ you are also acting racist as fuck, you are just hiding it behind greater good social justice game playing.

As long as we’re discussion representation, I would distinguish between two kinds of under-representation. One is when % represented is smaller than % of population. The other would be when a racial group has a smaller proportional allocation than most other racial groups.

Consider a situation in which 30% of the representatives are Jews, but the remaining representation is split up among the remaining races proportionally. Here, the other races face the first kind of under-representation, but not the second. In the second kind, over-represention of one race doesn’t imply under-representation of another race (“non-Jews” is not a race.)

I’m not going into details, because I’m not sure there’s anyone honest on the other side of this argument. But exactly which kind of under-represenation we’re talking about strongly affects my suspicions as to whether an imbalance is due to institutional bias or the cultural preference of the applicants.

I need to learn how to better stop the brooms I set in motion, or not start them, or something.

Do individuals deserve to be treated as individuals, and not as members of a race or religion?

If someone belongs to a socially recognized identity group, that’s part of who they are as individuals. We don’t get to choose all aspects of our identity, because identity is a social phenomenon. (The personally defined internal sense of self is called self-conception.) Treating individuals as individuals includes acknowledging their membership in socially recognized identity groups.

So, you’re essentially asking some kind of “P and something-that-implies-not-P” question here.

how can we justify policies aimed at ensuring racial balance by directly intervening in otherwise race-neutral policies?

This question doesn’t require the “if so.”

Institutional differential treatment can compensate for exactly those kinds of systemic interpersonal mistreatment that anti-discriminatory law can’t and won’t prevent.

And often enough, policies are not race-neutral in effect, even if the written policy makes no mention of race. Which do you care about, human beings and their experiences, or letters on a page?

what is equality before the law and freedom in civil society?

This question doesn’t require the “if not.” And I shouldn’t have to answer such a remedial question, but for the sake of comity or whatever, I guess I will.

Equality means: All individuals have ample opportunity to lead a flourishing life, free of suffering imposed by institutional maltreatment. All individuals have ample opportunity to engage with and participate in the construction, maintenance, and enforcement of the social contracts of their communities’ institutions, including ascension to those roles that are assigned power, privilege, and prestige in those institutions. All individuals have their irrevocable fundamental worth as a human being acknowledged and respected by the institutions of their communities, and are granted the dignity they are due as human beings, receive ample institution-sanctioned protection from cruel treatment inflicted by other individuals, and are not subjected to institutionally-sanctioned cruel treatment.

He has literally spent a large portion of his career exposing railroading and helping (often black) defendants avoid railroading. This case (at this point in it) could fairly characterized as involving a racist police department failing to adequately investigate a homicide, and then when exposed for being a racist police department, trying to make up for it by immediately railroading the suspect.

I don’t entirely disagree with that, and maybe my post came off too strong. But most of Balko’s post wasn’t directed at the Florida police, who, if any railroading is taking place, are the ones responsible for it. It was directed at the media, and even other civil rights advocates. And not just that they made mistakes, but that it was wrong to even consider race in connection to either this crime or to early police inadequacy.

Balko is no racist, and maybe I should have been clear that I don’t think he is. But he is mistaken in an important way, and I can’t let the fact that he’s done huge good elsewhere stop me from pointing out his mistake here.

js @146: depends on what you mean by “anti-discrimination policies”

Yes, you’re right. I should have been clearer that at least in response to one of your examples (police mistreatment), I’d favor race-based affirmative action. (Also, possibly, in hiring school administrators.) These cases are different from physicists doctors, and poets in that the aptitudes required are far less specialized and the degree of interaction with minority communities at large is relatively higher, so the importance of simply having someone in the position whom most of the people he/she is going to be dealing with can trust and identify with is correspondingly high.

I don’t see why it would seem obvious that the very same measures that may reasonably reduce white poverty would have the same effects for black communities

You may be right, but there’s a simple way to find out.

JW @149: your position comes down to saying that we should fight against injustice in general without fighting against any injustice in particular

Sorry if I gave that impression. To say it another time another way: what economically and educationally disadvantaged blacks need most — not the only thing, but what they need (and want most, if, say, Jonathan Kozol was accurately reporting the opinions of the poor black parents he spoke to) are measures that spend large amounts of money correcting those disadvantages, and there is no moral justification for not at the same time addressing the economic and educational disadvantages of nonblacks at the same time. Affirmative action and diversity hiring programs (except of the kind I mentioned in replying to js above) don’t help them as much, quite apart from raising problems of fairness (problems which would only be salient if the damned programs actually helped the people who most need help). Of course they, as well as their less disadvantaged black brothers and sisters, also need to be protected against discrimination, and would even if we attain social-democratic nirvana. There’s a large body of law and policy devoted to doing this, no doubt quite imperfectly, whose existence I strongly support and whose continual improvement I would welcome. I don’t think that’s quite the same thing as advocating that we should “not fight against any injustice in particular.”

Merp, the title sounds like it’s probably about racial profiling by authorities that is harmful to the society. Which may very well be the case, wouldn’t surprise me.

I’m talking about individuals. I don’t find it credible that those Manhattan cabbies would harm themselves by their profiling; if that was the case, surely by now someone would’ve discovered it and the pattern changed.

Data,

It’s also about individuals. This is twice now you’ve nitpicked academic research without reading it. Check out the Chronicle thread for reasons not to do that.

With regards to the taxi thing, you’re right, people never engage in behavior that doesn’t make sense, is based on erroneous assumptions or conclusions, or that harms their economic prospects. This type of argument which tries to say a given state of affairs is impossible because analyzing a situation solely through the lens of economic rationality makes it impossible reminds me of the old joke: a guy and an economist are walking around, guy says, “Look, a twenty dollar bill” and goes to pick it up. Economist says “Don’t bother. If that were really a twenty dollar bill, someone would have picked it up by now.”

So Balko is basically talking out of his ass here.

In the year I checked (2008) the NCVS has b-w interracial violent crime as 76% of interracial violent crime and w-b as 12%.

“Academic research does not incorporate empirical facts”

“This study is too long to read, and it doesn’t say what you want it to say”

Merp,

1) Needlessly-snide remarks aside, your first objection relies too much on the one-sentence summary of what I’m saying. “There are no racists, only racist acts” = “We can only call identify as racist things which actually happen; we can’t call having unconscious prejudicial bias against people with outgroup distinctions racism.” Using the definition I want to use, we can still call people who do racist things “racists”, just as we talk about “painters”, “boaters”, “gamers”, etc. There’s still a question of “where do you draw the line; what’s the statute of limitations on calling someone a racist”, but that question exists under the definition you want to use, too.

Well, that is your suggested definition, so I’m not seeing why you shouldn’t be held to it. It has a clearly absurd consequence—that there are, really and truly speaking, no racist people. That’s the exciting falsehood, shortly to be qualified down to something less exciting, and closer to truth. Snidery is perfectly in order.

2) “Only when someone has a stable tendency to experience racist emotions, enjoy cognitive states with racist content or affect, and act on them etc. is that person properly called a racist.”

[That applies to everyone ever. We all have a “stable tendency” to experience racist emotions, have racist cognitive states. It’s hard-wired into our brains. That’s my point. This distinction is not a distinction. If your point is that someone has to enjoy their racism for it to be racism, that eliminates the good portion (majority?) of racism which is unconscious/not self aware.]

It is false that everyone has a stable tendency to experience racist emotions, enjoy cognitive states with racist content, and act on them. I, for one, don’t; nor do many of the people I know and like. The closest relevant claim I can think of that has some chance of truth is that everyone implicitly and automatically employs racial categorisation. That is some distance from experiencing racist emotions or cognitive states, let alone adopting a positive and welcoming attitude to them. If you mean something slightly stronger—categorisation + implicit bias—then that isn’t ‘hard-wired’ since implicit biases are malleable. And categorisation and implicit bias can obtain in the absence of explicit bias: implicit bias tests presuppose an ability to categorise; those without explicit bias who take them and discover that they’re implicitly biased are the obvious example.

You’re not in a position to complain about the adequacy of the definition of racism on the ground that it eliminates a good part of racism.

(1) the definition picks out racist people, not racist acts.

(2) You’ve given up on internal psychological states as a way of separating racist from non-racist acts (and people). This follows from your denial below that internal cognitive and emotional states can be targets of judgement, on the ground that we lack epistemic access to them. If you can’t make those distinctions—if you can’t judge racist acts because you can’t identify internal mental states, then you can’t tell how many racist acts there are, since identifying racist acts requires identifying internal mental states (saliently, intention). In particular, you can’t distinguish racist from non-racist acts with the same effects (I notice, for instance, that in your opening comment, you rely on knowledge of intention to distinguish a racist from a non-racist act with the same effects).

That gets at a point I was driving at but didn’t explicitly state: we can’t judge internal cognitive/emotional states, can we. We can’t possibly think that Jones over there is secretly thinking racist thoughts and getting off on them, look at the way he wears his tie and is drinking his coffee, I just know he uses the term “Macaca”. There’s like a triple-bind in your attempted definition here. If you say “racism is cognitive thought/emotion”, everyone everywhere is racist. If you say “racism is cognitive thought/emotion that acknowledges/takes pleasure in making bigoted outgroup distinctions”, a big chunk of racism is defined out of existence. If you say “racism can be unconscious cognitive thought/emotion that makes bigoted outgroup distinctions”, not only are we back to calling everyone racist but no-one can be accused of being racist under this definition. It’d be like a Monty Python sketch. “You’ve just had an unconscious cognitive thought/emotion that makes bigoted outgroup distinctions.” “No I haven’t.” “Ohp you did it again!” The only way out of this thicket is to focus on acts.

Presumably, the obstacle to judgement is epistemic: we can’t know them, so we can’t judge them. Hence your Jones example: the evidence (the tie and coffee) doesn’t tell one way or the other. And then we’re invited to accept that this is always the case. But (i) gross physical facts are perfectly good evidence for internal mental states: anyone looking at you with open eyes in clear light can probably see you; if there are no apples in the jar, your putting your hand in the jar is pretty good evidence that you have a false belief; anyone who says that he saw a dodo in India is lying and (ii) gross physical facts don’t exhaust the evidence: social cues, rules, norms, expectations, other background knowledge etc. will often supply relevant additional evidence. If you have a general skeptical argument for the conclusion that none of the available information suffices for knowledge of other people’s internal mental states, let’s hear it. (It’s also interesting to compare your acceptance of psychological evidence that racial categorisation is ubiquitous, with your rejection of the evidence for the ubiquity of mindreading.)

Let’s disarm the two (not three) horns. (i) If I say that racism is cognitive, then it doesn’t actually follow that everyone is racist. Racist people are those for whom racism is a character trait. This goes under the explicit cognitive end of the definition. Not everyone is explicitly biased, and not everyone who is explicitly biased has racism as a character trait; those who do, most clearly those who enjoy the cognitive states, identify with them and are the clearest target of the description racist person. (ii) If I say that racism is unconscious cognitive thought and emotion that makes bigoted outgroup distinctions, it doesn’t follow that everyone is a racist, mostly because even unconscious thought and emotion motivated by bigotry is amenable to change.

What economically and educationally disadvantaged blacks need most—not the only thing, but what they need (and want most, if, say, Jonathan Kozol was accurately reporting the opinions of the poor black parents he spoke to) are measures that spend large amounts of money correcting those disadvantages

I dunno. Seems to me that would have helped Trayvon Martin the most would have been not being shot by a racist vigilante asshole. Yes, let’s have universal pre-K, single-payer healthcare and a 35 hour workweek, but you know, supporting those things does not absolve us of responsibility for doing something about the racist vigilante assholes too.

Affirmative action and diversity hiring programs (except of the kind I mentioned in replying to js above) don’t help them as much

I’m really baffled how you got the idea that this is what anti-racist politics is about. How about an end to mass incarceration of black men (which is really, really, really not the result of underclass criminality) and to residential segregation?

JW Mason, 191: mass incarceration of black men (which is really, really, really not the result of underclass criminality

Could you elaborate on this please.

You quoted homicides stats in 166. According to them, roughly half of the homicides (where both victim and attacker were known) were committed by blacks. Granted, this is only for homicides, but it doesn’t seem too arbitrary to extrapolate from there, to the rough proportion of, at least, violent crimes committed by blacks. Right?

According to wikipedia, in 2009 there were about 1,130,000 white and hispanic (that’s all ‘white’ in your stats) men incarcerated, and 840,000 black men incarcerated. Another source, ABC news, puts it even lower: “Black males make up 35.4 percent of the jail and prison population.”
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/story?id=5009270&page=1#.T6YOAMU_U1k

So, the proportion of blacks incarcerated is below (if you believe the ABC News, far below) the proportion of, at least, murders committed by blacks. Correct? Am I missing something? What am I missing? Is it that blacks commit a lot of murders, but few other crimes?

What are you saying, exactly? I’d really, really, really like to know, please don’t ignore this one. Thanks.

JW Mason, we already do something about the racist vigilantes, namely convict them if they have committed a crime. Anti-racism wants to be more then liberalism in that it wants to go beyond everyone having equal rights as individuals who are not judged on the basis of race, creed, or color. Residential segregation is already illegal. Is there anything to say about race that liberte, egalite, fraternite, doesn’t already say?

Emily, Fanon didn’t think so when writing “Black Skins, White Masks”. As for the exclusion of women, de Beauvoir credits the Enlightenment moment with the first attempts to remove the discrimination women faced, specifically Diderot and J.S. Mill. Justice was of course part of the meaning of liberty: no punishment except by law, which clearly stated what was illegal and what was not.

Witt, your website has this:
“Our analysis below documents these striking trends:
• The number of African Americans in state prisons for a drug offense declined by 21.6% from 1999-2005, a reduction of more than 31,000 persons.
• The number of whites incarcerated for a drug offense rose significantly during this period, an increase of 42.6%, representing an additional 21,000 persons in prison.”
http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/dp_raceanddrugs.pdf

Racism!

Anyway, people are incarcerated not for use, but for possession and distribution. And more importantly: go normalize by relevant parameters, like socioeconomic status. Otherwise, this is just the usual tendentious bs.

35-40% of the population in poverty are blacks, and 35-40% of the prison population are blacks. Why do you need special projects to understand it?

JW Mason at 200:

Very interesting theory on abb1=Henri Vieuxtemps=Data Tutashkhia. I thought with the new comments policy that Henri Vieuxtemps and Data Tutashkhia were the legal names of actually existing people. Although I do not think I have ever seen the name Data before except on Star Trek.

I remember abb1. Don’t think Data is abb1.

Watson,
“Man’s reason”?
We’re back to Mary Wolstonecroft! And @196
According to John Quiggan’s logic the future is somewhat imperriled by enlightenment thought and technology anyway.
The past, since time immemorial, pretty much did happen regardless of what the future holds I believe — do you have a different interpretation?

outrage about racism was the only way due process and fair justice would have been possibly applied to this case.

This really can’t be said enough. And it’s pretty key to why Balko is way off. I mean, it’s not as if you can section of questions of equality from those of fair treatment, even fair judicial treatment. Anyway, there’s simply no evidence to suggest that you can.

(Also, Merp, sorry if I misunderstood what you were saying way up above. Though, to be honest, it still seems pretty odd to me.)

While I obviously can’t say anything with certainty, I thought it was fairly obvious that abb1, Henri, and Data are one in the same. His bone-headed version of dime store Marxism and his racial no-nothing routine are quite distinctive (and, to my ear, indistinguishable from each other). The only thing I find puzzling is why so many otherwise sensible people keep shoveling him full of troll-food.

Watson@208
“The fundamental fact of traditional society, especially in Europe, is that it is not peaceful or tolerant.”

One could surely say the same about the imperial enlightenment or current global order, could one not?

Emily, you are missing something here. The norms that exist are superior norms to the ones that have existed, and society today has a capacity for rational transformation and self-reflection that didn’t exist before. By having this kind of debate you demonstrate that we live in a society that aspires to make itself known rationally, even if this aspiration is blocked in certain ways. That cannot be said about previous forms of society, all with universal thought taboos and a uniformity within each kind of person, even as it admitted different kinds. To live in a tribal society is to live as an object, subject to relations that are not of your choosing, and that dominate all aspects of your existence. A medieval Christian would not know the meaning of the term “human right” or “equality before the law”. God had ordained that there were classes, some with privileges over the others. That’s progress, worth a thousand Vendees.

Of course we are drifting far from the subject of disagrement, but the attack of liberalism on racism is that it recreates this caste system, an abhorrent and disgusting way to treat humans. The anti-racism of Salient on the other hand demands that blacks always be black, as separate from white as Jim Crow made them. Not to pick on Salient, but he’s just come right out and said it on this thread. It’s only because liberals have forgotten liberalism that this turn is possible.

I thought it was fairly obvious that abb1, Henri, and Data are one in the same. His bone-headed version of dime store Marxism and his racial no-nothing routine are quite distinctive (and, to my ear, indistinguishable from each other).

djw to the rescue. Yes, that’s the abb1-Henri-Data persona captured perfectly.

I don’t much care whether Zimmerman was X% racist or Y% racist and whether it is indicative of a character that is A% racist or B% racist. And spare me the “he did it too, miss”; a decent primary school education sorted that one out yonks ago.

What the heck was that all about?

Was Henri Vieuxtemps banned from commenting here not too long ago?

“Affirmative action, educational multiculturalism, diversity programs.”

Would all be positive things to have in their own right even in a society that focussed on class justice and eliminating class equality. Educational multiculturalism seems particularly to be a no-brainer – why would you ever design an educational system that wasn’t international and multicultural in scope. We live in a world after all.

The anti-racism of Salient … demands that blacks always be black, as separate from white as Jim Crow made them.

That… might be the stupidest and most offensive thing you’ve ever said, Watson. I’d probably just shrug it off if you hadn’t made a concerted explicit effort to tie me to it, but no, this was a targeted troll.

Obvious thing first. Americans didn’t suddenly start distinguishing whites from blacks in the years after the Emancipation Proclamation. FFS, even the letter of the law quite obviously distinguished whites from blacks prior to the Civil War. There’s no reading of the comparison “as separate as Jim Crow made them” that makes it any less idiotic or asinine. You’re just spewing words you think will incite someone. It’s a drain on other people’s energy.

You know what, screw it. I’m not going to sit here and prattle at you about the effective caste system that emerged from emancipation, if that’s what you want to call differentiated treatment that really just partially carried over the functional restraints and segregation of slavery. It’s a caste system that never quite left, and what we have nowadays are not much more than a handful of mostly theoretical protections and a number of people who have managed to transition between castes. There’s nothing to recreate. It’s still here.

Now please, regardless of whether or not you’re intentionally playing dense or honestly just this buffoonish, FFS at least try to do so without mentioning my name from now on, so I can skim on past and ignore it. I can and will extend the same courtesy to you. And really, I only ask that you not mention me because you seem categorically incapable of characterizing what I said accurately, and it’s just so fucking tiring to have to come along sweeping up after the messes of errors you create. Too much energy. Too many hours. I would like those hours back, impossibly. Please don’t take more.