Thanks to the Crooked Timber bloggers for this opportunity! I’m very excited to be joining the group!
I just finished reading the twentieth anniversary edition of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?
“As I was writing the prologue for the twentieth-anniversary edition of this book, I was struck by how much bad news there was in it. The events of the last two decades have done little to improve the quality of life for those most negatively impacted by the structural racism of our society. Recognizing and acknowledging the persistence of residential and school segregation; the economic inequality that grows from limited access to socioeconomically diverse social networks and high-quality education as well as continued discrimination in the workplace; and the stranglehold of mass incarceration, unequal justice, and growing voter disenfranchisement left me feeling disheartened. But I am an optimist by nature and I have lived long enough to know that meaningful change is possible. I was determined not to give in to a sense of despair but rather to actively seek out signs of hope—stories of people making a difference and promising practices that could move others to meaningful action. I found that these signs of hope are everywhere” (343).
Tatum goes on, in the epilogue, to “share some of what I found in hopes that the examples will uplift you as they uplifted me” (343).
Tatum’s stories are uplifting. But they don’t make me feel optimistic about the future. Some are about local initiatives like the Atlanta Friendship Initiative or the Community Coalition on Race in the towns of South Orange and Maplewood, New Jersey. Most are about things taking place on elite and liberal arts college campuses. But if Tatum is right, in the rest of her book, about how our racial identities form and when, developmentally, things begin to go wrong (spoiler alert: childhood and adolescence matter, a lot), then I don’t see why isolated anti-racist efforts of the type that she catalogues should give us much hope.
Don’t get me wrong. I loved this book. It’s engagingly written, and I learned so much from it. Even for those who read the original, there’s plenty in the new version that makes it well worth revisiting. Many parts of it will be great to teach with; in particular, I think students would get a lot out of reading Chapter 7, “White Identity, Affirmative Action, and Color-Blind Racial Ideology.” I know I did.
But I can’t help feeling that Tatum’s closing gesture toward optimism comes too cheaply. On the one hand, isolated cases of progressive anti-racist initiatives might give us reason to be optimistic about the prospects for change when it comes to such things as demonstrated hiring preference for whites (in one study, white applicants with criminal records had more callbacks and job offers than Latinx or black applicants with no criminal records (218-9)) or racialized treatment of patients by doctors (for example, with white patients more often being recommended optimal treatment than black patients for the same symptoms (224)). It might be too late for those in positions to make such hires of offer such diagnoses to overcome their biases, but the kind of racial consciousness-raising that plausibly occurs by way of Tatum’s examples might bring about better practices for offsetting bias or avoiding its activation.
In general, it’s great to have reason to be optimistic that more of us will be motivated and empowered to address our own implicit biases. [1] But the greater challenge for optimism that’s arisen in recent years, it seems to me, has to do with the prevalence of a more explicit kind of bias. This seems better exemplified by the story of white working class Americans that Arlie Russell Hochschild details in Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right
Or consider the cases of overt racial hostility that Tatum considers in her prologue, such as the graffiti in Durham, North Carolina: “Black lives don’t matter and neither does your votes” (66).
I think the sense of racialized alienation among white working class Americans that Hochschild describes is importantly different than the overtly racist attacks and white nationalism that were emboldened by the Trump election. But together, they constitute the biggest source of my own pessimism when it comes the prospects for anti-racist progress in the near term future. They’re not fueled by implicit bias among the economically privileged who make medical diagnoses or hiring decisions, and they don’t seem to be addressed in any straightforward way by progressive mobilization of the sort Tatum uses to substantiate her own optimism and encourage ours. If anything, such mobilization risks exacerbating both racialized alienation and overt racism by provoking backlash against proliferating identity politics among the liberal elite.
If racialized alienation and overt racism have their root, as Tatum’s wonderful book suggests, in early childhood and adolescent racial identity development, then we should look to ground our optimism in structural change of the sort that would generate meaningful integration of schools and neighborhoods and curricular innovations in compulsory education. Progressive mobilization in colleges and universities might be crucial to bringing these reforms about. Nonetheless, I’m pessimistic because much of what we’ve seen over the last couple of years suggests that proceeding in that way risks counter-mobilization, unless we find better ways to talk beyond the progressive groups we’re cultivating.
None of this challenges the strategic value of optimism: Maybe it is prudent to believe that change is on the horizon because our believing that it is makes it likelier that it will be. I’m only challenging the conviction that rational grounds for optimism can be found in many of the stories of progressive activism on offer, inspiring though they may be. Still, there is plenty that makes the book well worth reading, especially if you spend time with kids or adolescents.
[1] I think the relevant reasons for optimism would exist even if the skepticism about implicit bias is well-founded—even if the IAT doesn’t accurately reflect its existence, and even if its existence doesn’t actually predict discriminatory behavior. See here. Even if the research behind implicit bias is flawed, strategies for combatting it may help mitigate some of the discriminatory consequences of more conscious biases as well: see here.
{ 25 comments }
Peter Dorman 01.12.18 at 7:40 pm
I would take it as given (i.e. vastly confirmed by data and experience) that racism is pervasive in American culture, taking different forms and perhaps having different intensities in different social groups but unavoidable anywhere. This is not news. The question is what the prospects are for changing it.
What disturbs me most at the moment is the hegemony of the view that we first change the culture by getting people to think and speak differently on a personal level, and then, through the magic of democracy, economic, social and political hierarchies will be dismantled. At least, that’s the view I encounter in my (admittedly unrepresentative) academic bubble.
Now, the last thing I’d want to do is disparage efforts to counter implicit racism in language and interpersonal relations. This is fine and worth doing. (I’m remembering “Your Racist Friend†by They Might Be Giants—released in 1990, gasp.) But in my view the underlying model is mistaken: causation runs primarily not from personal belief to social conditions but from social conditions to personal belief. I suspect we all tend to naturalize the circumstances we experience, making the assumptions that confer normality on them. If this is true, the most important thing to do is to break down racial and other hierarchies in fact through redistributive programs, affirmative action, etc. Make this a more equal world, and then our efforts to alter the culture will have more traction.
To repeat, this is not an either/or choice. We can certainly do both, but in this political moment we have intense militancy around how people speak and behave in personal settings and a dearth of militancy about concrete programs for economic and social change. I’ve experienced this at my own college, which melted down last year over communication issues while gross inequities at the level of programming and resource allocation were ignored.
Thomas Mulligan 01.12.18 at 11:08 pm
The way this all ends, I think, is in agreement that a just society is a meritocracy, in which everyone (1) enjoys equal opportunity and (2) is judged on the basis of merit.
There will always be competition for social goods. We know from mountains of empirical research (in social psychology, experimental economics, neurology, etc.) which competitions people regard as just. These are meritocratic competitions.
We take satisfaction in an achievement (e.g. getting a job) only when we know it came as a result of our merit. And when we lose, we live without resentment only if we know the winner was truly more meritorious (better-qualified). Nowadays, more meritorious blacks are passed over owing to implicit bias. More meritorious whites lose out because they don’t promote “diversity”. Similar stories can be told about men and women. And we violate meritocratic criteria in myriad other ways: People get social goods because they are pretty, or through nepotism, or for countless other reasons irrelevant from the point-of-view of merit. And so resentment flourishes.
To fix things, we must stop violating meritocratic selection and start working toward establishing equal opportunity. Affirmative action and related ideas (e.g. reparations) have not and will not improve race relations. This is because they have virtually no influence on human capital development or the intergenerational passage of wealth and influence. In contrast, if we confiscated all inheritance and used it to establish equal opportunity–as I think we should–these problems would be solved. We would have an efficient, racially representative workforce, operating under meritocratic selection.
There is public will for these equal opportunity-related reforms: “The public strongly supports educational initiatives to expand opportunity and create a society based on meritocracy . . . large majorities of Americans favor a number of specific government programs that go well beyond education policy. . . . Support for these government programs comes from all sectors of society: from Republicans, from self-described middle-class and upper-class people, from whites, and from those with high incomes, as well as from Democrats, working-class people, African Americans, and lower-income citizens.” (Page and Jacobs 2009: 22-23)
I discuss these and related issues in detail in my recently-released book, Justice and the Meritocratic State.
John Quiggin 01.13.18 at 5:36 am
Hi Gina, and welcome to CT
I think your view of the dynamics is pretty convincing, but the picture is less negative than you suggest.
Looking at Pew poll data classified by age gives a bit more ground for optimism about the way things are going and particularly about young people. On the question ” immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents”, people aged 18-29 overwhelmingly (82 per cent) answer yes, whereas for those over 65, it’s 51 per cent. For those 30-39 (who would have mostly been in school in 1997), it’s 71
Overall, attitudes have shifted markedly in favor of progressive positions in nearly all racial issues, but this shift has occurred almost entirely among Democrats. More precisely, I think, the shift is partly a change in views among Democrats, partly demography, and partly sorting, as racists have sorted themselves into the Republican party and (to a lesser extent) anti-racists have sorted themselves out.
John Quiggin 01.13.18 at 5:45 am
On a separate point, “white working class” is a problematic category. Since class can’t easily be measured, it’s often coded as “did not complete 4-year college”, a measure that is highly correlated with age and rurality, at least as much as with class in the sense in which the term is usually understood. IIRC, the strongest Republican support is among high-income, low-education whites, archetypally rerpesented by “Joe the Plumber”
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Joe_the_Plumber
This raises some complex issues about how the school system affects (or fails to affect) racial/political attitudes. I’d be interested in your thoughts on that.
Gareth Wilson 01.13.18 at 6:04 am
“for example, with white patients more often being recommended optimal treatment than black patients for the same symptoms”
So the researchers found a way to determine the optimal treatment for a patient, free of any racial bias?
Belle Waring 01.13.18 at 5:12 pm
5: they may not always be entirely right, as new discoveries are made in medicine. However there are, for example, evidence-based protocols for treating heart attacks involving the orders in which interventions and drugs should be administered to the patient based on various measures that aren’t particularly subjective, but do include patient self-reporting about their condition. Multiple studies have shown that black patients are not given the appropriate drugs or interventions at the same rate even when their blood pressure etc. and self-reported symptoms are the same as comparative white patients. Black patients are also consistently given fewer painkillers than white patients after surgery or accidents. Serena Williams had her post-pregnancy symptoms dismissed by the nurse on duty and needed to demand specific treatment she had had before for blood clots. And she’s Serena Williams! So, yeah, it’s a thing.
bruce wilder 01.13.18 at 6:22 pm
Reducing racism to bad attitudes and personal bias, and then relating it to the formation of personal identity in a society the culture of which exaggerates individualism, is going to be deeply problematic. Amid all the talk of the need to talk about race, it seems to me designed to create sermons, not conversation.
Peter Dorman: What disturbs me most at the moment is the hegemony of the view that we first change the culture by getting people to think and speak differently on a personal level, and then, through the magic of democracy, economic, social and political hierarchies will be dismantled. At least, that’s the view I encounter in my (admittedly unrepresentative) academic bubble.
I have a slightly different interpretation of my probably similar experience: I offer it as a tentative hypothesis only. The hegemonic view, it seems to me, looks to a transcendent transformation of consciousness — a revolution of outlook and values both personal and cultural — but the result is not necessarily a dismantling of hierarchy, but hierarchy acting according to new shared expectations to police social relations. Altar boys report the priest and the bishop acts to punish the priest and protect the altar boys; the assistant reports the teevee star and the executives take the report seriously and the teevee star is sent into exile.
I went to see The Post last night and a major theme was the transformative and courageous example of Katherine Graham to women. She arrives at the Supreme Court for the climactic decision and is taken out of the waiting line by a young female clerk (of color, natch) and escorted in thru a side entrance. The young clerk works for the Solicitor General (the other side) but tells Graham she hopes the Post wins the Pentagon Papers case. Graham witnesses the young clerk being unfairly berated by a mean young white man. After the decision in her favor is announced we see her working her way down the stairs. She foregoes making a statement to the waiting cameras. And, then (thru diffuse light and focus of the kind used for Jesus entering Jerusalem on Pentacost), we see her crowded by the admiring, hopeful, upturned faces of many, many young women.
This isn’t hierarchy dismantled; this is hierarchy getting a steamwash and a new coat of paint. It is a bit heavy-handed in locating the transformation at the very pinnacle of social status and power.
No word on the long-term effects of revelations the government lied the country into pointless war over decades of flawed decision-making. Of course, we are so grateful that the courage of the New York Times and Washington Post publishers ended that shameful practice by shining the bright light of democracy, but . . . well, things did not “progress” did they?
Thomas Mulligan: The way this all ends, I think, is in agreement that a just society is a meritocracy, in which everyone (1) enjoys equal opportunity and (2) is judged on the basis of merit.
I think pretty much exactly the opposite: racism is the bullshit the slaveholders made and meritocracy is the bullshit our current masters make. Stop the bullshit.
Yes, we need high achievement and ambition, but we ought to recognize that in a hierarchical political economy that often means seeking after power and that power sought is dangerous to all. What someone achieves is usually as much or more about luck than hard work, and may well be about hard work making other people miserable thru domination, negligence, fraud and abuse. A telegenic face or a weird talent for dunking basketballs, some well-mannered sociopathy or some, say, mathematical talent in the autistic savant, if that person can navigate to the right nexus in the political economy, might make a lot of money, but that’s neither merit nor justice.
Layman 01.13.18 at 10:04 pm
Belle Waring: “Serena Williams had her post-pregnancy symptoms dismissed by the nurse on duty and needed to demand specific treatment she had had before for blood clots.â€
I read that story too, and it seemed overblown to me. Williams self-prescribed a specific medical treatment from a nurse, who instead of complying summoned a doctor. That seems the right decision to me. Williams then self-prescribed a specific treatment from the doctor, who instead performed his own examination and arrived at the right diagnosis and treatment. Again, that seems the right decision to me. It turned out Williams had been right all along, but there’s no way the nurse or doctor could know that, and I can’t really imagine them treating me (a white male) any different than they treated Williams.
None of that is to say there isn’t a genuine problem. I just don’t think the Williams story is evidence of one.
Whirrlaway 01.13.18 at 10:42 pm
We take satisfaction in an achievement (e.g. getting a job) only when we know it came as a result of our merit.
There’s a common Christian religious argument here that you’ve run over, that says that everything we do is by grace, not by our own efforts. (Fortunately, as sin increases, grace abounds all the more.)(… like voting … your personal vote “doesn’t matterâ€).
This emphasis on some generic pseudo-objective personal “merit†is actually an important factor in the alienation of non-yuppies. Who defines and enforces it? Just another tool for “creative disruption†of local communities. That’s where the inevitable resistance/“backlash†comes from IMO. Progressive attitudes can’t be imposed from 50,000’, they arise from people encountering people one at a time. That is also a Christian idea.
LFC 01.14.18 at 1:10 am
From the post:
That’s a fairly long-term and hard agenda though, and in the meantime the ‘racialized alienation’ described by Hochschild, grounded partly in some whites’ perceptions (however biased or inaccurate) of being “passed over” for various benefits by non-whites, will persist unless somehow dealt with. I don’t pretend to have the answers. Finding “better ways to talk beyond the progressive groups we’re cultivating” might be part of it, though that leaves open the question of what those “better ways” might be. Ideally perhaps one would take a message substantively close to the politics of Sanders or Warren and express it in a more populist accent designed to appeal to some of the voters who might have voted for Trump, emphasizing cross-racial and cross-class coalitions and mobilization. Easier said than done.
Like b.wilder, I’m somewhat skeptical of appeals to ‘meritocracy’, though (in fairness to T. Mulligan) it’s hard to compress a book into a blog comment. But Michael Young’s classic satire The Rise of the Meritocracy should probably be read a bit more often than it is these days.
J-D 01.14.18 at 8:42 am
Thomas Mulligan
I look forward to future reports of how much success you have in promoting that agenda.
Kiwanda 01.14.18 at 2:27 pm
Some other substantive indications of positive change: In the last twenty-five years in the US, the proportion of nonblacks who would oppose a relative marrying a black person has dropped from 63% to 14%. The proportion of marriages in 2015 that involved black and white couples was 11%, and the overall proportion of interracial marriages was 17%, up from about 10% in 1990. The proportion of 2015 newborns who were multi-racial or multi-ethnic was 14%, up from 5% in 1980.
This is not to minimize the continuing and not-improving police violence or incarceration or school segregation or voter suppresion, and so on.
Gina Schouten 01.14.18 at 3:00 pm
Thanks for the comments!
John Quiggin: I agree that there are complex questions about how the school system affects (or fails to affect) racial/political attitudes. That’s one of the things I wanted to be driving at here. I actually think simply incorporating conversations about race into schooling and making sure they’re informed by a more sophisticated and honest sociological and historical story than they often are are good places to start. One of the things I liked so much about this book–and one of the reasons I was disappointed with the lack of explicit normative upshot–was all the rich stories about Tatum and others talking to kids about race. Those stories made me more hopeful *relative to one set of feasibility constraints** about the possibility of a kind of structural educational change that I think would make a difference. But none of her reasons for optimism make me think that making compulsory education do better at racial identity formation is *politically* feasible. Your data about generational change helps, but it would help more if I thought that the kids of those who answer one way were going to school in large numbers with the kids of those who answer differently.
Gina Schouten 01.14.18 at 3:17 pm
On the question of white patients more often being recommended optimal treatment than black patients for the same symptoms, I can fill in a bit more from Tatum’s own discussion and its references:
“[E]mergency room and resident physicians recommended the optimal treatment, thrombolytic (blood-clot-dissolving) therapy, less often for a Black patient than for a White one with the same acute cardiac symptoms” (Here she cites the Banaji and Greenwald book Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.) She goes on: “The Institute of Medicine has concluded that racial and ethnic minorities receive less-effective care even when income levels and insurance benefits are the same, pointing to implicit bias as the cause” (Institute of Medicine, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Healthcare (Washington, DC: National Academy of Sciences, 2002).
Seems like there’s been a lot of attention to this (or a similar) phenomenon lately in the context of racial disparities in maternal death rates in the US.
Stephen 01.14.18 at 4:26 pm
A pessimist might take it as given that racism is pervasive in every culture, taking different forms and having different intensities in different places but unavoidable anywhere.
If that is not so, what are the exceptions? Why are some cultures entirely free from racism?
If that is so, what are the prospects for changing it?
Z 01.15.18 at 8:52 am
Terrific first post!
While also recognizing the value of strategic optimism, I’m on the pessimistic camp when it comes to the reality. To me, it is painfully obvious than American anti-Black racism is deeply structural, intimately intertwined with core social or even anthropological structures (where you live, how you get socialized, where you go to school, how long you live and how…) and that its deleterious effects start literally in the womb (with for instance the higher prevalence of dangerously small Black babies, something which is usually credited primarily to the in utero reaction to maternal stress, not to mention the utterly shameful disgrace that is Black infant mortality rate; a social fact that pretty much defines in itself the violence of American racism to me).
Add to this historical American constant the explosion of inequalities, and the structural obstacles the American society places in front of Black Americans become unsurmountable (the recently re-aired This American Life episode Three Miles tells an eye-opening story).
I seriously doubt that personal changes in attitudes, if not accompanied by a genuine support of structural policies, can do much about that. Are white, liberal, educated, affluent Americans OK with their relatives marrying a Black person? Of course. Are they welcoming of immigrants? More and more of them are, sure. But are they ready to live in a socially diverse neighborhood with affordable social housing projects nearby? Are they ready to send their children to the public school of that neighborhood? Are they prepared to pay significant more in taxes to make the public healthcare center of this neighborhood functional? Better yet, since I still phrased the previous questions in terms of personal willingness, are they prepared to support policies that will collectively constrain them to make these choices, and so trigger real structural change? The answer to that last questions is the important one.
(Off-topic but, aside from the word “confiscate” which strongly suggests something is taken from someone and perhaps with an intent of punishment – two connotations that I don’t think can be felicitous when the former possessions of a dead person are discussed -, I fully agree with Thomas Mulligan’s sentence ” if we confiscated all inheritance and used it to establish equal opportunity [the problem of intergenerational passage of wealth and influence] would be solved”. Every other sentence in his comment 2, however, is more or less precisely the exact opposite of what I believe, especially the opening sentence.)
F. Foundling 01.16.18 at 11:58 pm
@Kiwanda 01.14.18 at 2:27 pm
>In the last twenty-five years in the US, the proportion of nonblacks who would oppose a relative marrying a black person has dropped from 63% to 14%.
Maybe those statistics are right. In some US circles, however, this seems to remain a pervasive issue. A day or two ago, on a news website that seems to be used mostly by Americans, I saw a very terse news story about a woman who killed her children and then committed suicide. Insanity, I suppose. There was a picture of the mother embracing the children, with all three smiling. The woman was white and the children were black (between 5 and 10 years old, I think). The children didn’t look very much like the mother and I would have guessed that she had adopted them, if the question had even occurred to me at that point. Anyway, nearly all the comments below were variations on ‘ serves the b*tch right for “mudsharking” ‘. Leaving aside the kind of mentality that has even produced this remarkable word, I’d say that if an individual’s first emotional response to such a story looks like this, the problem is deep. One doesn’t empathise with the children (perhaps they don’t seem human enough), one feels neither horror nor pity for the sick mother, one’s first reaction is one of racial resentment and hatred. Amazingly … inhuman, if I may put it like this.
@Gina Schouten 01.14.18 at 3:17 pm
>The Institute of Medicine has concluded that racial and ethnic minorities receive less-effective care even when income levels and insurance benefits are the same, pointing to implicit bias as the cause
(Perceived) social capital still differs, I think. And people are intuitively more inclined to favour those whom they consider to be stronger and closer to themselves – and thus more likely to return the favour or to take revenge. This results in a myriad other biases besides racial ones (in healthcare, too). Response: teach people to fight their selfishness, and equalise social (and other) capital as much as possible.
@Z 01.15.18 at 8:52 am, Thomas Mulligan 01.12.18 at 11:08 pm
>†if we confiscated all inheritance and used it to establish equal opportunity [the problem of intergenerational passage of wealth and influence] would be solvedâ€
No, since there are many other ways in which influence and opportunities are passed down from parents to children: social connections, exposure to materials and communication that prepares you for life. People can never, ever have completely equal opportunities. I’m sorry, but this physical world of ours just doesn’t and can’t work like this. You will never be able to work out, in an objective and unquestionable way, what people truly ‘deserve’; we will always need to give things to other humans based on the sole ‘merit’ of their being human. ‘To each according to his needs’ will always need to be at least one of the principles guiding the distribution of resources, and so will ‘to each an equal portion of the limited resource’. Ideally, I believe that those should be the predominant principles, since (some) needs are indubitable and so is our common humanity. As for the motivaton to work – we all want to be appreciated, and that is, ultimately, what motivates us to make any efforts above the minimum needed for survival (for some people in our current society, this is mediated through status and power, for others not). Liking will never be distributed in a just way either, but there is no need to add any further unjustly distributed goods to that.
And the more you question the human value of people, and the more you suggest that their value is reflected in their place in the various current or future ‘meritocratic’ hierarchies of this world, and the more you deviate from the principle ‘from each according to their abilities’ in your expectations towards people, the more full of insecurity and safe-hatred they will be and the more they will be inclined to compensate for this by regarding other humans as ‘mud’ – thereby turning into the closest thing to ‘mud’ themselves.
map maker 01.17.18 at 7:07 pm
“None of that is to say there isn’t a genuine problem. I just don’t think the Williams story is evidence of one.”
Which is just reflective of your entrenched racism and bias towards biased beliefs about evidence and power structures?
F. Foundling 01.17.18 at 7:48 pm
I forgot to react to this in Thomas Mulligan 01.12.18 at 11:08 pm:
>We take satisfaction in an achievement (e.g. getting a job) only when we know it came as a result of our merit.
All the (ideologically-motivated) studies in the world won’t make me forget what I know from life experience and common sense: many, many people do take satisfaction in things they obtained undeservedly and in unfair ways, hence they go on obtaining them in the same way; and people in general are extremely good at convincing themselves that they deserve all the good things that they have obtained and currently have, and still more.
Z 01.18.18 at 12:40 pm
F.Foundling @17 No, since there are many other ways in which influence and opportunities are passed down from parents to children
Oh I agree, it’s just that everything else Thomas Mulligan wrote is pretty much the opposite of what I believe (which is more or less your concluding paragraph) whereas I do by and large support the idea of abolishing inheritance.
Layman 01.18.18 at 2:13 pm
map maker: “Which is just reflective of your entrenched racism and bias towards biased beliefs about evidence and power structures?â€
Well, could be. Show me the study which says that nurses and doctors carry out – without any other investigation! – the medical treatment instructions of white male patients more often than they do of black female patients, and I’ll be happy to take a look at it.
After all, I did also write this: “None of that is to say there isn’t a genuine problem.â€
Until then, maybe you should keep your groundless accusations to yourself?
Thomas Mulligan 01.18.18 at 4:35 pm
Of course there are sociopaths. But they are a minority, and they do not threaten the stability of the just distributive system.
One reason the empirical literature is so important is that it is the only way that most academics will gain a sense of how regular people, across ideological lines, live: the values that are important to them, the fairness norms that guide them, etc. And these are, after all, the people we would impose our normative theories upon.
This is less a result of ivory tower insularity and more due to homogeneity in the academy these days: homogeneity in politics (radical leftist) and socio-economic background (upper-middle/upper class). Most academics go directly from high school, to college, to graduate school, to a faculty job, having never known public service or private enterprise.
Kiwanda 01.19.18 at 3:23 pm
me:
F. Foundling:
….followed by a description of a news story with a comment thread that had many vicious racist remarks.
Maybe it’s silly to spell this out, but: I’m sure that F. Foundling understands that those awful comments are not in some way contrary evidence to what I said. Tens of millions of people have, in one limited sense, changed their minds in a positive way. A smaller number, but still likely some tens of millions, have not. That leaves at least a few to make nasty comments on blog posts. So then?
F. Foundling 01.20.18 at 12:02 am
@Z 01.18.18 at 12:40 pm
>I do by and large support the idea of abolishing inheritance.
So do I, at least as far as means of production are concerned; naturally, this also presupposes an efficient and just system of the distribution of goods.
@Thomas Mulligan 01.18.18 at 4:35 pm
>Of course there are sociopaths. But they are a minority, and they do not threaten the stability of the just distributive system.
That division strikes me as too black-and-white. Between so-called sociopathy and sainthood, there are many degrees and shades of self-serving ways of thinking, unfairness and selfishness and even the best among us occasionally exhibit them to some extent; I’d say that most people, academics no less – I’m sometimes tempted to say more – than ‘regular people’, exhibit them to a *fairly* significant extent. A degree of cynicism and some narcissistic self-delusion are basically *normal*, as is the simple morally indifferent pleasure at being lucky or succeeding in whatever one is doing. Finally, people’s very ideas of ethics and justice also vary greatly. Nepotism and favouritism for instance easily become a kind of second, unofficial norm in a culture or subculture. After all – since nepotism has been mentioned – it’s even hard to reach a consensus on whether inheritance is unjust or not. In general, justice is debatable and subjective; power disparity, whatever one’s estimate of the justness of the way in which it arose, will harm the less powerful, and the greater it is, the more it will harm them; hence the most important task is to decrease power disparities (supposedly just or not) as much as possible; and a given place in a hierarchy should be seen as a responsibility, not as a reward (just or not).
>This is less a result of ivory tower insularity and more due to homogeneity in the academy these days: homogeneity in politics (radical leftist) and socio-economic background (upper-middle/upper class).
I can’t help observing that I definitely wouldn’t describe most Western academics as radical leftists – not to mention non-Western academics – but I suppose that everything is relative and depends on the observer’s own position in the political spectrum.
>One reason the empirical literature is so important is that it is the only way that most academics will gain a sense of how regular people, across ideological lines, live: the values that are important to them, the fairness norms that guide them, etc.
This smacks of exoticising ‘the people’ a bit. I would question the assumption that one can generalise about the way ‘regular people’ (in the West?) as a group live and think, and that they live and think in a way so profoundly different from the way academics and/or upper-middle class people live. I suppose that the degree to which such an abyss seems plausible might depend on one’s country of residence, circumstances and way of life. In any case, even if ‘regular people’ did in fact form such a highly distinct group with a common and distinct set of values and norms, that still wouldn’t mean that these values and norms are something uniformly positive and/or natural and immutable (as opposed to the ‘unnaturalness’ of academic ideas?), which consequently must be accepted and to which one must adapt. Values, norms and notions of justice vary across and within cultures, they compete and they also change over time.
@Kiwanda 01.19.18 at 3:23 pm
> I’m sure that F. Foundling understands that those awful comments are not in some way contrary evidence to what I said.
No, I wasn’t actually trying to present a serious argument against your statistics with this anecdote – I suppose that to some extent I was just expressing my frustration at the earlier experience – and I’m fully prepared to believe that progress has been made. That said, it does seem surprising that a site that isn’t explicitly neo-Nazi would be so extremely unrepresentative that the enormous majority of the responses would reflect the views of just 14 % of the population. Of course, I might have misjudged the site, and a tendency of the Internet to amplify extreme opinions might also be involved.
Jorma 01.20.18 at 2:40 pm
I believe, and optimism has nothing to do with it, that fewer and fewer white Americans believe in the genetic let’s call it, inferiority of non whites. The belief in genetic or inherited superiority/inferiority is the purest form of racism. There is another thing however that is seen as racism but is something else that doesn’t have a name as far as i know. That is the belief that other cultures are inferior.
I say that a growing majority of white Americans believe in black inferiority not because of their human potential is determined by their genetic inheritance but because they come from an inferior culture. The ghetto or whatever.
For the purposes of discussing race this is mostly a distinction without a difference, to most. However I being cursed with a literal mind find all talk about racism lacks meaning because based upon my genetic vs cultural racism distinction the term racism lacks meaning. So while I am ‘optimistic’ that belief in inherited biological inferiority is on the wane the belief in cultural superiority, of whites, is on the rise.
Resolving nothing but I figured I would throw it out here anyway.
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