On a piece of bad reasoning about race and class

Who are some prominent, well known figures who would deny this reasoning- that race sorts people into classes and is therefore part of the picture? I can think of a handful of cranks, but that’s about it. Even the vast majority of people I know who explicitly argue for a “class first” leftism wouldn’t deny this.

“It is a silly objection, and obviously so. And yet we come across something very similar in form in many arguments about race and class. There are harms reliably associated with low socio-economic status and those harms fall on people regardless of their race. Kerching! – it is claimed – race doesn’t matter in the explanation of those harms! ”

I must say I never heard this argument in my entire life.

if being black increases your relative propensity of being sorted into a poor working-class group that is exposed to such harms, and if being white reduces your relative propensity of being so sorted, then race is actually a big part of the picture

Well yes and no. The overriding factor is history, in the sense of the temporal trajectory of any complex system. Your ‘blackness’ per se isn’t the primary determiner of where you start in life; the socio-economic history of your forbears is – your starting point in life isn’t generally a race-based ‘propensity’ that you have.

Obsessing about the colour of people today won’t change much because any race-based ‘sorting’ has already happened, mostly long ago (well to be sure, it might be occurring among other immigrant populations, but not much in the black US population).

Fixing the poverty of the recipients of their historical situation (just like generationally poor white, latino, etc people) is mainly a question of supplying forward-looking opportunities for everyone in such situations, as well as finding ways to combat negative aspects of the culture of poverty (e.g. fatherless families), identified by the likes of Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele etc.

I think “being sorted” is doing rather a lot of work in this argument. If it’s something done to one, by others, without any ability to control it, this argument makes sense. If it’s based on one’s own decisions, even if those decisions are more common among one group than another, it makes less sense.

For a concrete example: reckless driving is far more common among young men than among any other group. However, I think it would be unreasonable to describe a crackdown on driving 70 in a 30 mph zone as as an ageist or misandrist activity–and pointing out that young men who do not drive recklessly are unaffected would be a key part of that argument.

I’m with @1: I don’t think anyone really holds this argument (apart from a bunch of nutters who only really ‘exist’ so to speak on the internet). What is true that leftists are more prone to asking why whites have so many privileges in Western European countries and other ethnicities (not just African Americans) do not, and are more likely to tie this into colonialism and imperialism: i.e. elite geopolitical aims.

It’s worthwhile pointing out that Europe and North Africa aren’t the world. Has Aliko Dangote been held back by his race? Perhaps, perhaps not, although I would like to hear details.

Or what about racism in other countries actually in sub-Saharan Africa? I assume (perhaps I’m wrong! How would I know?) that there isn’t much racism as we would understand it in, say, the Democratic Republic of the Congo ‘cos there ain’t many white people, but this countries and others like it are still grossly inequitable: why? Which is not to say that there aren’t other divisions that function ‘like’ race (e.g. Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda…although the exacerbation of this issue in recent years is undeniably due to colonialism).

There’s also difficulties in extrapolating from statistical tendencies to specific cases here.

I can’t see the difference between “class” and “race.” Well, I can, but …

We don’t define class in terms of income. A graduate student usually isn’t lower-class, despite the low associated income. We don’t quite define class in terms of occupation, either. An ambulance-chasing attorney belongs to a very different social class than a Wall Street partner. In other words, class is one of those shifting social constructs that is very hard to pin down analytically, although we usually have no problems with attributions in individual cases. Just like race!

Social causality is extremely complex, and clumsy attributions are pernicious. There are times when “class not race” is precisely the right description of social reality–say for an advocate of an increased minimum wage. There are times it obscures everything, as with a foe of excessive police violence. As with most social phenomena, a light and sure touch, accompanied by good faith, goes much further than formal analysis.

…finding ways to combat negative aspects of the culture of poverty (e.g. fatherless families…

There’s a good bit of evidence the issues attributed to the “culture of poverty” tend to recede when the poverty, itself, is addressed.

To Sam Chevre at 7:

You say:

“I think “being sorted” is doing rather a lot of work in this argument. If it’s something done to one, by others, without any ability to control it, this argument makes sense. If it’s based on one’s own decisions, even if those decisions are more common among one group than another, it makes less sense.”

You seem to be arguing that “individual responsibility for one’s actions” should trump the causal power of “social or institutional causation” — unfortunately, without explaining how to disentangle the two. I mean, I think it would be incumbent on YOU to show exactly when social or institutional causation ceases and individual responsibility should climb into the cockpit, and yet I don’t see any kind of detailed discussion of knowing when this line has been crossed.

I would think it pretty clear that children are rightfully considered less “individually responsible” for their actions than adults. So, if your theory were taken to be a guide, it would be incumbent on society–who wished to insist on the “individual responsibility” of its adults–to provide extraordinarily equal childhood environments. Oddly enough, the people who cry most loudly about “just desserts” for adults never seem very interested in equalizing the opportunities, treatment, and resources devoted to children of any race or socio-economic group, although it would seem their own argument would force them into that position. So maybe it’s not really being offered in good faith?

Just wondering.

My own biased impression ( how would you measure this?) is that the bad faith arguments come from people who argue against social democratic policy on the grounds that even if no one went bankrupt from health care costs there would still be racism.

@Ebenezer Scrooge: “We don’t define “class” in terms of income,” except when we do. We also define it in terms of years of schooling, social status, family background, consumption preferences (e.g. Volvo sedan or Ford pickup), and a bunch of other variables–generally whichever best supports the case we’re trying to make about the significance of class in politics. I think this suggests two conclusions: (1) we had better insist that people invoking “class” as an explanation clarify just how they’re defining it, and when they’ve answered that question, (2) we should examine why, in their view, “class” matters. In many (most?) cases I think the answer to (2) is that we operate on the (usually implied rather than stated) assumption that “class” is a good predictor of political beliefs and voting behavior–a faint but significant echo of Marx’s assertion that at some point “man is compelled to face, with sober senses, his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind.” That is, “class” translates to “class interest,” and class interest becomes/will become the main determinant of political behavior, and we now know what’s the matter with Kansas. “Compelled” means “compelled,” doesn’t it? It will have been noticed, however, that this keeps not happening.

Forgive me for settling for something as crude as the pictures of we are so diverse marketing brochures many places of work or study like to show these days. Figured those parents income quartiles had the advantage there might be real data on that to look. If something like status group representation was ever seriously up for debate, the crude would also have the advantage of being harder to circumvent.
A more sophisticated approach could add all kinds of other things, parents, even grandparents type of education and job assets……..

Donald @ 17: “the bad faith arguments come from people who argue against social democratic policy on the grounds that even if no one went bankrupt from health care costs there would still be racism.”

Has there ever been such a one? Jess Jackson was advocating universal health care in the 80s; Martin Luther King was working against poverty for all poor people. What I -have- seen lots of, and from commenters who have already commented here, is two arguments: (1) that racism will just “go away” when economic redress is achieved (yeah, tell that to women about sexism and get ready for a big-ass gust of laughter) and (2) antiracist policies are put into place to allow high-performing people of color to advance, and nobody else benefits. I mean, it’s like these people don’t actually know what BLM is about, why it started, and why these protests start/restart.

A black child with a toy gun? Shoot him on sight. A black lawyer in a Walmart with a BB gun? Shoot him on sight. A motorist who warns a cop that he has a concealed-carry permit is summarily executed.

Sure, this is a merely a matter of class, the lamentable poverty of the unfortunate descendants of our country’s least favored immigrants.

The law, in its majestic equality, prohibits the black, as well as the white, from bearing arms? Clearly not, and that’s the point.

“[R]ich people who sleep under bridges” ?????

The use of this absurd characterization of the argument being critiqued betrays the utter bankruptcy of Chris B.’s argument.

It is perfectly legitimate to try to eliminate confounding factors from an analysis. It is perfectly legitimate to ask why do poor Black immigrants do so well relative to US Black population, if systemic racism is so prevalent?

It is also important to actually try to disentangle what is this mysterious “sorting mechanism” that keeps US Blacks down. Is it the large corporations that are desperate to increase the percentages of black hires (which would greatly decrease their chances of losing employment lawsuits)? Is it the desperation of STEM university departments, medical schools and law schools to get as many black persons admitted as possible? Those can’t be the mechanisms.

I guess it must be some toothless hick in Alabama who refuses to hire Blacks in his grocery store (where it has not been replaced by Walmart). We have found our Powerful Enemy that keeps the Black man down!

The secret to disentangling the the poor arguments that Chris B. (and many other academics) make is that they feel that they HAVE to take it as axiomatic that Black culture can not be blamed for any of the bad outcomes. Once you have that as an axiom, the “critiques” write themselves.

For instance, to the argument that poor Black immigrants do better than US Blacks, the answer is that immigrants have some special sauce which makes them on average better adapted to the US workplace environment. Therefore the argument is incorrect, it introduces a confounding factor, therefore I am an idiot for even bringing it up.

Well, OK — but what is that special sauce of the Black immigrants? It can’t be genes, so what is it? If it turns out that it is the culture, then we’re still back to explaining the discrepancies by the dysfunctional culture of many US Black communities.

It is indeed not surprising that for communities in which most families have a relative or a friend that was shot dead in gang related violence, the outcomes will not be that great. If a child is missing his father, the outcomes will not be great. If a child is being tutored by either a TV Set, by the neighbour’s unsupervised kids (often involved in gangs) or by a school which lowers its standards to the point where they teach nothing except how to avoid/survive a fight, then the outcomes will not be that great either.

But we rarely get to a serious analysis of how to change that culture. Instead, we get silly “arguments” like the one in the original essay, denying the usefulness of eliminating confounding factors, whose entire purpose is to sustain the boogeyman of the “systemic racism” myth.

Because academics are utter cowards — regardless of whether they are tenured or not — we get policies based on arguments that are based on lies. What is well know to Black church ministers and pastors is denied axiomatically by the intelligentsia. In the long term, those arguments based on lies lead to the further material and spiritual impoverishment of the Black communities. As such, the academics which make those arguments based on lies are complicit in bringing about that outcome.

@12–

No, saying that does not make you racist, but it may well imply you endorse a form of socialism. I doubt that “All Lives Matter” types would endorse any reasonable implications of that phrase, whether it be universal health care, redistribution of wealth, etc. beyond the tongue-in-cheek “refutation” of racism it dog-whistles.

I think that the only “bad reasoning” on display here is the reasoning in the OP.

The question, to stick with the “silly objection,” is do you fix the harms associated with sleeping under bridges by fixing racism? The answer is clearly no. All you will fix is the proportion of black people who sleep under bridges. Well, where the social ill in question is suffered almost universally by blacks, changing the proportion of blacks affected by the ill WOULD in fact go along way to fixing the harm associated with that ill. Slavery would be an example of this. But where the social ill is widespread but only disproportionately black, you don’t accomplish much for society by making the number of black sufferers proportionate to their numbers in the general population. As Adolph Reed has argued, it would be progress of a sort if the proportion of black billionaires were the same as the proportion of blacks in the general population; but if the wealth and income inequalities in society remained the same, then it isn’t something to get that excited about. It is not clear the extent to which poor blacks are supposed to feel better because people of their race are now represented proportionately in the upper echelons. And of course this does absolutely nothing for the poor of other races. It offers them no incentive to get behind the movement.

Here’s another example. Black men are far more likely than white men to be both the perpetrators and the victims of violence. Black people in general are far more likely than whites to be the victims of violence. And, as is usually the case, the violence occurs for the most part within the community between people who know each other. There is very little inter-racial violence. While there is lots of evidence that blacks are more likely to be charged and convicted for minor crimes that whites are just as likely to be guilty of (e.g. marijuana possession), in the case of violent crime, the incarceration rate for blacks is proportionate with the much higher level of actual violence in black communities. If we rule out the idea that blacks carry a “violent” gene, then we are left with the conclusion that the violence is the result of being poor and deprived in various ways. Focussing on racism, such that blacks were less likely to find themselves among the poor, would of course, reduce the problem of disproportionate incarceration rates among blacks. But wouldn’t it be far better to focus on addressing economic inequality head on, such that we make it less likely that ANYONE is poor and deprived?

“And when we investigate we find no difference in those harms between rich people who sleep under bridges and poor people who sleep under bridges. (We can assume that a few rich people, inebriated after a night at their club, end up under bridges too).”

It’s not just bridges. Some of the harms that poor people in France’s statement suffer for sleeping under bridges, begging, or stealing loaves of bread include 1) The comfortable passers-by are more likely to complain. 2) The police are more likely to come in response to those complaints. 3) When they arrive, the gendarmes are more likely to pack the person off to jail. 4) As they’re packing the poor person off to jail, they’re more likely to beat the shit out of them. 5) Once in the legal system, they’re more likely to be sanctioned. 6) Once sanctioned, their sanctions are more likely to be excessively harsh.

Each of those harms is more likely to occur to someone who is not white in the US, regardless of class, if such a thing is possible. The white card travels.
Each of those harms is more likely to occur to a poor person.
There are other identifiable categories–people with mental illnesses, substance abuse issues, age, and gender–that exacerbate each harm. (TL;DNR: if you are a young Black trans woman with no money and you’re high or experiencing psychosis, you’re in deep shit.)

Sometimes it’s really hard to disentangle the intersections, sometimes less so, but what’s clear from Crenshaw’s work is that very often, no single analysis (race, class, ableism, homophobia, or whatever) is adequate to a particular case.

In the current moment, a class-based solution, ending cash bail, would help, but it wouldn’t address the beating in the paddy wagon (I’m Irish) along the way. And that’s what’s immediately at issue for BLM in this moment, with the deaths in custody alerting us to less fatal, but system-wide, forms of abuse.

Crenshaw’s article is about employment discrimination. Her TED talk is about police violence, race, and gender, and also useful, if completely heartbreaking: https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality?language=en

sure man, tell me about all the white people who have “passed as black”, really man, go ON …..

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=rachel+dolezal

The OP muddies the distinction between explaining a bad situation and trying to fix it. People sleeping under bridges need shelter for the night, not an analysis of why they need that shelter. Believing that is not the same as believing that there might not be different reasons for sleeping under bridges: the “something very similar” between the OP last two paragraph “objections” is not actually similar.

Black people are more likely than white to be killed unjustifiably by trigger-happy cops; poor people are more likely to be killed that way than rich people; black people are poorer than white people. The just actions to take are not to try to get cops to kill more white people or more rich people, but instead are to try to get cops to be less trigger happy, and to get more people out of poverty. To the extent that black people are killed more by cops, and are poor, such interventions would correspondingly help them more, especially in combination.

It is also true that black people are more likely to be killed by cops, independent of (census tract) poverty, and again, more likely to be poor, so reducing cop-trigger-propensity in general, or poverty in general, may well not reduce those comparative differences. (Unless these reductions are so great that there are no trigger-happy cops, or no poverty.) So steps to reduce those inequities are justified. But it’s not either-or, between reducing harms in general, and reducing relative harms, and focusing on only one or the other is neither morally nor pragmatically right.

Alex K @ 27: You ask “how can immigrant blacks do so much better than native Black Americans, if it’s racism?”

And you’re not going to like this answer, white man. Immigrants -do- have a special secret sauce: we come from far away, and we (most of us) know we can’t go back. Our parents DRILL INTO US that we must succeed here, and we have a drive that you NATIVES don’t have, because you don’t need it — you have the security of living in your native land. [In this security, Black Americans are not so different from White Americans.] But the thing is, the -children- of immigrants don’t have as much of that drive, as much of that FEAR of what happens if they fail. And their children, even less. It’s a sort of regression to the mean, I guess.

So yeah, Black immigrants have something that Americans (and hence, Black Americans, b/c they’re Americans too) don’t have — the same thing that South Asian immigrants have, that Americans generally don’t have: an overriding drive to “make it”. Oh, and in case you think “gosh, well can’t those Black Americans man up and do like Nigerian -American immigrants?” I’d say to you: “you don’t ask that of Cletus and his inbred hillbilly relatives in West Virginia, why do you ask it of Black Americans?”

It would be remiss if I didn’t point out that for many of the (ahem) browner classes of immigrants, the barriers to immigration are so severe, that only the most well-educated and skilled get past them. This is another way in which immigrants are just smarter and better than you native types. But again, that (because we’re not idiots) isn’t genetic — mostly chance, some of it training — and so our children have less, and our grandchildren even less.-

And last, none of what I wrote above should be necessary. Go read Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law. Or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Case for Reparations. Jesus, you racists are all alike: you don’t even bother to learn the arguments of your opponents — just like creationists, you just spout whatever bullshit comes to mind, thinking that qualifies as decent argument.

Re: racism in Africa, there’s a lot of historical ignorance about what Medieval Africa was actually like. From the Bantu migration through the steady advancements of Christianity and Islam, Africa saw many great empires rise and fall and many indigenous groups were already conquered people several times over before any Europeans arrived. Many “fourth world” descendants of hunter/gatherers like the “pygmies” and “bushmen” of Central Africa are immediately distinguishable from their Bantu-descended pastoralist neighbors/rivals/overlords by height, body shape, and skin tone in a way that can only be called race (a similar dynamic occurs with Aryans and Dravidians in South Asia). It seems like once the Bantu groups spread across Africa (driven largely by an endless quest for more grazing land), they increasingly turned on each other and some groups became racialized over a period of centuries as certain peoples came to be seen as inherently uncivilized or “slaveable.”

It began with highly organized polytheistic empires with horses and advanced weaponry (one theory holds that the Iron Age began somewhere in the vicinity of Lake Chad) beating up on small kinship-based animist/totemist groups. By the Middle Ages, those subject peoples became more organized and better armed and the warlord societies became increasingly reliant on control over the Red Sea and Transsaharan trade routes to maintain their material dominance. This meant accepting Muslim and Christian missionaries and often giving them prominent roles in courts. Many leaders were attracted to the political and religious prestige conferred on them by divine right and association with powerful global religions and these kingdoms effectively converted themselves starting with the upper classes (the same thing was happening with many contemporary nomadic conquerers in Northern/Eastern Europe and what would become the settled “gunpowder empires” of Central Asia). This created a new (religiously) educated noble caste that came to displace or rival the older warlords, lawkeepers, and shamans at the head of societies.

By the time the Portuguese showed up in numbers in the 14th Century, the “typical” West African society (if there can be such a thing) already had a complicated racial caste system with a more-or-less monotheistic ruling class consisting of the wealthy elite of the preeminent imperial powers like the Mali/Mandinke or Mbaza-Congo, followed by vassal nations and minor powers that were mostly left alone to pursue their traditions as long as they paid tribute and contributed to their tribal confederation in various ways, followed by free clans of the majority ethnic groups, whose fortunes rose and fell with the health of their herds, the size of their harvests, and the honor, plunder (and captives) gained and lost in war. The bottom rung of society was the slaves who usually came from the people who had lost those wars or from the less “civilized” ethnic groups that lived on the margins of settler societies. Separate from and arguably below even those marginal tribes were small and isolated groups descended from various indigenous hunter-gatherers who lived in remote and rugged areas like the Ituri Forest and the Kalahari.

Genetic evidence suggests that these groups are not all closely related to each other
or to “pure” Bantus who are actually more closely related to Europeans, despite the illusion of skin color. Color in Africa is a terrible proxy for race and ethnicity because every ethnic group on Earth is descended from dark skinned Africans so we probably were killing each other over height, eye shape, hair type and so on long before any of us left the tropics and lost our permanent tans. Race=color is just another ahistorical eurocentrism.

I think part of the confusion is connected with the fact that in the past “racism” was referred to a system of oppression operating by explicit racial discrimination and unconscious racial bias whereas now a lot of people use it to refer to any statistically discoverable differences in outcomes between racially identified groups, whether due to present discrimination and bias or past “pre-sorting”, or ambiguously to refer to both these things.

@42
”The real question is, given that the “sorting” occurred long ago, to what extent is current social stratification due to race and to what extent is it due to class. Sure there is some “surplus” of racism over class structure. But is that the main story and what are the practical implications moving forward”?

So we finally have an answer to Emmas question:
”I want somebody to tell me, plainly and without euphemizing, exactly how much racism I’m supposed to swallow from poor/uneducated white people in order to advance the glorious revolution”?

AND the answer is:
”Sure there is some “surplus” of racism over class structure”.

And then – right away it came with another question? – the question:
”But is that the main story and what are the practical implications moving forward”?

Well – didn’t I tell all of you (white) guys about the very ”practical implication moving forward” by marrying somebody who isn’t ”white?
AND didn’t I hint – how happy WE ALL are that it currently is ”trending” NOT to be ”a Racist in my homeland the US of A?

And then somebody – like @42 comes along and insults the “The New Yorker” –
(which helped – that NOT being a Racist is/was ”trending”) – as ”a nasty neo-liberal rag, but a reliable indicator of what the chatterings of the Manhanttanite cocktail party circuit “thinks” – AND on top of it @42 quotes ”taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility”?

So let ME try to answer @42 question:
”But is that the main story -(that there is some “surplus” of racism over class structure”) – and what are the practical implications moving forward”?

The answer is:
”I want somebody to tell me, plainly and without euphemizing, exactly how much racism I’m supposed to swallow from poor/uneducated white people in order to advance the glorious revolution”? – AS I – ME – had the duty to interview over 100 workers from the so called ”Rust Belt” – before the majority of these workers erected ”Trump” -(the German word for ”STUPID”) – while often quoting the ”class” argument that ”Trump” -(the worst example of some Manhanttanite cocktail party circuit) – is/was ”on their side” – and that’s why they are going to vote for him)
AND I always asked myself: ”is that the main story?” until – after the interviews – it got more ”private” and we talked about ”this and that” and also about my ”coloured” boyfriend – and then I always asked myself -(just like Emma)
”I want somebody to tell me, plainly and without euphemizing, exactly how much racism I’m supposed to swallow from poor/uneducated white people in order to advance the glorious revolution”?

AND THEN! –
much later –
NOW! –
I found this question on CT – and asked ALL of the commenters of CT to answer it –
and I never got a real ”plainly and without euphemizing” answer –
about:
”exactly how much racism I’m supposed to swallow from poor/uneducated white people in order to advance the glorious revolution”?

@29, “No, saying that does not make you racist, but it may well imply you endorse a form of socialism. I doubt that “All Lives Matter” types would endorse…”

I don’t endorse anything, nor do I have any idea what the ‘types’ would endorse, if anything.

I’m amused by this ongoing effort to combine the incompatible: the left-wing doctrine of class struggle, and a far-right doctrine of ethnic survival and prosperity; the world as a stage for the ethnic groups to compete against each other.

And I don’t think it’s an accident that it’s the left-wing doctrine that gets smothered in the process.

“Our parents DRILL INTO US that we must succeed here”

This “CHEETAN R MURTHY” guy can’t manage to get to a third sentence without contradicting himself and confirming my analysis that the main cause of poor outcomes for the US black population is internal to the culture of some US Black communities.

(This is not a denial that pathological cultures can have deeper, historical, exogenous roots, like slavery, which is obviously the case. But ultimately those are cultural causes and can be changed with a change of culture, like insisting on the importance of family and having a strong spiritual foundation. Material causes can be important but they are not the whole story. Also, concretely, there are known ways of dealing with the 0.5% of the population that commit 20% or so of murders — but those might involve more, rather than less policing)

What exactly is “DRILLING INTO [kids]” good values, except a sign of a functioning culture?

But this is the pathetic state that the “approved” analysis must reach. Once you take it as axiomatic something that is false, you end up contradicting yourself and covering it up with sophomoric, vacuous, emoting.

And “CHEETAN” — I am an immigrant too, you utter doofus, so take your “lived experience” and shove it.

@52
It is class and race. The two are inseparably intertwined.
It makes no sense to think you can only address one and fix both.

And I thought for a while – that I had found out – that in the US (and the UK?) you have to fix ”race” first in order to fix ”class” – and then I remembered that – right here – on the CT – there was this… debate after the erection of Trump –
if it was ”economics” or ”racism” which erected Trump – and that Paul Krugman -(and some here?) opted for ”racism” – while I – coming back from the Rust Belt – thought it was more ”the economical devastation” – which got overlooked for quite some time – by
some ”Anglo-Saxon Economists”?

And THEN – I was ALL for some kind of (Non Violent) Revolution.
BUT! –
then –
I always read the comments of our ”Amateur Revolutionaries” – here –
(I should not name) – and start to think: Shouldn’t WE firstly decide what to fix first?
”Race” or ”class”?

I question John Halasz’s statistics and general argument but agree this discussion reveals the limits of “analytic” philosophy. “Everybody choose an abstract argument that tends to support their own side; then convert whomsoever they happen to encounter by entangling them in this one argument and committing them to its importance,” doesn’t seem guaranteed to produce results, in the absence of a metaphysics or a faith that it does.

Let’s listen to (or in some circumstances observe, but preferably listen to) people engaged with the world in some kind of (not necessarily political) action, instead of telling them how they should think.

I’m amused by this ongoing effort to combine the incompatible: the left-wing doctrine of class struggle, and a far-right doctrine of ethnic survival and prosperity; the world as a stage for the ethnic groups to compete against each other.

I suppose this ongoing effort is no less amusing for being a figment of the imagination.

… But ultimately those are cultural causes and can be changed with a change of culture, like insisting on the importance of family and having a strong spiritual foundation. …

Is there any evidence that insisting on something helps to make it happen?

Even if exhortations have some value as a tool of public policy, the case for making them its centrepiece is dubious.

The perennial question of “why do black immigrants succeed where African Americans fail?” is one of those things that would answer itself if people just stopped to think for one goddamn minute. It’s a common enough observation that winners tend to keep winning and losers tend to keep losing until some circumstances change. Making it through an expensive, time-consuming, and dehumanizing immigration system that was subtly but powerfully designed to exclude people like you is a huge “win” that most likely came on top of a series of other wins that required taking huge risks and a massive expenditure of effort. People have to be pretty brave and driven to even attempt such a thing and it takes skills, smarts, and generally some form of community support to make it to to the other side.

The people who successfully emigrate from the Global South to high income countries are a selected group at least twice over (with selection pressures that increase with every border they have to pass). This overlaps heavily with the concept of “brain drain.”

Even impoverished refugees tend to have specific advantages over those that “don’t make it” that can be expressed as human/social capital. Language skills, occupational qualifications, problem solving ability, cultural competence, and access to family and ethnic support systems are all huge advantages when navigating “the system” that successful immigrants are much more likely to have than the general population and which remain valuable after immigration. The idea that immigrants ever come to a new country “with nothing” is the product of subtly racist ethnic mythology (often reinforced by “hard-working” immigrant parents scolding “lazy” Americanized kids who may simply lack the skills, experience, and self-assurance immigrants have developed by being who they are). The most valuable thing we ever bring with us to a new place isnt in a suitcase, it’s between our ears.

@56
”It’s just this impressionistic blur of words”.

didn’t I already (once) explain: It has to be – ”rapping”?
And isn’t ”rapping” the right ripping of racism?

@
54
”Please forgive the personal nature of the question. I ask only because I would like to better understand you”.
No sweat – as I have been asked the same question on the Internet quite often – and my dad -(who is this HUUUGE ”Dadafan”) always suggests the ”Dada Manifesto”.

and about@60
”Oh, one bit I forget”.

”if you want to talk about reparations, a meaningless and empty piece of symbolic politics without any practicability, then Native Americans, not Afro-Americans would be first in line”.

Thats why I confessed already that – concerning my blood quantum – I qualify not only as ”White” but also as ”Native American” – and as ”one drop of blood” can make you an American Indian too – did you check already if you qualify for reparations – as my US grandmother already got her share from the US government – AND she didn’t think AT ALL – that it was ”a meaningless and empty piece of symbolic politics without any practicability” – as she bought ME a teddybear from the money?

@68
”That’s very interesting”!

I always thought so too – and HEEERE is the answer to all your
questions:

https://youtu.be/DyDfgMOUjCI

In the mid-80s, anti-apartheid protests and anti-racist or leftist teach-ins at my university in NYC often featured a black student group with booths and signs reading, “Jim Crow. Apartheid. Homelessness. Different names, same game.”

Nothing about racism in any other form. As if the homeless were the only black people not treated equally in the US at the time. I don’t know what to make of that fact, in retrospect. I certainly would have found the booths more persuasive if the argument had been stronger than that.

Chris Bertram’s choice of analogy suddenly reminded me of this.

The topic of this discussion (please correct me if you disagree) is this: people who believe that the leftist (marxist) ideology is inconsistent with (to make a more general case) grievances fermented by identity politics, are wrong.

Since you ask, I disagree. Chris Bertram made no reference to leftism, or Marxism, or to ideology of any kind, or to identity politics.

Leftists envision a classless, non-hierarchical society, where identities would (presumably) have no basis for grievances.

Identity politics, on the other hand, envision a hierarchical society with identities proportionally distributed among all social strata (see Bob @31 in this thread).

Neither of those statements is justified by evidence.

@nastywoman, 67
Some Native Americans get payments from the government because of the (horribly unjust and habitually violated) treaties they have with the US. It’s not really reparations. Reparations would be more like e.g. the Shawnee getting paid a fair price for all the real estate in Ohio or something.

nastywoman @75 —

Thanks! I like Billie Eilish, and I like her hit “Bad Guy”.

By a fortunate coincidence, your question comes to me a week after I had decided to find out who she was, and why I saw references to her name. So I spent a few hours last week listening to her songs and also watching interviews with her, and so was better prepared for your question today.

I understand some of what Eilish is doing with that song musically (what genres and models she is drawing on) and lyrically (the persona she is adopting, the mood she is conveying). She is a clever and talented kid, who seems to be handling her astronomical fame pretty well so far, and I wish her success and happiness.

You posted a link to her video as part of a conversation here. And as a response to what had been said earlier, I do not understand at all what you intended by posting it. So in that sense, I do not think I understand what you meant by it.

I’d love to hear!

No apparently I didn’t get under john halasz’s skin. Definitely not. My mistake ;-)
But as I said before, go read his comments. Supremely enlightening.

AND I can’t resist:
@
”Studies have shown that the people who narrowly elected Trump were the non-voters”.

”BEAUTIFUL”!
(as Trump for sure would say)
So let’s hope that this time the ”non-voters” will vote!

@82
”About the generational thing — I am the wrong person to ask, simply because I am so far removed from all of the current generations. The relative salience of race and class in the thought of the American left has changed several times over the course of my life, but I don’t know whether the changes coincide with generations”.

It has been said – that:
”Generation Z joins Black Lives Matter”? – and the importance of writing ‘’Everything (not only Billie Eilish) – Wanted’ –
And that includes – that ”class” has become a difficult privilege in this generation to identify right away – especially if I wear my ”Homeless T-Shirt” –
BUT –
”RACE” –
now –
”RACE” –
is easily to identify – and it might NOT get you the handbag you really want –
even if you belong to a ”Privileged Class” – which easily can afford it.

Do you understand what I mean?

”So I will stop now”.

Me TOO.

it shows how non-central such concerns can sound to someone who lacks the money required to exercise any such privileges they might have

Does this mean:
1. I’m poor and I can’t go into a handbag store but neither can a rich black person, so at least racism can enable me to feel equal to some of those rich people
2. I’m poor and I think I should be able to buy handbags; with the help of racism maybe I could confiscate other people’s handbags
3. I’m white and poor and I have to shop for handbags alongside black people; if I were rich I could avoid shopping alongside black people
4. Poor people don’t have handbags, and until they can we shouldn’t be concerned that black people also can’t have handbags

?

@Richard Melvin 86
“I don’t understand the part about handbags ”
“I think this is a reference to Oprah Winfrey getting refused service in a high-end handbag store in Zurich.”

Winfrey wasn’t refused service, she asked for a particular handbag and the clerk said: “why don’t you buy this instead, it’s cheaper”, which Winfrey took as a form of prejudice as the clerk, from her point of view, was assuming that she couldn’t be rich because she was black, hence assuming that blacks are losers.

She was refused the handbag, not recommended a cheaper one.

@88; that’s fair. Much as I think it get’s misused, if you are going to use the term at all, you’d use it here.

@87

it means if you can’t afford such a handbag (or a Porsche, or an Ivy League education; they are all similarly priced) then that is a real fact about the situation. Whereas whether the shopkeeper would be nice to you is in the same category as ‘would you rule fairly if you were King of France?’.

There is an inherent advantage that left wing (and sometimes other) political movement have. This is the thing that allows them historically to compete with the right, and sometimes win.

And that is that they makes visibly true claims, ones that match the lived experience of a numerical majority of people. Once you move away from that, into hypotheticals and narratives, you are choosing to fight fair against a stronger opponent.

You can call the mechanism of the resulting defeat ”racism’ if you want, and you wouldn’t be wrong. Still, having an excuse for failure is perhaps not yet the best achievable outcome.

Okay, my fault for not knowing about the episode with Oprah Winfrey in Zurich.

Faustusnotes —
I assume it means,
“people who focus on race are so blind to the effects of class that they care more about a billionaire’s feelings, just because she is black, than about the grinding poverty that blights my life, despite my being white.”

Or,
“my deprivations and indignities as a lower-class white person are objectively worse than the deprivations and indignities that Oprah suffered in this anecdote, and only a class-first analysis does justice to that fact.”

Or, “people who care about Oprah’s experience want to create a color-blind plutocracy, but a color-blind plutocracy is only trivially better than what we have now.”

I’m not agreeing with all that, just giving my gloss on Richard Melvin’s second option.