On a piece of bad reasoning about race and class

by Chris Bertram on August 28, 2020

Most people interested in thinking about inequality, will have come across the dry and sarcastic saying from Anatole France that “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread.” France shows us how the reality of class, economic inequality, makes a mockery of equality before the law because of the different real-life effects of the same law.

Now why is sleeping under bridges bad? Well, presumably, it is bad because it makes you more vulnerable to certain harms: exposure to the cold, or being beaten up by gangs of strangers. We can imagine a kind of objection to Anatole France, albeit a very obviously silly one. It would go like this: the thing we should really be concerned about is the harms that people are exposed to. 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). According to the silly objection, what we should concentrate on is the group of people who sleep under bridges: there’s a perfect match between membership of this group and those who suffer the harms, whereas it turns out that lots of poor people, because they never sleep under bridges, are not at risk of such harms.

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! But obviously, 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. Showing that, of those who are in a category that is strongly pre-selected for by race, harms were not associated with race, does not lead to the valid conclusion that those harms are not associated with race.

{ 96 comments }

1

dePonySum 08.28.20 at 9:45 am

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.

2

nastywoman 08.28.20 at 9:55 am

”Showing that, of those who are in a category that is strongly pre-selected for by race, harms were not associated with race, does not lead to the valid conclusion that those harms are not associated with race”.

Yes –
and is it NOW possible – for anybody here – to answer Emmas question from the other thread:

”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”?

3

MisterMr 08.28.20 at 10:20 am

“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.

4

MisterMr 08.28.20 at 10:49 am

Ok so I’ll now make an argument that goes more or less in the way the OP, and it is an argument that I actually believe:

Suppose that tomorrow everyone in the USA (or other country) became immediately color-blind, so that racism in strict sense disappeared.
But, as social mobility in general is quite low (much lower than we usually tend to assume), in pratice descendants of black families will still be ovverrepresented among poor/working class, while descendants of white families would be overrepresented in middle class and importantly amoing the rich.

This is, I think, true, and would be an example of the idea that what we call “racism” is really just disguised “class”.

But while I think this is true, I would never say that this represents the totality of the harms of racism, because with racism come an additional harm that might be delivered also to people who are rich (the example of antisemitism in europe expecially in the pre-war period is quite evident).

So while I DO think that much of what is imputed to race is disguised class problems, I wouldn’t go to the point to say that racism per se doesn’t exist, as is implied, I think, in the OP.

Furthermore, if I take the most glaring examples of racism: against blacks, against immigrants, and against jews, it seems to me that all those three are caused by distorted class antagonism pressures:

In the case of immigrants, it’s evident that many locals believe that they are stealing our jobs;

In case of jews, they were explicitly associated with banking so that when a very big crisis hit, they were blamed for it (instead than blaming the economic system); jews were paradoxically associated with communism for more or less the same reasons;

In case of blacks, I personally see continuous racism against black as a sort of war among the poor, that is used by right wing parties to keep in check social democracy demands.

So I actually think that class structure preceeds and actually causes racism, and therefore that there is a primacy of class structure relative to racism; but this is not the same than saying that racism does not exist or that being ascribed to this or that “race” can’t have bad consequences.

5

Thomas Beale 08.28.20 at 11:08 am

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.

6

Cahokia 08.28.20 at 11:20 am

Well said.

Additionally I found the short paper by Prof. Kimberle Crenshaw, Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics, very helpful as a living room teaching tool. It’s a study of law cases where these intersections are most opaque. Easily found.

Cheers

7

SamChevre 08.28.20 at 11:39 am

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.

8

engels 08.28.20 at 12:12 pm

I agree with others that this post would be improved if there were some indication of who has advanced the “bad reasoning” it is attacking.

9

Hidari 08.28.20 at 12:25 pm

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.

10

hix 08.28.20 at 12:29 pm

So we also shall not correct for social class, age or gender, definitly not war trauma when assessing refuges propensity to violence compared to the population at large?

It makes perfect sense to threat racism as a non issue if (yes big if) the only thing that keeps a disparty in lifing conditions intact is an ethnictity independent path dependency in a low mobility society high enquality society.

Some people being much poorer than others over generations does not get more just because those poor peoples ancestors got poor some other way than being shipped to the US as slaves. It also makes perfect sense to fear attempts to keep the privilegde of social class intact by allowing somewhat more upward social mobility among so far disadvantaged ethnic minorities. Or more perverse and more likely at the same time, by allowing less downward mobility among those. Maybe i´m just imagining American elite universities makeing a hell lot more effort to get the skin colours and gender of students matched to population shares than to income quartiles. Similar when it comes to political candidates. 1% ers all the way, usually by birth. That clown Trump would have more money today if he had put his inheritance in an index fund. Probably even if he had put it into a bank account.

11

Ebenezer Scrooge 08.28.20 at 12:34 pm

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.

12

Gorgonzola Petrovna 08.28.20 at 12:57 pm

If I suggested that no one should have to sleep under the bridge, would it make me a racist?

13

Shirley0401 08.28.20 at 1:43 pm

…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.

14

notGoodenough 08.28.20 at 2:26 pm

As we seem to be commenting on both threads, I will throw my own (no doubt uniformed) opinion into the ring.

I am genuinely confused, and I think a lot of that is because I am not always sure what people mean with the terms they are using. To that end, let me try and formulate an idea using some terms I will define (and if you have different terms for those definitions, please just mentally substitute). These are pretty sloppy and colloquial (I apologise for that, and for any unintentional insult I may cause), but I hope to use this to understand what people mean or why they might agree/disagree.

Terms:

Hierarchy: a system in which members of a society are ranked according to relative status or authority

Class: Grouping by socio-economic status within a hierarchy

Race: Grouping by ethnicity (belonging to a group sharing some degree of culture/language/heritage)

Privilege: a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group within the hierarchy based on their position within that hierarchy (e.g. under this definition being exempt from mandatory leaf-raking duty solely because you are a specific class/race would be a privilege, being exempt because you are physically unable to rake leaves would not).

Proposal:

In the spirit of a spherical-horse-in-vacuum approach, let´s imagine a society with a hierarchy, 3 “races” (the Northish, the Southish, and the Westish) and 3 “classes” (Top-class, who each individually have the equivalent of ≥ 10x resources; Mid-class, who each individually have the equivalent of 10x > resources > 1x; and Bottom-class, who each individually have the equivalent of ≤ 1x resources).

Hierarchies are inherently unequal, and so privileges conferred within the hierarchy can lead to injustice. For example, being exempt from mandatory uncompensated leaf-raking duty if you are Top-class or Northish creates a form of injustice (you are required to lose time, with no compensation, simply because you are not part of a certain class/race). Similarly, being forbidden from forming romantic relationships outside of you class/race if you are Bottom-class or Westish also creates injustice (you are denied the ability to pursue certain personal relationships simply because you are part of a certain class/race – or, to put it another way, because you are not part of the other two classes or races).

For me, the argument that race-discrimination is a subset of class-discrimination rings a little hollow, because even a situation in which everyone has the same socio-economic status does not necessarily remove discrimination based on race. If, for example “everyone knows you can´t trust those sneaky Westish” or “everyone knows the Northish are all angry drunks”, even if there is no actual formalised rules we can see that there would could well be injustice resulting from conscious or unconscious bias e.g. “well, I don´t have anything against the Westish, but I wouldn´t want my kid to marry one” or “hmm, that Northish candidate got very defensive in the job interview so we probably we should look at a less emotional person – maybe that Southish chap instead?”.

Of course, class discrimination does not necessarily have to be a subset of race-discrimination either – you could have an entirely racially homogeneous society, but still have discrimination based on class e.g. “of course, the only reason they are Bottom-class is because they are lazy – if they´d only work as hard as me, they could better themselves”.

To me, and again I may be missing something, they are discrete categories on a Venn diagram which may overlap strongly or weakly (depending on the class/rage/society/hierarchy).

I am in favour of maximising wellbeing, and the best way to achieve that would be to maximise the wellbeing of the society in which I live. So long as we recognise the intersectional nature of oppression and privilege resulting from the hierarchy, while also allowing that people may focus on certain aspects (e.g. class- or race- discrimination) as being more important to them (and so they are more motivated to address it, while still of course acknowledging the importance of addressing all injustices), I am not sure why this seems to be such a controversial topic.

By raising the wellbeing of everyone in the society I can ensure my own wellbeing increases (because I am part of society) whereas if I look to maximise my personal wellbeing only I may very well decrease it comparatively (or, simplistically, I am better off with a smaller slice of a larger pie).

15

William Meyer 08.28.20 at 2:33 pm

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.

16

M Caswell 08.28.20 at 2:39 pm

Rich or poor, it always helps to have money.

17

Donald 08.28.20 at 2:45 pm

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.

18

CHETAN R MURTHY 08.28.20 at 3:09 pm

MisterMr@3:
Stick around in this comments-section, and you’ll see a ton of it. I won’t name names, b/c I’m not certain, but I’m pretty certain that at least one commenter already above, is among their number.

There -is- an important bit missing in this analogy. In this analogy, the “people sleeping under bridges” are black people, and of course poverty is poverty. And sure, bad things happen to black people. But only some of those things come about because of poverty: many of those bad things come about, because they’re black, and they live in a police state [in the US; maybe in other countries it’s all sweetness and light, what do I know?]

What certain commenters here don’t get, is that every white person in America gets a WHITE CARD. This card allows them to murder (even mass-murder) innocent people, without having their constitutional rights summarily violated by the police. Every black person, on the other hand, does NOT get a WHITE CARD. This means that their constitutional rights can and will be violated, up to and including maiming and summary execution, at any time, for any reason, with (duh) no recourse.

This is something your analogy simply fails to capture, and yet it is the genesis and driving argument of Black Lives Matter.

19

john burke 08.28.20 at 3:36 pm

@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.

20

Thomas Beale 08.28.20 at 3:43 pm

@9
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

Racism isn’t a white people specific. Try India or most Arab countries. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/most-racist-countries

21

hix 08.28.20 at 3:45 pm

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……..

22

Peter Rosen 08.28.20 at 7:00 pm

Can’t say as I read carefully through these comments, but from what I did see, the misding point, a critical one, is that racism is a construct specifically useful as a way of keeping working class whites feeling better.

23

CHETAN R MURTHY 08.28.20 at 7:18 pm

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.

24

divelly 08.28.20 at 8:07 pm

@16
Corollary:
“Better to be rich and healthy than sick and poor!”

25

bad Jim 08.29.20 at 8:52 am

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.

26

Tm 08.29.20 at 11:04 am

I suppose Chris is alluding to Halasz on the other thread: „IOW it’s poverty, not race, that’s being punished and poor whites can have it almost as bad as blacks.“
Read the whole comment…

27

Alex K 08.29.20 at 3:16 pm

“[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.

28

Richard melvin 08.29.20 at 4:16 pm

In this analogy, the “people sleeping under bridges” are black people, and of course poverty is poverty.

I don’t think that is how the analogy is meant to work. In analogy-world (unlike reality), you can be poor and suffer no harm. But nevertheless being poor makes you statistically more likely to suffer that harm, via the mechanism of under-bridge-sleeping. So being poor in analogy-world like being black in real-world. And being shot by the police in the real-world is like underbridge sleeping in analogy world.

It’s not necessarily obvious to me that the analogy proves much. Both free and safe overnight hostels and cash handouts would help poor people currently sleeping under bridges. One solution is also good for drunken rich students, another is also good for non-bridge sleeping poor people. The only reason to think the latter is necessarily better is bleed over from what the word ‘poor’ means in the real world.

In the real world, a housing-first solution to homelessness seems to be a credible approach that can’t be rejected as obviously absurd. From wikipedia:

The programme is structured around the housing first principle. Solutions to social and health problems cannot be a condition for organising accommodation: on the contrary, accommodation is a requirement which also allows other problems of people who have been homeless to be solved. Having somewhere to live makes it possible to strengthen life management skills and is conducive to purposeful activity.

29

Alan White 08.29.20 at 4:23 pm

@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.

30

Peter Dorman 08.29.20 at 4:49 pm

My understanding of the Anatole France saying is that formal equality without substantive equality is inequality in disguise. It is not saying what the solution to homelessness should be, just what the solution isn’t — a law that criminalizes homelessness equally for everyone.

As I hope I made clear in an earlier thread, I don’t think either “class” (itself shorthand for multiple economic factors) or race are prior or more fundamental. Their interactions need to be looked at concretely.

Example 1: Racial income disparities widened during the post-civil rights period after
a couple of decades of shrinking. Roughly speaking, we can decompose the disparity into the sorting effect (role of racism in sorting people into different economic positions) and the general inequality effect (the difference between these positions). The data indicate that there was a slight reduction in racial sorting overall (probably different for different regions, people with different social backgrounds etc.), but it was overwhelmed by a big increase in the gap between better and lower paying jobs. (I wrote this up in a chapter in African Americans in the US Economy, but that was a while ago.) That’s useful to know politically. It doesn’t exonerate the racism that continues to exert a sorting effect, but it does say that doubling down on this to the exclusion of social democratic leveling isn’t a good strategy.

Example 2: There are very large racial disparities in infection and fatality rates from COVID. When we dig down we find multiple potential causal channels: different rates of employment in high-exposure jobs, more crowded living conditions, possibly differential treatment by the health care system. For some of them, anti-racism won’t help much, at least not in the time scale of an ongoing pandemic. For others it could be very important — different treatment by health practitioners, for instance.

To get back to the OP, although AF doesn’t offer much guidance, I would certainly want to know who is sleeping under those bridges and how they got there. Then I would support a movement to remove those causes. (And yes, immediate harm reduction like public toilets and lockers for homeless people is a valid first step while going after the underlying causes.)

31

Bob 08.29.20 at 4:57 pm

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?

32

bianca steele 08.29.20 at 5:24 pm

I want to second Peter Rosen @22, and suggest the concern about needing to not offend white people primarily comes from a concern about not suggesting rich white people think poor white people are “bad”. (This primarily plays out wrt poor white men, with white women requested to become offended when some white man (as long as he’s not from a class considered “liberal”) is treated in a way suggesting he doesn’t have infinite rights and infinite liberties to do as he likes and parade his superiority to whoever he doesn’t.) This is how the rich prove they’re not anti-social, even if they act in ways that damage the social safety net.

There is still a trace in this discussion, above, of the old, bad, racist idea that black Americans, uniquely among all social groups, had had all humanity and social sense stripped from them by slavery, and that unlike poor whites and many immigrant groups, who could be left alone to practice their folk cultures, black Americans could only be treated punitively and subjected to a kind of re-education.

A lot of class based leftism has always been populist and sufficiently centered on folk culture to make it ethnocentric, or racist, depending on the circumstance. Most 20th century “leftist” art in the US at least is really populist and centered on the whitest folk culture that could possibly be found here. That’s not to condemn it. Much of it was well-intentioned. But trying to make it Marxist based solely on the fact that the artist might have joined the Communist Party only confuses things. (My impression is that in the UK you’d have to describe leftist art as pertaining to bourgeois, Oxbridge-educated nonconformists. But, probably, the dynamic is pretty much the same.)

33

PatinIowa 08.29.20 at 5:30 pm

“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

34

CHETAN R MURTHY 08.29.20 at 9:44 pm

Tm @ 26: [not beating on you — but rather, on that incredible comment]

poor whites can have it almost as bad as blacks

Chris Rock said it well: https://youtu.be/0k_kIpxfWxA?t=76

The utter idiocy of some claim that poor whites have it as badly as poor blacks …. sure man, tell me about all the white people who have “passed as black”, really man, go ON …..

35

engels 08.29.20 at 10:50 pm

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

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

36

J-D 08.29.20 at 11:59 pm

… academics are utter cowards …

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liviu_Librescu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joshua_Chamberlain
My own (late) father, though he won no recognition for special valour, was a volunteer for military service during the Second World War, and subsequently became a university professor.

So you know what you can do, Alex K. You know what you can do.

37

Kiwanda 08.30.20 at 12:16 am

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.

38

Kiwanda 08.30.20 at 12:26 am

Chetan Murthy:

What certain commenters here don’t get, is that every white person in America gets a WHITE CARD. This card allows them to murder (even mass-murder) innocent people, without having their constitutional rights summarily violated by the police. Every black person, on the other hand, does NOT get a WHITE CARD. This means that their constitutional rights can and will be violated, up to and including maiming and summary execution, at any time, for any reason, with (duh) no recourse.

By the same reasoning: every man is taller than every woman, every man dies younger than every woman dies, every man has less education than every woman.

39

CHETAN R MURTHY 08.30.20 at 2:14 am

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.

40

CHETAN R MURTHY 08.30.20 at 2:24 am

Bob @ 31: I know I know I know, shouldn’t we all be talking about black-on-black crime, esp. in that urban hellhole of Chicago?

Rilly dude.

Here’s the thing: once upon a time, saints like Moynihan had these great theories about why black people were poor, and committed crimes. Stuff about growing up in families, being religious, shit like that. And man did the liberals eat that up. The conservatives, too. They had their theories for why black people were poor, and it exonerated them. Case closed. But then, the impoverishment spread to white people, and those white people started exhibiting the same behaviours (crime, lack of wedlock, etc) as black people had been. Some conservatives like Charles “Bell Curve” Murray stuck to their guns, and made the same argument about these white people — their lack of strong families and religion was the -cause- of their poverty, but most didn’t b/c …. y’know, these were WHITE people in poverty now, it couldn’t be their own fault!

Oh and by the way, nice rhetorical ploy there, arguing that it’s only about poverty, as if that’s what Black Lives Matter is solely about, or was founded to combat. I mean, wow, talk about not bothering to understand your opponents.

41

Fake Dave 08.30.20 at 4:45 am

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.

42

john halasz 08.30.20 at 4:49 am

Tm @ 26:

So I’m to blame for this brouhaha?

At least I offered actual empirical evidence, which is completely absent in C.B.’s 2 posts. And the specific case that you cite referred to U.S. carceral rates which are exorbitant anyhow. There’s more to it than that, but I don’t see how one can oppose police violence and abuse without referring to that broader system. (Police shootings and killings are high salience and dire events, but they are low probability events and there is no reliable data as to their number and causes, which is why I focused on incarceration, where the statistics are robust). And I did offer further empirical stats to go together with my criticisms of IDPol/PC ideology which many here want to fellow travel with.

SO if I’m to be the poster boy for “bad reasonings”, let’s look at C.B.’s superior reasonings. He chooses his own intuitions and preferences and the deduces some sort of normative implications while offering only artificial examples, “(thought experiments”), to bolster his case. This is typical of the “Analytic normative political philosophy”. And then in this post he invokes some amorphous “sorting” process and then claims an “association” of race with social stratification, hardly any sort of strong structural explanation. This is just bad sociology ad bad history.

No one here is denying the dire history of American racism. 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?

Perhaps part of the problem is that C.B. is a Brit and the “sortings” he refers to occurred more recently, after the War as “people of color” immigrated from the Commonwealth, so the social stratification was different earlier. But of course it was the British Empire that did so much to generate and foster racial distinctions and prejudices. In fact, the word n***** is of British origin and it didn’t just refer to Black Africans. (One of the objections to PC ideology is its sheer philistinism; one can’t read Joseph Conrad nowadays, who sailed the seas during the era of European high imperialism and saw a lot without provoking “trigger warnings”).

By contrast, the two comments that Peter Dorman has contributed here are relative models of clarity, containing both empirical content and structural analysis. Much more of that is needed in these catastrophic times.

Finally, Tm, you didn’t know who Robin DiAngelo is. She is a white woman who gives corporate “trainings” on “anti-racism”, making a good living thereby. Studies have shown that they are largely ineffective and counter-productive and they are mostly PR exercises for corporations that have run into trouble. Her recent book “White Fragility” was a best seller, further lining her pockets. Here’s a review from “The New Yorker”, a nasty neo-liberal rag, but a reliable indicator of what the chatterings of the Manhanttanite cocktail party circuit “thinks”:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/a-sociologist-examines-the-white-fragility-that-prevents-white-americans-from-confronting-racism

And here’s a debunking review from Matt Taibbi:

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/on-white-fragility

43

Chris Bertram 08.30.20 at 8:11 am

@halasz “At least I offered actual empirical evidence, which is completely absent in C.B.’s 2 posts.”

Pointing out flaws in reasoning is something that can be done independently of establishing the facts. I should say too that Halasz isn’t responsible for this brouhaha at all, insofar as I was completely unaware of his writing on the subject before commenters brought it up.

44

engels 08.30.20 at 9:10 am

But obviously, 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. Showing that, of those who are in a category that is strongly pre-selected for by race, harms were not associated with race, does not lead to the valid conclusion that those harms are not associated with race.

Did Halasz ever deny this?

I think one issue at stake, rather than whether race “explains” a racially marked distribution of harms, is the extent to which responsibility for the discrepancy lies with the police. BLM seems to strongly assume it does, but on a pure “pre-selection” view it might not seem to.

45

engels 08.30.20 at 9:27 am

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.

46

Tm 08.30.20 at 9:48 am

Halasz 42: that was a bit thin-skinned, wasn’t it? After all, I merely quoted you.

Re DiAngelo, thanks for pointing out she is a woman, my mistake. On the substance, you are not addressing my point. I’m not offering an opinion on her book. Perhaps it really is no good; I wouldn’t take Taibbi’s word for it, however, not in his current persona as antiliberal apologist for the Trumpist movement.

I did admire Taibbi’s work on the American “justice” system. he memorably pointed out that in NYC, riding a bike on the sidewalk is a “crime” that near exclusively African Americans are charged with, and that African Americans can even be arrested for “blocking the sidewalk” when standing at the front door of their own home. Facts that are pertinent for the present discussion.

47

nastywoman 08.30.20 at 11:03 am

@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”?

48

nastywoman 08.30.20 at 11:18 am

AND about –
”Teachings of Anti-Racism” and:
”She is a white woman who gives corporate “trainings” on “anti-racism”, making a good living thereby. Studies have shown that they are largely ineffective and counter-productive and they are mostly PR exercises for corporations that have run into trouble”.

I received my first ”Anti-Racism Lessons” – by a tremendously privileged old white Californian – and then in Italy and Germany in school – by ALL white women – and was/is that… ”bad”?

49

Gorgonzola Petrovna 08.30.20 at 12:16 pm

@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.

50

Richard Melvin 08.30.20 at 12:42 pm

Pointing out flaws in reasoning is something that can be done independently of establishing the facts

However it is not something that can be done independently of the presence of flaws in the counter-argument.

In particular, you can’t get from the universally correct:

Showing that, of those who are in a category that is strongly pre-selected for by race, harms were not associated with race, does not lead to the valid conclusion that those harms are not associated with race.

to the contingent:

what we should [not, in context] concentrate on is the group of people who sleep under bridges

‘Associated with’ does not mean ‘needs to be the focus of intervention’. That may to may not be true; I don’t think you can do anything but look at the evidence, and come up with a plan. And that plan will exist at the level of at the level of ‘this political party, in this country, at this time, should propose this‘.

51

Alex K 08.30.20 at 1:04 pm

“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

Jake Gibson 08.30.20 at 1:05 pm

The problem I see is making the argument class vs race. It is class and race. The two are inseparably intertwined.
It makes no sense to think you can only address one and fix both.

53

nastywoman 08.30.20 at 3:32 pm

@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”?

54

oldster 08.30.20 at 5:42 pm

nastywoman —

This is off topic, so (CB) don’t post if you don’t want to, but:

I am fascinated by your use of language. Can you tell me more about your linguistic background and experience? Are you multilingual? (I think you have indicated you live in Germany?) Did you learn English as a child, as an adult? Have you lived in an anglophone country?

Most of the time I cannot understand anything you are saying. You clearly know a lot of English, but your sentence structures are highly unusual. Your use of punctuation and paragraphing is also deeply original. (Do you use the same devices of punctuation, line-breaks and so on, when you are writing in languages other than English?)

To the extent I can understand your comments, I think I agree with your politics. To be fair, I think I can understand all of your comment 53 in this thread — it is easier than most of what you write.

But so often, I have an intense wish that I could understand your point, but I simply cannot parse your English! Perhaps if I knew more about your other linguistic abilities, I would have a key to use in unlocking them? German speakers tend to structure sentences one way, French speakers another, Russian speakers a third, and so on.

Please forgive the personal nature of the question. I ask only because I would like to better understand you.

55

bianca steele 08.30.20 at 9:10 pm

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.

56

Bob 08.30.20 at 10:10 pm

What oldster said at #54. I have had the same feeling of general agreement with nastywoman, but without really being able to make sense of what she is saying. It’s just this impressionistic blur of words.

57

J-D 08.30.20 at 11:06 pm

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.

58

john halasz 08.31.20 at 12:18 am

Chris Bertram @ 43;

Umm… you responded to my comment on the last thread. It’s @ 50. So your lack of awareness of my existence is a bit of a mystery to me.

I really shouldn’t have to tell you this, since you’re supposed to be some sort of philosopher. But arguments can be formally valid while being completely wrong. In fact, many formally valid arguments can be produced that are utterly opposed to one another depending on their premises and presuppositions. (The Greeks called it aporia). But what is required are warrants, i.e. a statement that connects an argument with evidence of a relevant kind, such that both can bear inferential and possibly practicable fruit. That is the only basis for choosing between arguments and their premises, which can’t be directly empirically validated. How well does a given conceptual framework marshal and organize evidence and ascertainable facts to support its conceptual, cognitive or theoretical claims?

Sitting back on your arm chair, while choosing your premises to flatter your prejudices and claiming to do multi-factoral analysis based on hypothetical variables, A B and C, without any actual analysis and evidence of institutional functionings , which might widely vary from place to place and across time, is an instance of foreshortened, deficient reasoning. Yes, bad reasoning! SO spare me your professorial snobbery and pretentiousnessm ,claiming that I’m incapable of reasoning. That’s just bigotry.

Tm@46:

No you didn’t quote me. You cited my comment on the last thread, implying that I was a paradigmatic example of “bad reasoning”. And you “quoted” me wrong, since the studies I cited were specifically referring to the U.S. carceral system, which is an abomination, not the whole enchilada.

I don’t want to derail this thread, by focusing on Matt Taibbi, but calling him an “anti-liberal apologist for the Trumpist movement” is just deranged. If you’ve ever listened to his podcast, the first 2 of the “4 food groups” are Democrats suck and Republicans suck. It’s not his job as a political journalist to advocate for any candidates. Though is partner on the podcast is an unabashed Berniecrat. It’s fairly clear that his own political preference is left-libertarian. He does do more than political journalism though. He authored the famous “vampire squid” article, which was a slander against vampire squids. And he cut his teeth in 1990’s Russia, a language in which he’s fluent, which helped him prepare for dealing with the rampant corruption of 21st century America. His latest book is a critique of the U.S.corporate media which he accuses of having abandoned all journalistic standards and become a partisan and divisive propaganda apparatus for the sake of profits. (His father was a network journalist in an earlier era). That is a correct judgment IMHO.

SO no, I’m not “thin skinned”. It’s you who are thick skinned and obtuse.

59

J-D 08.31.20 at 12:23 am

… 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.

60

john halasz 08.31.20 at 12:44 am

Oh, one bit I forget. It’s amazing how these 2 threads have devolved to focus exclusively on Black vs. White, in accordance with current media fashion. But you all do realize that there are other variably disadvantaged minorities, such as Hispanics, (which are a multi-ethnic set of groups. usually multiracial or mixed race, but squeezed together to fit the current ideology) and Native Americans.In fact, 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.

61

Fake Dave 08.31.20 at 4:08 am

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.

62

Alan White 08.31.20 at 4:44 am

@49

Your @12 was a hypothetical including “should”–that’s a word connotative of normativity, and such statements do have logical entailments that would in turn support or explain why that normative statement is made. Any such relevant entailments are endorsements unless the asserted “should” is in fact utterly baseless and said for some non-logical effect.

And you have made no effort at all to rebut my claim that “All Lives Matter” is a similar normative statement that has entailed support or explanation, but which many utterers of the phrase would not endorse–which implies it is likely from their mouths baseless emotivism of statement (in CL Stevenson’s sense).

63

nastywoman 08.31.20 at 6:36 am

@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?

64

engels 08.31.20 at 9:32 am

Aren’t we going to cancel TM for misgendering Robin DiAngelo?

65

nastywoman 08.31.20 at 9:57 am

@
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”.

66

Tm 08.31.20 at 10:39 am

john halasz 58, I guess I really got under your skin. I quoted an excerpt of your comment (https://crookedtimber.org/2020/08/27/on-an-objection-to-the-idea-of-white-privilege/#comment-804058) with the remark “read the whole comment”, implying of course that people should judge for themselves.

halasz 60: “focus exclusively on Black vs. White, in accordance with current media fashion. But you all do realize that there are other variably disadvantaged minorities…” But the term/concept “White Privilege” doesn’t focus on “Black vs. White”, it focuses on the privileged position of whites – relative to Native as well as African and Hispanic Americans.

Re Taibbi, of course he doesn’t directly support Trump or his party. What he does is make apologies for Trump supporters by claiming it’s all the fault of the liberals who insulted them so badly – by writing mean articles in Rolling Stone no less – that they understably had no other choice than to support a racist misogynist plutocrat, but not because of racism, it’s really an anti-elite revolt. (https://crookedtimber.org/2020/08/10/open-thread/#comment-803635) It is crazy enough to not trust his analysis in any respect any more, perhaps that’s unfair, there may be nuggets of truth, but I just don’t feel like I need to spend my time wading through crazy rants.

67

nastywoman 08.31.20 at 11:10 am

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

oldster 08.31.20 at 12:00 pm

nastywoman @63 —

That’s very interesting!

Who are the rap artists who have influenced you most? Do you work in a particular genre or regional dialect of hip hop?

And what music or beats do you have in mind when you compose your CT comments? If I could hear the rhythm that you hear, it might help me to understand how to organize your words into units of sense.

Do you write rap lyrics only for CT comments, or do you write this way in corresponding with your relatives and co-workers?

And do you write this way in all languages? Or does English in particular lend itself to this form of expression?

69

nastywoman 08.31.20 at 1:45 pm

@68
”That’s very interesting”!

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

https://youtu.be/DyDfgMOUjCI

70

Gorgonzola Petrovna 08.31.20 at 2:56 pm

@62
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.

I don’t think expressing an opinion requires me to endorse any particular ideology. I could be a monarchist, for all you care.

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). Making, in fact, the class structure more stable.

This, I’d argue, is a clear inconsistency. That’s all.

Oh, and about the ‘types’. I don’t think they are required to endorse anything. What they say is not a statement, it’s a retort. Retort to what is perceived as selective outrage.

71

bianca steele 08.31.20 at 4:42 pm

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.

72

Tm 08.31.20 at 5:46 pm

Cheesy 70: „Identity politics, on the other hand, envision a hierarchical society with identities proportionally distributed among all social strata“

Thanks for whitesplaining the phrase „Black Lives Matter“ so well. African Americans protesting police violence really want to „make the class structure more stable“. This is hard to top.

73

J-D 08.31.20 at 10:56 pm

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.

74

J-D 09.01.20 at 2:09 am

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.

How could that be measured, you ask? Well, if you produce clear examples of people arguing in the way you describe, your impression is probably not biassed. If you fail to do so, it is more likely that your impression is biassed.

75

lurker 09.01.20 at 6:40 am

@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.

76

nastywoman 09.01.20 at 7:06 am

And ”oldster” – may I also ask a question?

Did you understand:
https://youtu.be/DyDfgMOUjCI

Does anybody here understand
https://youtu.be/DyDfgMOUjCI

And do you guys think – it’s a ”generational thing” – to believe that we have to fix racism before class?
(especially in America?)

77

oldster 09.01.20 at 11:35 am

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!

78

john halasz 09.01.20 at 12:32 pm

Tm@66:
You should cut the condescension and self-conceit. No, you didn’t
“get under my skin”. You behaved obnoxiously. No, you did not quote me; you just mis-cited me, implying that arguments you disagree with are “bad reasoning” without offering any counter-arguments of your own, just asserting you own prejudices and preferences. That’s just bad discursive conduct. It’s clear that you’re just a run-of-the-mill never Trump liberal who regards any attempt to understand Trump phenomena or any criticism or refusal of the Dembot party line as an offense against “morals”. Nor can one draw any broad sociological conclusions from a procrustean electoral system based on an archaic constitution. Studies have shown that the people who narrowly elected Trump were the non-voters.

79

Tm 09.01.20 at 1:08 pm

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.

80

nastywoman 09.01.20 at 1:39 pm

”I do not understand at all what you intended by posting it”

That could be… the problem? – as when I would have asked you:
”Who are the rap artists who have influenced you most?
and what music or beats do you have in mind when you compose your CT comments.

And you would have answered by posting a link to:
”You ain’t nothing but a Hound Dog” by Elvis – I right away would have understood – that your favourite ”rap artist” is ”Elvis” and each time you ”compose” your CT comments – you think about the ”music” and ”beats” of Elvis.

AND – do you think – that’s a ”generational thing”?

81

nastywoman 09.01.20 at 1:46 pm

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

oldster 09.01.20 at 10:11 pm

nastywoman —

Ohhh!! Now I do understand!

Thank you for taking the time to help me out. I now see that I was being very stupid.

I asked you which artists influence you, and you pointed me to Billie Eilish, and that is a perfectly sensible response. It is my fault that I did not follow it. (I think maybe I was thrown off by your saying that it was an answer to all of my questions?)

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.

I do know that as I have gotten older (and older), the idea of having to fix X before we fix Y has seemed less plausible because I don’t think we get a complete solution of any serious problem very often. Incremental progress is all that we can hope for. X gets a bit better, and Y gets a bit better, and that’s a triumph. But if you think about it in incremental terms, then the order or priority does not matter as much — make progress on X until you get stuck, then switch to Y for awhile, then switch back, and so on.

In any case — thank you for your patience in helping me to understand your earlier comment.

83

nastywoman 09.02.20 at 6:06 am

@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?

84

oldster 09.02.20 at 12:10 pm

nastywoman —

I’m pretty sure I understand the part where you ask, “do you understand what I mean?”

Other parts are less clear, but I will say what I think you meant and you can correct me (or point out places where I am hard to understand).

I think you are proposing that the emphasis on the politics of race among younger generations is the result of its being easier to ascertain someone’s race than their class.

That may be right, but I find it a little strange as part of a generational analysis, because (at least in the US), the greater visibility of race over class is a fact of long standing. I do not know whether there has been a time in US history when it was as easy to tell someone’s class at a glance as to tell their race.

(Yes, I grant that there are complications about the visual continuum of racial appearances, about passing, about even the assumption that skin-color is a natural visual grouping when e.g. hair-color is not. But all of those issues will apply equally if not more so to the visible indicia of class.)

I don’t understand the part about handbags — is that an accusation that generation Z is obsessed with the possession of fashionable consumer goods? Maybe not, and you just meant “handbags” to stand for any good or service? Could you have written “healthcare” in place of “handbags”?

“and the importance of writing ‘’Everything (not only Billie Eilish) – Wanted’ –”

This part I did not understand at all — I do not even know which verbs to join with which nouns.

But you have been more than generous in answering my questions, and probably your other readers understand you better than I do, and they are feeling impatient with my being an old fool. So I will stop now. Thanks again!

85

nastywoman 09.02.20 at 3:25 pm

”So I will stop now”.

Me TOO.

86

Richard Melvin 09.02.20 at 4:11 pm

@oldster

the greater visibility of race over class is a fact of long standing

The relatively new thing is the existence of non-white middle class and rich people. The first African-american billionaire, according to Forbes, got there in 2001. Anyone who started high school the year the civil rights act passed has probably only just passed the peak of their professional career.

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. To some, this is a demonstration of how no amount of money will buy you white privilege. To others. it shows how non-central such concerns can sound to someone who lacks the money required to exercise any such privileges they might have, if they did.

87

faustusnotes 09.03.20 at 12:58 am

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

?

88

nastywoman 09.03.20 at 6:23 am

@
”To some, this is a demonstration of how no amount of money will buy you white privilege. To others. it shows how non-central such concerns can sound to someone who lacks the money required to exercise any such privileges they might have, if they did”.

Could we change it into:
This was a demonstration of how no amount of money will buy you white privilege. To some. it shows how non-central such concerns can sound to someone who lacks the money required to exercise any such privileges they might have, if they did?

89

MisterMr 09.03.20 at 7:04 am

@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.

90

J-D 09.03.20 at 8:24 am

… probably your other readers understand you better than I do …

I wouldn’t count on it. I found nastywoman’s comments incomprehensible some time ago, and stopped reading them as a result. I doubt your difficulties are peculiar to you, and thought you might find that reassuring.

91

Faustusnotes 09.03.20 at 9:07 am

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

92

MisterMr 09.03.20 at 9:25 am

@myself 89
“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.”
Actually I don’t know this, this is just my inference.

My point is just that the clerk didn’t refuse to service OW, the clerk just pointed to a cheaper bag, nad OW took this as a form of prejudice.

93

Richard Melvin 09.03.20 at 10:18 am

@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.

94

Tm 09.03.20 at 10:23 am

95

oldster 09.03.20 at 1:43 pm

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.

96

hix 09.03.20 at 10:28 pm

So people trying to sell one stuff worth 5 Euro for 50000 instead of 5000 Euro is a sign of privilege. By that logic, Chinese tourists are now officially the most privleged social group. Also sounds like a good case for female privilege. At least the 150000 Porsche one might try to sell me after an extensive refurbishment of my cloth might be almost as usefull as a 8000 Euro Toyota Yaris. Much better in relative terms. The attempt to sell at 150k as opposed to 200k – which might be the list price reserved to those at least twenty years older and again asian Tourists would then be a case against privilege. NO definitly not. Pretty sure it was the kind of store where everyone who wrote anything here would have been welcomed upon entering with a “can i help you” that sounds like “have you been lost get the fuck out”.

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