>From an economist, this is a surprisingly racial thesis, where a simple economic one would do: close the door on others after they're already in the castle.
As you yourself admit, race is a very convenient way to help close the door.
As you yourself admit, race is a very convenient way to help close the door.
For instance, this went by recently in my feeds: http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/shampooing-hair-a... In Michigan, getting a hairdresser's license requires requires 1,500 hours of training, the same as an airline pilot.
Was somebody going yeah, this'll keep those nasty other races down? Was it just an attempt to pull the ladder up behind them by the existing hairdressing firms? Was there some regulator somewhere who was honestly convinced by someone that hair chemicals are so dangerous that they require 1500 hours of training as to how to handle properly? Was it something else?
If you don't identify the problem correctly, you don't stand a chance of solving it. The zeal to attribute everything that can possibly be attributed to racism to racism ironically hurts the very people it's trying to help by ensuring the problems facing them do not get correctly addressed, when it isn't always racism.
Maybe it was this time. I dunno. Maybe there really were some legislators or regulators in Michigan who where just champing at the bit to find a way to keep down those nasty people, and ha ha, here's my chance to strike, no hairdressing for you unless you pay the rent! Ha ha ha!
But I suspect that sounds pretty silly to most of you reading this. I mean, even the most stereotypical racist I can come up with in my head isn't standing there ranting about how terrible it is that "those people" have hairdressers who didn't have to take the full 1500 hours of hairdressing training like good, decent people. It was probably something else.
I mean, think about NIMBYism (or any of the examples above where access to some economic benefit are restricted). White folks have most of the assets; NIMBYism means the world's most vibrant cities become more and more off-limits to non-white folks, who then become even less likely to hold and grow any real assets. I'd call that racist, but again, it doesn't really matter if the people who benefit from racism are Racists with a capital R. They may not hold racist beliefs, and yet they can still benefit from and promote racist systems. We're all complicit in these systems, because they persist today. Denying that, I think, is a way to keep racism working.
How do you fix the real root problem without naming racism and the people who benefit from it as in some way complicit in racism? I don't know. "Racist" is a high bar, and it lets us ignore that so many of us are responsible for the persistence of racism.
The problem is, in the real world, everything correlates with everything. Why are there potholes in the road? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why is there acid rain? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why is there a plastic patch in the ocean? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else). Why are governments everywhere going dangerously into debt, running the risk of defaults? Institutional racism, sexism, and ruralism (and everything else).
You need no more stretching for any of those examples than the gymnastics you exhibited in your post.
If everything is caused by the same cause, nothing is really caused by that cause. It has no information content. You can't fix anything if you assign everything the same list of root causes without distinction.
In trying to do a favor to the victims of racism, you are working very, very hard to ensure that only ineffective methods of solving their problems are deployed. Is that really helpful?
Try not to conflate the words "disproportionately affects" and "systemic discrimination." There are some things that disproportionately affect women, like "being able to become pregnant." That's a mere fact; frustratingly, it turns out to also be a thing that marks someone for systemic discrimination. "Being able to become pregnant" is, on its own, just a boring old fact, and we mustn't do anything about women being able to become pregnant at rates far higher than men. On the other hand, we ought to do something about ongoing misogyny, in all its modern and subtle forms.
And yeah, if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs or policies that mark them for lesser treatment and poorer outcomes merely for their being rural dwellers, then we can't ignore that. Do you not understand that there's a difference between people being different, and people being marked for worse treatment because of their difference?
I think all I'm asking is that, yes, you do fight against the root cause: the act of marking others for lesser treatment because of their group. If you deny that such a difference is salient to someone's treatment, you have freed yourself from noticing or helping their plight.
When your body of data is so large, it is easy to mistake cherry picking and associated fallacies for empiricism.
>if rural folks are disproportionately affected by a set of beliefs...we can't ignore that
We can if these policies create more good than harm. Furthermore, even in this example, whether the issue is classism or collateral effects, although people would be quick to scream racism if we replaced "rural" with black, without sufficient evidence of racist intent.
The biggest problem I see with a mindset like this is that the conflation of equality of opportunity with equality of outcome leads to policies which forgo merit to correct imagined racism. And we end up with less competent firefighters, law officers, doctors, lawyers, etc; and by lowering standards to attempt to force equity, all of society is worse off.
There's also the fact that many people are indeed, openly or covertly, racist.
Just because it's not mentioned in "polite company", and surely not in the kind of circle most Bay area programmers frequent, doesn't mean they don't exist.
And this includes government officials, judges, bankers, and so on...
The former pair are contributing causes to the latter pair (and especially the last.)
On the contrary, if you want to fix the problem, actively ignoring the real and existing racism that caused and is contributing to maintaining the problem is going to be a lot less effective than acknowledging and addressing it and it's mechanisms and effects.
If one can look at the results, see the net effects, and then not do anything to fix it, one's intent doesn't matter.
I believe jerf's point is that motivations do matter, at least a bit, in understanding how a state of affairs came to be. If it's racism, then we might be able to dismantle it and let it be. If it's about keeping out competition, then taking away barriers is very likely to provoke a backlash as the people whose incomes drop look for a way to avoid that.
Again, you're 100% correct. Intent is not magical. It's just that motivations matter at least a little bit for predicting human behavior.
(http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2015/mar/15/...)
The core problem is attributing bad behavior that is caused by something other than racism (such as classism, greed, or just trying to win a non-infinite sum game) can create problems by hampering discussions of the actual root issues.
Of course, we shouldn't completely dismiss it as a reason for some people to do what they do. But there has to be a middle ground between saying it is the primary factor and it is never a factor.