in a culture where all white people are guilty for slavery, this mindset makes sense to me
Not all white people are guilty of slavery, and virtually no one thinks that they are.
Essentially all American white people continue to materially benefit from a long history of systematic racism in America [0], including slavery, state-mandated and state-tolerated post-slavery subjugation and segregation. Heck, many living white Americans are direct beneficiaries of overt discrimination in public programs, not to mention systematic, coordinated private discrimination.
People who oppose acknowledging the latter point like to set up the former as a convenient strawman.
[0] which is not to say all are in a good absolute position, or even not structurally disadvantaged on balance; systematic racial discrimination isn’t the only structural bias in American society.
I come from a family of poor farmers in the South. I've done some genealogical digging, and thus far I've found three 16-24 year old members of my family who died in the Confederate war. We never owned slaves; service was mandatory back then, either through law or social pressure.
Approximately ~600-700,000 people died in the Civil War. This country has made sacrifices for African Americans and racial equality, more than any other country on Earth. It will never be enough.
No matter how much they give, apologize, change the rules, white Americans will never shed their "original sin." Because of my white skin, I "continue to materially benefit" from "systemic racism," and yet, where are these benefits? I come from a place riddled with opiate addicts and alcoholism. Most of the younger people don't make it out, they have to score much higher than African Americans applying to the same colleges (as do Asians).
Everyone was on board with MLK's dream of equal opportunity for all. Racial discrimination was clearly a bad idea. But, in the last 10 years or so, some people have realized that "racism" is perhaps the most powerful bludgeoning tool in the US. Now, MLK is outdated, the new movement is about racial revenge.
And I would dig into MLK's thoughts on economic justice a bit more. The white washed view ignores his belief that equality couldn't be achieved even within the bounds of capitalism. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/21/economic-e...
And I say this all as another poor white boy from the deep south.
A racially divided nation is profitable, and it's much harder for workers to organize.
still kinda nuts to me that this isn't widely acknowledged.
> I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
> I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
As for connections to Occupy Wall Street, my view as some one connected to the scenes is that they're orthogonal, and instead both rise from the beginnings of a generational shift in existing power structures.
Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here, 1967
I'll give you that anyone saying that _only_ corporate identity politics can solve racial issues in America is blowing smoke up your ass, but honest looks at why companies as their employees become richer trend white and male is an important component of the fight for racial equality.
Less likely to be arrested or incarcerated, less likely to be stopped or harassed by police, less likely to be denied a job or mortgage. Those are some of the major systemic privileges White people have that Black people don't in the U.S. The statistics are pretty stark.
if yes, then how is this associated with racism?
This is something I like to bring up, since it's a great example of a microcosm of discrimination that it's easy to not think about. There's a black saying that blacks have to work twice as hard to get half as far, and the data seems to be remarkably close to that assessment.
Truly life changing benefits.
Communities which experience more crime tend to interact more with law enforcement. The perpetrators of those crimes, who generally come from the same communities as their victims, tend to get arrested and incarcerated in proportion to their rate of criminality. Most murder in the US is committed by black men [1], and mainly concentrated in a handful of poor urban areas: St. Louis, Chicago, Baltimore, Oakland, etc. The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) [2][3], widely seen as the gold standard for data on criminal victimization, confirms that violent crime is simply a larger problem in America's urabn black communities compared to the white, Asian, and Hispanic communities. Rates of arrest, conviction, and incarceration reflect this.
It is no longer the 1960s. Body cameras and smartphones are everywhere. Racism has been taboo for decades. Police know that if they unjustly shoot or abuse a black person, there's a good chance their careers and lives as free citizens will be over. The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence.
Tracing back through history, the forces which led to the present situation such as slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, and redlining were undoubtedly racist and systemic. However, these systemic forces are now gone. They have even been replaced in many areas by systemic counter-forces, such as in university admissions [4], law school admissions [5], med school admissions [6], access to government debt relief [7], and access to the COVID vaccine [8]. The problems which bedevil many black Americans today- disproportionate poverty, broken families, drug addiction, all resultant criminality- would appear to be the results of historical inequities, not ongoing systemic racism.
[1] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
[2] https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/ncvs.html
[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/revcoa18.pdf
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/30/us/affirmative-action-50-...
[5] https://blog.powerscore.com/lsat/do-underrepresented-minorit...
[6] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-chart-illustrates-graphic...
[7] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/wisconsin-dairy-farmer-sue...
[8] https://khn.org/news/article/vermont-gives-blacks-and-other-...
Over-policing and racial profiling is a large cause of the increased criminality. The base rate of illegal drug use is fairly similar for all races but arrests and convictions have been much higher for Blacks and other minorities for quite some time [0][1].
> The notion that law enforcement arrests and incarcertates more black people mainly due to racial antipathy, rather than that community's starkly higher rate of criminal violence, is not supported by evidence.
Actually, traffic stops are biased against minorities despite a similar base rate of infraction [2] yet this increases the rate at which Black people interact with police which compounds the harm caused by statistically harsher reaction to infractions. Further, sentencing is influenced by race in complex ways for which there is unfortunately limited data [3] but Blacks tend to receive longer sentences and be at risk of minimum sentences [4].
The root causes of violent offenses are even more complex and although income disparity, childhood trauma/abuse/neglect, and oppression are all potential causes I haven't found good sources with solid statistics to dig into that.
[0] https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/rdusda.pdf [1] https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2019.3054... [2] https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/suspect-citizens/A399F1... [3] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228718440_Reassessi... preprint; 2013 publication is behind a paywall. [4] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi%3Fartic...
People who are poor, and especially those that live in rural areas, face serious difficulties. But minority Americans face those same problems, plus racism.
"Everyone was on board with MLK's dream of equal opportunity for all. Racial discrimination was clearly a bad idea."
Everyone? Clearly a bad idea? I could rustle you up a big stack of people who disagree. Weirdly, many of them are poor and rural---you'd think they would see the common cause and join together, but no. On the other hand, there's the old joke about everyone having to have someone to look down on; they may be white trash, but at least they're not black.
> I'm sure you recognize different dog breeds, and possibly know that certain dog breeds are known to act a certain way. This is due to generations and generations of artificial-selection in breeding. Herding breeds were designed for herding, German Shepherds were designed for herding and protection, Shitzus were designed for companionship.
> You probably wouldn't expect to see a Shitzu herding sheep. That does not, in any way, make Shitzu's "less than" a herding breed, they're just built for a different function. Shitzus evolved in environments where companionship was prioritized over herding, obviously.
> And yet, when it comes to humans, we choose not to acknowledge this fact: geography influences evolutionary pressures, and evolutionary pressures influence the humans that evolved there. You see this in culture too. Cultures evolve just like the humans that belong to them do, and it's a big soupy mess of genetics influencing behavior/culture, and behavior/culture influencing genetics.
> Expecting African Americans to act like neurotic white protestants is fundamentally racist, you're trying to shove a square peg in a round hole. Human diversity is real, except it goes beyond skin color. On average, racial groups exhibit similar behavior, across socioeconomic spectrums. Racial groups evolved in similar geographic regions, they are optimized for survival in those regions, around those people.
> "All men are created equal" is perhaps the most harmful lie ever told.
Just to fast forward the discussion for some people so they know the conclusion noofen is leading toward.
Further, I don't think you can exactly call losing the Civil War "making sacrifices for racial equality." If I've got my boot on somebody's neck, and I won't take it off until pushed off by force, my skinned knee isn't a sacrifice that I made so that my victim can get up.
Your grandfather dies. In his will, he leaves you his house, which has been in your family several generation. It's a nice place, better than the crappy apartment you live in, and it's yours now by all rights, so you move in.
When you do, you discover to your delight that you water bill is zero dollars every month. What a nice bonus! Free water from the tap!
One day, when poking around the basement, you discover the secret to this mystery. Apparently one of your ancestors many years ago dug a secret tunnel over to the neighbor's house put a T on their water main, and ran a pipe back to your house. Your water isn't free. Your neighbors have been paying for it the whole time.
In fact, they have even known this and been trying to tell you. But, you know, you were so busy getting settled in and dealing with all the stuff in your own life that their discussion about "water equality" never really registered for you. It's not that you didn't care (you love equality), you just didn't think it had anything to do with you.
So what is your moral position today?
It is not one of guilt. You didn't put that sneaky pipe in. And while, yes, you certainly took some showers with free water, at the time you honestly didn't realize that anyone was paying for it. There was no malice on your part.
You could argue that since it's your neighbors who are suffering from the jacked up water bill, they should be the ones to pay to cut that pipe and remove it. After all, you didn't cause the problem, and you don't have any personal incentive to fix it. You aren't trying to steal their water, it's just the way your plumbing happens to be set up.
At the same time, your neighbors are actually poorer than you, in large part because they have been paying your water bill the whole time. It feels pretty selfish to expect them to foot the plumbing bill to get it fixed.
So I think that you bear a responsibility to fix the plumbing because you now own the house. And you have some moral obligation in the sense that those who are most able to do a thing bear some obligation to their community to do that thing. If we're all in this together, then we give back to society in the ways we best can. Since you can more easily afford to the fix the plumbing (all those months of free water let you save up some cash), you should be the one to do so.
Now, granted, there are certainly some progressives (of all races) who take the history of slavery in a guilt/shame direction. If you're white, you're just supposed to feel bad. We should all be walking around in hairshirts as a penance for the sins of our fathers. There is a real weird Catholic guilt vibe in some progressive circles today.
But I think for most, it's not that. And the most charitable interpretation of people saying that whites today bear responsibility for slavery is just what my example here says: we have some ownership over the institutions that benefited from slavery, and we have a greater capacity to amend that problem, thus responsibility to do that falls on our shoulders.
The most compassionate way to look at this is as an opportunity. What a great thing it is to be in a position to help address one of the most grievious injustices in the United States.
I get that you're trying to be charitable but there really isn't a valid defence for an ideology that tries to slap a label onto heterogeneous groups of people with nothing in common beyond their skin tone. It is a racist way of thinking and should be called out as such.
I understand that this is an extremely sensitive topic that can make it hard to reason about. People never feel good when accusations—false or not!—start flying. And once those kind of intense feelings get involved, it's hard to lower your defenses and try to read what people say charitably.
The point of my comment was entirely that it is not about guilt. None of us living today bear responsibility for historical slavery in the US, even those whose ancestors owned slaves. How can I be considered at fault for something that happened literally before I existed? How could I have caused that?
(Edit: I realize now that my analogy where the house is inherited obscures that. I think the analogy would work better if I said you won the house in a lottery.)
What we carry is not guilt from the past but responsibility for today. Because of that history of slavery, many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people. (In my analogy, the pipe continues to deliver water long after the person who unfairly plumbed it has died.) Because of those benefits, white people today have more power as a group generally than Black people do.
It is today's unearned benefits and the greater capacity to remedy them that places responsibility on white people in the US, not any bloodline that traces back to slaveowners.
We should fix racism today because it's wrong and because we can. We bear a moral obligation to people living today to give them the more just world they deserve.
"many institutions today still unfairly benefit white people."
Beyond that, I struggle to believe it, but perhaps you can fill me in if I'm missing something.
As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people?
Their entire culture hates them (music, movies, media) and they are quotad out of universities and flashy career paths. To add salt on the wound their manufacturing jobs are shipped overseas.
This reality on the ground is the near opposite of any kind of institutional privilege of the sort you're talking about. In some cases (e.g soft quotas) this is demonstrable institutional racism working against white people.
I think it's both pro-white and anti-black. When you dig back through US history, you see plenty of evidence of both a belief system that whites are the best (and thus deserve to have power over other races) as well as that blacks are particularly deserving of their lowest status. Other races and ethnicities form a more complex middle ground. In many places and times there simply weren't a great enough quantity of those members of those groups for any well-defined cultural claim to be made.
I don't think your average 19th century Virginia farmer had a strong opinion one way or the other about the relatively inferiority of, say, the Sami people because they'd never even heard of one. Whites in almost all parts of the US by necessity had to incorporate blackness into their culture because—thanks almost entirely to the slave trade—blacks were so present in much of the country and were enshrined in its laws and institutions.
> As an example, in what way are institutions biased in favor of poor rural white people?
"Poor", "rural", and "white" are three ways to slice demographics and the way they interact can sometimes illuminate and sometimes obscure.
I think most of what you're seeing is that it generally sucks to be poor and rural, full stop. In 1910, there were about 13 million US farm workers. Today there are about 3 million. In 1979, there were close to 20 million manufacturing jobs. Today it's around 12 million.
This disproportionally hurts whites because black people have historically concentrated in urban areas (often driven by trying to escape anti-black racism). So it's easy to have a vivid image of how much it sucks for some opioid addicted country-music blaring coal-rolling white dude living in a trailer in Appalachia compared to some hip black guy riding the subway in NYC listening to billionaire Kanye's latest album.
But that's comparing different cohorts. The real question is what is it like for a poor, rural, black person? Black people make up only 3% of the population of West Virginia, but 28% of its prison population. (Whites are 93% of the state, but 65% of prisoners.)
Meanwhile in NYC, black people are 16% of the state population but 53% of its prison population. The median household income for white people is $80,300, for black people it's $42,600.
So, yes, I agree that poor rural folks have gotten the short end of the stick since neoliberalism took over. And their perception of relative worsening is something that we should look at. (I think it's one of the primary drivers of the Tea Party, Trumpism, the alt-right, etc.) While their anger at black people is misplaced and wrong, I can empathize with where it's coming from. It hurts to feel that others are moving ahead while you yourself are not.
But at the same time, it has always been hard to be black in the US and it's still hard. Here's a fun (spoiler: not fucking fun at all) guessing game to play if you don't already know the answer: When was the last lynching in the United States?
If you were naive, you might guess the late 1800s when Jim Crow laws were rife and the country was still coming to grips with emancipation. Maybe you'd guess the 1930s when the KKK was flourishing. You would hope it wasn't the 1950s when economic prosperity and blacks and whites fighting together in WWII should have brought us together. Hopefully no later than the 1960s when the Civil Rights Act was signed.
Actually, it was 1981. His name was Michael Donald. He was 19 years old and was chosen at random by KKK members angry about an unrelated murder trial "to show Klan strength in Alabama".
He was killed by poor rural whites who were this close to getting away with it completely until the FBI got involved.
"When you dig back through US history, you see plenty of evidence of both a belief system that whites are the best"
I only see evidence that the system today is anti-Black and anti-poor.
I accept the historical examples you've given of pro-white attitudes, but I'm hoping to discuss today's reality since that's the point of contention.
"I think most of what you're seeing is that it generally sucks to be poor and rural, full stop"
The soft quota they face in employment and education and the hatred and derision uniquely directed towards them in particular (and towards no other group) from all cultural institutions.
The white quota in the workforce, for example, is there to be filled by inner city whites with the right pedigree and right social values. The white quota in higher education makes it difficult for rural whites without the same early educational opportunities to have a chance, whereas a black rural person (even if they're a recent immigrant) will have an easier time, all else equal, for no other reason than they have the right skin color.
From my perspective, this is evidence of institutional discrimination, but it runs in the opposite direction to what's claimed.
"Meanwhile in NYC, black people are 16% of the state population but 53% of its prison population."
Hindus do better than Whites in general. Is the system pro-Hindu?
Nigerians immigrants do well. Is the system pro-Nigerian?
Differential outcomes are not evidence that today's system is pro-white.
There's certainly a historical legacy of slavery and discrimination that helped to create these inequalities. But it's not evidence for much beyond that if we're discussing the institutions of today.
I don't know what to tell you, man. I pointed out that the incarceration rate of blacks is dramatically higher in the US state that likely has the greatest concentration of poor white people.
> derision uniquely directed towards them in particular (and towards no other group) from all cultural institutions.
Sure, Hollywood makes fun of them, but I don't think that has a particularly significant material effect on the quality of their lives. (Though it does make them really angry and more politically active.)
> Hindus do better than Whites in general. Is the system pro-Hindu? Nigerians immigrants do well. Is the system pro-Nigerian?
There is significant selection bias here in that immigrants are not a uniform sample from their ethnicities.
"pointed out that the incarceration rate of blacks"
And again, disparate outcomes aren't evidence of current discrimination or bias for or against any group.
You could be right that Hindus do well in the criminal justice system because of selection bias, and whites do well because of specific pro-white bias that Hindus don't benefit from. But the burden of proof is on you to show that that's true. Do poor Hindus or poor Asians do worse than equally poor Whites? If you could show something like this, then you will have convinced me that the criminal justice system is pro-white.
The only actual evidence I've seen is that the criminal justice system is anti-Black, and that evidence has nothing to do with disparate outcomes. Beyond that I haven't seen any evidence.
Would you say that it's impossible to fix climate change until people stop profitinng from trying to fix climate change? Is it impossible to fix infant mortality while doctors profit from saving infants' lives?
There is something to what you're saying. There's a process that goes like:
1. People who dislike X want to fix X.
2. In order to put a lot of time into fixing X, they seek out work that pays them to do it.
3. In the process of that work, they build up a lot of expertise.
4. Now they have a natural incentive for X not to be fixed so that they can continue to make money from their expertise.
This is a real thing. A perverse incentive that arises basically in all cases where bad things require deep expertise to fix.
I see very little evidence that this incentive is powerful enough to dwarf the massive desire to fix X for most problems.
Most oncologists are not out there blowing cigarette smoke into people's faces to ensure their job security. Dentists are not plying kids with candy. Most people fighting against racism are not so callous as to completely undermine their own deeply held convictions just to keep themselves employed.
> in fact, it sure seems like things just get worse.
Things looking worse is often a sign of them getting better. You never saw news articles about the environment in the mid-1900s when pollution and industrialization was at its worth. It didn't become visible until people cared enough and had enough power to make it visible.
The "me too" movement isn't about sexual abuse becoming more prevalent, it's about victims finally having enough power to be able to shine a light on it. If we weren't hearing about Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, and Bill Cosby, that wouldn't mean they weren't still abusing. It would mean they were continuing to abuse with inpunity.
Maybe the Irish person is the first guy's roommate or spouse - they didn't directly inherit the free water from their direct ancestors, but they're still getting free water from next door.
One main thing is that white people as a whole need to atone for slavery, even though the vast vast majority (poor southerners, northerners, immigrants from after the civil war) had nothing to do with it. And secondly, that race is used to only talk about the issues facing black people, not whites. Poor white people (in WV, the South, etc.) are just as poor as black people, yet get no help in things like university admissions or job placements.
And for Asians (inc. Indians), they (disclaimer: I am of Asian descent) also receive material disadvantages (I have zero chance of getting into an Ivy League, nor will I ever receive assistance programs for minorities) so that black people have a level playing field. Positive discrimination works, but not in its current form.