If you don’t mind fleshing this idea out for me a bit, how would I, as an evil conservative, ‘grant equality to others’ (assuming, if you’ll indulge me for a moment, that I wanted to)? And would doing so really not ‘change my own privileges’?
Is access to the express lane “equality of opportunity,” or “equality of outcome?”
Depends how you got that access. But once you’ve got it, it shouldn’t be taken away because other people are saying “No fair!”
I think you misunderstood somewhat. The point is that every white person who lives in a historically white-privileged society with a long and influential past of racial discrimination against non-whites IS racist, to some extent, just through living in a society that was historically shaped by racism.
That’s not saying that all white Americans (of whom I’m also one, btw) are consciously or intentionally racist, or that they’re actively trying to harm or discriminate against non-white people. It’s simply noting that, not being superhuman, we can’t live in a historically racist society without having some of the pervasive racism rub off on our fundamental beliefs and attitudes.
There’s nothing “shaming” about pointing out the universal influence of historical racism, and there’s nothing wrong with saying that we have to recognize its effects before we can solve racial problems successfully.
Sure, outcomes are never going to be identical across the board for all people, even if we had a society with no racism or discrimination whatsoever. But I think the problem with that distinction is that a lot of people assume that “equality of opportunity” exists where it actually doesn’t.
For instance, if employers looking at the same exact resume are more likely to offer the applicant an interview when the name on the resume is “Connor” than when it’s “Jamal” (an actual study), then Jamal isn’t really getting equality of opportunity there. Even if the employers in question would never dream of using explicitly or consciously discriminatory practices like putting up a sign saying “No Blacks Need Apply”.
I understand your broader point about inequalities in opportunities, but IMHO, that study sucks. Here is a PDF of the study, and near the end you can read Table 11 that shows the actual names used in the study and their callback rates. Emily’s callback rate was a measly 8.3%. She got beat by Latonya at 9.1%. Poor Neil, Geoffrey, and Brett did even worse, at 6.6-6.8%. Neil actually tied Jamal at 6.6%. Brad and Jay did the best, at 15.9% and 13.2%. Does that mean we should have pity on the Emily’s, Neil’s, and Jamal’s of the world, and look down on Brad for only achieving his position in life through name-privilege? Just how fine and precise are we going to try to be in ferreting out sources of privilege?
It will never end, trust me, unless and until the U.S. turns to communism and everyone is forced to live drab, dreary lives of privation and repression but where at least no one has more than anyone else.
Um, you did look at the p-value numbers, right? If you compare the core survey findings in Table 1, about the overall effects of “racial-sounding” names on employers in general, you see that those p-values are mostly very low, implying high statistical significance.
The additional results in Table 11, comparing the effects of individual names within the different “racial-sounding” groups, show very high p-values (all well over the standard threshold of 0.05), indicating that the results are likely not statistically significant.
So in fact, the evidence in that study for “name-privilege” on the basis of individual names is far more uncertain than the quite strong evidence for “name-privilege” on the basis of racial-sounding category of names. In consequence, trying to use the former to downplay the importance of the latter isn’t a persuasive argument.
I’ll pause the discussion there in case you accidentally overlooked that p-value difference and now realize that the table you cited isn’t actually supporting your point in any significant (no pun intended) way.
Straw men like this are easier to confront than the possibility that the “other side” might actually have rational and reasonable goals.
There are indeed ridiculous overreactions and examples of political correctness, but the occasional example doesn’t invalidate the concerns that people might have over the statues.
I agree: removing statues won’t solve problems of crime in black neighborhoods. It won’t by itself solve racial strife, but that’s missing the point. Removing these symbols does hopefully make society a little more sensitive to groups of people who have historically been victimized by a majority. And sensitivity, while seemingly unimportant, creates an environment in which people can communicate more easily. It builds trust between groups, and convinces people that the majority at least is at least willing to show concern for other problems, like poverty, like discrimination at the workplace, like police brutality. So it’s not an insignificant step even if it directly doesn’t result in any observable outcome on the surface.
One challenge (of many) is that modern mass media and social media have distorted some of these issues. People want simple answers to extremely complicated problems that are going to take generations to solve. Healing the wounds of the past isn’t as easy as saying ‘If we do X, then racism will disappear’. Nobody is saying that, of course. But the 1-minute news clip shows a lot of conflict and emotions, which sells airtime and gets lots of clicks of the mouse, but rarely goes deeper to identify sources of tensions.
This is also how an exceptional example can be used to try and invalidate the concerns that are still otherwise valid. Take a single example of overreaction or where and say “See, people are just milking racism for whatever they can get out of it.”
Actual Nazis and White Supremacists? Very few. What I see as different is half of the country aligned to a political party defending them by deflecting to attack those who counter protested. THAT is what is different. There have always been Nazis, skinheads, white supremacists, etc. What is different now is 10-20 years ago when they showed up in your town or city to march or protest they were universally condemned or ignored. It was commonly understood that “the right to free speech” allows them to be there but no one actually DEFENDED them or blamed those who did come out to counter protest. Christ, people just wanted them to go away because it was so embarrassing that anyone even thought that way anymore.
Now, I see good people staunchly defending them and virulently hating those who counter protested all because they believe those counter protesters were “liberals”. This is a terrifying change in our society. Political partisanship has become so bad that due to political party affiliation one would prefer to attack those who stand up against the most vile and reprehensible beliefs than side with “liberals”.
The whole thing is typical white man malarkey but I’ll focus on the bold part for now. Nobody’s “trying to shame people”. Your assumption that a protest over a monument or some other example of protest is “trying to shame” is typical of whites who just want to shut the conversation down.
“Look, we outlawed slavery 150 years ago, time to move on.”
“My Irish ancestors were discriminated against. So what?”
“My great great great grandmother was a Native American, and ‘we’ were oppressed far worse than blacks.”
Irrelevancy aside, a culture should be ashamed of its past if that past involves venerating slave owners and people who fought for a white supremacist society, just as Germans ought to be ashamed of their Nazi past (and they are). Being ashamed of past behavior doesn’t mean being ashamed of the culture today in its entirety. There is no moral ambiguity here. You can try to bring your Jewish ancestry into it all you want but you’re not getting it. There is no white Jewish person alive who will understand what it means to be a black man in America. Stop trying.
In any event, why does doing the right and decent thing have to have a significant social impact?
I agree, but unfortunately, when people are losing an argument on ethical grounds, they try to look for an epistemic way out.
In the same vein there is no black person alive who will understand what it means to be a white Jewish (or Christian, Muslim, Sikh, Roma, Wiccan, etc.) man or woman in America. There’s plenty of blacks that don’t get it when it comes to various non-main-stream white, brown, red, yellow, etc. cultures, yet somehow those minorities are supposed to overlook those shortcomings.
Giving power to others means less power to those who already had it, there is no other way around it. We are not talking about stuff here.
This once-common understanding seems to not be fully understood by this new generation of counter-protesters. You and I may agree that it’s not ok to throw bottles filled with urine at them for wrong-thinking, but apparently not all the counter-protesters do.
I don’t have any problem at all with liberals peacefully counter-protesting, and I suspect virtually no one else does either. It’s when some of them start throwing urine, punching peaceful people for wearing a MAGA hat, cracking skulls with bike locks, etc that we take issue, and that somehow translated, in your mind, to “staunchly defending” white supremacists. That is, I think, where the breakdown occurred.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you, but in terms of talking about healing the wounds of America, I think it’s a fairly safe bet that black Americans have more wounds to heal than the rest. Even when a black man was president, you didn’t see black nationalists in the White House; you do, however, see more than one white nationalist in the White House today. And that’s the point. White racism against blacks (and others) has an established track record, and not just in society but as a matter of actual governmental policy. Read the original Constitution: it refers to black people as 3/5 persons, but just for the purposes of political apportionment - otherwise they were considered 0/5 persons. And today white nationalists, as opposed to black nationalists, are much closer to the levers of real power. Blacks get it - the question is, do whites get it? Probably not.
You and I may agree that it’s not okay to literally mob and murder peaceful counter-protesters for being there, but apparently not all the right-wingers do. In fact, evidently quite a few of them don’t.
[QUOTE=HurricaneDitka]
I don’t have any problem at all with liberals peacefully counter-protesting, and I suspect virtually no one else does either.
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I rather question that “virtually”, because ISTM that a lot of conservatives these days are deliberately shutting their eyes to the nature and size of the right-wing hate movement that their fear-and-resentment politics of the last few decades has generated.
In any case, when you have right-wing terrorists believing it’s literally okay and even commendable to outright murder liberals and members of other despised groups in the name of their racist-bigot ideology, even a quite small number of them can do a large amount of damage.