I don’t think all that black people have achieved over the last fourty years is solely due to discrimination on their behalf. I feel that as the legacy of discrimination grows distant many of these gaps will be overcome. There may always be some difference but I think black people are more talented than you give them credit for.
What I meant is that race would play a diminished role in people’s lives. It makes a huge difference if you identify as a certain race if belonging to a race brings legal benefits. If it does not matter then the distinctions between races will grow ever more slippery.
You can feel whatever you want, but there is not a shred of data to support that “feeling.”
There is a reason so many are concerned that now that finally have blacks in positions of responsibility and success, we should just roll back race-based AA.
It would be a disaster. An absolute catastrophe. Private institutions won’t give up their admissions data for a reason: the need to skew admissions is profound. I gave you one data point from the JBHE article that should give you pause: *“If these institutions were to choose their students solely on test scores and college grades, it is clear that in the intense competition for places at medical schools in the United States, African Americans would be at a severe disadvantage in relation to the highest scoring whites. Under these circumstances no blacks would be admitted to the nation’s most selective schools of medicine.”
*
It is bad enough that some states, at public institutions, are rolling back race-based AA. On any broader scale, we will simply lose black representation, no matter how you “feel.” Did you follow Ricci v DeStefano? We aren’t just talking about black professionals; we are talking about black success across every segment of the job market that rises above laborer.
Four decades of progress wiped away because we want to antiquate “race.”
Hopefully this isn’t too much of a tangent:
I know that JFK’s Catholicism was something of a big deal at the time. Was this comparable in magnitude to Obama being black today (or 2008, rather)? I.e., not too meaningful for most of the population, but significant enough that it had a meaningful impact on the election.
If so, maybe we can hope that in 50 years, race will be as irrelevant as the exact brand of Christianity one adheres to.
That level of mixing has already happened in several Hispano-American countries. Anti-miscegenation laws constrained it in el Norte, but the dam has burst.
The OP said 100 years from now. I suppose that’s not an unreasonable ballpark number.
The problem is that we aren’t tackling the actual issues surrounding achievement through discriminating on the behalf of minorities. Not only do social resources have to be as available in predominately minority areas as white areas, but change also has to come from within the group, itself.
The reason that, even when controlled for income and other factors, blacks score behind whites, asians, and hispanics is because that particular culture as it exists within the US doesn’t emphasize education as much as the others. Asians, for instance, score above whites because most of the asian cultures that emigrate to the US are dogmatically all about education. That doesn’t mean the black test takers aren’t intelligent, it means that their intelligence isn’t focused on the things that come out well on tests. This, in addition to available services, needs to change. But, unfortunately, this has changed very little in the last 40 years.
So, for how long should AA be continued without support from within that culture itself? To me, AA is a failure because it was a nice speaking point that addressed no issues but made politicians be able to spread the “feel good” message instead of focusing resources on the actual problems. And I despise legislation like that. Instead of AA, we should have passed appropriate funding and resources for the low achievement areas. But that’s not politically expedient, either in the past or now.
Obviously I meant something rather more efficacious than that. I’m referring to the point where someone with darker skin than the average person could choose to be lighter than the average person. Or indeed have a skin tone than no human would naturally have.
Of course at this point many people will be yelling “Michael Jackson!”. But who knows what the hell was going on there. There should be more examples than one if such techniques were widely available.
Indeed. But the OP also mentioned mixing of ethnicities such that most people appear mixed. I’m saying before the latter happens tech changes (if not sociological changes) could make the issue moot.
And yet separation by superficial skin colors and discrmination based on them still exists in all of them. So I doubt it will become antiquated. Less discriminatory, yes.
This is a different thing than races, though. It’s discrimination, but the idea of races means that if you’re white, you’re not black, and if you’re black, you’re not white. My point was that there is a small but increasing number of people who reject this.
You can have discrimination based on stupid things without have people divided into the categories we know as races.
You can have have divisions based on real differences such as ethnicity or geography without the races.
You can even have affirmative action (based on economics, or a heritage connection to a group historically discriminated against) without the races. In other words, I don’t care what you are, if your great-grandmother was black, this has affected you, and affirmative action will help balance it.
Affirmative action is one of the problems I was thinking of with the OP. I think it’s a necessary program to redress imbalance, but at the same time it keeps these artificial categories alive, and presumes that someone isn’t part WASP and part black. I don’t have a better solution that what’s in place now (well, except for not gutting the Civil Rights-era legislation, but I guess the horse has bolted on that one).
That’s a definition of “race” and “racism” that is rather particular to an American who lived in the late 20th and early 21st century. It isn’t by any stretch of the imagination the only one.
If the black/white divide becomes irrelevant, there’s nothing stopping people from redefining who is or is not their “race.” That’s easily seen in other parts of the world; Hutu and Tutsi did not consider themselves the same race in Rwanda. Jews and Arabs don’t consider themselves the same race, and indeed the notion of “Jew” as being a different race is common everywhere. As recently as the late 19th century it was not entirely uncommon to hear of the Irish being regarded as an inferior race.
“Race” can mean any grouping of humans connected by some commonality; the idea that there are broad morphological “races” where people are white, black, Asian and maybe “Hispanic” is not a universal or even logically derived one.
So to answer the OP’s question, probably never. Race will always matter.
I think you can say race is no longer a thing in the U.S. when it’s no longer connected to problems like poverty, lack of opportunity, material death rates, poor health, and incarceration. The thing you have to realize is that these things have been codified and enforced in American society in various ways pretty much from the word go. So … don’t hold your breath. Affirmative Action doesn’t keeps this stuff alive. What keeps it alive is the lingering effects of centuries of policies that were intended to help white people, primarily wealthy white people, at the expense of others. You can’t really talk about eradicating awareness of race until you talk about getting rid of those things, and in our politics today it’s barely even acceptable to talk about these issues because people insist you’re accusing them of being racist and because it’s just sort of a big downer.
In 2010 almost 3 percent of Americans were multiracial, according to the Census Bureau. The bureau believes that by 2060 that figure will skyrocket to… a bit over 7 percent. I think that could be an underestimate because they’re probably relying more on growth rates than on the increasing number of people who are identifying themselves as multiracial. Still, I hope you’d agree that race won’t stop existing just because 10 percent of citizens call themselves multiracial. It’s a big country and it’s not as if all the populations are equally mixed throughout.
And of course there’s that. People have always found ways to separate themselves, and that’s why we came up with ideas like race in the first place.
Or we could make up new subcultures: perhaps black/white will be seen as a group distinct from white/Asian or black/Latino, for example.
Isn’t that exactly why Asian-American is a thing? Yes, the term itself is culturally confused and geographically nonsensical, but the point is that for most of its history, American society hasn’t cared if your ancestors were Thai or Chinese or Japanese. Everybody who looked vaguely similar was and is assumed to be the same by the majority, so the minority group has some common experiences in that society. Ironically that does create an actual bond.
These seem like opposite ideas: First you admit that socioeconomic equality does not solve the problem because it’s cultural, and then you feel we should fix the SES disparity with “appropriate funding and resources for the low achievement areas.” I’m not clear where and how you think we should be spending money to fix this cultural problem.
But the problem is not cultural, and outside of this sort of general contention that it is, I wonder if you can present any data for the notion?
Here’s a simple way to think about the fundamental dilemma driving the need for race-based AA: The black Doctor’s kid needs race-based AA to get into Med School because his academic achievement is worse than the white sharecropper’s kid.
Black upper middle class kids in good schools with educated parents have lousier grades and scores than their white and asian peers. Not just a little worse. Horribly worse. So much worse that if we take the scores of black kids from families that make 80-100 thousand dollars a year, their scores are actually worse than white kids from families that make under 10K a year.
For you to argue that the problem is “cultural” means that you think middle and upper class black families and their children simply cannot figure out that education is important enough to do their best, and to put education first.
I think that’s ridiculous. It’s a back-handed way of saying blacks are lazier than asians when it comes to education. Sure; “asian culture” (whatever that is) values education. Why? Because anyone with an IQ higher than a cantaloupe can figure out that education (and the grades and scoring that are requisite for it) gives you more choices than trying to get rich winning the lotto or hitting the professional sports tours.
I find it very patronizing to promote this idea that the entire black community in the US is too dumb to try their best at school, particularly when their parents are well-educated and economically successful.
We simply are not going to “antiquate” race–and the need for race-based AA–until the performance differences are equalized among those races for the various things we think need to have diversified representation. And to date there is no evidence whatsoever that the performance difference is a problem of “culture.” I see very little race-based difference in the approach to how one succeeds among my professional asian, black or white colleagues.
From the paper abstract: “To date, there is no conclusive evidence that such negative peer pressure is prevalent among Black students or unique to their peer groups. At best, we can say that some small segment of the Black student population experiences race-specific negative peer pressure. In light of this research, the author advocates moving beyond traditional cultural explanations for the Black/White achievement gap. Instead, he argues that more attention be given to the structural, institutional, and symbolic disadvantages that shape the racialized educational terrain that Black students navigate.”
Diamond argues the performance gap is not cultural; it’s structural (socioeconomically structural). Of course, folks who look at the fact that SES normalization does not normalize scores say it’s not structural; it’s cultural. Round and round the discussion goes, but what never goes away is an acceptance that we need race-based AA.
Why wouldn’t it be both? It originates in the oppression by the dominant subculture, who impose the structure. With limited opportunities and artificial ceilings, the oppressed subcultures react.
It seems clear that to solve the problem, both prongs need considerable change, but the only one government has a direct say in is structure. Thus AA.
Why would it? Who doesn’t want to make more money or get out of poverty? The cultural thing is basically a story the majority tells itself so it doesn’t have to feel guilty about the whole thing.
Because culture isn’t based on disinterested rational analysis of the situation. Because if the deck is stacked against you and everyone you know, you learn to put your energy into different directions, ones that will work. Because if some people escape poverty, there can be pushback from the community that resents their success, and people can be seen as betraying their community. Because success in mainstream culture often means performing white identity (in terms of speech, behavior, etc.) which can seen as a rejection of those who do not make that choice, or don’t have the ability to make it.
Individuals can make decisions against the grain of their culture, but it’s not as easy as you make it sound.
I’m sorry, I thought I did. Culture evolves within a context, one that in this case includes limited opportunities for people who are not white men. The culture is going to be shaped by that; why wouldn’t it be?
I think most poor people would like to be not poor. Their cultural upbringing, however, may not be enough for their will to allow this to happen. An individual’s talent and strength of will is one factor, but other factors are external pressures from friends and families and unspoken expectations.