The GOP line. But spell that out for me. Tell me precisely how the culture of victimhood operates on the level of an individual and his outcomes. He chooses to get racially profiled and put in prison for marijuana possession because he knows he is a victim? She gives away the massive inheritance from her parents’ suburban house because it is her station in life? He chooses to drop out of high school because it is the fate of his people? I am genuinely interested in hearing how you think “people like me” cause all of these racially disparate outcomes.
I’m especially curious to hear how “people like me” have convinced all those black kindergartners that they are part of a culture of victimhood causing them to be disparately disciplined by their teachers.
(1) You (plural) have brainwashed blacks for literally several generations that they cannot get anywhere because the white society is against them. Note: not that they have to work HARDER because the white society is against them. But that they cannot succeed because of the white society.
(2) You also have brainwashed them that they are now entitled to extra benefits, again, because of the “white supremacy”, and that they deserve those because of their skin color. Not because they are capable of something, or that they worked hard for it. Because of their skin color.
(3) You also have been pumping into blacks this misguided for a lack of better term “black pride” thing that makes them eschew aspects of the “white society” that are in fact beneficial to all - because they are “white”. Such as education. Don’t try to pretend that is not true.
Then, when on one hand there is resignation because of (1) and the expectations from (2) meet reality, and mixed in is (3) that’s a deadly combination that produces the results you see.
Wow. So, they *used *to be victims, way back a long time ago. But then something happened and they stopped being victims but were “instilled” with a “culture of victimhood” by liberals. But if they stopped buying that liberal bullshit and saw things as they really were, they would realize how totally not victims they are!
So they used to be oppressed by people who didn’t want to change shit (conservatives) but now they are victimized into believing that shit needs to be changed by the people who want to change it.
I guess I’ll wait until the debate is over, then. But I’ll be shocked if the Roberts court rules that deliberately segregating school children by race is OK for any reason similar to the examples in the OP.
Ture, but that is altogether different than a deliberate policy of treating students of different races differently.
Yes and no. Just because we can accomplish some societal good doesn’t make the means to accomplish that thing constitutional. I imagine that requiring all schools to set up hiring quotas by race to ensure faculty reflected the racial makeup of the student body would improve the treatment of racial minorities, but it would not be constitutional to do so.
I suspect the courts would allow schools to deliberately bring in speakers of varying ethnic/racial backgrounds to speak to all the students, but I’m just not seeing the courts saying public schools can segregate by race in order take part in some educational exercise; even if there was some evidence that it did some good.
I suspect the courts would allow students to organize extra-curricular study groups that focus on racial issues as long as the groups were open to all students, regardless of race.
I would look for more inclusive ways to address the problem, per above, rather than take an active role in deliberately segregating students by race as I firmly believe doing so would violate the constitution. A lot of us lived thru the bussing experiments of the 1970s and don’t want to go thru that again.
I am opposed to significant social inequalities predicated on race, and am partial toward strategies that reduce such inequalities. Racist bullshit like your most recent post about brainwashed blacks are exactly the sort of approach that increases such inequalities.
It’s interesting that you insert the word “deliberate” rather than the similar word “foreseeable” in front of “racial segregation.” Plenty of conservative strategies–vouchers, charter schools, penalizing schools with low test scores, reducing public education funding–have a de facto result of increasing racial segregation in schools, and have effects orders of magnitude greater than the effects of questionable field trip plans. But because you can claim that these massive resegregation dynamics are not deliberate, you can condone them. How conveeeeeeenient.
Calling temporary race-based educational activities “segregation” strikes me as mildly well-poisoning. Obviously, segregating classes based on race would be unconstitutional under modern precedents. Pulling some kids out based on race for a project is a whole different matter. IIRC, race-based school admissions with benevolent purposes were struck down 5-4 in 2007 (and not 9-0). Indeed, Kennedy wrote separately to say that he thought such programs could be constitutional, but needed to be more narrowly tailored. I suspect the rather more radically limited “segregation” at issue here would tip the balance the other way.
What makes you think its not deliberate? And what do you mean by deliberate? And why does it matter?
Lesser means have been used. When I was hired to work in a Title I school, I and a bunch of other beginning teachers went through orientation together. At some point, I and the other non-white-female teachers got called to a separate room, where we each received a $500 signing bonus, part of the attempt to diversify the staff. These bonuses are, to the best of my knowledge, vetted by district lawyers and thoroughly constitutional.
I’m not so concerned with what it’s called. I’m concerned with what it is. That is, having a deliberate policy that separates children by race for any academic activity. Call it whatever you like.
If you remember the case, I’d be interested in reading it. I did not, btw, expect a 9-0 ruling.
I said there was not a deliberate policy to treat students differently. Some teachers might, in fact, do so deliberately, but they would be acting against school policy. I suspect we will never reach a time when there is complete racial equality in our public schools, but we have reached a time where we do not allow policies whose goals are to treat students differently. That’s the difference. We can’t always eliminate every last residual bit of unconscious racism, but we can eliminate all deliberate, institutional racism.
Wiki page here. Reading that page reminded me that the Court’s plurality found that since Seattle had not been subject to de jure school segregation, it could not claim that its race-conscious integration policy was remedying some past harm. I think that’s incorrect analysis that totally misunderstands American history and the nature of racism, but in any event that analysis would not necessarily apply everywhere or to every program designed to remedy some specific historical wrong or problem. If a program puts black proctors in tests because it is proven to reduce the effects of stereotype threat (and the school documented its existence in that school), for example, would that pass muster in the Roberts Court? Unclear to me.
I don’t agree that we have reached a time where we do not allow policies whose goals are to treat students differently. We have reached a time when we do not allow policies which in their written text classify students based on race in order to treat them negatively. But we still have policies with racially disparate effects which are favored because of those effects, from the way some states do charter schools to school discipline policies that result in sending many of the black pupils to special classes or separate schools entirely.
And I also reject this constitutionalization of racism analysis. This whole intent/effects dichotemy is a creature of law, not sociology. Outside of a courtroom in the real world, the way racism operates is not so cleanly categorized, and the lines between deliberate policy and “unconscious racism” not so clear. Intent was used as a means of line-drawing, to avoid making illegal every policy with a racially disparate effect. But we’re not making constitutional law here. We’re doing messy policy. So we can do more fine-grained line-drawing, and decide case-by-case whether a policy is racist or not regardless of whether the text of the law or policy talks about race or there’s proof of some administrator using racial slurs. This is also true of our evaluation of whether a given well-intentioned policy that uses race is doing so in an overall damaging way–acknowledging, of course, that any race-conscious activity by the government probably has some inherent negative effect, but weighing that against the benefits of the particular activity.
Has any race-conscious effort ever been thoroughly assessed and proven to be effective in helping blacks? We’ve been implementing things like affirmative action for over forty years. If we’ve yet to find a successful way of boosting black achievement by treating blacks in a special way, perhaps it’s because such programs as a group don’t work.
Snark instead of anything substantial - that’s what I expected in response, so no surprise. That’s the usual liberal MO - ask, indignantly, for a response to a query, hoping for a “getcha”. Then, when such response is provided, and no “getcha”, just snark off.
Perhaps if you name one of these innumerable policies tried over forty years, I could tell you whether it has been evaluated, and if so, whether it has been a success at its aims. But I rather suspect you aren’t talking about particular policies or outcomes, and instead just noting the existence of some preferential hiring and admissions policies alongside continued deep racial disparities. If that’s so, then I invite you to learn a little more about what has happened in the last forty years.
We did start to have semi-serious affirmative action policies in the 1960s. The Supreme Court struck down the use of race as a determinative factor in affirmative action in 1978, not more than a decade after America had completed its latest roundof plunder, and while we were busy building the next.
Around 1980 (while crime was declining, mind you, and before the crack epidemic), we decided it would be a good idea to embark on a “war” that would ultimately round up roughly a third of all black men and put them in jail, while also radically increasing the direct and collateral consequences of criminal conviction. We successfully increased our imprisonment rate by 500%, mostly for nonviolent drug offenses, with little or no appreciable affect on drug use. Today there are more African Americans under correctional control than were enslaved in 1850, and they’re doing brisk business. The consequences of that drug war, Reagan’s “law and order” continuation of the Southern Strategy, have been predictably devastating. In fact, you hear them all the time from conservatives who ask, “where are all the black fathers?” The answer being that you locked them up, mostly for doing and dealing the same drugs your white kids do and deal without serious risk of arrest. They would vote to change things, but you won’t let them vote.
I don’t know whether a few more federal contractor or corporate jobs or Harvard grads has done much to offset that. Or to change the huge wealth gap across the races created by slavery followed by Jim Crow followed by intentional ghettos. I doubt it. My guess would be that it has increased black middle class incomes and educational attainment at the margins, which is pretty much what you’d expect for radically pared-back affirmative action policies implemented in higher education and a small segment of employment.
In case I haven’t been clear, I’m not supporting this policy. I’m saying the fact of it treating black students differently is not, on its face, sufficient reason to reject a school policy. There can be good reasons for doing so that outweigh any intrinsic harm by such classification or differential treatment.
You respond to snark; you don’t respond to anything substantial.
And you’ve also handwaved away the valid point therein: that you’ve written a lengthy message described how black people are all just victims of liberal brainwashing in an attempt to demonstrate that black shouldn’t think of themselves as victims, all the while ignoring all the practices blacks in America were - and in many respects still are - actually victim to.
Were I tempted to stoop to your mode of argument I might describe this form of blinkered doublethink as “the usual conservative MO” but I’m quite happy to ascribe the blatant weaknesses in your argument to you alone.