You should maybe look at the last hundred years of disenfranchisement of African American voters before you say that.
Looking at the US social safety net from Europe, it, um, doesn’t seem particularly generous.
In any case, creating stable, decently paid jobs that don’t require excessive educational qualifications would probably do a lot more good, but nobody knows how to do that.
I have heard that black and other minority communities suffer from both over-policing and under-policing. Addressing the former without considering the latter may turn out to be a very bad idea.
You know what they say about continuing to do the same thing while expecting a different result. Reconsidering the War on Drugs might be a good place to start. When there’s more money and opportunity in the illegal economy than the legal one, you can’t expect good results.
And just who decided that cornrows are not a professional hairstyle?
That’s getting kind of off topic, though.
It’s probably a red herring to worry about whether a law should be called racist or not. When laws are passed there must be some effort to look at pros and cons, and the law would (hopefully) only be passed if the former outweigh the latter. The question of whether the law has a disparate impact on minorities should be included in this analysis, including whether small changes could ameliorate that impact.
It’s really not. “Professional” hairstyle limits were decided by white people based on what white people considered professional. It’s just another way that white=default or white=normal may affect minorities in unexpected ways.
That wasn’t a reply to crowmanyclouds; I agree about the hairstyles. I was referring to my last post.
(Yet more evidence for including the reply arrow when it is a reply to the previous post.)
Ah, got it.
So you don’t see an issue with a company, or society as a whole, designating traditional black hairstyles as unprofessional, while designating traditional white hairstyles as professional? And you don’t see an issue with allowing employees to be fired or disciplined for having black hair?
This is not a hypothetical, by the way, nor ancient history. These policies exist widely across today’s employment landscape, and black people are still fired fairly often for simply having hair that doesn’t look like a white person’s. In 2021, not 1921.
What if the alternative were the case? If crew cuts, hair gel, bobs and ponytails were considered unprofessional, and bosses would fire any white employee who couldn’t grow an Afro or dreadlocks? Would you see an issue in that situation?
John Oliver did take a look about that, and he admits that there was a lot of what he didn’t experience. And that there is a lot of ignorance coming from white people about black hair and styles.
Can you imagine someone getting fired from a call center just because of his black hairstyle? As John Oliver put it, it is really ridiculous as customers would not see the operators, it was just the judgement of the managers of the call center.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit on behalf of Chastity Jones who had a job offer withdrawn after she refused to remove her dreads. The EEOC claimed that this was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, skin color, national origin, and religion. However, the courts disagreed with the EEOC’s opinion. While dreads might be associated with race, they are not an immutable physical characteristic and banning them did not constitute discrimination.
Far be it from me to question the court’s decision. However, if my employer wanted to ban dreads, cornrows, or twists I’d ask what they were trying to accomplish. What problem are they trying to solve? Have they considered what message this would send to our black employees? What about public perception? Will this hurt recruitment efforts or our diversity initiative?
Even if that hairstyle can’t be accomplished with some people’s hair without doing damage to the hair, and possibly systemic damage?
I forgot to add a very related quote on why the hair issue is one item that in combination with the way many other laws are interpreted that create many chances for blacks and other minorities to trip and fall behind.
John Oliver: And I wish I could say that that is a thing of the past, but you know it isn’t.
Chastity Jones, the woman you saw earlier, spent years appealing her case, only to lose, in part, because judges interpreted civil rights law to protect against discrimination based only on immutable or unchangeable characteristics associated with race, like skin color.
So for decades, courts have found that hairstyles, even though they are deeply tied to racial identity, are not covered.
And all of that means that a younger generation can still end up having to deal with this shit.
If the employer had demanded she straighten her hair, would that have been a violation of the Civil Rights act since it’s an immutable characteristic?
Siri, show me white privilege.
That’s an interesting question and if I had to hazard a guess as to what the court might say I’d go with yes. It’s one thing to ban one or a handful of hairstyles but I suspect the court wouldn’t be too keen on an employer dictating that an employee must straighten their hair. Legal or not, I sure as hell wouldn’t want to be the one to demand a black woman straighten her hair if she wanted to keep or get a job.
Yes, I think a good analogy here would be environmental regulations. When you are starting a large construction project it is generally required that you do an environmental impact assessment in order to determine to what negative effect your activity will have on the environment. Now the regulators know that for the most part you probably aren’t building a dam specifically to kill off salmon, you probably like salmon just fine, but if the effect that building you dam has on them is something that is important to take into consideration. Now if a law resulted in a particularly negative impact on the enviroment, say repealing the clean water act, you might call that law anti-environmental. But again the supporters of the law aren’t specifically opposed to clean water they just want to produce a lot of chemicals and not have to pay a lot to clean up after themselves. In the same way a particularly bad law might be called racist, even if the goal of the law isn’t in and of itself racist.
Now just about everything you do is going to have some impact on the environment, digging up a flower bed will hurt some bugs so one could say that just about every law is anti-environmental, but it really comes down to a cost bennifit analysis, and whether the potential environmental impact is worth the value of the construction.
All that CRT is basically the same thing that the environmental movement started doing in the mid 20th century, trying to develop the methods and tools to make racial impact assessments. The main difference is that unlike with racism, for the most part there aren’t people who actually desire environmental destruction as a goal (although maybe that is changing). And so it wasn’t met with quite such virulent opposition. But banning CRT would be the equivalent of banning study of the environment because the results they find might harm business.
The bans don’t make it illegal to examine laws for disparate impact, though. They are stuff like ‘don’t teach kids collective guilt or tell them some races are inherently oppressive’. The fear they appear to be addressing is ‘schools are trying to indoctrinate our kids into becoming Social Justice Warriors’, not ‘academics may declare some laws racist’.
With the understanding that what conservatives appear to fear is poppycock.
However, banning the teaching is not just an inconvenience, professors don’t do just research, they teach. It is not just ignorance what the right wing politicians are using, many should be smart enough to know that universities, colleges and some schools will not be as willing to hire professors and teachers involved in the issue because one key part of their job is cut off. They also do know that most of the ones involved on looking at injustices towards minorities in the US are also minority teachers and professors. As I have seen many examples in other subjects, for many conservatives the cruelty is the point.
As I pointed out, the conservative politicians have another thing coming at them. With all the stupid (and also bigoted IMHO) laws (old and new) that they passed, what they are doing is leading many (myself included) into checking what CRT is all about. Suffice to say is that many conservatives in the US are just demonstrating why CRT is needed.
I think that is a good analogy.
And I will also point out that the people who rail against CRT are largely the same cohort that rail against environmental laws.
For fans of John Oliver, he covers housing discrimination and its myriad deleterious effects in his usual sardonic and comedic way:
