Because he/she was a product of something that should be discouraged, is it?
Growing up poor is a disadvantage to be sure, but “permanently handicapped”?
To extrapolate a bit, if the adults in the family make the choice to conceive this child. If the adults in the family (2 or less) cannot afford to raise a child in the society that they are born in, then the adults need to make a choice to not conceive the child, or the state who will ultimately not let a child go uncared for, should take and place that child in a better place.
What is remotely rational about permanent financial punishment for parents who take additional time off to make sure their kids get a good start in life? More parent-child bonding has been linked to reduced child mortality and improved cognitive outcomes for the child, among other benefits; are those important to society, or no?
Maybe I’ve lost track of something, but I don’t see how it’s rational to expect someone who has left the workforce for 5 or 10 or 15 or 20 years to be earning the same as people who have an additional 5-20 years of experience* unless you are going to say experience should never count for anything - not for raises, not for promotions, not for anything. I mean, there are actually jobs where that’s true to an extent - where you reach the top of the payscale in X years and whether you have X years or 3X years your pay is the same, but even then, it’s only after you have X years in the same job at the same employer , not a total of X years at three different employers with five year breaks in between.
*yes, I know people who have left the workforce for 20 years to raise children. I even know people who have done it who didn’t have any children.
Study after study has shown that women who take an extended maternity leave (say, a year or more) have much more difficulty getting considered for promotions, even promotions they were in line for before the leave. It’s called “being mommy-tracked”: you are no longer taken seriously because you are no longer seen as being devoted to your career. It’s not just that you aren’t on par with people who started at the same time but worked continuously; you aren’t on par with the people who have the SAME amount of working time as you. The person who has ten years of experience but with a break in the middle doesn’t earn the same pay or have the same career possibilities as the person with eight years but no break. That’s the financial penalty.
Let’s see some of these “studies”
Here’s one: The Fatherhood Bonus and The Motherhood Penalty: Parenthood and the Gender Gap in Pay. Among the conclusions:
The import of this research shows that having children reduces women’s earnings, even among workers with comparable qualifications, experience, work hours, and jobs.
Here’s another study on the hiring process: Getting a Job: Is There a Motherhood Penalty?. As part of this study, the researchers did a real-life experiment by sending in pairs of resumes in response to help-wanted ads: one person mentioned s/he was an officer in an elementary school PTA, while the other claimed to be an officer in a college alumni association. The resumes otherwise claimed equivalent education, experience, and salary history. Childless women received twice as many callbacks as equally qualified mothers (but employers expressed more interest in fathers than in childless men, although not to the same degree).
After reading both of those cites: I have some questions.
Is it the norm for Sociologists to be conducting the researchers for the gender pay gap ? I mean it is certainly plausible that it is entirely correct but neither one of the cites address the “extended maternity leave” claim you had made.
They both address that women (with children) are paid less than childless women on a 3.6% average. I can probably come up with a half a dozen factors that would account for that amount and then some.
Both papers were pretty interesting though in that they found that men’s salaries go up when they have kids (Which is a weird finding IMO)
Are there studies that show women on a career path, that take maternity leave, and then come back are paid less, or are then passed over for promotion after taking said leave? To me, that was the claim. These papers don’t say anything along those lines.
But neither of those is talking about people being penalized for a break in employment- both of those quotes are comparing mothers to other people with “equivalent education, experience and salary history” or “comparable qualifications, experience, work hours, and jobs”. Neither one mentions comparing someone with ten years of experience with a year(s) long break to someone with ten years experience without a break and they certainly don’t mention comparing mothers who took extended maternity leaves with those who didn’t. The reason I point that out is because it is entirely possible that mothers are penalized simply for being mothers* , even if they only take a six-week maternity leave. Which is wrong, but it’s a bigger and different problem than being penalized for taking an extended maternity leave.
- or for doing things associated with being the mother rather than the father - I’ve seen women take off for sick kids far more often than I have seen men do so.
Slask2k
Hello? Hello?
I’ve been thinking about what bothers me so much about that chart, and I think I’ve pared it down.
The original argument for slavery (and the universal racist argument) was like this: Races have different characteristics, and the white race has the best ones. Whites are smarter, harder working, more logical, respect authority, value education, etc. Other races don’t, and that’s why white people are their natural rulers. Hell, it’s for their own good. That’s what colonialism was: the attempt to bring ‘enlightenment’ to the inferior races, or at least to install rulers that would rule these countries along superior, ‘white’ characteristics.
The pushback against this came from liberals, libertarians and others who believed in the enlightenment principles of individual rights. They denied that there were immutable differences between races when it comes to things like work ethic, intelligence, etc. To the extent that there WERE measured differences, it was attributed to racist institutions like slavery, poor nutrition, lack of education, etc. So the great liberal plan to end racism was to fix all the problems that kept other races from succeeding in ‘white’ society. Liberals don’t believe that the characteristics on the chart are ‘white’ characteristics, they believe they are enlightenment characteristics, available to everyone and learned through thousands of years of experiment and philosophy. They’re the rules that create a civil society and allow people to work together.
For an example of the kind of systemic racism liberals fought against, a liberal would say that white people would never tolerate the terrible schools that exist in many black neighborhoods or on Native reservations. They wanted more funding to improve those schools. They saw that minority neighborhoods were wracked with violence which keeps kids from being educated or even living to adulthood, so they created the COPS program, midnight basketball, etc. Pro-active policies to fix the things that kept minorities from achieving everything white people were achieving, safe in the knowledge that if the societal and systemic problems that prevent them from rising up were fixed, they could achieve the same levels of success as everyone else, because they were intrinsically no different than anyone else.
But the new, ‘woke’ ant-racism has more in common with the racists in that it seems to believe there ARE fundamental differences between races, or at least the cultures the various races live in. So where an old KKK guy might say “Blacks are lazy”, the new critical theorists say, "Sure, blacks don’t value hard work or punctuality as much as whites, but that’s only a problem because whites get to choose what values ‘work’ in society. A society based on ‘black’ values is equally good and can provide just as much happiness to all, but it’s being suppressed by systemic racism (that being defined as any system that rewards ‘whiteness’). But so long as society is organized around ‘white’ rules’, minorities will never succeed.
This is a dead-end philosophy. It is a recipe not for racial harmony, but for endless race struggle. This is explicit in critical theory - that we are all racists because we value our tribe’s values, and therefore there can never be racial ‘justice’ without endless racial struggle. This is Marxism with the class struggle replaced by a race struggle.
The liberal prescription for racism makes sense. We ARE to blame for the plight of many black people, but mainly because of failed policies that crowded them into inner cities run by corrupt single party governments, We incentivized natives to stay on reservations where there were no opportunities. We created islands of despair and high drug use, then responded to that with a drug war that imprisoned black men and created the welfare and single motherhood problems.
The liberal approach to racism can have concrete goals. It can have specific programs like Head Start that aim to solve specific problems.
The ‘Woke’ approach is vague and undefined. The ‘System’ has to be completely destroyed and rebuilt somehow. ‘Justice’ means tearing down the past and somehow rebuilding the present. It means reparations, and nationalization and confiscation and lots of other things that will be fought against strongly. It apparently needs a society that doesn’t reward ‘white’ attitudes like respect for authority and hard work, but it never specifies what that would lok like. It helped bring Trump, and if it goes farther it will bring someone worse in four years.
And most of all, it’s racist. It’s just a form of racism that says whoever is ‘inferior’ is currently socially constructed by the ‘winner’, and seeks to replace one racist system with another racist systemt that simply favors different groups, because races are intrinsically different in many ways and there can be no ‘justice’ without constant struggle for your side’s characteristics to win.
This is an evil philosophy that can lead to nothing but constant fighting and decline. Time we called it out and got back to productive ideas that can actually help individuals succeed no matter what their background, race, or sexual orientation. We need to get to a color-blind society where everyone is simply treated as a unique invividual, while correcting the systemic problems that keep that from happening.
Critical theorists don’t want that, or even think it’s possible. Color-blindness to them is just a way for the current winners to maintain the status quo, so we must always consider the races of the people we interact with. You can’t fix racism by giving everyone a good education, because the very need for a ‘good education’ is a trait of whiteness to be discarded. All that matters is the struggle, because that’s the only way for one race to ‘win’ over another.
Oh, and maybe the worst thing this new ‘woke’ anti-racism has done by explicitly acknowleding ‘racial identity’ and pitting one race against another is that it has inevitably created a resurgence of white identity politics. As I just read on facebook this morning, “I never used to care about race, until you started blaming my ‘race’ for your problems and demanding ‘justice’. Now I have to defend the white race.”
This movement of people into racial identity groups is a very dangerous trend, and the people likely to be hurt most by it are minorities.
Note that the Smithsonian poster is not claiming that any of these ideas are true. It’s explicitly emphasizing the fact that these claims have been normalized as the cultural perception of whiteness—and by extension, as the “good” or “right” way to be in general—in the historically and persistently racist context of American culture.
You seem to be collecting a bunch of random baggage that you associate with stereotypes of “wokeness”, “critical theory”, “anti-racism” and so forth, and dumping it on this poster in particular, which AFAICT is still completely unjustified. If you want to complain about “wokeness”, just go ahead and do that without insisting on a wholesale misinterpretation of a specific exhibit.
Well, we’re not going to get there by shutting our eyes to the underlying structure and nature of those systemic problems. Willful blindness about racial issues is not the same thing as genuinely post-racist color-blindness.
If large numbers of white people melt down into victimization tantrums just from encountering the observation that American culture has traditionally normalized white ethnicity and culture as uniquely good and desirable, largely by insisting on associations between specific favored traits and white ethnicity, then they are definitely not ready for a color-blind society.
'Scuse me, did you just quote a white person as unironically complaining and feeling aggrieved because non-white people are blaming white people for the existence and effects of white racism?
For goodness’ sake, who does s/he think ought to be blamed for it instead? Extraterrestrial aliens? Ergot in the barley? Time-traveling Voldemort?
Yes, white racism has been (and still is) the cause of a great deal of injustice against non-white people. Yes, the perpetration of that injustice has been conceived, supported and carried out by the enthusiastic participation of white people. Any white person who is too fragile to accept those basic facts without retreating behind a barricade of defensive racial tribalism is nowhere near mature enough to be participating constructively in the national conversation about race.
Does that mean that white people are uniquely innately horrible, and that other racial groups couldn’t have behaved in similar ways if the roll of the historical dice had instead given them the geopolitical strategic advantages in the early modern world that majority-white European nations ended up with? No.
Does that mean that there haven’t been a lot of anti-racist white people who deserve credit for their opposition to racist oppression and injustice? No.
Does that mean that white racism is perpetuated only in the form of deliberately evil acts of willed injustice, rather than largely being transmitted through unthinking cultural indoctrination of white people who don’t consciously choose or want to be racist? No.
Does that mean that overall, white racism is still fundamentally the fault of white people? Yup. Sorry if that fact offends you.
The poster did not simply say that the things it lists “have been normalized as the cultural perception of whiteness”. Those are your words; they are not the words of whoever wrote that poster. The poster explicitly says that the things it lists are the “traditions, attitudes and ways of life” of white people, and explicitly says that if non-whites have adopted those things, it’s because they have “internalized” those aspects of “whiteness”. The poster straight up says that if non-white Americans believe in things like “Hard work is the key to success” or “Plan for future…Delayed gratification” or “Objective, rational linear thinking…Cause and effect relationships” then that just means that those non-white Americans have “internalized some aspects of white culture”.
According to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, we white people are the ones who taught those poor backwards people of color the value of “hard work”, “delayed gratification”, and “cause and effect relationships”! (Along with the Christianity and the bland food.)
That poster is a hot mess; the Smithsonian has–wisely–taken it down (though whether the people behind the exhibit really learned anything from all this I couldn’t say). I have no idea why anyone is still trying to defend the damned thing.
Please don’t use your direct verbatim quote of my words to imply that I was attempting to pass them off as a direct verbatim quote of the poster’s words.
Directly and verbatim, the poster says that “White dominant culture, or whiteness, refers to the ways white people and their traditions, attitudes and ways of life have been normalized over time and are now considered standard practice in the United States”, which I think is much more accurately represented by my interpretation than by yours.
There are other ways to view cause and effect and logic than what we typical do in western thought.
The Buddha for example used 4 (sometimes 5) state logic where by any statement is either
- True 2. False 3. Highly likely to be true one day (example the prime minister of Canada in 40 years from now will have a French last name) 4. Paradox 5. Misformed (example how high is up?)
We generally don’t do it that way. We prefer binary logic and if we were to assign a value to a sentence we would build a binary decision tree. Here is an example of dual-logic meeting fuzzy logic.
Cause and effect as well. We tend to think of it as linear cause —> effect. And when we stumble upon something like a vicious cycle we think it’s amazing. To the Buddheist they are aware of Contingent Orgination. Which visually looks like a state machine. Causes create effects for further causes. It is not an unbroken line it is web.
I don’t want to get into a whole thing here its not like there are alien cultures that truly don’t grasp concepts “if you drop rock, rock falls, and crushs foot” but at the same time these underlining assumptions do have practical aspects. Do not think I am saying any anti-science nonsense like there is not objective reality. I am saying there are philosophical ways to model our world and they do vary from culture to culture. You agree that there are different languages but at the same time there is a universal grammar. Same with logic and cause/effect.
The poster doesn’t say that certain things are perceived as being “whiteness”. The poster says that certain things are “whiteness”. That’s a crucial distinction.
Sure, and also different languages can be stereotypically identified with particular characteristics irrespective of their factual applicability. To take your simile more literally, French is sometimes called “the language of love”, even though there isn’t more love poetry, say, in French than in English. A stereotyped cultural image isn’t the same thing as an essential innate reality.
And by the way, ids, welcome to the Straight Dope!
I don’t think it’s meant literally to imply that these attributed characteristics are merely neutral objective facts about white people, because I think that would be an incredibly naive interpretation.
I highly, highly doubt that the staff of the Museum of African American History and Culture who made that graphic as part of their “Talking About Race” exhibit really believe that white people actually have more of an innate essential tendency toward, say, hard work or rational thinking than other people do.
My guess is that they simply didn’t predict how clueless many white people are about embedded “aspects and assumptions” of racial culture. As Michael Welp put it in his TEDx Talk, white people don’t see “whiteness” as a cultural entity any more than a fish sees water as “water”. It’s just the natural way the world is.
We assume that we don’t have a racial “self-image”, we just perceive things the way they are. If we value, say, punctuality very highly, that’s simply because punctuality is a good thing, completely abstracted from any cultural specificity. Punctuality has no particular relation to our culture except insofar as we’re able to perceive that punctuality is a good thing, which it is. And so on and so forth. Non-white people, of course, have always been more able to see the cultural “water” that white people are living in. We all perceive the world through a cultural lens of stereotyped “aspects and assumptions”, but being white in America means you don’t have to be aware of the existence of your own lens.
But punctuality, like a great many entries on that chart, are highly valued in a great many non-white countries. The Chinese and the Japanese value it very highly. In fact, they value it much more highly than white Americans do. The Japanese, in particular, are obsessed with punctuality. So how does it make sense to say punctuality is a “white” virtue when, globally, more non-whites than whites value it.
A color-blind society? That’s such a convenient fall back. Take half a millennium to design a social structure based on giving unearned advantages to people who can claim white status, and then scrub the system of overt racism, but leave in place all the racist structures, so that the favored race can continue benefiting passively and with deniability. Call it color-blind and sit back and just be blind.
Right. Right. Exactly. Nobody is denying any of that.
Nobody in any context whatsoever is claiming that punctuality is culturally perceived as only a “white” virtue, much less that only, or even mostly, white people actually practice or value punctuality in real life.
The claim is simply that within American culture, punctuality is normalized as one of the self-evidently “good” and “important” things, and that that normalization of certain favored characteristics is related to their place in the cultural self-image—the “aspects and assumptions”—of whiteness in particular.
Nothing about that is asserting that any of these favored characteristics can’t also be present in the cultural self-image, or “aspects and assumptions”, of people in other societies.
BTW, I admired the way in which the NMAAHC curators on the “Whiteness” page of their “Talking About Race” online exhibit referred to the fuss over that “Aspects and Assumptions of Whiteness” chart:
They are tactfully refraining from blaming or criticizing the fussers in any way, but you notice that they’re also not saying that the chart was wrong or inaccurate in any way. And they have left up on the same page the TEDx Talk video of Michael Welp, who is explicitly discussing characteristics and practices of “white male culture”—again, without claiming in any way that only white males are entitled to identify with these characteristics or capable of these practices.
It’s very clear that the overall message is about cultural self-image and the normalization of aspects of that self-image of the dominant group within the wider society. Not about naive or racist claims that specific abilities or values are intrinsically the property of people who are racially white.
I think the fundamental error the exhibit curators made with that chart was just failing to realize how much longer it’s taking than we thought.
I still don’t understand how they attribute these things to “whiteness”. Isn’t the most logical process that over time with tried and true methods (that had success) were utilized by the dominant culture so they have been adopted into society.
It almost seems like the poster is attempting to justify an, IMO, lazy way to forgive other races for not adopting the things that have been proven to correlate with success.
Most of those things are tried and true to correlate with success, that they happen to have been adopted into the society (that was at the time white) is just background noise.
As i have stated before, you might as well have the chart labeled “How to give you the best shot at being successful in America”