by russell
TNC is Ta-Nehisi Coates, he writes for the Atlantic. He mostly writes about issues around race, which is a topic of interest to me. He is, consistently, a thoughtful and measured writer, and he does his homework.
What's not to like?
He has a long piece up now which I'm making my way through, and which I recommend. It has the guaranteed-to-start-arguments title The Case For Reparations.
"Reparations" in this case refers to reparations to American blacks, from the American public. There are probably a thousand plausible bases for a pro-reparations argument, Coates starts from the patterns of systematic housing discrimination that persisted well past Jim Crow days.
Coates was until fairly recently not an advocate of reparations; he explains some of the reasons for his change of mind here.
FWIW I am, personally, not an advocate of reparations, but not for the obvious practical or logistical reasons. My feeling is that, were reparations ever to be made, they would be followed by widespread resentment of blacks that would make current-day blabbing about "those people" seem like very small potatoes in comparison. The attitude would, I think, be we've paid you off, now leave us alone. You're on your own.
Just my opinion.
In any case, Coates is always, always worth reading. Enjoy.
h/t to our very own Donald J.
I’m always rather curious at extremely emphatic calls for reparations for the assorted depravities that the United States and its populace inflicted on its African-American population, which go on at great length about how acknowledging and addressing them is fundamental and necessary to address racial disparity and our national history… yet never call for even considering the question of reparations for the assorted depravities inflicted upon Native Americans. I’m aware that this is a certain awful sort of whataboutery on my part, but it really does strike me as odd to see claims that this one acknowledgement and recompense of past evil is of dire and fundemental importance, but the other is not even worthy of mention.
More on topic, I agree that reparations would be extremely divisive. Given the difficulty in establishing just levels, eligibility, etc. (i.e., the practical matters you allude to, which would be be no mean feat), there would inevitably be widespread disgruntlement, and this would be a ready dogwhistle to call back on pretty much forever. Given that, the theoretical cure might make things worse, not better. Depending on their scope and nature, it’s impossible to ignore the possibility that reparations could (but not perforce would) significantly change racial poverty rates, so it’s not reasonable to discount them strictly on the basis of nebulous concern that they’d generate resentment, not least because it’s placing a higher value on the resentment of the rest of the populace over the resentment that the portion currently enduring poverty entrenched by collective sins committed generations ago. But even so, I’m leery of the notion because of how heavily it simplifies notions of group identity (particularly over time) and collective responsibility. I’m not sure I couldn’t be persuaded – that something leaves a bad taste in my mouth is not just cause to oppose it if it would truly do good – but I can’t say I advocate reparations.
I’m not sure how reparations would work. I’ve read the beginning of the TNC article (and agree that, especially regarding the issue of race, his work is a must-read). Perhaps he suggests something later in the article (which I will continue to read). Obviously, people were hugely wronged. As Nombrilisme Vide noted, so were Native Americans. Perhaps, in a perfect world, reparations are due to both. Not sure how to figure that out though. And lesser (but important) reparations for those who were cheated because they immigrated at a time when discrimination against their X ethnic group was rampant, etc.
Looking forward, not backward, has some practical appeal, even if it seems cynical.
Will read more.
Thanks, russell.
I suspect TNC would agree that Native Americans also deserve reparations. Sometimes slavery is considered America’s greatest sin, but I’m sure most people would put the ethnic cleansing and theft (and genocide in the most extreme cases) committed against the Native Americans of equal weight. The numbers of people involved are smaller, I think.
“were reparations ever to be made, they would be followed by widespread resentment of blacks that would make current-day blabbing about “those people” seem like very small potatoes in comparison. The attitude would, I think, be we’ve paid you off, now leave us alone. You’re on your own.”
I thought of that too. Someone, maybe in the article or maybe somewhere else, said that, say, 1.5 trillion dollars could be paid over 10 years and it really wouldn’t be that much. Possibly so, but you know the reaction from a great many whites (and probably some non-whites) would be exactly what Russell predicts. Still, I’m not sure that’s enough reason not to do it. I’m sorta torn about it too.
Part of what TNC is up to is not just to argue for reparations, but to change how people think about the problems black people have in America. He has some pretty serious ambitions for his piece in that respect. Here’s a sample of what he has to say–
“The final piece of this was the uptick in cultural pathology critiques extending from the White House on down. There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people. There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what’s wrong with black people. But we don’t really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture. Our conversation omits a major portion of the evidence.”
He thinks even liberals get this wrong (including the WH, but also liberals like Jonathan Chait over The New Republic–he’s had an argument with him recently.)
The problem I have with reparations is this. I can see paying reparations to someone who was personally harmed by something. But not to someone who happened to have an ancestor who was harmed. Which is to say, it is too late to pay reparations for slavery. Unfortunate, perhaps, but there it is.
Of course, the follow-on effects of slavery are still with us, as TNC notes. But the way to deal with those is to deal with them as present problems, not on the basis of what happened a century or two ago. And that has the added advantage of allowing much easier determination of who has been harmed and needs action.
I say “needs action” because I think that, fairly or not, “reparations” is going to get major negative knee-jerk reactions. Even from people who would otherwise agree that something should be done to address the current problems.
“Reparations” says to people paying them (or taxed to pay them) that they, personally, did something which demands payment. But the vast majority of Americans not only never held slaves themselves, they don’t have any ancestors who did either. So they naturally feel it is unjust to force them to pay for something that they never did, nor benefitted from. And that even though they would frequently say that, Yes, something should be done to level the playing field for today’s children.
Labels matter. And in this case, I think TNC is damaging his goal by the label he has chosen to apply.
Sometimes slavery is considered America’s greatest sin, but I’m sure most people would put the ethnic cleansing and theft (and genocide in the most extreme cases) committed against the Native Americans of equal weight. The numbers of people involved are smaller, I think.
It wasn’t as systematic, and large-scale examples of it mostly ended significantly earlier than African slavery, but slavery (to include export trade) can of course be included in the evils inflicted on Native American populations by European Americans and proto-Americans. But you’re right, at this point the numbers are a lot smaller. Depending on how you slice the 2010 census data, you get ~42m for African American, and ~5m for Native American.
“So they naturally feel it is unjust to force them to pay for something that they never did, nor benefitted from.”
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that most whites haven’t benefited from white supremacy. Anyway, people are normally happy to benefit from the actions of people a century or more ago, so I think it’s fair to say that we might also owe reparations for what our country did a century or more ago. If there can be collective benefit that stems from being an American citizen then there can also be some collective obligations. If people don’t want to assume those obligations, then they can move to some other country. But he isn’t just talking about the distant past. Basically his view as I understand it is that America was a white racist country from the very start and it has acted this way right up until the present. It didn’t end with slavery and it didn’t even end with Jim Crow or sundown towns and much of the wealth of the country was built on the backs of unpaid slave labor. And much of the wealth since then was stolen from blacks–this is why he spends so much time talking about the real estate market in Chicago. Even the New Deal is tainted with white racism.
There are plenty of practical problems with reparations but for me he makes a pretty good case that America as a nation owes a massive sum of money to many millions of its black citizens.
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume that most whites haven’t benefited from white supremacy.
As I understood it, the (somewhat narrower) question concerned reparations for slavery. And those whose ancestors arrived since the Civil War? How did they benefit from slavery? Answer: mostly, they didn’t.
They may have, as you say, benefited from white supremacy. But that is a much harder sell, given that discrimination has afflicted not only blacks but other races. And, indeed, ethnic groups which today are grouped together as “white” — which would include, for example, the Irish, the Italians, the Poles, etc., etc.
If you start down the reparations road, consistency will require taking essentially every individual and calculating how much in aggregate they benefited and how much they (perhaps via their ancestors) were harmed. This way lies madness. Better by far to take the world as we have it today and deal with its problems.
There’s nothing wrong with acknowledging the wrongs done in the past. But reparations, being monetary, require calculations — detailed and at least somewhat precise calculations. There is no way to go there without leaving some people, and probably everybody, feeling that they have not been treated equitably. Not just whites, but everybody. Not good.
Theoretically, Native Americans received (or were supposed to receive) reparations, in that the Federal government was supposed to provide for tribes on the basis of treaty obligations. Of course, the impetus was, as one Kiwi said in regard to the natives of Aotearoa, to “smooth the pillow of the dying race”, which suggests that the obligation would terminate with the passing of the tribe or tribes.
There is also the payment made to Japanese-Americans who were interned, signed by Ronald Reagan. An article about the bill and the report written for commission, entitled “Personal Justice Denied”, is here
Looking forward, not backward, has some practical appeal
What does “looking forward, not backward” look like?
Leaving reparations to the side for a moment, is anything at all due to American blacks, given our history?
If so, what would that be?
It seems to me that the disparate experience of whites and blacks, specifically, in our history is like a wound that will not heal. Still, to this day.
What will it take, looking forward, to change that?
To me, personally, simply acknowledging that “bad things happened” doesn’t quite address the scope and scale of what the “bad things” actually were.
Nor does it address the continuing disparity between the experience of being white, and being black, in this country.
Looking forward, not backward, has some practical appeal
To those on top, certainly.
Wasn’t that the exactly Obama’s argument for not prosecuting torturers ?
It is as though the maintenance of the American myth outweighs any considerations of justice.
The practicalities themselves have never been explored.
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested…
Anyway, people are normally happy to benefit from the actions of people a century or more ago, so I think it’s fair to say that we might also owe reparations for what our country did a century or more ago. If there can be collective benefit that stems from being an American citizen then there can also be some collective obligations.
I agree that there has been collective economic benefit to white Americans from the fact that our country was built on slavery, and that no price has been paid, leaving African-Americans in a worse situation. I believe in generous government financed social programs for the poor, or even just having a reverse tax, where the poor would be given tax dollars rather than having taxes taken. I wouldn’t base this on “race”. I think we have to try to get over “race” as defining a political class.
Nor does it address the continuing disparity between the experience of being white, and being black, in this country.
The only thing that the law can do is find ways to address economic disparity as it exists today. It’s unfair and divisive to address the sins of the distant past, trying to determine whose ancestors owe whose money, and how that has played out since then. Affirmative action and other proactive efforts at integration were attempted, so it’s not as if this society has just acknowledged that “bad things happened.” Human history is full of examples of conquest, ill treatment of conquered people, slavery, etc. For good or evil, we have the world as it is now, including its comforts and its perils, and we’re here together.
People who have lots of money should pay taxes. People who need money should get financial assistance. We need to mitigate income inequality and individual opportunity. To the extent that certain classes of people have been disadvantaged (including African-Americans because of slavery, native Americans because of government abuses, women because of property inequalities and lack of franchise, immigrants because of discrimination and exploitation, etc.) addressing income inequality is the best we can do.
i think some kind of reparative process must happen. i am a 53 year old white man from texas. i realized a few years after i became literate (14, 15?) that the foundation of all of the wealth of the south was derived from the blood and lives of black people. were the value of all the lives and all the wealth those lives provided for the white south to be returned to the african-american people of this land it would be a desolation. but repair we must. our attempts so far have been well-intentioned but misunderstood and the incredible magnitude of the crime seemed too far distant for some to recognize that affirmative action was a remedy for the monstrous past or that the past still lives in the present circumstances in which people find themselves. some reparative process that allows for a true, full, unmistakable airing of the atrocities might allow us to progress beyond the halting baby steps we’ve taken so far. good luck to us all.
I think we have to try to get over “race” as defining a political class.
What if race *does* define a political class?
I.e., what if black people are treated differently than whites?
I suspect virtually every black person in this country would love it if race was an insignificant factor in how folks were treated.
Part of what TNC is up to is not just to argue for reparations, but to change how people think about the problems black people have in America.
I have the same impression.
I think reparations to a couple of million Vietnamese and Iraqis are a bit more pressing.
Thanks russell, was going to put something up on this but didn’t have the time yesterday.
AFAICT, here is what Coates is looking for:
the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them.
John Conyers’s HR 40 is the vehicle for that hearing. No one can know what would come out of such a debate. Perhaps no number can fully capture the multi-century plunder of black people in America. Perhaps the number is so large that it can’t be imagined, let alone calculated and dispensed. But I believe that wrestling publicly with these questions matters as much as—if not more than—the specific answers that might be produced. An America that asks what it owes its most vulnerable citizens is improved and humane. An America that looks away is ignoring not just the sins of the past but the sins of the present and the certain sins of the future. More important than any single check cut to any African American, the payment of reparations would represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.
Essentially, let’s study it and see what happens. People won’t because they are afraid. People won’t because “America, fnkc yeah!” People won’t because “I got mine.”
So we will carry on as he says elsewhere in the article:
The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
I think we have to try to get over “race” as defining a political class.
I’m sure TNC would agree with you.
Barring that utopia arriving without effort, how do you suggest we get there ?
As TNC approvingly quotes LBJ:
“Negro poverty is not white poverty.
Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.”
I think reparations to a couple of million Vietnamese and Iraqis are a bit more pressing.
Actually, in the case of Vietnam, secret memoranda from Nixon during the Paris Peace accords said that the US would give 3 billion dollars in reconstruction aid. While the language was carefully constructed to avoid the word reparations, they were, I think, clearly reparations in spirit. Unfrotunately, the MIA issue was raised as a reason to withhold this, followed by Vietnam’s invasion of Cambodia. Of course, in the interim 3 decades, Vietnam has increased its GDP and become one of the SEAsian tigers, so the trade embargo was lifted in 1995, so I don’t think the Vietnamese consider the question of reparations pressing.
My feeling is that, were reparations ever to be made, they would be followed by widespread resentment of blacks that would make current-day blabbing about “those people” seem like very small potatoes in comparison.
TNC posits an interesting counterfactual with the example of Germany/Israel. FWIW.
This is pretty much in line with my objection to reparations.
I would be open to a discussion of how the effects of past injustice can begin to be undone. But it would have to be in deed, not just empty gesture. And no, I don’t know what that would look like, but I am open to ideas.
The country could start by getting rid of the war on drugs.
Amen, Charles, Amen!
“Reparations” says to people paying them (or taxed to pay them) that they, personally, did something which demands payment.
It doesn’t say any such thing.
People might choose to infer that, but it is not necessarily implied.
The UK (arguably) benefitted greatly from its colonial history, and (arguably) continues to do so.
Did I participate in it ?
No.
Do I feel some sort of responsibility for it ?
Yes.
This happened before I was born:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/uk-compensate-kenya-mau-mau-torture
I don’t have a problem with my taxes being spent on it.
It’s not that I mind my tax dollars being spent, and I certainly don’t mind that my tax dollars are being spent on people who are in a bad place now. It’s easy to talk about reparations for people who aren’t in your country, or reparations for people who were harmed fairly recently.
However, so much time has passed, that many of us are African-American who don’t even know it. Basically, it’s a matter of skin color or ethic identification, or ability to trace ancestry to slavery. I can trace ancestry to a Cherokee person, who probably was also African-American. If my DNA checks out, how much do I get? And how many prosperous African-Americans (and I know they aren’t represented among the prosperous as they should be) would get their token sum?
Monetary reparations makes no sense at this time.
On the other hand, John Conyers’s hearings would be very welcome. However, no “settlement” would be enough, so then what?
“I think reparations to a couple of million Vietnamese and Iraqis are a bit more pressing.”
Why? I completely agree that we owe reparations to the Iraqis and the Vietnamese, but a black child living in poverty with rather poor life prospects seems like a pressing problem to me.
Also, why does this have to be some sort of freaking ideological competition?
The TNC article was a good read, thanks for posting it, russell.
Two comments have struck me so far in this thread.
LJ:
Vietnam has increased its GDP and become one of the SEAsian tigers, so the trade embargo was lifted in 1995, so I don’t think the Vietnamese consider the question of reparations pressing.
and charles:
The country could start by getting rid of the war on drugs.
Reparations have always troubled me.
Punishing children for the crimes of their parents, even if they benefit from it, troubles me.
On top of that, the how much and to who are complex problems (which someone, I think sapient, touched on upthread).
On top of that, there is the SCALE of the problem. Let’s assume you want to just bump the median payscale to white levels for a generation. That’s almost 25K a year per family (http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-median-income-in-the-us-by-race-2013-9 ). That’s a lot of money. Other calculations based on the price of slave labor are also high.
On top of that, there is the question of how much a cash transfer really matters to a problem that is this multifaceted (there are poverty problems, access to education, legacy admission disparity, generational issues).
On top of THAT, there is the resentment issue russell mentioned.
The end result, in my not educated at all opinion, could be a crippling cost resulting in minimal lasting effect tied to increased racial tensions.
In short, I think it would perpetuate the problem. Would be willing to convinced otherwise, I’m not an expert, etc etc.
So going back to the comment of LJ and charles:
The “need” for reparations go away, in my mind, if we equalize opportunity. Instead of focusing on the racial differences, we focus on making it so that anybody that works hard has access to education and middle class jobs.
Not that that’s an easy thing to do, and there is a lot of disagreement on how to do it best. But I think a start is recognizing some obvious inequalities in our current day system. Which is where charles’ comment comes into my thinking.
Our drug law, indeed most of our justice system, is rife with racism. I’m more concerned with the inequalities that exist today than reparations for crimes committed.
Not because the crimes weren’t terrible, but just because I think the inequality of today we can fix, while the crimes of the past are a permanent stain on our history.
Just my two cents, I’m not an expert on any of these issues.
Coates has an intimidatingly large number of links in his blogs on this question. Here’s one to a piece responding to the notion that reparations are only about slavery. This piece is about discrimination in real estate,which if I understand the argument is a major cause of the wealth difference between whites and blacks
link
Folks really need to read the article to engage with the concept TNC is laying out, and not what they imagine “reparations” to be. The first order of business is a national, public accounting of the scale of the plunder, an acknowledgement of what this country has done to get to today.
Given that a sigificant percentage of the population and political office-holders treat facts they don’t like as if they were falsehoods I’m not optimistic.
And if you’re a white American whose parents were able to get mortgages in nice neighborhoods, like me, then you’ve benefitted from white supremacy (likely in many other ways, too, but housing is Coates’ angle of attack). My parents were actively liberal – my dad went to the March on Washington, for example – but they had access to capital (social and financial) that was in part ill-gotten, and that has flowed on to me.
Start with a Great Reckoning, and see what comes of it.
But it would have to be in deed, not just empty gesture.
This captures a lot of my issue with reparations.
Were they to be paid, IMO they would likely be basically a gesture.
And, the gesture having been made, the need for a response in deed would be soon forgotten.
I’m also not sure how you put a price on what we’re talking about. Same for the Native Americans – what do we do, give them back North America?
I note Coates’ comments regarding Germany and Israel, but I also note the anger many in Israel felt at the idea that mere money could make up for what had happened.
As far as being asked to pay for things that aren’t your personal responsibility, I see the point, but I also see that lots of folks suffer for things that aren’t *their* personal responsibility.
Perhaps the question of who’s to blame is no longer really the point.
My personal thoughts about what “in deed” look like usually run along the lines of:
Discriminate against someone in a mortgage, you buy them the house.
Discriminate against someone in rental housing, you pay for their apartment.
Discriminate against someone in hiring, they get the job and you lose yours.
Ditto for college, criminal sentencing, police activity, etc. It’s kind of an eye for an eye thing, which may seem harsh, but it would make the point.
Ideally, we would all recognize the humanity in each other, and treat each other as we would like to be treated. No law against that, and no law needed to make it so.
Would that it were so.
Punishing children for the crimes of their parents
As an aside, I don’t think the point of reparations is to punish anybody.
If I understand correctly, reparations are intended to remediate harm done, not punish those who did the harm.
That Israel angle made me think of the Palestinians. Pass some of the money along to the Palestinians if the German money is dirty. But they may not want it either–they want their homeland back.
“Punishing children for the crimes of their parents, even if they benefit from it, troubles me.”
It’s not punishment–it’s reparations. Again, it’s strange to me that everyone takes for granted that we can benefit from the unjust acts of people in the past, but the idea that we might try to make up for some of those injustices by spreading the wealth to those who have been hurt by it, and we are talking about present day injury, not just what happened in 1850–well, it just seems odd.
Anyway, I want to echo Priest and urge people to read both Coates and some of his links. I have only read a little. Coates wants to change the way we think about this and whatever one thinks of reparations, I think he’s right about that. There are far too many whites who think that black poverty is due to black culture (or black genes) and that white racism no longer plays much of a role.
I never gave any thought to the effects of housing discrimination until I saw Coates refer to it from time to time at his blog.
And just this week the House GOP is pushing an ag bill that would support a summer school lunch program, but only for rural areas and not urban kids.
Makes it harder to address reparations when you’re still fighting active discrimination.
Nigel,
So what do you say to some Vietnamese boat person about why he should pay for the sins that occurred a century before he arrived? Or is he somehow benefiting from racism against blacks — and if so, how?
Any time we get past the philosophical position and into specifics, we have to deal witht he fact that the country is full of people who don’t fit the black/white bifurcation that reparations discussions start from. There are those who don’t belong to either race. There are those who just arrived in the country. And then there are the increasing number of mixed race children. Until you come up with specifics of who, exactly, is eligible and who is not, and for who would be expected to pay and who would not, the discussion can go nowhere.
Just as an intellectual exercise, what would you say of Mr Obama? He gets labeled as black. Yet his American parent (his mother) was white, and his father was not American and, because he was only here for college, not significantly impacted by American racism. So, does he get reparations, or does he help pay them?
If I understand correctly, reparations are intended to remediate harm done, not punish those who did the harm.
Still, what about people (oops – rural people) like this: http://history1900s.about.com/library/photos/blygd45.htm
Were they just b.s. people? Who is telling their stories? Were they just white supremecists gone lazy?
As a society, perhaps there is nothing worse than slavery, and the horrible stories that TNC recounts about so many people. But not sure that the “American story” is served by making it exclusively about slavery, and especially about race.
Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Fat chance. To even think that last part is pure unadulterated heresy. What part of ‘divine providence’, ‘manifest destiny’, ‘God’s new chosen’ and ‘American exceptionalism’ don’t you understand?
@Priest
And if you’re a white American whose parents were able to get mortgages in nice neighborhoods, like me, then you’ve benefitted from white supremacy
This sort of nonsense is what makes the subject hard to discuss. It is absolutely true that blacks suffered from their inability to get mortgages, including in “nice neighborhoods”. But that isn’t the same as saying that someone else benefited because they were able to. At best, the lack of potential black buyers reduced property costs/values by some miniscule fraction. But it hardly represents a benefit in any real amount.
“Reparations” says to people paying them (or taxed to pay them) that they, personally, did something which demands payment.
So, no reparations for the Japanese American internment then?
Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Reparations may beckon that. But the chances of it actually having that effect are nil. Most likely, it will have the (admittedly unintended) consequence of enhancing a sense of victimhood. But that effect? Never going to happen with real people.
TNC is exactly the problem. We rail against people who talk about”those” people m, unless TNC proclaims it is “those” people who are the victims. The mortgage fiasco was initiated by politicians trying to help black people, and unintended consequences. TNC blames it on racism???? Banks were REQUIRED to meet quotas for subprime lending. The black community wasn’t required to buy houses they couldn’t afford. In north Baltimore.
bah, humbug.
Were they to be paid, IMO they would likely be basically a gesture.
And, the gesture having been made, the need for a response in deed would be soon forgotten.
[…]
I note Coates’ comments regarding Germany and Israel, but I also note the anger many in Israel felt at the idea that mere money could make up for what had happened.
This draws to mind a (bad, poor-fitting) parallel: the scant reparations that have been made to Romani survivors of the Porajmos. It’s a bad comparison, not least because antiziganism remains a politically correct form of racism in many places, and it’s still essentially acceptable to reduce the Holocaust to the Shoah, but it goes well with the notion that reparations could easily be reduced to an ephemeral sop, accompanied by no social change and possibly resentment. Although to underscore how poor a parallel I’m drawing, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t resentment from this paltry-but-temporarily-significant gesture because it sounds like it occurred entirely outside the consciousness of the general public.
One thing that is perhaps more relevant coming out of that digression is that when the subject of reparations has been discussed with Romani organizations, one point that they emphasized was that any reparation funds should not be used strictly to provide compensation to survivors, but should be used to help improve the situation of the Roma in Europe today. Which I think is a useful notion to keep in mind. As discrimination is very much ongoing, just handing out cash to individuals will not change anything beyond the short term. Of course, the problem is that it’s so much easier to just hand out cash and declare things all done…
wj, it’s not nonsense. The FHA was created as a part of the New Deal, and the policies implemented made it easier for white people to get mortgages. I would characterize a government funded program designed to only help white people as more than hardly any benefit.
That’s why there has to be a public accounting. As long as there’s this level of public ignorance about what actually happenend and why, there will be little support or pressure for productive measures.
Priest, what is the “public accounting”? What are the Civil War Amendments to the Constitution but a public accounting? What is the Civil Rights Act but a “public accounting”? What was affirmative action but a “public accounting”? The public has accounted. It’s time to address poverty, and move beyond race. Being reminded of history is jarring, but how much money do I get, as a white looking octaroon?
The relations between Israel and Germany on both the political (i.e. between governments) and the personal (opinion ‘in the streets’) level are complicated (on both sides). And both sides try to get unfair advantages out of it. Germany is still in the business of denying actual Nazi victims compensation asking them instead to get it from Israel whereto, as it is claimed, all the necessary money was sent already. And Israeli governments try to morally blackmail German politicians on a regular base. Guys in the current government even sink so low as to accuse Germany of planning to complete Hitler’s work anytime there is even mild criticism of Israel’s behaviour towards the Palestinians. And just a few days ago Netanyahu threw a temper tantrum when he heard that the next delivery of German weaponry would have to be payed at market prices instead of being free of charge or at least half-price as in the past (as with the Israeli submarines*). In other words Germany uses its ‘reparations’ to and support of Israel as a moral shield** and to absolve itself at least in part of the bloody brown history, and Israel milks the moral obligations of Germany to gain often totally unrelated material advantages and stacks of get-out-of-jail-free cards. That in turn feeds anti-Israel sentiments in the German population that can often get turned into outright antisemitism by demagogues. Germany tries to gets its fingers clean from the past but risks to just get new dirt on them from the attempts in the present and Israel increasingly squanders its moral credit by playing the Holocaust card even where there is no reasonable connection to be made.
—
Plus there is also a rivalry between different groups of Nazi victims. Some Jewish groups with Israeli backing try to monopolize the Holocaust even going so far as to actively fighting official German attempts to formally recognize other groups of Nazi victims (‘Gypsies’, homosexuals etc.) and to include them in the memorials (or giving them their own).
*that’s an especially contentious issue since there has been fear that Israel could use those for a first strike on Iran, maybe even with nuclear tipped cruise missiles
**in intra-German politics too. Mandatory support of Isreal is often quoted as a reason to be silent and inactive on other topics.
@marty
if by “helping” african-americans you mean forcing them into sub-prime mortgages despite their credit scores and positioning them into losing their homes and ruining their credit scores, then yes, banks certainly “helped” the african-american community into another round of destruction. if you think the quotas for subprime lending set by fannie mae were anything other than a naked attempt by that organization to make money off the subprime market you really weren’t paying attention.
5 acres of piney woods with poor soil. Not sure about your eighth of a mule, maybe time share with your neighbors.
The quotas were driven by Barney Frank and his cronies with the best of intentions. Everything isn’t a conspiracy, sometimes its just stupidity. No person was ever “forced” into a mortgage.
Hartmut: Germany is still in the business of denying actual Nazi victims compensation asking them instead to get it from Israel whereto, as it is claimed, all the necessary money was sent already.
Well, I can see this, actually. I’m the child of a WWII veteran and grew up with skeptical feelings about Germans. But let’s be real: what could Germans do to repay Holocaust victims? They could definitely do something, and did, but never, never would it be enough.
It would never, never be enough for “Americans” to pay reparations for slavery. No amount of money is enough. The Civil War wasn’t enough. The Civil War Amendments weren’t enough. The Civil Rights Act wasn’t enough. Desegregation wasn’t enough.
I’m not trying to complain that African-Americans aren’t satisfied. I’m just saying that there isn’t a way to satisfy. How do you “satisfy” the European Jews for the Holocaust? Not possible. How do you “satisfy” African Americans for slavery, and their loss of civil rights? Not possible. We did some symbolic things. There are still racists and bad people to perpetrate more injustice.
Work against people who perpetrate injustice, and work for economic equality.
Still, what about people (oops – rural people) like this
Is it a contest of some kind?
The quotas were driven by Barney Frank and his cronies with the best of intentions.
Marty, the real estate stuff TNC discusses in his article are from Chicago in the 50’s through 60’s, maybe into the 70’s.
Nothing to do with Barney Frank.
And, not a simple matter of “regulations gone awry”.
You (and others here) are correct, not everything is about race. The stuff that is about race, is about race.
Are folks thinking that we’re all done with the race thing, and it’s just a bunch of blacks whining now?
FWIW, here’s Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, talking about his interactions with the Philly and NYC cops, and on the obligation he feels to make sure that nobody around him feels threatened by him.
If you don’t know Thompson, he’s the drummer for the Roots, a very visible and successful band, he’s an enormously hard-working and successful musician and music producer, and he appears on the television nightly on the Jimmy Fallon show, where he is the music director.
He’s a businessman, an extraordinarily proficient musician and a serious scholar of popular music going back 60 or 70 years, a tremendously successful professional in a very difficult and competitive industry, and he’s one of the most intelligent and peaceable cats you will ever want to meet.
And he’s an obviously black man, and as such he’s obliged to deal with a constant level of hassle and suspicion.
I could be wrong, but I’m not seeing (frex) Kid Rock getting hassled by the cops every time he drives through Detroit. And, of the two, Questlove projects far less of a “thug” persona.
My point here is that the experience of being black in this country is not like the experience of being white. And that’s to a degree that is not accounted for by geography, economic status, or anything other than skin color.
I don’t understand people who talk like race is not a real issue, still.
“real estate stuff TNC discusses in his article are from Chicago in the 50’s through 60’s, maybe into the 70’s.”
some was some wasn’t, the whole Wells Fargo, subprime mortgage rant was directly related to the mortgage collapse. I read every word, which I can never do with Coates, and the closer he got to real time the more he stretched.
No we are not through with race, yes there is a lot of whining going on.
My point here is that the experience of being black in this country is not like the experience of being white. And that’s to a degree that is not accounted for by geography, economic status, or anything other than skin color.
I agree. But skin color isn’t necessarily indicative of what someone’s ancestry is about. Yes, dark brown skin probably indicates African-American. Unless a more recent immigrant, probably a descendant of a slave.
But it’s hard, 150 years later, to say that when I see someone on the street who has dark skin, that person’s great grandmother was a slave. Or when I look at my own olive skin, that I am getting that from Eastern Europe, or some mix of African-American-European that’s on the other side.
It’s not feasible to do a money thing now. Best to address income inequality so that people don’t have to “prove” their racial identity. Sure, it’s okay to identify with some group, but it should be a cultural, not political or legal identity.
No one ever forced anyone … Yadda yadda.
True.
That’s why America has sales forces and the Russians have Cossacks.
Always be closing with fools.
At least the Cossacks were honest.
Americans protect penny stock brokers under various rules of law and the Constitutional right to lie your effing butt off over a public utility, whereas the Cossacks would eviscerate the bastards.
We’re so enlightened.
Coates is a serious individual.
Or exactly the problem. Jesus…
I’d like to see some real actual evidence that Barney Frank forced Wall Street to issue NINJA loans to people who had virtually no means to pay them back. I’d like to see some REAL evidence that Fannie and Freddie were big players in subprime. They were not. They came late to the party:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/barney-frank-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/2011/11/28/gIQANqLH5N_blog.html
more…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/barney-frank-didnt-cause-the-housing-crisis/2011/11/28/gIQANqLH5N_blog.html
Somebody who actually noted the bubble in 2002, and issued an appropriate warning:
http://www.cepr.net/index.php/publications/reports/the-run-up-in-home-prices-is-it-real-or-is-it-another-bubble/
The demand, driven by Wall Street, for mortgages for repackaging into marketable securities was a big driver in the inflation of the housing bubble. See “The Big Short” or Yves Smith’s “ECONNED” for more on this.
apologies for runaway bold…I do not know how to staunch it…shoot the monitor?
</b>
Coates: “Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look.”
…still reading. wow.
russell (and a few others):
Yeah, I shouldn’t use punish. It’s the wrong word. What I’m trying to express is that the repayment has to come from SOMEWHERE which means less money for other things.
Putting aside our goals as a nation to pay back our wrongs as a nation. Which means someone else is going to have their ox gored.
That isn’t to say it shouldn’t be done, but there are costs, and someone has to pay them.
russell said better:
If I understand correctly, reparations are intended to remediate harm done, not punish those who did the harm.
I agree, now the question falls to how to remediate the harm. I’m unconvinced monetary reparations, either direct or indirect, would really do much good.
We have to ask ourselves, what do we want?
If the answer is that everybody, regardless of their ancestry,
should be able to work hard, be educated, and have a middle class life, I’m on board 100%.
If we, as americans, want to absolve ourselves of the sins of our forefathers, I don’t think we can. They are there, and we must carry that burden.
There are deep structural problems that afflict minorities, especially african-americans, disproportionately. Monetary reparations won’t fix that, imo (again, not an expert).
Perhaps the question of who’s to blame is no longer really the point.
I agree. It’s how to fix the problem.
It just came to me that there is a better German example more comparable to the US situation: the (double) black genocide committed against the Herero and Nama in South-West Africa (today: Namibia). A few years ago (I guess around the time of the centenary) we got reminded that Germany never officially apologized for what was done in that colony. I remember what followed as a shameful farce with the German administration seeking a way to get out of it on the cheap, a wild search for a way to ‘apologize’ without giving anyone a legal way to seek compensation/reparations/whateveryoumaycallit. If my memory does not deceive me there was even a case of one (iirc Green) politician trying to do a sincere expression of contrition/remorse about the atrocities resulting in official denials that that public expression of German guilt was in any way official or could be made use of legally. It was not about ‘hell, we did nothing wrong there’ but a pure ‘OK, we did a really bad thing but we are not willing to do anything that could cost us materially’. Among the few concrete steps was renaming a street in Munich (replacing the guy who was responsible for the genocide with the name of the tribe he tried to wipe out).
Several years earlier when Namibia became independent things looked a little different. Iirc there was substantial German support for the new state but (again iirc) no one prominently mentioned the darker aspects of the German rule there at the time.
East Africa is a bit more complicated. After the Maji-Maji uprising the German colonial government started serious reforms to remove the root causes. That had little to do with morals but with simple utilitarian pragmatism but it was a huge step into the right direction. WW1 put an end to that. What happened in WW1 is still to a large degree a dirty little secret and the legend of Lettow-Vorbeck has still not been fully dismantled. Still too many believe that the natives voluntarily fought shoulder to shoulder with their German commanders because the preferred them to the Allies and the German/African troops were greeted as liberators when the went on the offensive into neighbouring colonies. That is about as true as the claim that the black slaves in the American South joined the Confederate case en masse to fight the evil Yankees and the reason to keep up that lie is the same, self-exoneration: ‘If they fought on our side, our prior treatment of them must have been very good indeed => to claim we were racist donkey cavities is shameful libel and slander. WE were the good guys there’.
Should we see it as net positive or negative that the current youngsters suffer from near total amnesia about the very fact that we ever had colonies (part of being generally totally uninformed about anything that happened between Waterloo and the 1918 armistice) and thus lack the traditional prejudices?
The previous posting attempt seems to have failed, so here is a retry. Please delete, if the previous attempt should show up later nonetheless.
It just came to me that there is a better German example more comparable to the US situation: the (double) black genocide committed against the Herero and Nama in South-West Africa (today: Namibia). A few years ago (I guess around the time of the centenary) we got reminded that Germany never officially apologized for what was done in that colony. I remember what followed as a shameful farce with the German administration seeking a way to get out of it on the cheap, a wild search for a way to ‘apologize’ without giving anyone a legal way to seek compensation/reparations/whateveryoumaycallit. If my memory does not deceive me there was even a case of one (iirc Green) politician trying to do a sincere expression of contrition/remorse about the atrocities resulting in official denials that that public expression of German guilt was in any way official or could be made use of legally. It was not about ‘hell, we did nothing wrong there’ but a pure ‘OK, we did a really bad thing but we are not willing to do anything that could cost us materially’. Among the few concrete steps was renaming a street in Munich (replacing the guy who was responsible for the genocide with the name of the tribe he tried to wipe out).
Several years earlier when Namibia became independent things looked a little different. Iirc there was substantial German support for the new state but (again iirc) no one prominently mentioned the darker aspects of the German rule there at the time.
East Africa is a bit more complicated. After the Maji-Maji uprising the German colonial government started serious reforms to remove the root causes. That had little to do with morals but with simple utilitarian pragmatism but it was a huge step into the right direction. WW1 put an end to that. What happened in WW1 is still to a large degree a dirty little secret and the legend of Lettow-Vorbeck has still not been fully dismantled. Still too many believe that the natives voluntarily fought shoulder to shoulder with their German commanders because the preferred them to the Allies and the German/African troops were greeted as liberators when the went on the offensive into neighbouring colonies. That is about as true as the claim that the black slaves in the American South joined the Confederate case en masse to fight the evil Yankees and the reason to keep up that lie is the same, self-exoneration: ‘If they fought on our side, our prior treatment of them must have been very good indeed => to claim we were racist donkey cavities is shameful libel and slander. WE were the good guys there’.
Should we see it as net positive or negative that the current youngsters suffer from near total amnesia about the very fact that we ever had colonies (part of being generally totally uninformed about anything that happened between Waterloo and the 1918 armistice) and thus lack the traditional prejudices?
“”Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”
There is a strange and powerful belief among some, that if you DIDN’T stab a black person 10 times, but happen to vaguely resemble somebody who did long ago stab a black person, you’re guilty of a stabbing, and need to compensate somebody who also vaguely resembles the long dead victim.
This strange and powerful belief is substantially more irrational than the first.
Donald, I don’t want this to be a competition either but e.g. the genetically deformed children of agent orange victims or the Iraqis forced to hang out in Syria of all places are the direct result of the explicit policies of recent administrations (not to speak of all the loss of life and property) and they haven’t received even a token compensation or admission of guilt and probably never will receive anything substantial – the Germans got the Marshall plan.
This strange and powerful belief is substantially more irrational than the first.
From Donald Johnson:
And, Brett, I’m pretty sure there’s going to be no accounting mechanism by which the federal government is going to send a bill to people who vaguely resemble … well … anyone.
There isn’t going to be a fund set up that gets paid exclusively by white people, if that’s what you had in mind.
Not to mention that, whether or not you did the stabbing, you still benefited from it. I’m guessing you’ll deny that up and down, but that’s still part of the idea – not that you, Brett Bellmore, benefited in particular, but that many, many people in the United States, generally, have benefited (and still do benefit) from the historical (and on-going) harms inflicted on black people.
That’s not to say that I’ve firmly decided that reparations are a good idea, but it seems the concept needs repeated clearing up, given the number of times people have tried on this thread, without it preventing comments like your last coming up afterward.
whether my ancestors held slaves or not they were the beneficiaries of the enormous wealth, north and south, accumulated by means of the claveholders lash. i can live a life as free of racist sentiment as it is possible for a fallible human being to do but as a white man my wealth, my opportunities, and my lifestyle have been subsidized by the monstrous instrument of slavery followed by oppression followed by exploitation. my biracial grandsons are more likely to be written up for disciplinary infractions in school, harrassed by police officers, considered dangerous by random strangers, and hunted down by people like zimmerman in florida than my white nieces and nephew.
i stand by my previous statement, reparative justice is not just about money, it is also about the acknowledgement of our shared participation in an economy and a polity tainted at its heart by the legacy of the extraction of value from black bodies and black pockets over centuries.
No we are not through with race, yes there is a lot of whining going on
Though of course some of us will differ as to whether ‘a lot of whining’ is going on – and indeed as to who here is doing the whining.
“There isn’t going to be a fund set up that gets paid exclusively by white people, if that’s what you had in mind.”
That’s true: Reparations are a complete non-starter, never going anywhere. That’s the point to talking about them: To foster a sense of entitlement and grievance which makes the people you’re promising reparations to easier to manipulate, and distracts them from solving their problems themselves, instead of waiting for somebody else to solve them.
The purpose of reparations talk is just to make blacks easier to manipulate as a voting block, that’s all. From that perspective, the there’s no actual prospect of their ever being paid is a feature, not a bug. If reparations actually got paid, they’d lose their utility.
“Not to mention that, whether or not you did the stabbing, you still benefited from it.”
Yeah, because I’m white. Never mind any actual facts of my life history, where my ancestors came from, where I grew up. I’m white, so I get assigned this guilt. Straight up racism: My color tells you everything you need to know about me.
You know why reparations are going nowhere? Because most people aren’t racist enough to think they make any sense.
Given the current state of our society, reparations are a bad idea. Whites hold overwhelming social, economic, and political power. As a group, they continue to benefit from racism. Since they benefit from it, they continue to practice it.
The reparations (an idea that is politically DOA in any event)would simply be stolen back.
The past is not as distant as some here seem to believe it is.
…so I get assigned this guilt.
I don’t recall mentioning anything about guilt. That’s self-inflicted, apparently.
As far as your personal and family history goes, you seem to be stunningly unaware of the context in which you live. It is as invisible to you as the air you breathe (though you still manage to admit the existence of air somehow).
TNC has an interesting post on the evolution of his won thinking on reparations:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations-an-intellectual-autopsy/371125/
Both that, and the article itself, fairly evidently give the lie to Brett’s rather spectacular piece of motive finding / mindreading…
That’s the point to talking about them: To foster a sense of entitlement and grievance which makes the people you’re promising reparations to easier to manipulate, and distracts them from solving their problems themselves…
*own*
“You know why reparations are going nowhere? Because most people aren’t racist enough to think they make any sense.”
this statement sums up the monumental obliviousness of our society and does explain why reparations are likely not going anywhere but not for any reason the author of the statement means. this statement also helps sum up the catastrophic failure of history education in our nation. for an educated individual such as the author to display so little understanding of the exploitative, indeed extractive, roots of the wealth of this nation-both in terms of the natives present before the europeans and the africans and african-americans whose destinies were kidnapped so soon after the europeans came- is to highlight either a failure of his education or a willful blindness to history on his part. my hat is off to him for making my continuing point by such an extreme negative example.
I’m white, so I get assigned
this guiltprivilege.Navarro,
the problem with your ongoing statement is that it goes even further than most in assigning all wealth, particularly in the South, exclusively to that extracted from blacks. Any real reading of history contemplates slavery, sharecropping, which wasn’t a singularly black experience. The civil war destroyed huge portions of wealth derived from slavery, even destroying the meager existence of the vast majority of Southerners who didn’t own slaves.
My point is you, and TNC in 20000 words, assign value to all white people that just doesn’t exist for most. Lest we forget that, by numbers, there are many more poor whites in this country than blacks.
Yup, get assigned that, too. And that’s the point you can’t grasp: You’re just assigning it to me. You don’t give a damn about my personal history, where I was raised, where my ancestors came from, none of that matters.
Only my skin color matters to you. And you think I’m the racist here.
Only my skin color matters to you. And you think I’m the racist here.
What you don’t seem to get is that your skin color isn’t the point of reparations. It’s about the wealth created for the entire county on the backs of black people. (Again, not that reparations are necessarily a good idea.)
And when did I say you were racist? First you’re guilty of something and now you’re racist. WTF?
There is a difference between guilt and obligation.
The US, as a nation ought to be able to have an obligation to a disadvantaged group whose continuing disadvantage can be traced all the way back to the nation’s founding.
One may deny the obligation, but calling those who acknowledge it racist is pretty twisted thinking, IMO.
You don’t give a damn about my personal history, where I was raised, where my ancestors came from, none of that matters.
Actually, that part does matter. You are American, right? If not, this doesn’t concern you.
On re-reading, my last comment could be read as some sort of swipe at the non-Americans commenting. It wasn’t. My point was only that we’re talking about reparations to be paid by the United States for what the country as a whole did to black people, to its great benefit.
Material benefit, that is. Spiritual, not so much.
In lieu of reperations, anybody on board with my “tough love for bigots” proposals, way upthread?
You discriminate, you pay.
What could be more fair than that?
Coates: “There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people. There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what’s wrong with black people. But we don’t really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture. Our conversation omits a major portion of the evidence.”
His current state is, as he describes it himself, “blue” and rubs against the upbeat standard theme of American “progress”.
For those of you so inclined, a brief overview of the Coates-Chait dialogue can be found here.
We are what we are, but we continue to find ways to pretend that it’s not the case. It is this veneer of self delusion that Coates despairs shall never be penetrated.
“My point was only that we’re talking about reparations to be paid by the United States for what the country as a whole did to black people, to its great benefit.”
The “country as a whole” didn’t do squat. Part of the country waged a bloody war against the other part, to free those slaves, and in the process destroyed all that “great benefit”, and then some. Or perhaps you didn’t notice that the south was impoverished for generations after the Civil war?
And here you are, demanding reparations for slavery from the decendents of Union soldiers, the decendents of people who ran the underground railroad? And you don’t think it matters a whit whether somebody’s great granddad died on the battle field to defeat the Confederacy, or arrived in the US off a boat long after slavery was illegal. Just as much on the hook as Simon LeGree’s lineal decendant.
You figure everybody who’s white benefited after the fact from slavery, and you figure you’ve got no obligation to prove this in any particular case, because you don’t feel any obligation to treat people as individuals, rather than mere instances of the group you’ve assigned them to. You’ve rejected the idea that people are entitled to be treated according to the content of their character, their own character, rather than the color of their skin.
In my book, this makes you a racist.
And you, of course, figure I’m a racist, because I demand that people be treated as individuals, without regard to their race. Funny how things have gotten stood on their head.
Slavery and the Jim Crow South created a cost payed by everybody. Just that blacks had to pay a great deal more than most anyone else. Anytime a society marginalizes any of its members, it harms the whole society.
Odds are, if slavery had been prohibited from the outset, the US would now be a wealthier and better country. In any case, a quite a bit different country.
“And here you are, demanding reparations for slavery from the decendents of Union soldiers, the decendents of people who ran the underground railroad? ”
Sure. I didn’t do anything to the Japanese-Americans, not being alive at the time, but have no problem with the government paying reparations that come out of my taxes. Once one accepts this principle, that as citizens of the US we have both rights and obligations, the rest is detail. Of course the details matter and I’m not convinced either way on whether reparations are a good idea, but your argument really amounts to the usual libertarian one that taxes are wrong.
And you, of course, figure I’m a racist
There’s exactly one commentator on this thread calling other commentators racists.
Finding his identity is left as an exercise.
I didn’t do anything to the Japanese-Americans, not being alive at the time, but have no problem with the government paying reparations that come out of my taxes.
Note, however, that those reparations were paid to those who were actually injured. Not to their descendants. My mother-in-law, having spent her teens at Manzanar, got a payment. My wife and brothers-in-law, not being born then, did not.
“There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people. There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what’s wrong with black people. But we don’t really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture. Our conversation omits a major portion of the evidence”
The most telling of all things in this discussion, the black community simply bears no responsibility for their circumstance. The mounting evidence is completely contrary to this set of assertions. 75% of all of those living in poverty live in single woman led households. 75% of black households are led by single women and 35% live in poverty. It is a testament to the other 40% that they have escaped the statistics. Culture is contributing to the problems, yet TNC needs to deny it. Because then there could possibly be some self responsibility.
I still see opinion leaders on the (often religious) Right that try to not only whitewash US slavery but even try to present is as a benefit the n-words should be grateful for. Standard arguments:
a) if the n-words had not been brought over as slaves, they would likely never have found Christ and thus they and their descendants all would burn in hell.
b) Africa was (and is) such a hellhole that even the most mistreated slave in the US had it better than in the native land (an of course all the talk of mistreatment was mainly a Yankee invention to justify the War of Northern Aggression).
The guys making these arguments don’t get shunned but their endorsements are sought in elections (although they sometimes get asked to not combine both because the PC crowd would try to paint the candidates as racist just for ‘asking questions’). Btw, is there any proof that rape victims didn’t secretly enjoy their experience and the ‘PTSD’ is just their guilty feeling about it? Just asking, you know. And did Hillary really not suffer permanent brain damage from the fall she invented in order not to have to testify about Benghazi? Just asking.
Marty:
You haven’t demonstrated culture is causative. You demonstrated that family makeup correlates with poverty. The direction of the causal linkage, if any, is unknown.
As something to consider, roughly 50% of children born to low income parents in the US become low income adults. 40% of high income children become high income adults:
(http://books.google.com/books?id=mJlKOHGaSaAC&pg=PA143&ei=KdZ-R9TFFouotAOEvLWcCw&sig=xujAA5avuWMdAZ-4zoXFhv_tMHE#v=onepage&q&f=false )
Given that and the generations of theft and worse inflicted on african americans aren’t really that historically distant, shouldn’t we also consider that portions of the population are just locked into the cycle of poverty?
because I demand that people be treated as individuals, without regard to their race
And by that logic you should support reparations.
Unless you’re happy to demand the principle while doing squat about it.
Just wanted to chime in for a moment to point out that Coates’ argument for reparations is based on things that happened, at most, 50 to 60 years ago.
Not 150, or 400.
Many of the folks involved are still alive, and their kids and grandkids most certainly are.
Also wanted to point out that the specific thing he calls for is bringing Conyers HR 40 to the floor. Many, many steps from there to cutting a check.
Did folks actually read the piece?
Russell,
the fha and slick mortgage practices in Chicago 50 years ago are non compelling based on my understanding of what the state of affairs for many nonblack poor people at the time. After that I’d a reach and Conyers bill should be a nonstarter. If we want yo study the effects of a variety of predatory practices on poor people, well I’m ok.
Thompson,
I was just pointing out that Coates had not established causation of anything. Worse, hr dismissed any other possibility out of hand.
“And by that logic you should support reparations.”
No, not really. Yes, “reparations” can mean “repairing” something, but that’s an archaic meaning of the word. The modern meaning of the word is,
“1. the action of making amends for a wrong one has done, by providing payment or other assistance to those who have been wronged.”
Paying “reparations” denotes that one is the victimizer. That’s what it means, and it is perfectly sensible for people who have not committed a wrong to flatly refuse to pay reparations for it.
I’m all for reparation from actual, individual victimizers, to actual, individual victims. But that’s not what we’re talking about here. We’re discussing just indiscriminantly extracting wealth from people who happen to be white, and giving it to people who happen to be black, (Maybe not in the form of checks, but yes.) without any concern for the actual individual histories.
Not going to pay reparations, any more than I’d volunteer to do jail time for a crime I didn’t do. Just not going to.
Housing remains – effectively – segregated in the US.
This feeds in to everything from quality of schooling to childhood lead exposure.
Your causation is right there.
Please let us know what ‘other possibilities’ you would like us to consider.
Did you opt out of the internment reparations Brett?
Did you read the article, Brett ?
And do you believe you can opt out obligations the Unites States might agree they bear, according to your personal prejudices ?
As noted above, the people who got those reparations were the actual victims. Paid by the government, if not the individuals, who did the deed.
Asking the federal government to pay reperations for slavery is like asking the Allies to pay reparations for the Holocaust.
“Housing remains – effectively – segregated in the US.”
People aren’t living in the same places with equal frequency, to be sure. But segregation means more than that, and no, US housing is not, today, “segregated”.
Just wanted to chime in for a moment to point out that Coates’ argument for reparations is based on things that happened, at most, 50 to 60 years ago.
It’s not clear to me that Coates is making the argument for reparations just on the basis of more recent racism. Certainly there are recent examples of the legacy of racism continuing, some of which have been litigated in courts.
What he does suggest, concretely, is that Conyers’s bill go forward. I see no reason whatsoever why anyone would object to a hearing. As the article states, Congress studies a lot of much less important matters.
I was impressed by this solution:
“Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.”
I think that such a program, using general tax dollars or capital gains taxes, would be an appropriate way to address this issue.
What I’m hearing from Marty and sapient is that public efforts to help poor people, in general, are fine with them. Things that address blacks, specifically, not so much.
From Marty I’m hearing that poor whites have it tough, too.
Do you guys have any sense that there is anything unique about the history and experience – past and present experience – of blacks in this country? Nothing that would merit public efforts directed toward them, specifically?
Or is it that we’ve already done that, it got as far as it got, time to move on?
Russell,
there are unique aspects to the black experience, then and now. There are also unique aspects to the poor white experience, the recent immigrant experience, the poor Mexican experience, the Chinese American experience, Japanese American experience.
So yes we have done a lot, to the point where the things we have done like subprime mortgages are now counted as racist policy. The war on drugs was an attempt to stem the tide of drugs to the inner city, now a racist jail program. I could go on but my point is that we should stop trying to fix things for “those” people. Lets fix them for poor people.
Lets fix them for poor people.
poor people problems are not what Coates illustrates. the institutionalized racism that he describes in great detail is not a poor people problem, and it can’t be fixed by helping poor people.
Things that address blacks, specifically, not so much.
Well, I was actually quoting Professor Ogletree, who is the only proponent of a specific solution cited in Coates’s piece. So I’m not sure that his solution doesn’t address blacks. I actually thought that I was agreeing with Coates, who doesn’t really have a program, other than to hold hearings on Conyers, and maybe consider proposals like Ogletree’s.
I think that helping the urban poor, putting efforts towards urban poor rather than rural poor, would disproportionately help the African-American poor. I think handing over money to black people, just because they’re black, is extremely wrongheaded. Again, who will collect the cash, and who will pay it? What’s your practical solution, russell?
Also, russell, not sure what your smoking lumping my opinions and Marty’s together. Marty thinks that Conyers’s bill is “a nonstarter”, and I’m in favor of hearings on it. That’s just the beginning of where Marty and I aren’t on the same page.
Oh, and just to be clear, I said this: “I think that helping the urban poor, putting efforts towards urban poor rather than rural poor, would disproportionately help the African-American poor.”
I think that Ogletree’s proposal would help the urban poor, giving more focussed help to African-Americans who have suffered from the kind of housing discrimination that Coates described. I’m in favor of that.
On the other hand, if your program helps all of the poor (both the mostly black urban poor and the mostly white rural poor) you at least have an outside chance of getting it passed. If you only aim to help one or the other, no way it happens.
What’s your practical solution, russell?
for the record, this is where I tune you out.
also for the record, i’ve already offered my practical solution. for reference, please see upthread.
Discriminate against someone in a mortgage, you buy them the house.
Discriminate against someone in rental housing, you pay for their apartment.
Discriminate against someone in hiring, they get the job and you lose yours.
Ditto for college, criminal sentencing, police activity, etc. It’s kind of an eye for an eye thing, which may seem harsh, but it would make the point.
Ideally, we would all recognize the humanity in each other, and treat each other as we would like to be treated. No law against that, and no law needed to make it so.
I guess this is what you meant by your “solution”. Sounds good in theory.
Maybe you don’t understand the way the legal system works, but this would require individual lawsuits. For example:
“Discriminate against someone in a mortgage, you buy them the house.”
Party X would bring a civil suit alleging that Party Y discriminated against them in a mortgage. Litigation would ensue. Party X would win (maybe lose though). Party X would be awarded damages against Party Y. Party Y would need to pay the judgment.
It’s already against the law, by the way, to discriminate against people, so this whole thing is already available to people. Trouble is, going to court and proving stuff is a serious endeavor, likely to fail.
Not going forward with the rest of your rant, but your practical solution, russell, isn’t practical. You’re welcome to “tune me out” but, in fact, your solution would fail.
This is the problem. We live in a world governed by a legal system. (Everybody loves “the law” when it favors their approach. Not so much, when it doesn’t.)
And, hey, if I’m wrong about my critique of your answer to things, please let me know in what way I’m wrong! I actually want to get there from here as much as you do, but simplistic “let’s do the right thing” isn’t how it works, unfortunately.
Meanwhile back in the real world
“…federal government spends hundreds of millions of dollars on the Summer Food Service Program, which provides meals to low-income children when school is not in session and they don’t have access to free or reduced school lunch”
so we spend hundreds of millions on the summer food service program for urban poor, plus the lunch programs while school is in session, but 27m to rural poor is white privilege. It is unfathomable that this is said with a straight face.
It is unfathomable that this is said with a straight face.
Why we’re distinguishing is even more interesting. I’m assuming that rural poor children also go to school? So they’re getting part of the lunch program money, why do they get special rural money too, Marty?
Look, I know some white rural poor (confederate flag bumper sticker/hating on immigrants). My hope for their children’s future is limited, given the ignorant attitudes of their parents. But they need food, just like everybody else. They don’t need it more than urban poor do.
U didn’t distinguish lj’s link did.
*I* didn’t….
didn’t distinguish lj’s link did.
And the bill didn’t…
let’s be clear, slavery provided wealth to more than just the south. the wealth of the textiles industry in the north did not vanish in the civil war, the wealth of the shipping companies based in the north did not disappear during the civil war. the wealth created from the labor of slaves in the slave states that stayed in the union did not disappear during the civil war, the wealth created from the labor of slaves in all states before slavery began to be eliminated in the north did not disappear during the civil war. the wealth gouged from african-americans by legal chicanery after the war was unaffected by the civil war. the constant humiliations and indignities to which african-americans have been treated both during the centuries of slavery and the century and a half since slavery’s end have in no way been assuaged.
some of you in this discussion seem to be hurt by the suggestion that as white americans you have been the beneficiaries of a system with the thumb of white privilege heavily weighted in your favor. no one here, least of all me, doubt your sincere belief that all of your accomplishments have been earned by dint of your hard work but simply believing a thing to be true does not make it so. i was born white and because i was born white i have not been subject to all the obstacles our racist society has put in the way of those who are not so born. your terror of the proposition that a commission be organized to study what reparative justice for african-americans would look like tells me that some deep part of your psyches understand that all is not as you would like to believe.
i agree that other groups who are not white have suffered under discrimination and humiliation themselves but none of these groups suffered under centuries of slavery and we must begin by casting out the beam in our eye before we begin dealing with the motes.
I assure you terror is not the overwhelming emotion here. The subject can be studied and restudied and discussed for another century and no poor black person will be any better off. But the bible references are appropriately emotional.
And the idea that what I might have accomplished in life was due to “privilege” ignores the black presidents and ceo’s and etc. Who Coates “proclaims” got there by working twice as hard, not 1.5, twice as hard. So all the other black people need to do us work twice as hard as me, right?
No matter how fancy the dance, every successful black person who grew up in the poor art of Chicago belies Coates most basic premise. They didn’t overcome white privilege so much as black culture although some of both. And the only way he can try to substantiate any claim today is to denigrate every hard working nonblack person who has bettered themself.
ignores the black presidents and ceo’s and etc
Name 2. Bill Cosby and sports figures don’t count…
The bobbyp 12-step program, such as it is:
1. Conduct full hearings on the Conyor’s Bill and have the discussion. What, pray tell, could be the harm? You have to admit to having a problem before you can solve the problem, right?
2. A jobs guarantee at a livable wage for anybody willing and able to sign up.
3. An end to any and/or all public subsidies that promote suburbanization, because such subsidies are effectively promoting housing segregation.
4. A fully funded public “sting” program that sends black agents posing as job seekers or home buyers out into the marketplace to nail those who discriminate on the basis of race. The penalties for being caught out and convicted should be punitive (economic confiscation, lengthy jail time).
5. A public policy that funds individual and class-action anti-discrimination lawsuits on the basis that such lawsuits are, in the whole, serving the public interest.
6. 10 year tax holiday (state, local, federal) for zip codes of disproportionately poor (yeah, white trash, too) or minority population.
7. Public education shall be a public right funded by the federal government. If rich white people want to leave such a system, impose a heavy fee. They can afford it. No whining. I am tired or rich people whining. They disgrace themselves.
8. Any and all rich white legacy enrollments to a publicly funded institution of higher learning shall be balanced equally by one aggressive affirmative action enrollment. The white person who couldn’t get in and raises the aggrieved cry of “reverse discrimination” can sue the family who got the legacy slot. Punitive damages would be allowed.
9. Conviction of an officer of the law caught red handed stopping somebody for “driving while black” shall be a capital offence.
10. Public policy should promote this general principle as regards all minorities: STOP FUCKING WITH ME. I admit this is a bit nebulous, but hey, if we can have a policy to “unleash the winds of freedom in the Middle East” and spend hundreds of billions of dollars invading countries on a whim, why can’t we have this one? If you are going to have a god damned fanciful public policy, I vote for mine.
11. End the war on drugs.
12. Declare “voter ID” and “stand your ground” laws unconstitutional due to their obvious disparate impact.
The white race is in the grip of a higher power, and it’s far past time to admit it.
Showing up at an AA (Affirmative Action) meeting might do you some good.
With the exception of step #11, a twelve step program to create a libertarian majority. Or something.
And the idea that what I might have accomplished in life was due to “privilege” ignores the black presidents and ceo’s and etc.
The disparities of wealth and income as between blacks and whites are observed at all wealth and income levels, Marty. How do you explain that? Why aren’t the richest blacks as rich as the richest whites? Why are “middle class” blacks less wealthy than middle class whites? Please do point out to us the “cultural” markers that condemn a rich black guy to be less wealthy than a rich white guy?
Do you condemn poor whites for their “culture” also? I have seen no evidence that you do. If “culture” can explain the poverty of large swaths of the black population, then it must follow that “culture” explains the large (and growing larger) poverty of poor whites.
Or is it that poor people are simply moral imbeciles, lacking in motivation and burdened by laziness. If that is the case, why are poor whites, on the whole, better off than poor blacks?
And please, single mothers? Russell demolished that silly assertion on a previous thread. Try something different, because that one just doesn’t fly.
Actually bobby I believe that the culture of being poor is not black or white. But we aren’t discussing paying reparations to white people. As far as the disparities, there are fewer blacks in all those categories. Even if I just concede the richest black person has less money than the richest white person, in America, then the sheer law of numbers may account for that. It certainly does for the averages at the lower levels, at which those numbers have gotten progressively closer.
@marty
you may deny the privilege with which you and i were born but simply to deny a thing is not to render it nonexistent. although the smell of fear seems to permeate every excuse, rationalization, and projection you give i’ll try and take you at your word and assume you are unafraid which leads me to wonder why your opposition to the idea of a commission to study the subject of reparations is so intense if you have so little to fear.
As far as the disparities, there are fewer blacks in all those categories.
The sample size is sufficient…we are talking millions of people. The results are statistically significant. There is “something” that explains why the upper and middle distribution of black incomes and/or wealth are way lower than their white cohorts. If there is no significant discrimination or “brake” due to previous and ongoing discrimination and the lingering effects of white accumulation (theft) of capital (and the compounding of wealth effect over time) then it must be something else, right?
Do we agree so far?
If you assert it is “black culture” then you will reasonably be asked to produce some evidence of how black middle class/upper class “culture” is holding them back.
What is it?
IMO, the unique stuff about the history of blacks in the US was quite a while ago, the real problem they have today is that it positioned them to be particularly hurt by some things which later came along, which were not racial, but economic and location based. Like somebody who’s living in a trailer park because racism made them poor, and just as they’re struggling out of it a tornado hits.
The tornado wasn’t racist, it hit everybody in the trailer park.
But I can understand that Democrats wouldn’t want to blame the cultural disintegration of the urban poor, who are merely disproportionately black, on their own war on poverty…
Actually bobby I believe that the culture of being poor is not black or white.
But you point a finger explicitly at “black culture” in previous comments.
Why is that?
The tornado wasn’t racist, it hit everybody in the trailer park.
So if we had public policies in the past that herded everybody named “Bellmore” into a trailer park in tornado alley and impoverished them so that very few of them could get out, and they get hit by a tornado shortly after we declared them “free at last”, then no harm no foul?
Just trying to get the ground rules straight here…..
I suppose the whole privilege thing could be treated by moving everyone at birth to state ran homes where they would be treated equally well, or badly, until they were adults.
Not going forward with the rest of your rant, but your practical solution, russell, isn’t practical.
OK, fair enough.
Here is my alternative practical proposal:
You discriminate against anyone, on the basis of race, for any of the things I named, and your ass lands in jail.
A straight up criminal penalty, no lawsuit required.
Put some teeth in it, 10 years no parole. That seems reasonable to me for a denial of basic civil rights.
If the remedial approach doesn’t suit, then let’s just kick some ass.
And the only way he can try to substantiate any claim today is to denigrate every hard working nonblack person who has bettered themself.
I’m trying, without success, to make sense of this statement.
The other thing I note is that Coates’ argument is based less on the fact that blacks are poor, and more on the fact that they’ve been f**ked over.
Poverty per se is not the issue.
“Do we agree so far?
If you assert it is “black culture” then you will reasonably be asked to produce some evidence of how black middle class/upper class “culture” is holding them back.
What is it?”
in order, and I’m answering these because I think the answers ate important,
1.No we don’t necessarily agree, ever.
2. One of my first points was that Coates tells a nice story but provides no support for his assertion that white supremacy is still the driving force in those disparities. The rest of the discussion has been interesting. So no, I don’t have to prove black culture is the problem, in fact, Coates does an interesting job of talking about kids selling drugs on a street corner while no one does anything about it. Their corner. Coates complete refusal to allow for any other cultural or personal responsibility is plenty to support my point.
3. You don’t really seem to know what you are asking. Do you want to know about white poverty? At 13%? Do you want to talk about statistically significant differences? Then you should start with the numbers and percentages for middle and upper income disparities. Do you want to understand cultural differences beyond cheap histrionics, I never said anyone was lazy, I did say there is an obvious statistical correlation between single mother led households and poverty, whether that’s causal or a symptom, it is still culturally significant.
I don’t have some of these answers. But, Coates didn’t have any, and his conclusions about the most recent ones were dubious.
You discriminate against anyone, on the basis of race, for any of the things I named, and your ass lands in jail.
Sounds good to me.
I also think that bobbyp’s 12-step plan is brilliant.
I’m skipping over some comments, because I’m noticing a common thread – most commenters haven’t actually read the article.
Please read TNC’s article, and his previous writing. He’s possibly the best writer on race of this generation.
“so we spend hundreds of millions on the summer food service program for urban poor, plus the lunch programs while school is in session, but 27m to rural poor is white privilege. It is unfathomable that this is said with a straight face.”
Posted by: Marty | May 24, 2014 at 07:14 PM
Last I heard, the point was that this program is only offered to rural areas.
most commenters haven’t actually read the article.
or read, and somehow missed important points.
I also think that bobbyp’s 12-step plan is brilliant.
agreed. i like it better than my crappy ideas, it’s far more comprehensive.
And here you are, demanding reparations for slavery from the decendents of Union soldiers, the decendents of people who ran the underground railroad?
I’m not demanding anything. I’ve only written it explicitly more than once that I’m not sure reparations are a good idea. You seem to have such strong biases that you can’t comprehend written words that contradict what you’ve already come to believe – based on what, I don’t know.
In any case, reparations wouldn’t come from particular people descended from other particular people anymore than any number of government programs I strongly object to are funded particularly by me.
You figure everybody who’s white benefited after the fact from slavery, and you figure you’ve got no obligation to prove this in any particular case, because you don’t feel any obligation to treat people as individuals, rather than mere instances of the group you’ve assigned them to. You’ve rejected the idea that people are entitled to be treated according to the content of their character, their own character, rather than the color of their skin.
You’re the one who keeps making this about white people. There wouldn’t be a fund paid into exclusively by white people for reparations. And it’s not only white people who’ve benefited. How many effing times do I have to write this sh1t only to have you ignore it?
In my book, this makes you a racist.
In my book, the fact that you wrote that makes you an a$$hole.
And you, of course, figure I’m a racist, because I demand that people be treated as individuals, without regard to their race. Funny how things have gotten stood on their head.
Funny how things don’t exist except inside your head, even after it’s been pointed out explicitly that what you figure isn’t true.
@russell
Here is my alternative practical proposal:
You discriminate against anyone, on the basis of race, for any of the things I named, and your ass lands in jail.
This is a practical proposal??? It would be fascinating to know how you identify discrimination with any reliability. The verdict of 12 randomly(?) chosen citizens? (Good luck with that in some places.) The decision of a council of experts? A more than full time job for russell — just so we have a single coherent standard?
And are we limiting this to discrimination on the basis of race? Or does religion come into it? How about body type (size, eye color**, etc.)? Or gender, etc.? We have enough difficulty already with the current legally defined categories . . . and there is constant pressure to expand them to yet more groups.
** FYI, there are a fairly broad swath of cultures which a) worry about the “evil eye”, and b) define said evil eye, consistently, as blue. Which means that anyone with blue eyes will be avoided as much as possible. (Amazing what you can stumble across in Anthropology.) If someone with blue eyes complains of discrimination by someone from one of those cultures, does that warrant jail time?
I came late to this discussion, which is fine, because most of what I had to say has been said by someone else already. But these are some of my conclusions:
1) Blacks have been disproportionately screwed throughout US history, up to the present.
2) TNC discusses “reparations,” but what he really wants is a serious national discussion about #1, with an eye to “what can we do about it.”
3) “Reparations” as normally conceived are not workable, on a variety of technical & social grounds (as TNC knows, I’m sure). The case of Germany and Israel, though fascinating, isn’t really germane, because Germany had, in its defeat, received a far greater shock than any the US has so far (thank goodness) AND because in Israel it had a target donee that could accept such reparations. (Not that there weren’t problems – but can you imagine if the proposal here was to give US money for blacks to Liberia?)
4) That leaves the “serious national discussion” that is TNC’s actual aim (IMHO). Not a bad thought except:
5) Congress, as it is currently constituted, and has been for at least the last two decades, since Nuclear Newt reaped the benefits of going permanently negative, is incapable of a serious discussion about anything, much less the consequences of slavery and segregation. We all know that.
6) In the broader public sphere, the contributions on this very thread of Brett Bellmore and Marty – though civil enough, to be fair – prove, I fear, how hopeless it is to expect a serious discussion of the issue. Reactive reactionaries, ready to go into rebellion if anyone points out anything obvious about race, like the fact that they’ve benefited – as I certainly have – from being white in a country built on racism.
Alas.
By “benefited” I mean a good deal less than the kind of privilege George W. Bush had, where he was born on third base, believing he had hit a triple. I didn’t have anything like that, and I doubt Brett & Marty and most of the other protesters against “privilege” did, either.
I mean something much more mundane. Let us suppose there are 100 candidates for some opportunity. It could be college admission, or a scholarship or loan, or the chance to buy a house, or get a job, or a promotion – life is full of such competitions. We’ve all competed; sometimes we’ve won. Yay, us!
Arbitrarily, however, 10-20% of the pool of potential candidates was disqualified, so we actually competed against only 80-90 others. This is an advantage, a benefit, even if it’s still an accomplishment to beat out all the rest of the other (white?) candidates. No one should deny that accomplishment – but by the same token no one should deny the advantage, either.
(And if this thread were about sexism, how much greater the advantage we once had. Half of all the potential candidates gone at a single blow! I’m pleased, and not a little proud, that sometimes I prevailed over the other 50 men – 40 white men – but I’m not so arrogant as to assume that the broader disqualification wasn’t a help.)
There’s a lot more to “white [male] privilege” than this – the fact that I’m more likely to be believed or trusted in most situations (people don’t fear me, police don’t shadow me), etc. – but the effective elimination of some of the competition, as described above, will do for a base-level account of “benefit.”
That’s actually one of the most concise, comprehensible explanations I’ve ever heard of how privilege works.
(Even conceding, as you do, that there’s more to it than just that.)
dr ngo:
Thank you for such a calm and reasoned post. IMHO, your list is mostly dead on. I think, however, your accounting of benefits is only half the story.
Beyond lacking the “benefit” you’ve described, there are also substantial problems (among them are increased targeting by police and harsher sentences) associated with being a minority in this country, especially african american. You alluded to this, but I think its an important factor in enforcing the racial divide.
It is incredibly difficult to build strong communities which result in positive outcomes for their children if the communities are gutted of economic capital (something TNC discussed well in his article) and human capital.
And if this thread were about sexism, how much greater the advantage we once had. Half of all the potential candidates gone at a single blow!
This is an excellent point. Clearly we should be talking about reparations for all females in the country. That should be a fun calculation.
WJ: Here we must all give thanks to the institution of heterosexual (i.e. “Biblical” or “normal”) marriage, which has over the generations ensured that a sizable proportion of the disadvantaged female population has at least nominal access to some of the benefits that have accrued to the males. How these benefits (within marriage) have been allocated in practice is left as an exercise for the reader.
Thompson: You’re quite right about the problems associated with being a “person of color” in America, but I’m assuming these would not be seen as germane by those intent on denying any “white privilege” they may enjoy, which is why I emphasized the “benefits” argument.
If we ever have that “serious national discussion” on race, however, you should certainly bring them up. ;}
wj,
This is an excellent point. Clearly we should be talking about reparations for all females in the country. That should be a fun calculation.
Take all wealth in the country. Divide by two. Nothing to it. Of course this goes beyond “reparations” and well into “confiscation” territory. However, we have a well established history of consfiscation, so nobody should whine about it being “novel”.
My 12 step program for sexist male privilidge can be mailed to you for a nominal fee.
What is you address?
Thanks.
Please forgive my incontinent spelling.
Well said, dr ngo above. My thanks.
All of you: READ THIS.
Then try to tell us that structural racism is “not proven”.
Moyers interviews TNC about this article:
http://billmoyers.com/?gclid=CJC0uKb3w74CFaVxOgodtH0Abg
Powerful story on school segregation via housing, bobbyp.
There was a similar story recently on Atlanta’s suburbs (which concentrated more on the problems of transport & job opportunity)… housing affects everything, and the effects of housing discrimination last for decades, maybe generations.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500.html
And this is no mere bureaucratic problem. It’s by design, a political decision that came out of a time when Cobb County was trying to keep the city out—not make sure it stayed connected to it. Back in 1971, residents of Cobb and Gwinnett counties, both heavily white at the time, voted against joining the MARTA system and rejected it again in subsequent votes, choosing to form their own internal transit systems. Only relatively recently was an agreement hashed out to allow a few buses to cross county lines, which is how the Cobb County buses are even allowed to stop now at stations in downtown and midtown Atlanta.
“Our transportation system as a whole is terrible,” complains Beavor, of the Georgia Center for Nonprofits. In part, says Charlie Harper, a Republican political strategist and transit advocate, that’s because it has been seen and sold historically as a giveaway to the lower socioeconomic classes. For transit to sell in suburbia, he says, “We need to look at this as fundamental to help all of us as a region.”
The tieing of education funding to local property taxes is particularly pernicious, though.
Equally pernicious is that the segregation of the suburbs is virtually invisible compared to that of urban areas.
“In the broader public sphere, the contributions on this very thread of Brett Bellmore and Marty – though civil enough, to be fair – prove, I fear, how hopeless it is to expect a serious discussion of the issue.”
Well, hopeless if you define “serious discussion” as “a discussion which goes my way, accepting all my assumptions as givens.” Which way too many people do.
I read the linked to article. I found it disappointing, seriously so. Just lame.
I found it disappointing, seriously so. Just lame.
Given that you dropped your first comment before actually reading it, I’m not particularly surprised. And I’m sorry, I’m not going to believe you if you said you did read it, as this comment evinces no evidence that you had.
It would be fascinating to know how you identify discrimination with any reliability.
What do we do now? Are we incapable of determining if people act differently toward people of one skin color, vs towards people of other skin colors?
There’s no proposal that’s perfect, or simple, or without complications. That includes the proposal called “doing nothing”.
I am, personally, in favor of direct solutions to things rather than remedial, after the fact actions. If the problem is discrimination, address discrimination.
Even Brett and Marty should be on board with that. Punish the one who does the harm.
And if it really doesn’t exist – if so-called “discrimination” is just a bunch of lazy black people whining rather than getting up off of their @sses – then there’s no problem, right?
“i found it disappointing, seriously so. just lame.”
given that statement i’m going to guess that you must find the entire history of slavery, jim crow, and the 20th century exploitation of african-americans a fairly disappointing thing as well. after all, it offers america at its sustained worst over the course of centuries up to the present day. it’s not the kind of thing you can flippantly dismiss as irrelevant to the modern black experience which, paradoxically, is why you are probably so quick to dismiss it..
of course it was obvious to anyone who had read the essay and engaged with the various sidebars that you had not read anything past the title when you began posting comments.
since you claim to have read it now, are there any of your previous posts in this thread which you might wish to change given the elimination of your previous ignorance? or would you rather stand on the posts despite the clarity with which they demonstrate you didn’t know what you were talking about when you posted them?
IMO, the unique stuff about the history of blacks in the US was quite a while ago
read TNC’s piece and then see if you still feel that way.
Yes, I think it was lame. He started out reasonably observing the Asian-Americans having done well in the exams because they actually worked at it. and then just went off the rails. And then, when he got around to attributing the entirety of black problems to white supremacy? No issues of culture At All? That’s verging on insanity.
About all that reading the essay did was convince me that he was seriously over-rated.
Perhaps Brett can do a guest post on black culture.
One post by TNC on black “pathology”–
link
To me this makes sense. There are behaviors people acquire when living in violent neighborhoods that serve them well in those conditions, but which are not appropriate outside them. And given that blacks have often been forced to live in such neighborhoods, the “pathology” and the policies produced by white racism form a sort of feedback loop.
The idea that Brett and Marty have, which is that TNC dismisses the notion of personal responsibility and culture as irrelevant, is false. TNC is trying to shift the Overton Window, so that we don’t speak of the problems that blacks have in America as something that is entirely their own damn fault. He wants us to see white supremacy at the root. I think he’s right. I seriously doubt that TNC, for instance, tells his son not to work hard and not to bother getting an education. I suspect he does tell his son some things about America that would make Brett and Marty very upset.
And here is TNC talking about his own inappropriate response to a situation.
link
I should just put this all in one post. Anyway, I’ve read TNC off and on for years. I’m not a regular. But I’ve read enough to get some sense of what the guy thinks. And reading Brett and Marty comment about TNC will tell you something about Brett and Marty, but nothing about TNC.
dr ngo: “In the broader public sphere, the contributions on this very thread of Brett Bellmore and Marty – though civil enough, to be fair – prove, I fear, how hopeless it is to expect a serious discussion of the issue.”
Brett: Well, hopeless if you define “serious discussion” as “a discussion which goes my way, accepting all my assumptions as givens.”
No, Brett, that’s not it. You just don’t get it. Just as you don’t get the distinction – even after it has been pointed out to you – between “benefiting” from something and being “guilty” for it. E.g.
hairshirthedonist: “Not to mention that, whether or not you did the stabbing, you still benefited from it.”
Brett: Yeah, because I’m white. Never mind any actual facts of my life history, where my ancestors came from, where I grew up. I’m white, so I get assigned this guilt. Straight up racism: My color tells you everything you need to know about me.
It’s that absolute refusal – or inability – to understand the simple proposition that you, like every other white person in the USA, have benefited in some ways from the oppression of blacks that make it pointless to expect a meaningful discussion with you.
Sigh.
Donald Johnson:
I think your 2nd link (@5:08) includes some good discussion (although brief) on the concept of “culture” and how it fits into the overall picture.
Worth reading.
I also like the D&D references, but I’m a nerd.
It’s that absolute refusal – or inability – to understand the simple proposition that you, like every other white person in the USA, have benefited in some ways from the oppression of blacks that make it pointless to expect a meaningful discussion with you.
I started this comment trying to make sense of Brett’s and Marty’s view, but it’s the refusal, not the inability, that gets in their way. Not sure any blog discussion in the world will cure that. The hope is that demographics will prevail over white supremacy. Unfortunately, I recently met a young one.
Donald,
I believe you mean well, but don’t assume too much. In lots of ways, as I said earlier, the pathologies of being poor span race. It is the assumption by TNC that the impediments that create that culture are unique to blacks that is wrong. And, wishing now I had more time, it is where you might learn something about TNC from having a discussion with me.
I would also note that in the Moyers piece he interestingly says, “through at least the early sixties”.
Met a young one
Young what?
Young white supremacist.
So should I interpret the flow of that comment personally? Because up until now we have discussed white supremacy, its relative impact on the status of blacks in society today and whether a study or reparations would be warranted, all without the stated or implied personal insult.(brett’s rants the obvious exception, sorry hsh)
…the pathologies of being poor span race.
Well sure. This may be necessary, but it not sufficient to explain the economic gap as between the races. See here for example.
To deny that this disparity is not due, in significant part, to unique “impediments” is simply wrong on its face and flies in the face of the evidence, only a small part of which was cited by Coates. There is a great deal more.
As for the 60’s, one of the central characters in the essay is still alive. He was robbed by a racist policy. Generally when people are robbed we try to make things right. I guess in his case, and thousands of others like him, not so much.
I was alive during that time. It was not that long ago (as I recall).
The past is still with us. Racism is alive and well in America as the articles cited above about Staten Island and Cobb County attest.
And then, when he got around to attributing the entirety of black problems to white supremacy? No issues of culture At All? That’s verging on insanity.
Au contraire, Brett.
In this case you are virtually (in the modern sense of the word) blind.
“This may be necessary, but it not sufficient to explain the economic gap as between the races. See here for example.”
Not one of the things in that list could not be explained by the simple fact that blacks are disproportionately poor. And so, today, suffer disproportionately from the pathologies of the poor.
I said it earlier, I’ll say it again: Because of the effects of slavery and Jim Crow, blacks were disproportionately poor. But, of course, other minorities have been disproportionately poor for similar reasons, and recovered from it by hard work once the racism was lifted. The Irish, the Chinese. Blacks, too, were climbing out of that pit, in the same way: Hard work and self-reliance. They were on the mend from the damage done them by racism.
It was the misfortune of blacks to have been disproportionately poor, when policies which did cultural damage to the poor, especially the urban poor, were put in place. But the same damage was done to the non-black poor. The war on poverty didn’t discriminate in screwing up poor communities.
And so, today, to attribute the poverty and cultural pathologies of the black community as being due to nothing but white supremacy, is to ignore why blacks, unlike other minorities, did not raise themselves back up once the boot heel was lifted.
It’s because that boot heel was replaced by a different boot heel, one that did not discriminate, but held all the poor down.
But, of course, Democrats can not acknowledge the damage done by the war on poverty, must attribute even today the problems of the black community to racism, instead, because that was YOUR boot heel.
And then, when he got around to attributing the entirety of black problems to white supremacy? No issues of culture At All?
are you sure you read it?
…is to ignore why blacks, unlike other minorities, did not raise themselves back up once the boot heel was lifted.
is something that could only be said either by someone who didn’t actually read the article, or someone who did read it but who didn’t think what it had to say was important because it didn’t agree with his own preconceptions.
Not one of the things in that list could not be explained by the simple fact that blacks are disproportionately poor.
Why are blacks disproportionately poor?
is to ignore why blacks, unlike other minorities, did not raise themselves back up once the boot heel was lifted.
When was that, exactly ?
Which particular boot heel are you referring to ?
Slavery ?
Jim Crow ?
Housing segregation parts 1,2 or 3 …?
And which ‘other minorities’ felt the weight of all those boot heels ?
Did you read the link boobyp posted, and do you still believe society to be colourblind ?
http://www.longislandpress.com/2014/05/17/long-island-segregation-drives-educational-inequality-60-years-after-brown-v-boe/
It’s because that boot heel was replaced by a different boot heel, one that did not discriminate, but held all the poor down.
Not replaced; added to.
Maybe I am misreading Brett’s words. But what he seems to be saying is that the War on Poverty is the what is holding the poor (including blacks) down. So the solution for the situation that we see today is to get rid of the War on Poverty.
Unfortunately, not unlike Obamacare, “War on Poverty” makes a nice overall label. But it might help to get specific as to exactly which parts of the War on Poverty are the problem. For example, the part that provides free lunches to poor children while they are at school, so that they have at least one good meal for the day? It being well established that someone who is seriously underfed does not absorb lessons well. (And how does that hold their families down?) One or more of the other programs?
Because, rather like Obamacare, I’m thinking that there are at least some parts of the War on Poverty which, other than their being part of it, Brett would actually be fine with. Although I may be wrong about that….
Noodling around to work out what is meant by the ‘War on Poverty’, I noticed possible evidence that welfare spending has been peculiarly ineffective in the US compared with other western nations:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welfare%27s_effect_on_poverty
(I’ve no idea how strongly that suggestion holds up, but eyeballing those graphs, the US is a definite outlier.)
to attribute the poverty and cultural pathologies of the black community as being due to nothing but white supremacy, is to ignore why blacks, unlike other minorities, did not raise themselves back up once the boot heel was lifted.
What is it that we are ignoring? Why have blacks, uniquely, not “raised themselves up”, now that the boot heel of racism has been lifted?
If you’re going to say this, it would be useful for you to explain what it is you’re talking about.
You make reference to a fairly important phenomenon, but you don’t explain what it is.
Also, not for nothing, but the experience of the Chinese, Irish, Italians, Jews, or pretty much any ethnic demographic is not the same as that of blacks.
That of American Indians is arguably as horrific and damaging, although in other ways.
Every other group you name, not so.
That doesn’t argue against your point, it’s simply something you appear inclined to ignore.
In any case, I’m interested to know why blacks, apparently uniquely, have failed to raise themselves up, now that the boot heel of racism is a thing of the past.
russell, as you say, Native Americans appear to be a special case. But every other group you mention has seen, over time, their status migrate from discriminated against to what amounts to “not black.” In fact (again excepting Native Americans) a case could be made that America today only really differentiates two groups:
black
not black
The census and other government (or government-driven) forms may have lots more categories. But the social structure only seems to have those two.
Someone could do (or perhaps already has done) an interesting study in how various groups moved from “discriminated against” to “not black”. But it seems rather obvious that blacks will have a serious problem moving to a category of “not black”.
wj:
Well, naturally, the War On Poverty keeps the poor in that state due to perverse incentives….living on food stamps is soooooooooooooooooo…..easy! Why would anybody want to get off them? If these programs were eliminated, poverty would cease.
Of course, this would be offset by other glibertarian policies that would result in the rich cornering the market in financial and economic wealth. Logically this implies the existence of poor people.
In Bret-world, the feckless Democratic Party threads this needle by passing government programs to help BOTH groups, and create loyal voter blocks to perpetuate their reign of error. The New Deal and the War on Poverty programs were enacted consciously and precisely to keep black people “on the plantation”.
Plain as the nose on your alleged face.
Maintaining power is the sole reason for their existence as noted in the Democratic Party platform.
The GOP and their glibertarian allies, on the other hand, seek only to implement the highest principles of Liberty and unrestrained capitalism, which would, no doubt, result in a popular uprising. Unlike their Democratic Party foes, they do not seek to curry favor with interest groups, kiss the ass of rich people, or practice politics in any meaningful sense of the word.
Like their communist brethren, they seek to eradicate government, not promote it.
Principles is as principles are……
one of the things i learned from the reality based community before dr. kleiman et al. completely destroyed the commenting ecosystem was that whenever the thread reaches the point of being nothing but responses to mr. bellmore’s idiosyncratic world view, the thread is dead. never one to admit to error or see the value in another’s point of view, mr. bellmore is colorblind in the worst sense of being incapable of understanding that any out group (whether derived from ethnicity, gender, or sexuality) could possibly experience our society in any way other than the way it is experienced by him. this allows him to work from a basis of perfect certainty and makes of him a singularly frustrating interlocutor.
to attribute the poverty and cultural pathologies of the black community as being due to nothing but white supremacy, is to ignore why blacks, unlike other minorities, did not raise themselves back up once the boot heel was lifted.
Again, why have blacks, unlike other minorities, failed to raise themselves up, now that the “boot heel” is lifted?
What are we all ignoring?
“what are we all ignoring?”
it isn’t so much what we might be ignoring as it is what we are assuming. we’re assuming that the boot has actually been lifted and i think what might make the average white person uncomfortable. uncomfortable enough to slide over into denial, is the idea that maybe it hasn’t been. maybe the chains are gone, maybe we’ve stopped lynching them (although trayvon martin and jordan davis might disagree), but the boot of our collective attitudes with all the old racist expectations and considerations is still written into our culture to such an extent that the average african-american doesn’t have the same opportunities as the average white american.
Because up until now we have discussed white supremacy, its relative impact on the status of blacks in society today and whether a study or reparations would be warranted, all without the stated or implied personal insult
No, and my apologies. I should not have lumped your views with Brett’s.
Thanks sapient, no problem. My and Brett’s views surely overlap at points, but are not equal.
I was cranky. Thanks for being gracious, Marty.
Someone could do (or perhaps already has done) an interesting study in how various groups moved from “discriminated against” to “not black”.
“How the Irish Became White” by Noel Ignatiev”
So great — always someone here who knows the where the answers are. Who needs Google, when we have ObWi?
But Ignatiev’s book does raise one question. The Irish, in his example, became white by being more enthusiastic about segregation than anyone else. So how did the East Asians (Chinese, Japanese, etc.) do it?
By being, for many generations, “model minorities” – obeying the law, largely refusing to protest (except the Filipinos who were active in United Farm Workers), doing well in school, taking up respected professions, and suffering in virtual silence repeated injustices well into the second half of the 20th century. When I was a boy in 1950s California I remember reading about Dr. Sammy Lee, who had already won two (eventually four) Olympic gold medals for the USA in diving, being denied housing nearby because of racial “covenants” of some sort. Racially based (though technically “country of origin” based) discrimination in immigration continued until the reforms of the 1960s. And so far as one could see, the only protest was polite letters to the newspaper or to representatives – no riots, no marches, no “in your face” rhetoric. So by the time things lightened up a bit, Asians were eligible, for all intents and purposes, to be honorary whites.
(That’s an extremely crude summary of a very complex subject on which entire courses are taught and careers are built, so please pardon any oversimplification.)
So, Asian-Americans essentially took the Gandhian approach: Let the state abuse you, but make it do so under circumstances which would outrage the conscience, so the abuse would become unpopular. Demanded nothing more than to be allowed to succeed on their own efforts, and demonstrate that, if you are so permitted, you will be model citizens.
It seems to have been successful, wildly so. Perhaps it’s worth of emulation?
why, it’s almost as if there’s something working against blacks that’s not working against other minorities, and which makes their attempts to emulate the wildly successful Asian model unsuccessful. i wonder what that could be.
if only some reporter would write a big piece detailing a bunch of instances of things that blacks face that other minorities don’t…
cleek,
despite your humorous sarcasm, the article that TNC write didn’t say anything about the problems other minorities, or even poor white people, faced or didn’t. Nothing.
Housing discrimination was certainly not unique to blacks, lecherous real estate lenders and slum lords weren’t either. His article would lead you to believe that the only people ever taken advantage of by shysters and crooks were black people. But that simply isn’t true.
His article would lead you to believe that the only people ever taken advantage of by shysters and crooks were black people.
This is a total misreading of the article. Coates brings evidence of such discrimination that was or is explicitly race based.
As for the “model minority” that’s a stereotype that emerged in popular culture in the 60’s to basically shame the civil rights movement. It, too, is a stereotype. Google the wiki entry on the subject. For a brief intro, see also here.
His article would lead you to believe that the only people ever taken advantage of by shysters and crooks were black people.
To echo bobbyp’s point, I think you are taking a meaning from TNCs piece that isn’t intended.
He’s discussing the experience of American blacks. Hence, the experience of other groups doesn’t play a large part.
He’s also focusing on housing discrimination, in Chicago, in the mid-20th C, as *one* of many – many – examples where blacks, specifically, were singled out for discriminatory practices. And, where the discriminatory practices were supported by the law.
I doubt Coates would claim that no other group has been discriminated against. I think his claim is that discrimination against blacks, specifically, would justify reparations, were those to be considered.
Other folks might well also, it’s just not his topic. Coates’ piece says nothing about it, pro or con.
I appreciate dr ngo’s comment about the Asian experience(s) in the US, but I have to say that the two histories here – those of Asians and those of blacks – are not really commensurate.
And, as always, the floor is open for Brett to explain to us why blacks, uniquely, have failed to rise above their difficulties, now that the boot heel of racism has been lifted off of their necks.
We’re ignoring something, he tells us, but he won’t tell us what it is.
Actually bobby he did no such thing. The buying of houses from “sellers” was not race specific, the 600 houses the guy owned when he died spanned beyond the neighborhood TNC talked about. While there was NO definition of where the rest were, it is unlikely they were all in black neighborhoods.
But, of course, other minorities have been disproportionately poor for similar reasons, and recovered from it by hard work once the racism was lifted
racism against blacks hasn’t been lifted.
“We’re ignoring something, he tells us, but he won’t tell us what it is.”
Perhaps, as in the case of victimized, freedom-loving libertarians, who have multiple boots firmly on their forever trodden necks, blacks don’t have enough high-caliber weapons, high-capacity clips, and ammo rounds yet to throw off their oppressors.
Just a guess, on Brett’s behalf.
Or maybe, insufficient bootlicking down through the years since the Civil War is holding them back.
Actually bobby he did no such thing. The buying of houses from “sellers” was not race specific…
Simply and unambiguously not an accurate take on what Coates wrote. The reason this predatory practice was overwhelmingly engaged in wrt African Americans is because they were barred from standard issue real estate financing. If you re-read the article you will see Coates provided this rather essential background.
And, as usual, what Russell said.
I don’t usually post stuff that comes to me via Facebook, but this article seems apropos.
So what should we make of this? Rodger was a violent misogynist, indeed, but his misogyny was justified and bolstered by his racism. This does not discount the role of either: Such forms of oppression only grow stronger with the addition of others, and in the end, both maintain a similar set of systemic inequalities.
“We’re ignoring something, he tells us, but he won’t tell us what it is.”
It could be the ding-dong (Bell) curve stuff, but I’m just guessing. Brett can read liberals’ minds, but we cannot read his. This is an obvious disparity, and I think a burdensome, regulation driven, and corrupt government program is called for.
“We’re ignoring something, he tells us, but he won’t tell us what it is.”
oh he told us. it’s ‘culture’.
Yeah, culture. Asian-Americans recovered from legal discrimination, and even the Japanese internment, because of culture. Blacks did not, again, because of culture.
There are ways of living that work, and ways of living that don’t work, and if you stick with the latter, you don’t need somebody’s heel on your neck to hold you down. You do a good enough job of it yourself.
Sure, culture. That did make a difference.
But also the East Asians were never the victim of the level of discrimination that blacks were subject to. (And I include the Japanese internment.) Consider, for example, that until Truman ordered differently, blacks in the military served in segregated units. But East Asians did not. They were mixed right in with whites.
In short, their starting point was miles ahead.
has it ever crossed your mind that ‘culture’ isn’t just something that comes from inside, it’s something that can be imposed from the outside? it’s not just what you choose to do, it’s also what the larger society lets you do.
“To echo bobbyp’s point, I think you are taking a meaning from TNCs piece that isn’t intended.”
Probably all the criticisms of Coates in this thread have been like that. Coates doesn’t think personal responsibility matters, for instance, only what whites do to blacks. That’s the sort of criticism that, again, says more about how the critic filters things, than it says about Coates.
Culture is the new Bell curve.
“That’s the sort of criticism that, again, says more about how the critic filters things, than it says about Coates.”
No, it says that HE said that in his pieces. The driving force of everything was white supremacy, sixty years ago at the most recent. His whole point in that piece. If you want to try to say he really didn’t mean it that’s fine, but don’t tell me I cant read. That’s silly. If that wasn’t his point then he wasted a lot of words and our time.
The driving force of everything was white supremacy, sixty years ago at the most recent.
Yes, and that is his basis for arguing that reparations are worth considering.
Is there any freaking question *at all* that white supremacy has been a significant force in American political, cultural, social, and economic life, from (let’s say) 1625 to now?
And without wanting to get into side arguments about whether or not poor white people have it bad, or which particular ethnic group had the very very worstest bad time in the US, I’ll state quite simply that anyone who thinks anti-black racism is a non-issue today isn’t paying very close attention.
The driving force of everything was white supremacy,
given that the subject of his article was about how the white majority can make it up (so to speak) to the black minority, focusing on what why whites should have to make anything up seems appropriate.
sixty years ago at the most recent.
sigh.
FTFA:
the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.”
Thank you Tavis Smiley.
Note that Smiley has since broken off with Wells Fargo.
cleek (to Brett): has it ever crossed your mind that ‘culture’ isn’t just something that comes from inside, it’s something that can be imposed from the outside?
Well, it has crossed MY mind. I have often wondered whether spray-painting Brett black would change his “culture” at all.
What’s “culture”, exactly? Does it bear the same relationship to individual personality as global climate bears to local weather?
Is hillbilly redneck “culture” better, in some sense, than urban black “culture”? If so, in what sense?
–TP
So, if you refuse to loan to a minority person because of bad creditworthiness, it’s racism. If you loan to a minor person in spite of bad creditworthiness, it’s racism. I think I’ve got it now.
“has it ever crossed your mind that ‘culture’ isn’t just something that comes from inside, it’s something that can be imposed from the outside? it’s not just what you choose to do, it’s also what the larger society lets you do.”
Of course it has. That’s exactly what I’ve been saying. Though I think it was “imposed” out of misguided paternalism rather than malignacy, it did come from without, to a large degree.
The point is, culture is self-perpetuating. The cultural damage was done, not just to blacks, but to the urban poor, (Blacks “merely” being disproportionately both.) at least a generation or three ago. The damage having been done, you don’t have to posit contemporary racism to explain ongoing problems. Remedying contemporary racism won’t remove the problems. Their own culture won’t let a large faction of blacks get ahead, even if they are getting a fair shake, or even preferences. They won’t do what’s needed to get ahead, because their culture says not to do it.
So, how do you fix that? “Reparations”? If the cultural problem of blacks today is a disdain for hard work and intellectual achievement, if they think of the things necessary for success in our society as “acting white”, and believe their problems are because somebody else is victimizing them, how is a handout going to improve things?
Rather than perpetuate the problem?
How do you fix a broken culture? Not with “reparations”, that’s for sure.
It’s only racism to refuse to lend to a minority person with bad credit is you are, however, willing to lend to a non-minority person with the same bad credit. It isn’t a pure matter of how you treat someone. It’s how you treat them compared to other people who are in the same circumstances except for race. And that’s where Wells got it wrong.
So, if you refuse to loan to a minority person because of bad creditworthiness, it’s racism
no, it’s racism when loan officers refer to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
The damage having been done, you don’t have to posit contemporary racism to explain ongoing problems.
you don’t have to. but when it’s as plainly friggin obvious that race (“mud-people” and “ghetto loans”) is a component of ongoing, it’s just stupid to pretend it’s not.
so why are you pretending it’s not?
The point is, culture is self-perpetuating
I asked a day ago whether you had read this article (not to mention the 50 or so pieces of academic work it references)…
http://www.longislandpress.com/2014/05/17/long-island-segregation-drives-educational-inequality-60-years-after-brown-v-boe/
Sure, poverty is self-perpetuating. You get no argument from me on that point.
But segregation is emphatically not merely self perpetuating. There is a wealth of evidence that racist attitudes and active behaviours perpetuate that segregation.
If you persist in believing otherwise, I can only conclude that you are being wilfully blind.
Culture is self-perpetuating, but not in an absolute way, just in and of itself.
There are what we may consider conceptually as feedback mechanisms. The questions are – which feedback mechanisms come directly from within the culture and feed back into it, which feedback mechanisms come from within the culture and feedback into it through the rest of society before returning to the culture, are those various feedback mechanisms positive or negative, and how large are their coefficients?
Perhaps we might also think of other inputs from the rest of society simply as inputs rather than feedback.
Maybe Brett, as an engineer, can consider things more readily in this manner and advise us what sort of feedback paths and inputs American society at large has and continues to contribute to black culture, and whether those feedbacks and inputs are and have been mostly helpful, more or less neutral, or mostly harmful.
I’d also like to know more about his first-hand knowledge of black culture, since he seems to give it so much weight with such great confidence. He must have some great insights, personally, by having done lots of reading and/or through direct experience.
how is a handout going to improve things?
you should really read the article. don’t just skim it for things to get mad about, read it.
Culture is the new Bell curve.
Ah, if only that were the case. However, if you look closely, you will find this theme echoing down through the centuries. One of the justifications for slavery itself were the multiple asserted shortcomings of black “culture”. After all, they were mere “savages”.
As Coates wrote elsewhere, the “absent black father” was a theme propounded by racists during Reconstruction. Historical research has demolished that claim.
And now we are here and some (to coin a phrase) declaim, “But this time it’s different!”
Now ask yourself, what is your reaction whenever you hear that under other circumstances? Do you get a bit uneasy?
But perhaps my worthy opponents are right. They assert (I assume correctly)that they, as individuals, are not racist. But they go beyond this. They claim racism simply has vanished, like passed gas on a windy day. They no longer desire to oppress black people, they just desire, contentedly and without the slightest twinge of guilt, to ignore them….
….that and repeatedly give them moral pointers. After all, they’re just trying to help.
The point is, culture is self-perpetuating
To some degree this is true.
What you are missing, I think, is the fact that black culture is not the only culture involved.
You also seem to consider “inner city black culture”, perhaps as portrayed on “The Wire”, as the entirety of black culture.
A lot of American blacks don’t live in cities at all.
The point is, culture is self-perpetuating
Then to take this assertion one step further, it appears to be obvious that this is apparently not an attribute of “white culture”.
How is this difference explained?
it appears to be obvious that this is apparently not an attribute of “white culture”.
Yeah, we (whites) are all better now.
TNC isn’t the first person who wanted to have a national conversation about race. At least one reason why that conversation never got off the ground is that it was never intended to be a two way street, but rather a lecture followed by what the lecturers see as as essential reordering of thought by, I suppose, white people.
Since we are imputing to white people, as a whole, various thoughts, attitudes, etc, I’ll add a couple more: (1) most white people will not accept that black people’s issues are the product of white supremacy, particularly younger white people; (2) white people who do not like black people aren’t going to listen at all and will find justification for their views in the kind of statements one can read in TNC’s article; (3) it is likely not true that much of the wealth in the US today is built on the exploitation of black people, but it is a handy rhetorical device; (4) there is no workable reparations scheme that even approaches fairness; (5) TNC fails to address, as do most of the commenters here, the direct correlation between being the uneducated child of an uneducated single parent and poverty coupled with the direct correlation between ‘no education and no personal wealth’; (6) and few intelligent people outside of the philosophical camp that finds value in TNC’s words will accept at face value that the problems of illegitimacy and ensuing poverty can be traced to white supremacy, whatever in the hell that is.
TNC argues tendentiously by assertion, not evidence. Good luck with that. Good luck with promoting cross ethnic understanding and good will by name calling and shaming. Good luck with threatening people with jail if they don’t hire in a manner that meets a highly subjective definition of discrimination. I can’t imagine a better way to bring people together.
Like I said–this conversation is a one way street. I just finished a four week trial with some very well funded folks who, in a not so different context, saw only one side of the evidence. They lost.
McKinney,
When you address a jury, what are you doing but delivering a “lecture” in the hope of “an essential re-ordering of thought” on the part of, I suppose, the jury?
I say “I suppose” because it seems unlikely to me that you’re trying to re-order the thoughts of (in English: to convince) the opposing lawyer.
So what is this BS about a one-way street? You lecture the jury, your opponent lectures the jury. One of you convinces the jury, the other doesn’t. The fact that the losing lawyer remains unconvinced does not make the trial a “one-way street”.
What exactly would make the conversation a two-way street, in your view?
–TP
I have to agree completely with your 4th point. But your 6th point seems a bit more problematic.
A part (not the whole, but a significant part) of the illegitimacy and absent-father problem stems from the fact that a substantial portion of the black male population is in prison. And a big part of that is for drug-related crimes. Crimes which
a) a white defendant would be likely (not certain, but likely) to get a far shorter sentence or even just a fine, and
b) frequently involve drugs which were banned explicitly because they were commonly used by blacks. No doubt you have good sources on the legislative arguments from the middle of the last century, when marijuana was being banned. Not to mention the crack vs powdered cocaine difference.
“frequently involve drugs which were banned explicitly because they were commonly used by blacks”
huh?
“His whole point in that piece. If you want to try to say he really didn’t mean it that’s fine, but don’t tell me I cant read. ”
His whole point was that white supremacy is the primary reason blacks are far behind whites in this country, but no, he doesn’t say that personal responsibility doesn’t matter. Furthermore, as I already pointed out myself, Coates himself has written how behavior patterns that are sensible in a poor violent neighborhood are inappropriate in other settings and he even used himself as an example in one of his posts, where he nearly got into a fistfight a few years ago with a blogger who was being obnoxious. I linked to this. And obviously Coates comes from a tradition which highly values education–I seriously doubt he tells his son to be a slacker and join a street gang, because it’s all whitey’s fault anyway.
Look, Marty, if you insist on reading Coates in the dumbest possible way I can’t stop you. But you are not presenting his views accurately. It’s not your reading ability. You want an easy way to discredit everything Coates says.
Tony,
Apparently the lectures from McKinney, such as the broadside delivered above, are not “one way streets”. Why it just oozed with serious concern, understanding, and empathy.
He must have temporarily forgotten he is an attorney. 🙂
And I really love how all the doubters have hurled that charge that Coates “offered no evidence” despite the numerous citations in the text. Maybe they are just mad because he didn’t use a formal footnoting format.
Coates has written, Coates obviously comes from a tradition, I’m sure Coates says to his son..
We are discussing what he said in the Atlantic article, not what you think you know or believe about him. I’m reading what he wrote today, I listened to the Moyer interview, I read why he thinks differently today than he did before. He wants to blame white supremacy for all of black Americas problems, and all of America should pay money, to someone, to make it better. Not exactly being clear how that would make it better, or noting that it is the problem we have already thrown more money at than any other to no avail.
…the problem we have already thrown more money at than any other…
Is there an accountant in the house?
–TP
“it is likely not true that much of the wealth in the US today is built on the exploitation of black people, but it is a handy rhetorical device; ”
Much of the wealth in the 19th century was built on the exploitation of black people.
As for today, there’s a difference between saying that most white wealth comes from exploiting black people and saying that black people are poor in large part because of exploitation by whites. Blacks are a minority in this country. I’m not going to bother with a numerical example. The irony is that your point actually works in favor of reparations–if what was stolen from blacks is a small fraction of white wealth, it would be no great hardship to give it back.
Not that I have any notion how reparations would work. That’s why it should be studied–to see if there is any practical way it could be implemented.
TNC fails to address, as do most of the commenters here, the direct correlation between being the uneducated child of an uneducated single parent and poverty coupled with the direct correlation between ‘no education and no personal wealth’
I can’t think of a single person who either ignores, denies, or fails to recognize the correlation between lack of education, single parenthood, and poverty.
The question is why some folks are more likely to come up in single parent homes, with less education, than others. Among other things.
There are lots of reasons why those conditions might be so in any given case. There are particular reasons why those conditions are more commonly so for blacks, in the United States, both historically and now.
Arguments that equate more or less to “those people need to get their sh*t together” leave a lot of reality out of the picture.
I’m still waiting on the drug that got banned because blacks used it….
@marty
“frequently involve drugs which were banned explicitly because they were commonly used by blacks”
huh?
Sorry for the slow response to your question. (My day job keeps interfering.)
When drugs were being banned, the legislative decision about whether to ban marijuana was driven by the “fact” that it was a drug widely used by blacks.
Similarly, the penalties for crack vs powdered cocaine stem from views by those setting the penalties about the race of those using each.
TNC isn’t the first person who wanted to have a national conversation about race. At least one reason why that conversation never got off the ground is that it was never intended to be a two way street, but rather a lecture followed by what the lecturers see as as essential reordering of thought by, I suppose, white people.
Never intended by whom to be a two way street? The only people who wanted a conversation about race? In other words, the people who recognized that there was a problem, and wanted to solve it? Maybe the reason that it wasn’t a two way street was because the people who didn’t want a conversation about race put their fingers in their ears.
(1) most white people will not accept that black people’s issues are the product of white supremacy, particularly younger white people;
I think that you know a very select group of younger white people. And are you among the “white people” who will not accept that “black people’s issues” are the product of white supremacy?
If you live in Texas (which I guess you do) and you’re around my age (which I guess you are) you have to have witnessed Jim Crow. And, yeah, we’re old, so that was a long time ago. But how about the people who resisted the dismantling of Jim Crow? Many of them are still there, many passed on their resentment on to their children. On the other hand, many who embraced desegregation and racial harmony passed that instinct down. The “people aren’t going to accept” argument won’t fly until a discussion is had. I’m pretty sure that the 27% of hard-core right-wingers will not accept the fact that white supremacy is still a factor in how society is structured today, but that leaves 73% who might give it a listen.
(4) there is no workable reparations scheme that even approaches fairness;
I actually agree with that statement. There’s no way to figure out “damages” for African-Americans to repay them for their generational economic deficits as a result of slavery, and post-slavery institutional racism. However, all Coates asks is that Conyers’s bill have a hearing. He doesn’t suggest any other concrete proposals for assessing damages. The closest he came was to mention (not endorse) Ogletree’s proposed remedy, which doesn’t consist of any kind of handover of money. (I actually wish that Coates would have endorsed some kind of practical proposal.)
I confessed when I posted my first comment that I hadn’t read the whole article. I expected a “damages” approach to the question of reparations, and reflexively thought (and still think) that such a thing would be unworkable. But remunerative programs (targeting certain urban areas) can be fashioned, under the theory of reparations, that might lift some people out of poverty. I agree that these programs shouldn’t be race-based, other than to target them towards people who were subject to well-understood abuses, such as redlining. Honestly, if a critical mass of African-American people could rise out of poverty, it would make a difference to the matter of racial injustice. (In fact, I predict that Obama’s presidency will make a difference to a lot of African-American children, just as Kennedy’s presidency inspired so many youths.)
It’s unlikely that much will happen legislatively in the near future, because we can’t seem to elect a Democratic Congress. Not all Democrats would be on board with this, but we know that Zero Republicans would support it. And then the legislation is sure to be challenged by the courts, where Republican justices still prevail. It makes one think how important elections are.
This is a long rant, but I’ll conclude by saying this: a lot of attempts have been made by well-meaning people over the years, so I reject the concept that we have “done nothing” about race. What we haven’t succeeded at is minding the statistical economic gap. But since the economic gap as a whole is growing wider, we need to try to change how the cards are dealt. I hope that we can “spread the wealth around” generally, in a way that lessens the gap between races, and makes everyone who’s hurting more comfortable.
Another Coates piece worth reading–
link
I think it would be a good idea if all of us interested in this topic took some time simply to read some large fraction of the references that TNC has supplied at his blog. Of course that goes against the whole blogging concept, where we come to a highly emotional topic with our minds made up, but nonetheless we might all learn something. I’m positive I will.
As for reparations, I think this thread demonstrates that the concept is utterly impractical. Forget reparations. There’s not a chance in hell we could even have an intelligent empathic conversation about race in the United States–the instant the subject is broached some white people act like they are being insulted, and anyway, they already know all the answers. It’s a reflex, and impossible to change.
I’m going to go back to reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction”, which is an even more depressing work about how humans are probably causing a mass extinction with climate change. For similar reasons, I’m not optimistic she will be proven wrong.
I’m going to go back to reading Elizabeth Kolbert’s “The Sixth Extinction”, which is an even more depressing work about how humans are probably causing a mass extinction with climate change. For similar reasons, I’m not optimistic she will be proven wrong.
Not to dissuade you, Donald, but why now? At a certain point, have a drink (or a soda) and watch TV.
There are 27% of people in our country who are uncompromising right-wingers. Most of the rest of people can be persuaded. “Reparations” is a word that makes people believe that “white people” whoever they are at this point need to cough up money and pay it to “black people” whoever they are at this point. That’s never going to happen for reasons that I mentioned upthread. Race, as a label and an identity, is becoming way less popular as so many people identify as multiracial.
Instead, if we’re going to talk about compensating people for specific injustices that occurred (as was being attempted in the lawsuits that Coates described), we can do that. Even that is a bit difficult though, because as we found out with Katrina victims who sought compensation from BP (which were similar to “reparations”), proving stuff is difficult (at least a pain), and the resources will never be enough to really be “fair.”
Coates recommends the Conyers hearings as a first step. I would suggest that we all insist on that. It won’t happen in a Republican Congress, so we need to get rid of Republicans. So sad that it comes down to being a loyal Democrat, but it does.
When drugs were being banned, the legislative decision about whether to ban marijuana was driven by the “fact” that it was a drug widely used by blacks.
Similarly, the penalties for crack vs powdered cocaine stem from views by those setting the penalties about the race of those using each.
Part of rejecting “white supremacy” is owning the fact that these things are true.
e wants to blame white supremacy for all of black Americas problems, and all of America should pay money
FFS, that’s not what he says at all.
The closest he came was to mention (not endorse) Ogletree’s proposed remedy, which doesn’t consist of any kind of handover of money.
even more, TNC says:
and
and
so, when Brett says TNC’s is demanding handouts… i know he didn’t actually read what TNC wrote. because money is beside TNC’s point. he’s not asking for it, he’s asking for “the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences”.
people are not reading what TNC wrote. they are, apparently, reading that one inflammatory word in the title and using it as an excuse to tell us what they already think about a whole range of thing, none of which address what TNC actually wrote.
which, is an old response to the word, and one that TNC also wrote about in his piece.
I would urge both Marty and Tex to read this article. It makes many, if not all, of the points Coates is making, but in more neutral social science terms. The conclusions are damning: The effects of white supremacy reverberate through the years and down to the present.
Here is a special quote from the text for Marty:
We find that getting married over the 25-year study period significantly increases the wealth holdings for white families by $75,635 but have no statistically significant impact on African-Americans. Single whites are much more likely to possess positive net worth, most likely due to benefits from substantial family financial assistance, higher paying jobs, and homeownership. Hence, marriages that combine modest wealth profiles seem to move whites past emergency-level savings to opportunities to invest and build wealth. By contrast, marriage among African-Americans typically combines two comparatively low-level wealth portfolios and, unlike white households, does not significantly elevate the family’s wealth. While the number of household wage earners bringing in resources does correlate to higher wealth, the impact of marriage is not statistically significant for blacks and the reality is that most do not marry out of the racial wealth gap.
The most startling data is that african americans appear to be falling behind when it comes to accumulating wealth, a vital marker of “progress”. This is exactly the opposite of what the “let’s not discuss reparations because I say so, and racism is ended” crowd would predict. So again, the burden of proof is on them: They claim racism is “effectively over”. If it’s over, why do we continue to observe these outrageous disparities?
Single mothers doesn’t cut it. Wearing your belt below your hips doesn’t cut it.
To summarize, I shall continue to mock attempts to blame these observed outcomes on “black culture”. And righteously so, because people who bring that bogeyman bring essentially nothing..(following deleted due to mature content and explicit language).
Except in discussing it with Bill Moyers he says that the money would come from his taxes too. I never said he was even consistent with himself, but it’s you choosing which parts you want to read.
Except in discussing it with Bill Moyers he says that the money would come from his taxes too.
I don’t think you’re making the point you think you’re making.
Russell, if he wasn’t talking about reparations, money, then he wouldn’t be talking about where it comes from.
I haven’t waded in much to this cause I don’t think minds are going to changed. That doesn’t mean I think Coates is wrong for discussing this and I’ve learned a lot from him. The Overton window moves both ways.
I do note that the Moyers program begins with a definition of reparations that is something like reparations: the process of making amends. One could argue that the term has to include the phrase necessarily means the payment of money, but if there is a term for making amends that excludes the possibility of paying money, I’d be interested to know what it would be. It doesn’t surprise me that it is constantly cast in terms of money, but it seems that this is not inherent in the word but rather inherent in the way that transactions tend to always come down to money. Marty seeks to try and dismiss THC because he said that the money would come from his taxes as a way to imply that he just wants to pay black folks, but here is the full quote
It’s what the state — the United States, as we should say, of America — first of all owes African-Americans, but not far behind that what it owes itself. You know? Because this is really about our health as a country. And I make that delineation because there are people who, you know, and they would say this, who never held any slaves, who were never voluntarily part of any sort of Jim Crow system, who thought the country should be doing something different the whole time. Nevertheless, we’re all part of this. We’re all part of this. Whatever solutions that eventually come to, will come out of my tax dollars, too, I assure you
Whatever the government does, it will require some money, as Brett is so fond of telling us, and it sounds to me that he’s particularly ruling out ‘handouts’, but is thinking of things that the government can do (increased enforcement of laws, looking at neighborhoods and thinking about increased support, etc). But as long as one takes the opinion that reparations=money out of my pocket, the focus of the discussion will always remain on figures and dollars and cents. I don’t know if these people will eventually be excluded from polite society, just like the people who express extreme racist views in public will, but one (or at least I) can hope.
My bad, I mistook the point you were going for.
Net/net, I’m with cleek, I don’t really think Coates gives a crap if a single check gets cut. Yes, you can find specific statements where he talks about money in the context of reparations, but the overall thrust of his writing is not really about making whitey hand over the $$$$.
To some of McK’s points, based on my reading of stuff Coates has written recently, I don’t think he’s really trying to change many minds, either. I think he has, to some degree, resigned himself to living in a nation and a culture informed by persistent, obstinate racism, both historical and current-day.
My impression is that he doesn’t see that changing in his lifetime, and probably ever.
I think he’s just trying to bear witness to his own experience, and to what he knows and understands of the history.
To my eye, among folks writing about race these days, Coates does more, and more thorough, homework than anybody else.
You might not like what he says, or where he goes with the information he has, but I can’t think of anyone who has engaged the history with a greater openness to go wherever it leads him.
Coates did not start out with the opinions he holds now.
bobbyp, its interesting, you simply declare
“Single mothers doesn’t cut it.” Then ask for proof from others.
The article you quote says “While the number of household wage earners bringing in resources does correlate to higher wealth, the impact of marriage is not statistically significant for blacks and the reality is that most do not marry out of the racial wealth gap.”
That statement is so fraught with inconsistency I won’t bother to read the rest. The simple fact is that multiple wage earners put a dent in the income cap, eventually the wealth gap. As fewer black women marry, they fall behind, not at all surprising. That getting married doesn’t have an immediate positive impact, statistically, is not surprising. GETTING married isn’t really the point. The value is in how, with a little more family income and a fatber, the next generation turns out.
That statement is so fraught with inconsistency I won’t bother to read the rest.
You call this an argument? GETTING MARRIED is precisely the point. It’s the point you raise all the time to explain all things.
It is the shared resources aspect. In your analysis, this is simply waved away. You have totally misrepresented the thrust of the point being made…it is this: If you are a very poor black person, the expectation of this decision (to marry) does not bring with it the “wealth positives” that those who are (for the most part) even poor whites get from it. The expectation is zero.
In other words, it is a coin toss for the poorest of African Americans, regarding the advantages of matrimony. There is, statistically speaking, no wealth building incentive to marry…it will not enhance wealth, unlike their similarly poor white cohorts.
Nonetheless, most black people marry. This is an undeniable fact. They have less wealth than their white counterparts across all income categories. Some “cultural pathology”, what?
You have been asked repeatedly to explain this. You have declined to do so in each and every instance.
(3) it is likely not true that much of the wealth in the US today is built on the exploitation of black people, but it is a handy rhetorical device;
Which appears nowhere in the article.
The only such claim I can find is: “The early American economy was built on slave labor”. Do you really dispute that ?
Either a handy lawyer’s device, or you didn’t read the article that you disparage in such trenchant terms.
That statement is so fraught with inconsistency I won’t bother to read the rest
Establishing something of a pattern, here.
Net/net, I’m with cleek
So am I. The critics of the article, assuming they read it, are grossly misrepresenting what he said.
Lately, Coates has been rather pessimistic regarding any “solution”. He brought up reparations to get the conversation going, but it is clear the critics don’t want to have the conversation to begin with.
They start from the position of “prove my personal blame, I dare you” and go from there to “if you can’t prove my personal blame then you can’t prove anybody’s”.
Which is a non-sequitur.
(4) there is no workable reparations scheme that even approaches fairness;
The very acceptance of the claim would be (as Coates suggests) halfway towards reparation. I’m not sure that I share his complete pessimism as to the possibility of this happening.
In practical terms, the single biggest (but possibly most difficult) thing that you could do ?
Tackle housing segregation – which has never really been attempted by government since Nixon sacked Romney from HUD:
http://www.propublica.org/article/living-apart-how-the-government-betrayed-a-landmark-civil-rights-law
A more realistic aim might be to (again) attempt to attack educational segregation – something that is again moving it he wrong direction:
http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/04/segregation-now/359813/
“… A 2014 study conducted by Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found desegregation’s impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier.
Notably, Rucker also found that black progress did not come at the expense of white Americans—white students in integrated schools did just as well academically as those in segregated schools. Other studies have found that attending integrated schools made white students more likely to later live in integrated neighborhoods and send their own children to racially diverse schools…”
You could start by replacing the means of funding public education through local property taxes, an entirely toxic system.
Perhaps it is just because I’m a model minority, but I glossed over this comment by Brett
Asian-Americans recovered from legal discrimination, and even the Japanese internment, because of culture. Blacks did not, again, because of culture.
Again, a model minority might avoid pointing out how ‘whitesplaining’ it is to use the suffering of one minority to try and score a point on another minority. A model minority might avoid telling you that you are revealing your total cluelessness with this rhetorical gambit, which is essentially if cultures would just be more like you white folks, everything would be fine. And if I weren’t a model minority, I might even hope that you are still around when China replaces the US as number one and hopefully you’ll get told by some Chinese that your culture prevents you from participating completely in society. But being a model minority, I try not to point these things to my betters…
“There’s not a chance in hell we could even have an intelligent emphatic conversation about race in the United States–the instant the subject is broached some white people act like they are being insulted,”
That would be because we’re being insulted.
“so, when Brett says TNC’s is demanding handouts… i know he didn’t actually read what TNC wrote.”
What it means is, I know what the word “reparations” means. Look it up.
If TNC doesn’t want to insult people, if he doesn’t want people thinking he’s demanding a handout, he should stop using the word “reparations”. Assigning some idiosyncratic definition to it won’t stop people from taking offense, if you use a word which by definition accuses them of being guilty of something they damned well know they didn’t do.
Reparations means payments made by a guilty party to the person they wronged. The moment you use the word, you’re accusing somebody, and demanding money from them. And you should expect people who didn’t do anything to feel guilty about to take offense, and secure their wallets.
Culture is the problem here, regardless of how it came about, and while culture persists, that persistence is a function of environment. The plague of single-motherhood created an environment in which culture was very subject to being changed and degraded. Today, we need to create an environment where the culture of poverty will be changed into a culture of achievement and wealth.
I would say, start by abolishing the war on drugs, and getting rid of all excuses for jailing people who haven’t actually harmed anyone. That won’t abolish the disparity in imprisonment rates between blacks and whites, because blacks commit many very real crimes at a disproportionate rate, too, but it will help.
Move on, by changing the welfare system to remove any incentive for parents to not marry.
One does not just inherit culture from one’s parents, but also one’s neighbors, and how are you to be raised into a culture of employment, if you live somewhere few people have jobs? Require, and provide assistance, to move people who go on public assistance to places where there are jobs available. Rather than paying them to stay where they won’t find work. Local governments will scream about this, ignore them. Better to create ghost towns than ghettos.
Next, it teaches a bad lesson to give people assistance without requiring them to work. Revive the CCC, establish the principle that nobody gets money without working for it.
That’s a start. But forget “reparations”.
What it means is, I know what the word “reparations” means. Look it up.
Yet again, Brett’s vocabulary skills are shown to be lacking.
reparation
/rɛpəˈreɪʃ(ə)n/noun
the action of making amends for a wrong one has done, by providing payment or other assistance to those who have been wronged.
“for a wrong one has done”
I’m not the one with vocabulary skill issues here. If it’s not a wrong YOU did, it’s not “reparations”, so a demand for reparations is always an accusation.
And “other assistance” is not going to be free.
The guilty party here is the US of A. As a shareholder in that entity folk will benefit from its good deeds and will suffer from its wrongs. Love it or leave it.
Assigning some idiosyncratic definition to it won’t stop people from taking offense, if you use a word which by definition accuses them of being guilty of something they damned well know they didn’t do.
he’s not doing that.
in a nutshell, “The Case For Reparations” is that actually sitting down and doing the math could lead to the kind of reckoning and acknowledgement that could make it clear to all parties exactly how whites have benefited on the backs of blacks, for four hundred years.
What it means is, I know what the word “reparations” means.
it means you’re doing exactly what i said you are and what TNC predicted you would: you’re using the word as an excuse to get your back up without actually reading what he wrote.
“Nonetheless, most black people marry. This is an undeniable fact”
OR about 40%, which is close to most.
Alternatively, actually sitting down and doing the math could lead to discovering that all the wealth created by slaves was burnt up in the Civil war, and that modern America’s wealth has precisely nothing to do with the wrongs long ago committed.
Oh, and I’m 55, not 400.
In general, the “if they read the article” question is pretty tiresome. I, for one, dint agree with your(bobby, Nigel, whoever) reading of the article. What’s more,i don’t find TNC to be the oracle of Baltimore. He USA magazine writer using it as a soapbox for pretty spontaneously changing, and ill supported positions.
So *I* would prefer that you just discuss the topic, some of your points are interesting, rather than just disparage anyone who takes the other side.
*is a* not USA, interesting spell check choice
reparation (n.)
late 14c., “reconciliation,” from Old French reparacion and directly from Late Latin reparationem (nominative reparatio) “act of repairing, restoration,” noun of action from past participle stem of Latin reparare “restore, repair” (see repair (v.1)). Meaning “act of repairing or mending” is attested from c.1400. Reparations “compensation for war damaged owed by the aggressor” is attested from 1921, with reference to Germany, from French réparations (1919).
“You have been asked repeatedly to explain this. You have declined to do so in each and every instance”
First, I haven’t been asked repeatedly, second you have presented no facts the there is inequality within income groups and, last, why would you assume that any 11% slice of the population would match the overall population? The factors for blacks make it less likely. Over half live in the Deep South where incomes are substantially less across the board, outside the south the vast majority live in the inner city which is, in general, the most expensive place to live aside from low income housing, there is no mention that broad based school integration failed in large part because blacks and whites objected to bussing, both vocally preferring neighborhood schools, or that spending on inner city schools has tripled and even anecdotally you have to compare per student expenditures to the very wealthiest districts to find much disparity. I can go on, but that isn’t the topic.
“by the aggressor”
Again, I’m not the aggressor, so I can’t pay reparations. That’s why so many people object to any talk of “reparations”: The concept is inextricably tied up with guilt, and most people don’t feel guilty about things they didn’t do.
Alternatively, actually sitting down and doing the math could lead to discovering that all the wealth created by slaves was burnt up in the Civil war,
if you’d read the article, you’d know that the institutionalized abuses that have kept blacks from progressing continue to this very day. they didn’t stop in 1870, or 1940, or 1965. they are ongoing.
In general, the “if they read the article” question is pretty tiresome.
well, if y’all would quit arguing against points that have nothing to do with the article, or which are 180deg opposed to what the article actually says, then maybe i’d stop assuming you hadn’t actually read it.
Brett, that definition kicks in at 1921 and is related to WWI. You do know how to read etymologies, don’t you?
…and most people don’t feel guilty about things they didn’t do.
I know you don’t think you’ve benefited in any way from the institutional, social and economic disenfranchisement of blacks in this country, Brett, so we’ll have to disagree on that point. But many people are prone to feeling guilty about benefiting from harm to others, whether they caused that harm or not. Some people are even prone to wanting to redress harm to others, regardless of having benfited from that harm or not.
All of this should be irrelevant to you, though, since you think the problems black people have today stem from their inferior culture. Am I understanding you correctly on that point?
OR about 40%, which is close to most.
A quote from the link below:
“Toldson and Marks found that 75 percent of black women marry before they turn age 35 after examining census data from 2005 to 2009. Moreover, black women in small towns have higher marriage rates than white women in urban centers such as New York and Los Angeles, Toldson remarked in the New York Times.”
http://racerelations.about.com/od/diversitymatters/a/Four-Myths-About-Black-Marriage.htm
First, I haven’t been asked repeatedly..
Yes, you have. I have provided links to the data. Please to review my diatribes above.
Bobbyp, I find the statistics conflicting, but here from 1/1/2014 the percent of black women married is 26%. So either a lot of divorces or the 2009 data is dated.
http://statisticbrain.com/marriage-statistics
@Brett
“There’s not a chance in hell we could even have an intelligent emphatic conversation about race in the United States–the instant the subject is broached some white people act like they are being insulted,”
That would be because we’re being insulted.
Perhaps you need to find a different set of acquaintances. Because I have been in quite a number of conversations about race in which nobody was insulted. (Also some which descended into insult, of course. But they are the minority.)
If every serious conversation that you have experienced on the subject led you to feel that you (and/or white people generally) were being insulted, then either:
a) you have a very different set of people you have these conversations with, or
b) you are feeling insulted by pretty much anything which touches on the subject.
So, conversations exclusively with insulting people or hypersensitivity — which is it?
For anyone who may doubt that “white” includes a lot of people whose race is definitely not Caucasian, consider the following”
“SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — In a groundbreaking disclosure, Google revealed how very white and male its workforce is — just 2 percent of its Googlers are black, 3 percent are Hispanic, and 30 percent are women.”
Notice that this sentence completely ignores (and groups in with “white”) the substantial percentage of Google’s employees who are of Asian origin. I don’t know if this was done in Google’s report, or if the reporter writing the story did it. But I will be surprised if anyone bothers to issue a correction.
CNN says 30% of Teh Googlers are Asian.
First, just want to recognize that Brett and Marty make some reasonable points in, respectively, their 6:37 and 8:41 comments.
Some additional data points.
The rate – the number per 1,000 individuals – of out of wedlock births among blacks has declined. The *percentage* has risen because the rate of in-wedlock births among blacks has declined by more.
Ratios are funny things, they always require you to ask, “compared to what?” in order to understand what they signify.
The rate of out of wedlock births for whites, in comparison, have gone up.
Sorry, no cite, I made a comment earlier, in another thread, which includes the numbers from either Census or the CDC, I forget which. If you don’t believe me, you can find the numbers there.
A point often overlooked in discussing marital rates among blacks vs others is the sheer number – absolute numbers, and percent of the population – of black men who are in jail.
Brett alludes to this, but ascribes it purely to blacks doing more crimes. That doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.
there is no mention that broad based school integration failed in large part because blacks and whites objected to bussing, both vocally preferring neighborhood schools
Cite ?
From what I can see, it started to fail because the courts stopped enforcing it.
Against your assertion, I would ask where else in the world is there gerrymandering of school districts on racial grounds ?
What I find lacking in the argument that problems in the black community are due to “black culture” is that they are, basically, tautological.
Oh, black people are poor, and otherwise disadvantaged, because their family structure is weak, and they live in places where there’s no jobs or industrial base, and their marital rates are low because so many of the men are in jail, or have substance abuse issues, or have no jobs or prospects of legal work?
Do tell.
Why the hell are *all of those things true*. Why is “black culture” what it is?
If you think it’s a function of having black or brown skin, as opposed to how all of the rest of us react to people having black or brown skin, you’re not paying very good attention.
Now that white people, after a generation or two of non-professional workers being screwed over, are starting to show the same social disorders that folks have used to beat black and brown people over the head for lo these many years, even unreconstructed racists like Charles freaking “Bell Curve” Murray are figuring out that *it ain’t about the skin color*.
Cultures are, to a large degree, adaptations to circumstance.
The question is why the circumstances are what they are.
“marital rates are low because so many of the men are in jail,”
I always love this one, when I talk to black women the answer to this is because its hard to find a good black man to marry. Of course that’s completely anecdotal, unlike the statistical analysis of there are a lot of black guys in jail….
And, in general, there is a move toward more women just not caring about being married, probably because a good white man is also hard to find.
The fact that the rise in the numbers of single parent families of all races corresponds with the rise in poverty for all races somehow doesn’t prove it wasn’t a problem for black families to me.
Bobbyp, I find the statistics conflicting, but here from 1/1/2014 the percent of black women married is 26%. So either a lot of divorces or the 2009 data is dated.
Or there are a lot of black women either under the age of 35, divorced, or widowed. In fact, the number of black women under 35 according to the 2000 census, was 10,006,534. The number over 35 was 8,186,471.
(Of course, the idea that marriage reduces poverty, rather than that wealthier people tend to get married, is also fallacious.)
“Ratios are funny things, they always require you to ask, “compared to what?” in order to understand what they signify.”
The ratio is what’s important here, because the next generation consists 100% of the people who actually got born. It’s size may vary with the absolute numbers, but it’s composition varies with the ratios.
“Brett alludes to this, but ascribes it purely to blacks doing more crimes. That doesn’t begin to tell the whole story.”
Actually, per the victimization surveys, it does a pretty good job of telling the story. Blacks are doing time at a higher rate, because they’re committing crime at a higher rate. And, in as much as most of that crime is committed against their fellow blacks, it would be racist to NOT jail them in response to this.
The fact that the rise in the numbers of single parent families of all races corresponds with the rise in poverty for all races somehow doesn’t prove it wasn’t a problem for black families to me.
I’m not hearing anyone say it wasn’t a problem.
What *I* am saying is that it begs the question.
Why is it that black family structure is, and/or has been, weak?
the next generation consists 100% of the people who actually got born.
You are completely correct.
And if what we’re concerned about is the people who actually got born, and we believe that being born out of wedlock is Not A Good Thing, then fewer children born out of wedlock would seem to be the relevant piece of information.
Not the percentage, but the number.
Unless there’s some weird mojo whereby the number of children born in wedlock improves the fate of those born outside of it.
You’re an engineer, right?
Actually, per the victimization surveys, it does a pretty good job of telling the story.
No, not really.
Here is some meat to chew on.
What I find lacking in the argument that problems in the black community are due to “black culture” is that they are, basically, tautological.
Oh, black people are poor, and otherwise disadvantaged, because their family structure is weak, and they live in places where there’s no jobs or industrial base, and their marital rates are low because so many of the men are in jail, or have substance abuse issues, or have no jobs or prospects of legal work?
Do tell.
Why the hell are *all of those things true*. Why is “black culture” what it is?
HELLO!!! (I didn’t want to write, “What russell said” yet again.)
doing time implies conviction.
are conviction rates equal? no.
do conviction rates depend on the color of the accused? and do conviction rates depend on the racial mix of the jury? yes.
do sentence lengths depend on race? yes
looks like there’s a culture of convicting black defendants more frequently and to longer sentences than white defendants.
i’m sure it’s because black people refuse to take responsibility for something.
i’m sure it’s because black people refuse to take responsibility for something.
If black people didn’t tend to be poor, they could afford better lawyers. Duh…
@Marty
And, in general, there is a move toward more women just not caring about being married, probably because a good white man is also hard to find.
This would be more interesting if there was some data (both for black women and white women) as to what they mean by “a good man.” My suspicion is that it amounts to “a man who would put in the effort to support and take care of his family.” In short, a man who is responsible. Which puts rather a different perspective on things.
Of course, it might be that these women have something else in mind. But I’d like to see some evidence for that.
“In short, a man who is responsible.”
I’m pretty certain this definition is one of many. It would be a great poll.
More partisan, but easier to read and digest.
And, with links!!
I’m at the point where I have to step back from the fine details of this or that statistic or whatever and say that, when you start with slavery, move on to Jim Crow and the KKK, continue on to housing discrimination, disparities in treatment under the criminal justice system, discrimination in employment, access to quality education and healthcare – even healthy food – not to mention the petty day-to-day BS black people in particular put up with as a matter or course, how is it that we’re having the conversation we’re having?
How is it that what should be the obvious problems all these things have caused and continute to cause are argued to be problems of culture, which came from who-knows-where? Or that it’s simply a failure of black people in America to overcome things done long ago by people long dead?
I can certainly understand arguing over the best way to deal with past and present racism, but I can’t understand the denial of it.
Just looking at the situations in the TNC piece, discussed in detail and well documented, though not exhaustive of the discrimination blacks have faced in this country, it’s really fncking hard for me to understand how intelligent people can simply wave it away.
Is it all made up? Is there really nothing to all of it? Is he a really good liar? Is the historical documentation that backs his piece up falsified? Does he twist the facts in such a way that it’s impossible to actually disprove what he says, so there’s no point in trying?
Is it a bias stemming from defensiveness about white guilt that allows people to say it’s just black culture, or that TNC is overrated or just on his soapbox?
The whole thing is strange to me.
it’s strange to me too. and it’s interesting that the split between those who see a problem and those who adamantly refuse to see a problem is the typical ObWi split.
why on earth would this be a partisan issue?
“Is it a bias stemming from defensiveness about white guilt that allows people to say it’s just black culture, or that TNC is overrated or just on his soapbox?”
It is not bias, nor is it questioning the building blocks of the case he is trying to make. It is questioning whether those blocks build the case. We all know that all of those things happened. Well, most of them. The question is whether all of the Great Society programs that have covered everything from urban education to food stamps to welfare to low income housing to whatever, have been America’s attempt to do exactly what he is talking about. Hundreds of billions of dollars, with sketchy results. So I believe he has the question backwards, why hasn’t reparations worked?
Eventually people like Coates need to ask themselves why things haven’t changed as much as we would like, and it is not due to America, as a country, trying. Two generations, barely even a good test.
But, somehow each anecdote of racism today is interpreted as a marker for how little life has really changed for black people.
Which is the real point of contention.
Then you devolve into stats and self segregation and culture.
why hasn’t reparations worked?
An excellent question.
Eventually people like Coates need to ask themselves why things haven’t changed as much as we would like
And not just Coates.
why on earth would this be a partisan issue?
Probably because one side sees everything as a partisan issue. That is, if anyone who is even loosely associated with the Democrats raises an issue, not only must it be reflexively opposed. but any evidence that there is even a problem must be denied.
Clearly this is not true of all Republicans. But it is true of enough of us that our politicians feel compelled to act like they see the world thru the same lenses. Doesn’t matter if the subject is race or climate or economics or anything else. Facts cannot be allowed to interfere with absolute refusal to accept anything that might even maybe reflect a different perspective.
none of the great society programs were ever attempts at reparation. all of those programs you talk about helped and continue to help many more white people than they do african-americans. many of the antipoverty measures passed by congress were deliberately restricted in ways detrimental to african-americans. if you’re too proud, scared, ignorant of history, or racist to admit what damage white society and white culture has done and continues to do to keep african-americans downtrodden that’s your lookout but don’t expect me to have your back on the issues. any white person who thinks they’ve never benefited from the oppression of african-americans is either lying to themselves or a resident of another country.
Following up on an earlier sideline (and it’s only that; I’m really not trying to derail the main discussion), some more thoughts, not mine, about How Asians Became White
“if you’re too proud, scared, ignorant of history, or racist to admit what damage white society and white culture has done and continues to do to keep african-americans downtrodden that’s your lookout but don’t expect me to have your back on the issues. ”
So lets be clear, I don’t want to discuss anything with you.
Eventually people like Coates need to ask themselves why things haven’t changed as much as we would like…
My opinion: That is precisely the thrust of his entire oeuvre. The problem you seem to have is he keeps coming back to a cause that you appear to deny: Ongoing white supremacy.
Please also be aware that the sums spent on the War on Poverty, etc., were aimed at poor whites also. So I would ask you to do a couple of calculations:
(1.) Add up all that money specifically targeted to African Americans (say 50% of those “hundreds of billions” just to pick a number)and divide that by total federal spending since 1964. I bet you would be surprised how small that % is. All those “hundreds of billions” have to be put in context.
and…
(2.) Add up all the benefits the rich have received since 1963 (I’m cherry picking to include the Kennedy tax cuts) in the form of tax reductions (this is spelled H.E.L.P. for rich people). Compare that to all those “hundreds of billions”. Tell me which number is larger.
Thx.
On black female marriage rates…..
1. A snapshot at any given instance of time will give you a low % of black females currently in the state of grace known as marriage (the full Marty).
2. A longitudinal study done over time shows that most black females give it a go at some point in their life (the fully bobbyp).
There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. We are cursed by the latter.
Proposition 1: If we gave all the wealth in this country to African americans, white supremacy would end tomorrow.
Discuss.
My opinion: That is precisely the thrust of his entire oeuvre.
Yes, mine as well.
The problem you seem to have is he keeps coming back to a cause that you appear to deny: Ongoing white supremacy.
It may be that the phrase “white supremacy” is a sticking point.
That would be understandable. It’s an ugly phrase, with an ugly history. Who wants to put their hand up and say “hell yeah, I’m down with white supremacy”?
Personally, I find it sufficient to say that black and brown people tend to be treated differently than other folks, still, by a really wide range of public and private institutions.
Often enough, and consistently enough, and to enough of a degree, that it makes a significant difference in their lives, when compared with the lives of the rest of us.
Schools, banks, courts, police. Insurance companies, restaurants, hiring managers, retail store owners. Cab drivers, for crap’s sake.
Take your pick.
The experience of being black or brown in this country is not the same as being not black or brown.
And the reason for that is, by far, not down, solely or even primarily, to what black or brown people do or say. Not how they dress, or how they talk, or how they style their hair.
It’s not on them. Not completely, not even mostly. In lots and lots and lots of cases, not at all.
It’s a different world for black and brown people, to their disadvantage and harm, and they didn’t make it that way.
To my ear, that is the point Coates is trying to get across, and I find myself in agreement with him.
The case for reparations is not about cutting a check, it’s about trying to get folks to recognize and acknowledge that simple fact.
Who wants to put their hand up and say “hell yeah, I’m down with white supremacy”?
Besides Pat Buchanan, and Charles Murray, and our pal Andrew Sullivan, I mean.
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Proposition 1: If we gave all the wealth in this country to African americans, white supremacy would end tomorrow.
Discuss.
Well, if what you mean is “If we white Americans gave all the wealth in this country to African americans voluntarily, white supremacy would end tomorrow.” Then yes, that would generally be true.
But if you mean it to happen via government edict, or magically, or anything other than vountarily? No. What would happen is a lot of violence aimed at reintroducing white supremace . . . and at a level not seen since the pre-Civil War South. Including violence by a lot of people who don’t embrace white supremacy, but would seriously resent so draconian a change.
What is this white supremacy of which you speak? Are you talking about an attitude on the part of some people? Or a literal supremacy by the melanin deficient hordes? If the later, there’s hasn’t been a real supremacy by any particular group of people in the US in a long time. White advantage? Okay. But, then, people are born with all kinds of advantages and disadvantages. All too many of them artificial. I hear blondes have more fun.
I can’t think of a single person who either ignores, denies, or fails to recognize the correlation between lack of education, single parenthood, and poverty.
The question is why some folks are more likely to come up in single parent homes, with less education, than others. Among other things.
I’m usually not a big fan of statistics because they are so easily manipulated. Marriage and illegitimacy rates, I think, are part of census data going back decades. Census data, to me, seems fairly reliable but I am prepared to be shown otherwise. Comparing the 50’s, very early 60’s data to a trend starting in the 60’s and continuing to the present is not encouraging, and I don’t think White Supremacy is the answer.
I would urge both Marty and Tex to read this article. It makes many, if not all, of the points Coates is making, but in more neutral social science terms. The conclusions are damning: The effects of white supremacy reverberate through the years and down to the present.
Read it, didn’t think much of it. It simply asserts, for instance, that marriage is irrelevant to wealth accumulation. It posits a college degree as responsible for five percent of the delta in relative black/white wealth accumulation. Five percent, seriously?
We can both find articles, full of statistics–or which seem to be full of statistics–that support pretty much any view, within reason, one might want to take.
If someone has a set of poverty/race stats that compare like to like and don’t beg a million questions, I’d like to see it. I’d like to see how one meaningfully compares useful college degrees or acquired-over-time trades or other skills to being a high school drop out with no skills.
Punch line: stay in school, don’t get pregnant, get a worthwhile degree, show up to work, do a good job and life will be a lot better than if you quit school, get pregnant and work at McDonald’s.
Raise children to respect school, respect teachers, to work hard and to stay focused, and you will get a better result than doing the opposite.
I spent a full day, this past Tuesday, doing a postmortem on a fairly big case we tried for four weeks ending last Friday. Seated to my immediate left was a retired Texas Supreme Court justice whose hourly rate is at least three times my hourly rate and who is African American. Seated down the table was the VP-General Counsel of my client, also African American. I know the retired Supreme Court justice outearns me by a considerable margin and I make a pretty good living. Good for him–he went to a better law school, a better undergraduate school and spent 15 years on the bench during which time I outearned him. He put in his time and his reaping the rewards.
He also won two statewide elections, as a Republican. In Texas, the land of White Supremacy, if I am reading TNC correctly.
Compare like to like. An African American college graduate with a degree in Black Studies isn’t going to make what any engineering graduate makes. Or any accounting or finance grad. Not going to happen.
A degree in education gets you a teaching job. Rewarding, yes, but not conducive to significant advancement over the years and consistent six figure earnings.
As for the conversation that TNC and many here want to have, I repeat: it isn’t a conversation, it’s a lecture. The punch line is a foregone conclusion. And anyone who doesn’t accept that foregone conclusion falls into one or more unsavory categories.
Finally, TP, when I argue to a jury, I make pretty damn sure I don’t do several things: (1) stray from a reasonable interpretation of the evidence, (2) insult their intelligence, (3) presume their goodwill and (4) most importantly, I do the opposite of lecture.
I want to win. You win in front of 12 strangers by using evidence and reason.
I haven’t tried a case in front of a non-diverse jury in forever. I almost always represent a large or large’ish institution. In this instance it was an insurance association–not the most sympathetic operation in the world to defend.
By not generalizing, by looking past race and seeing the individual, I pick my juries based on who I think will hear the evidence fairly (if my client is going to lose on a fair reading of the the evidence, a not uncommon situation, I tell the client and it usually settles–or loses).
It may be that the phrase “white supremacy” is a sticking point.
Could be. Coates is not that coy: “Obama-era progressives view white supremacy as something awful that happened in the past and the historical vestiges of which still afflict black people today. They believe we need policies—though not race-specific policies—that address the affliction. I view white supremacy as one of the central organizing forces in American life, whose vestiges and practices afflicted black people in the past, continue to afflict black people today, and will likely afflict black people until this country passes into the dust.”
A bit depressing, that.
Well, if what you mean is “If we white Americans gave all the wealth in this country to African americans voluntarily, white supremacy would end tomorrow.” Then yes, that would generally be true.
Precisely. Then the question becomes one of just how much do we give. I would further assert that, as a group, honestly admitting that such a measure would be socially beneficial would do much good in and of itself.
Tex: Read it, didn’t think much of it. It simply asserts, for instance, that marriage is irrelevant to wealth accumulation.
I do not believe so. Please cite the part of the study that said that.
It posits a college degree as responsible for five percent of the delta in relative black/white wealth accumulation.
Because they found other factors had greater weight. What have the studies supporting your position found?
Oh, that’s right, you don’t “believe” in statistics. Seriously?
“I am sure'” you write, “We can both find articles.” I couldn’t agree more.
Perhaps you should find one…just one.
McTX: I do the opposite of lecture.
I don’t know what “the opposite of lecture” is, McKinney, but maybe I’m unfamiliar with Texas trial procedure. Do jurors get to talk back to you when you’re addressing them?
You can repeat all you like that the race debate “isn’t a conversation; it’s a lecture”, but you risk sounding like a whiny minority, if you’ll pardon the expression.
You complain about “the conversation that TNC and many here want to have” because it has a “foregone conclusion”. I suppose you say so because you feel that your’s would be the minority point of view in such a conversation. You seem to equate being in the minority with being “lectured” to, and even looked down upon.
One wonders whether minorities other than middle-aged white married guys ever feel like that.
–TP
We are discussing what he said in the Atlantic article, not what you think you know or believe about him. I’m reading what he wrote today, I listened to the Moyer interview, I read why he thinks differently today than he did before. He wants to blame white supremacy for all of black Americas problems, and all of America should pay money, to someone, to make it better”
We are discussing his views, which you can find on his blog. You can go back a few months and find posts about black culture, pathology, etc… You can find him being self-critical about the time he nearly got into a fist fight.
Yes, TNC thinks white supremacy is at the root of black America’s problems. But no, you can’t conclude from this that he thinks personal responsibility is unimportant. He doesn’t think personal irresponsibility is the main reason for the problems of black America and he is sick of how people use the personal irresponsibility argument to gloss over the racist policies and attitudes that have held blacks back. That’s what confuses you, or rather, that’s what you latch onto so you can dismiss everything he says. He also points out that on the whole, black Americans have shown amazing levels of personal responsibility and grit and gumption and because of white supremacy it hasn’t gotten them nearly as far as it should have. Not every single person and not all the time, but on average. He is also saying that the tough guy attitudes that some black men display are a survival mechanism for living in violent neighborhoods, but yes, this attitude is wildly inappropriate outside of those circumstances. Again, he uses himself as an example.
You (Marty) and Brett and MckT all seem to take TNC’s views as a personal insult. What he says about America and its treatment of blacks is like a slap in all your faces. McK claims to want a dialogue and is outraged that Coates wants to lecture him, when it is obvious that McK has his own mind completely made up.
So I guess we can conclude from all this that slavery doesn’t matter, Jim Crow doesn’t matter, governmental policies that discriminated against blacks don’t matter, sleazy real estate practices don’t matter, the segregation that resulted doesn’t matter, unequal treatment in the legal system doesn’t matter and really, the only thing that does matter is that blacks stop trying to make white people feel guilty. It’s very unkind and they feel oppressed. I get that sense every time this subject comes up.
Not sure if someone has linked to this article yet–TNC links it in his most recent blog post. It’s about housing discrimination and there are a few tentative suggestions on how reparations might work in this case. At the end the authors suggest that a race blind policy might be designed that would accomplish the desired goal of closing the white/black wealth gap.
link
Of course, since none of this has anything to do with the personal failings of black people, the alleged discriminatory practices probably didn’t happen and nothing needs to be rectified.
“Personally, I find it sufficient to say that black and brown people tend to be treated differently than other folks, still, by a really wide range of public and private institutions.”
I find it offensive when similarly situated black and brown people, or people with eye folds, or what have you, get treated differently from other similarly situated people. Blowing off or just assuming that “similarly situated” is remarkably common. It is, IMO, doing almost all of the work of proving TNC’s “white supremacy”. It’s doing almost all of the work here. To the point where noticing that blacks and whites are NOT similarly situated in proportionate numbers is taken as proof that you’re a racist. Poor Charles Murray, condemned as a white supremacist for just going where the data led.
It is widely understood that Asian-Americans do better than whites in academic settings. To the point where they are the main victims of academic affirmative action programs, often explicitly. “If we admitted just on merit, nobody but Asians would go to college!” you’ll hear, by people who aren’t the least ashamed to say it.
Do we live in a nation ruled by Asian supremacists? And, if not, how does whites doing better than blacks establish white supremacy?
How DID Asians go from a despised minority group subject to legal discrimination, to a better than white status? By whites loving them more than themselves? I doubt it. By getting handouts and preferences? Certainly not.
But that’s the real question: What causes the rise and fall of different ethnic groups, even in the teeth of discrimination, and is there a more successful strategy that blacks could adopt, than the one they’re fixated on now?
Sigh. One more time. Donald, I don’t take anything TNC says personally. I am not impressed by his article. I don’t think he makes a very good case for monetary reparations in the article that was cited in the post. Since I don’t think he is a very interesting writer, I have little interest in “going back and reading his blog” to decipher what he “meant”. Half the people here say he isn’t “really” for monetary reparations, but then you point out that he even more recently linked to another article all about monetary reparations, so I think my read was accurate.
Whats more, as a senior editor at the Atlantic, I’m not sure he didn’t write it for circulation value. Interesting to see those views numbers.
It is widely understood that Asian-Americans do better than whites in academic settings.
That is simply not true.
…is there a more successful strategy that blacks could adopt, than the one they’re fixated on now?
I’m not sure who “they” are. We are discussing one article by one author. However the whole tenor of this remark presumes that what you believe would be a “successful” strategy for blacks (mind your p’s and q’s, study and work hard, yadda, yadda…)has not and is not being tried.
Trust me on this, it has been and is currently being tried by millions of hard working people.
Coates provided the “memo ” on his blog that he wrote to his editors pitching the reparations article, which he thought of as part of a continuing reconsideration of the issue on his part, not a circulation boost.
Had the latter been his motive, he could have suggested a nude centerfold of Jesse Jackson receiving his first reparations payment.
No doubt his previous pieces rejecting reparations caused the Atlantic’s circulation to dive into the dumper, except for conservative pundits who read them and wrote their own articles touting Coates’ previous liberal apostasy as a bid to juke their own flagging circulations.
I demand reparations to Coates for this dastardly calumny thrown out in the heat of argument solely to draw eyeballs to OBWI.
Are there no Nat Turners or John Browns to seek redress for such injustice, I ask you?
Smiley faced emoticons wear hoods and ride betorched through the night to escape my wrath.
“Had the latter been his motive, he could have suggested a nude centerfold of Jesse Jackson receiving his first reparations payment.”
I question the increased circulation value of this mental image.
tsk, tsk, Marty. Do you really doubt that women would be interested in a nude centerfold? How . . . sexist. 😉
(OK, Mr Jackson might not be the the ideal model for such a centerfold. But in general….)
Even if Asians did do better academically than any other ethnic group in the US, would that, in and of itself, constitute general Asian-American supremacy?
I think McKinney and Brett need to debate the outcomes of Black Americans. McKinney has examples of how well they’re doing, so maybe Brett’s wrong about the inferiority of their culture.
More seriously, I do wish the assumed mutual exclusivity between racism being a serious problem and personal responsibility being important would just go away, to echo Donald Johnson’s earlier comment.
I see no one arguing here that personal responsibility doesn’t matter because of racism – though I do remain cautious about the model-minority imposition when acknowledging personal responsibility as something of importance. The two need not be conflated.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Overton window works. Brett comes here with his usually racist tripe. Marty expresses offense that he’s getting lumped in with Brett, but then goes with the same ‘treatment of Asian-Americans prove that there is no racism” trope. McT, late to the party, tells us that he knows African Americans who have done well and explains that he doesn’t like being ‘lectured to’. There will be no examination of Brett using the internment of Japanese-Americans to prove that blacks are just not culturally suited for success, and Marty will recycle myths about Asian-Americans (a remarkably flexible category that includes Japanese, Chinese (mainland, Taiwan, hong kong and expat?), Korean, Pilipino, Vietnamese, Lao, Hmong, Burmese, Thai, etc etc) while McT tut tuts about how statistics never compare like to like. Never any examination of Marty or Brett’s propositions. Cause they aren’t lecturing to McT, they’ve got his back.
I’m curious if you can quote one place I even discuss Asian Americans?
Sorry Marty, you are right, you posted right under Brett’s tripe and my eye caught your name. But my point still stands, extremism in defense your position never seem to be a vice.
The argument from Brett, Marty, and McK appears to be:
The reason blacks are at a disadvantage nowadays is because they just don’t have their sh*t together.
They don’t get married, they don’t have enough self-discipline, they don’t study hard enough in school, they don’t have good work habits.
If they find themselves at a disadvantage in American society, it’s on them.
And look, we’ve already done a lot for them. Civil rights laws, subsidized housing, food stamps, affirmative action, the whole nine yards.
How much can we be expected to do?
Add in a dollop of “Hey, I didn’t discriminate against anyone, get off my back! You’re insulting me!”.
Add a pinch of “Why can’t blacks be like Asians?”.
Correct me if I’m misinterpreting the arguments.
Does anyone here think that black and brown people, in the United States of America, today, are treated the same as people who aren’t black and brown?
Feel free to make whatever adjustments you want so that we are comparing “like to like”.
Compare black unemployed teenagers to white unemployed teenagers.
Compare black brain surgeons to white brain surgeons.
Compare black cops and firemen to white cops and firemen.
Compare black retired state Supreme Court Justices to white retired state Supreme Court Justices.
Pick any category you like.
Are they treated the same? Are they afforded the same respect, the same opportunities, the same standing and treatment from public and private institutions?
Either they are or they aren’t.
If you think they are, you’re not living in the same world I am.
“Does anyone here think that black and brown people, in the United States of America, today, are treated the same as people who aren’t black and brown?”
Of course not. For one thing, people who aren’t black and brown don’t get racial preferences in hiring and college admissions.
If New Haven holds examinations for promoting firefighters, and no Asians get promoted, they don’t scrap the test.
Nobody sweats it if merit based hiring results in 78% of NBA players being black. You don’t get demands for an NBA that “looks like America”. That only happens if the disparities run the other way.
So, no, I’d say they’re not treated the same. They’re getting special preferences.
russell, the one I like that I saw today is “compared to whites with a criminal record, equally qualified blacks with no criminal record were still less likely to get a job interview.” (emphasis added) And unemployment among recent black graduates with STEM degrees is more than double (~15%) that of white STEM graduates (~6%).
Sure, that means that there are lots of blacks with STEM degrees out there who are getting interviewed and getting hired. Brett et al. are right about that much. But it also means that discrimination is still with us.
They’re getting special preferences.
you’re such a fncking troll
@russell–this, and more so.
aspects of this thread have led me to speak intemperately but the willful blindness or obtusity of some of the voices herein have been remarkably frustrating. in my own life i have seen with my own eyes and ears the effect of white racist society on the fortunes of african-americans. from my earliest experiences seeing the difference between the “colored” waiting room at the clinic in my hometown which stayed in existence until 1969 and the whites’ waiting room or the whites only restroom at the county fairground which stayed in existence until 1971 and the other restroom off in the woods adjacent to the fairground. the way my african-american classmates received harsher and more frequent discipline than my white classmates, even for offenses that occurred simultaneously. the way the teachers deal with my biracial grandchildren. the way they talk down to my daughter-in-law when she attends a parent conference and the respect they show my son when he is the one to attend. all the different humiliations, slights, and assumptions african-americans have been and continue to be confronted with day after day, year after year seems not to matter or even exist to some of the commenters here. it’s hard to work towards a solution when a substantial number cannot even admit to seeing the problem.
So, no, I’d say they’re not treated the same. They’re getting special preferences.
In a few unusual circumstances. The reason you can so readily point them out is that they make the news, because they are unusual. Do you really think the examples you raise prove something as a general matter?
The NBA? Seriously? What percentage of the Black population in America plays for the NBA, Brett?
And your first example regarding hiring and college admissions ignores the socially built-in preferences that white people get with or without it being a matter of any official policy. Of course, those things are so baked in to the cake that you don’t even notice them. But that’s privilege for you.
Russell,
I don’t think black people are treated the same anywhere. There are both public and private institutions that treat them better, others worse. One of my subjects I never discuss is racism, so everything here has been a huge exception. Why don’t I? Because most of what you said in your last comment is true but clearly insufficient to define the problems or, more important, recognize where we are in solving them. There are urban problems, rural problems, education problems that exacerbate employment problems, housing problems, health care problems and hunger problems. Almost all of these have improved in the last two generations. We should focus on making them improve each generation, yet, we now have the problem that a whole American generation is worse off than the previous one.
So I think that America needs to focus on fixing that, which helps everyone. I think we should particularly work on helping the 60 million poor people, I think that’s the optimum help we can give the 13million black poor people. And no, I am not willing to say we should somehow care more about the black poor. I am saying we need to continue to improve our public and private institutions to achieve color blindness. It has been two generations since the Civil Rights Act, the first post welfare generation is now raising children. There are tons of success stories, lots of still not good stories. There are factors that make it hard to compare and measure, the concentration of blacks geographically skews statistics. I simply was not convinced by TNC that a sweeping rehash of history and a contentious reparations discussion moves the country forward faster, it would not.
Of course not. For one thing, people who aren’t black and brown don’t get racial preferences in hiring and college admissions.
George W. Bush is incredibly not black. “Preferences” helped him get into Andover and Yale, possibly in place of a better-qualified black kid. “Preferences” made him money in his oil and baseball ventures. “Those were not racial preferences,” I hear you cry. And you’re right: they were even more insidious.
If New Haven holds examinations for promoting firefighters, and no Asians get promoted, they don’t scrap the test.
If the Asian population of New Haven were 30% and the Black population 1% then you might have a point.
Nobody sweats it if merit based hiring results in 78% of NBA players being black. You don’t get demands for an NBA that “looks like America”. That only happens if the disparities run the other way.
Nobody sweats the NHL being lily-white either. Nobody I know of bemoans the under-representation of Asians in the NFL. And you know why? Because most people have a sense of proportion.
–TP
Marty, thanks for your thoughtful reply at 1:16. All good points.
Marty @ 01:16 above. Well said. I agree with a lot of this, especially about taking on widespread and widening poverty. I suspect our pet public policies may differ in some deep sense, but that would at least be a conversation starting from an agreed premise.
You’re not impressed by Coates. I am. There you go.
I am saying we need to continue to improve our public and private institutions to achieve color blindness.
Well, sure. But that is where the rubber meets the road so to speak.
Marty, I agree that your 1:16 was good.
I think a lot of us (myself included) find it hard to understand why the statistics show such a shocking disparity between African-Americans and whites when empirical evidence shows us successful African-Americans enjoying prosperous lives, in situations where diversity prevails. There is a disconnect. That’s why the word “reparations” seems like a step back to a place that we think we’ve moved forward from. Unfortunately, the statistics tell us that what we see isn’t necessarily representative of what’s really going on.
As an exercise, I went back and read all of Marty’s comments through the entire thread. Most of them are of the form, “I don’t think this particular thing proves that particular thing” or “I disagree with TNC on this or that.” The biggest issue I would probably take with any of them would be along the lines of, “I think you’re disagreeing with something TNC didn’t mean, according to the way I’m understanding him.”
All in all, not so bad – mostly uncharitable readings of TNC, which isn’t going to get me too fired up. YMMV.
Asians? they ain’t even American!
Cleek, that is bad! And to think some people think prejudice has mostly died out….
So, what kind of an “American” name is “Chu”?
“mostly uncharitable readings of TNC, which isn’t going to get me too fired up. ”
It gets me fired up because “uncharitable readings of TNC” isn’t just about TNC . ( I’m not always a fan of TNC, believe it or not, but that’s another subject, an extremely unimportant one.) It’s about the subject TNC writes about. The subject is white supremacy, TNC has written a great deal arguing the case that it still matters, and the usual suspects all line up and attack TNC for allegedly not believing in personal responsibility. I liked some of Marty’s 1:16 post too, but not the last sentence. Until people know the full history, I don’t think we are going to have a serious discussion on race and poverty in America.
I actually thought that racism was a dead issue in the US–this was back in the early 90’s. I remember telling a friend that what really mattered now was poverty and it wasn’t primarily a racial thing. Of course that wasn’t totally wrong, but I was the typical white person who thought that because I no longer knew white people who used the n word everything was fine. A year or two later the Bell Curve came out and I was stunned to see with how much glee people latched onto it and took it seriously. I didn’t have any new information about housing discrimination, the criminal justice system, and so on, but the mere fact that so many people seemed eager to believe that Science demonstrated that blacks were genetically stupid suggested to me that maybe the problems of racism weren’t quite so far back in the past as I had thought.
Incidentally, speaking of that, Nicholas Wade’s new book has been largely panned. I’ve read secondhand that Charles Murray liked it. Even the Andrew Sullivan blog panned it, though maybe that’s because Sullivan was on vacation and others wrote the posts while he was gone.
Ok, I get it. Chu isn’t the originator. He’s just putting up for scrutiny a bunch of dumbass comments by a bunch of dumbasses.
So, what kind of an “American” name is “Chu”?
Quite possibly the name of an American whose ancestors came here over a century ago. Not unlike the ancestors of a lot of Americans with names like Smith or Jones.
You (Marty) and Brett and MckT all seem to take TNC’s views as a personal insult. What he says about America and its treatment of blacks is like a slap in all your faces. McK claims to want a dialogue and is outraged that Coates wants to lecture him, when it is obvious that McK has his own mind completely made up.
I am not insulted nor do I particularly want a dialogue. Blaming the present status of African Americans generally on white supremacy is sloppy analysis, a cheap out and, more to the point, unlikely to persuade anyone who doesn’t already buy into the notion. Yes, my mind is made up on that. Also, I do not care to be lectured by ideologues as to what I should and should not believe, particularly on a view as tendentious as this white supremacy business.
If TNC, or anyone, wanted to say something on the order of: racism, particularly with respect to African Americans, still plays a significant role in a variety of contexts, I’d agree.
But, no, that isn’t the proposition, and as I noted, not buying into the proposition produces being dismissed as deficient or unsavory or both. So, no, not a compelling argument.
LJ piles on:
That, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Overton window works. Brett comes here with his usually racist tripe. Marty expresses offense that he’s getting lumped in with Brett, but then goes with the same ‘treatment of Asian-Americans prove that there is no racism” trope. McT, late to the party, tells us that he knows African Americans who have done well and explains that he doesn’t like being ‘lectured to’.
This is juvenile. But, consistent with the subtext of how such a conversation would go: push back, get dismissed, end of story.
Marty makes the obvious points. I’ve never been a fan of the criminal justice system, for precisely the reason that it railroads minorities. However, colleges are receptive to diversity, so being a minority helps in that regard. My preference would be that both simply operate even handedly, but the former is far worse than the latter.
Progressives–I’m happy lumping all of you together, given the topic at hand–like most ideologues, are so busy buying their own tacos (not a slight against Mexican food, I can assure you), they can’t imagine a good faith, much less, a valid basis for rejecting their burning issue of the day.
As a final note, Asians and Hispanics seem to assimilate much better and faster than African Americans, at least in my neck of the woods. Hispanics, particularly non-English speaking Hispanics remain at a significant and obvious disadvantage. Second, third and fourth generation Hispanics, less so.
If I was going to make an argument for an exploited ethnic group, it would be first and second generation Hispanics. They are ubiquitous in every menial, manual job one can find.
The issues of race, acceptance, assimilation or not, remedies and solutions are far too complex to ascribe any one, even one dominant, cause. To default, as TNC and many here do, to white supremacy/reparations/etc, and then to insist that anyone who disagrees *must* be wrong to the point of ridicule is hubris.
Until people know the full history, I don’t think we are going to have a serious discussion on race and poverty in America.
Maybe by then, the discussion won’t be necessary. You can take that one of several ways.
does a white person have to worry about these things?
http://angryblackbitch.blogspot.com/2014/02/on-disturbingly-regular-basis.html
The issues of race, acceptance, assimilation or not, remedies and solutions are far too complex to ascribe any one, even one dominant, cause. To default, as TNC and many here do, to white supremacy/reparations/etc, and then to insist that anyone who disagrees *must* be wrong to the point of ridicule is hubris.
TNC is not reducing the issue to one cause. i don’t know if he even talks about a “cause”.
he’s saying American whites have systematically abused American blacks for centuries, and he lists a variety of the abuses. and he points out that even though the abuse continues, many still refuse to admit it even exists. and he says that talking about how whites could pay back blacks for the centuries of stolen wealth and progress might lead us to a point where whites could at least admit that these abuses are real.
If TNC, or anyone, wanted to say something on the order of: racism, particularly with respect to African Americans, still plays a significant role in a variety of contexts, I’d agree.
yes, that’s exactly what he says: racism is widespread and institutionalized and it’s probably far more corrosive than most people think.
i await your next non-lecture.
As a final note, Asians and Hispanics seem to assimilate much better and faster than African Americans, at least in my neck of the woods.
I find the idea of African Americans “assimilating” to be profoundly odd.
African Americans aren’t immigrants. The international slave trade ended in 1808. If you are a descendant of a slave, your people have been here for over 200 years. Many white people can’t say that.
African Americans don’t live in some culture apart from American culture. African American culture *is* American culture, and American culture *is* African American culture. At least a subset of it, and a quite large, ubiquitous, and seminal subset at that, and that’s from the very beginnings of English-speaking habitation on this continent. It’s impossible to imagine American culture without the influence and participation of African Americans.
African Americans *are* Americans, and have been, as long as anyone speaking English on this continent has been.
There is no question of them “assimilating” into the “broader culture”. They are not only already assimilated, they are woven into every inch of the broader culture, as long as that culture has existed.
The issue is the position that they have been allowed to occupy in that culture. Not by their choice.
It’s almost 400 years since people speaking English have lived on this continent in any kind of permanent settlement. Africans have been here that whole time.
It’s only in the last 50 of those years that they have had the basic, rudimentary legal standing to participate fully in American society. And they still get hassled, in hundreds of ways everyday, simply for doing so.
I take Marty’s points about the complexity of the issues involved, and I agree that TNC’s argument is polarizing and not likely to win hearts and minds among many folks. I don’t think that’s his project, so I’m not sure that last point matters one way or the other. But, in any case, all good.
But talk about “assimilation” is, basically, off the mark.
African Americans are woven into American history and culture and society, as deeply and pervasively as any other group. They are Americans, they have no other identity and no other place in the world. There is no African homeland for them to go back to, just like I’m not going back to Italy or Scotland or Wales, and you’re not going back to wherever it is that your great-great-greats came from.
The issue is the position they are able to occupy in that society.
As a total aside, which hopefully will not spawn a threadjack of some kind, it strikes me equally odd that somebody living in Texas talks about Hispanics “assimilating”. They were here before you, McK, you’re living on their turf.
Just saying.
“They were here before you, McK, you’re living on their turf.”
Likely not the ones he’s talking about, who were living further south. The ones who were living where McK is living, and have all along, are part of the local culture, and have no need to assimilate. The ones who were further south, and have moved north in recent years, were NOT there before McK, and DO need to assimilate.
To realize that, of course, requires understanding how much gets smuggled in when you use that “they”, how many individual differences get elided.
Purposefully.
African Americans don’t live in some culture apart from American culture. African American culture *is* American culture, and American culture *is* African American culture.
[…]
African Americans *are* Americans, and have been, as long as anyone speaking English on this continent has been.
Haven’t had much to say on this thread that hasn’t been said by others.
But this is absolutely correct, and bears repeating.
In California, as in Texas, Hispanics were here long before Anglos were. Yet people who are new in California (and whose ancestors reached America far more recently) tend to treat all Hispanics like they are wet-backs who have personally snuck over the border. Including remarks about how they “don’t assimilate.” As do some California natives, who ought to know better if they were paying attention to their history lessons in elementary school.
That’s absolutely correct, and absolutely deceptive.
Yes, you could say that the culture of inner city gang-bangers is a “sub-set” of American culture, while the culture of Asian-American math nerds is a different sub-set of that culture.
One subset works better than the average American culture. The other is horribly, horribly broken. The people in the broken one really would benefit from assimilating into a different subset of American culture, one of the ones that actually works, rather than condemning most of it’s members to abject poverty.
Ok, let’s say that broken culture was deliberately broken by racists, rather than accidentally broken by the welfare state. It’s still broken, it still dooms the people brought up in it to horrible lives.
How do we fix a broken culture? Maybe we can figure out how, and agree to call fixing that culture “reparations”, and reach an agreement. But you don’t fix a culture by putting it on life support. Maybe that’s even how you break one.
The ones who were living where McK is living, and have all along, are part of the local culture, and have no need to assimilate.
Yes, I would think that would be implicit in the phrase “they were here before you”.
But all “Hispanics” are alike, right?
It ain’t me having a problem making important distinctions.
the culture of inner city gang-bangers
What color are inner city gang-bangers?
What language do they speak?
Are gangs only in cities?
Who else lives in cities?
What city are we talking about the “inner” of?
But yeah, blacks all live in the inner city, and they’re all gang-bangers. And Asians are all math nerds.
Ok, let’s say that broken culture was deliberately broken by racists, rather than accidentally broken by the welfare state. It’s still broken, it still dooms the people brought up in it to horrible lives.
any chance it’s white culture that’s broken? TNC documents quite a few areas where whites have systematically, institutionally, blatantly and continuously abused black people. and then, after centuries of abuse, white people blame blacks for not being as super awesome as they are.
any chance that the whole freaking culture is broken?
just saying.
“But all “Hispanics” are alike, right?
It ain’t me having a problem making important distinctions.”
Yeah, actually it is. McKinney makes a remark which is clearly directed at recent immigrants, and you interpret it as being directed at people who’ve been here for generations. Why? Because “they” are both “hispanics”?
“any chance it’s white culture that’s broken?”
Hm… Who’s poor, has the high crime rate, high rate of broken homes, and so forth? Oh, right, the people with the culture that isn’t broken?
No, not much chance of that.
McKinney makes a remark which is clearly directed at recent immigrants, and you interpret it as being directed at people who’ve been here for generations.
What makes them immigrants is that they crossed a line drawn on a map.
The line hasn’t been there all that long. In many cases, they and their families have.
My point, since it seems to require painstaking explication, is that there is a rich irony in an English speaking person living in Texas talking about the need for Spanish speaking people, whose forbears likely lived in the area for hundreds of years before a word of English was spoken there, to assimilate into “our culture”.
If you’re talking about immigrants from, for example, Guatemala, or Brazil, or Panama, yes, those folks are recent immigrants.
If you’re talking about norteno Mexicans, not so much.
And no, not Norteno the gang, just people who live in northern Mexico and areas that used to be northern Mexico.
And no, I’m not picking on Texans, the same or similar phenomena happen all the time, all around the world.
As a final note, Asians and Hispanics seem to assimilate much better and faster than African Americans, at least in my neck of the woods. Hispanics, particularly non-English speaking Hispanics remain at a significant and obvious disadvantage. Second, third and fourth generation Hispanics, less so.
McKinney makes a remark which is clearly directed at recent immigrants
Well, to me at least, that remark reads as though it’s directed at all non Anglos, talking as it does about the relative abilities of first and fourth (!) generation ‘Hispanics’ to ‘assimilate’.
Even to someone who doesn’t entirely buy the white supremacy thesis, that’s fairly straightforward evidence that someone is using it as a working assumption, consciously or not.
Russell
I get the drift, but you are wrong. Most of Texas north of the Rio Grsnde is a mix of cultures. Certainly from San Antonio southwest the assimilation is to the legal system etc, but pretty easy culturally. If you go southeast you quickly get into a Cajun culture, while just north in Austin is the German hill country of central Texas. Texas id a huge place, maybe a quarter of the continental US and incredibly diverse. Dallas and Houston are both very metropolitan, and completely different, both with large Hispanic populations while Dallas has a large black population. None of that has anything to do with how long there have been Mexicans living along the border, there weren’t that many north of the Colorado in the first place. And there’s still lots of empty land. The latest generations of immigrants do need to assimilate as they move further north. I haven’t even covered Northeast Texas, or the Panhandle, or the High Plains oil country.
I get the drift, but you are wrong.
That’s cool, thanks for at least getting the drift. I appreciate it.
I agree that people immigrating to the US have to assimilate – they have to learn the language, learn the law, adapt themselves to prevailing cultural and social norms.
I also understand that there weren’t that many Mexicans living in what is now the US in the time period when those areas became first TX, then US territories and states. As I understand it, that’s part of how they separated from MX, many folks living there at the time (both English and Spanish speaking) weren’t feeling all that well served by folks in Mexico City.
You make all good points here, and I appreciate your comment, and also your capsule introduction to the various cultures of TX. My comment upthread was really nothing more than an aside – it struck me that there was something of a historical irony in McK’s comment.
Nothing more intended in it than that.
And TX is really only about 10% of the contiguous 48, but I grew up there so its quarter rounding up.
Still talking about this? I liked Jelani Cobb’s reflections on this.
Absent an understanding of this past, it’s possible—even entirely reasonable—to conclude that affirmative action represents a full recompense for the social engineering that produced a disproportionately black underclass in the United States. To the extent that the history remains obscured, the narrative looks like a lineage of failed handouts to a feckless and troublesome population, never quite capable of pulling themselves up, and mired in their own self-defeating ways. These deletions in our own history deliver various national oddities, like an overwhelmingly white Tea Party movement that is fixated on government encroachment on liberty and yet has almost no regard for the concerns of African-Americans, whose history is defined by the government-sanctioned theft of their freedom.
Hm… Who’s poor, has the high crime rate, high rate of broken homes, and so forth? Oh, right, the people with the culture that isn’t broken?
Well, I dunno’. Affluent white culture can be characterized as narcissistic, clueless, selfish, arrogant, inclined to psychotic bursts of unjustified violence, psychologically and socially rigid, and criminally inclined. Their sense of overweening entitlement is unsurpassed. Their ability to sink into fathomless depths of self absorbed resentment is astounding.
I would say it is broken.
“Black culture” has endured 400 years of efforts to wipe it out. I’d say it’s incredibly resilient, a hearty perennial.
To cite the pathologies of the worst of the inner city as the marker for “black culture” only betrays the ignorance of the speaker.
“like an overwhelmingly white Tea Party movement”
Like a Democratic press carefully choosing their camera angles in mixed race events? I saw that in person, back in 94′; The media had decided that the militia movement was a white supremacist movement. When they came to cover militia events, like the march in Lansing, they just carefully photographed around all the blacks who were present. The news coverage managed to look nothing like the event, and it was no accident: The narrative is everything, and reality can’t be allowed to interfere with it.
The overwhelmingly white Tea party movement.
“To cite the pathologies of the worst of the inner city as the marker for “black culture” only betrays the ignorance of the speaker.”
I can only endorse that. Go back through the thread, now at four or five pages, and look for all the instances of that phrase. And note who is and isn’t using it.
If the level of evidence that you summon is typing ‘blacks in the tea party’ in google search, it’s pretty clear you don’t know what evidence is. Marty, McT, if you feel your arguments align with Brett’s to any significant degree, you might see why you are getting piled on…
[…]
[t]hat “polls suggest that tea party activists are not only more mainstream than many critics suggest,” but that a majority of them are women, not angry white men…They are predominantly white, but other groups make up just under one-fourth of their ranks…
[…]
Tea Party Movement – Membership and Demographics
I really don’t know what the Tea Party membership is, but the first part of the Wikipedia article says
Several polls have been conducted on the demographics of the movement. Though the various polls sometimes turn up slightly different results, they tend to show that Tea Party supporters tend more likely than Americans overall to be white, male, married, older than 45, regularly attending religious services, conservative, and to be more wealthy and have more education.
Brett is basically using Google image search to, well, there is a word for that.
Sorry to pile on McT and Marty, but if you don’t like it, you may want to not associate yourselves with this kind of argumentation.
Lj, you should argue with the person who posted the comment and quit trying to justify your earlier diatribe. I am absolutely certain that I speak for me, Brett speaks for Brett and McK speaks for himself. It would be good if you could discern the differences as well as any similarities. Nothing I don’t do with you, russell, cleek, Donald, hsh,etc.
McT argued that I was ‘piling on’. You said that there was numerous points of overlap between your and Brett’s position. That suggests that you are located in the same space.
I personally found the comments about Asian-Americans not only ill-informed but rather insulting. If you want to claim that there are numerous points of overlap, you may want to call out the places where you don’t agree. Just like I do with russell, cleek, Donald, hsh,etc. Would that be too difficult?
“If the level of evidence that you summon is typing ‘blacks in the tea party’ in google search, it’s pretty clear you don’t know what evidence is.”
The evidence is my own eyes. Lacking a way of downloading the contents of my visual memory to Photobucket, I provided that image search.
As I said, I’ve been at events before for groups the media had decided to portray as all white. It’s hilarious, in a dark way, watching them choose their camera angles to avoid the photos contradicting the narrative. Of course, today, with digital cameras, I suppose they just snap away, and falsify the coverage at the selection end of things. Since they don’t have to worry about conserving film anymore.
You claim that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white. What, precisely, did you mean by that? “A little less black than the general population, as is unavoidable for any conservative group in a country where something like 80% of blacks are Democrats.”?
Hm… Who’s poor, has the high crime rate, high rate of broken homes, and so forth? Oh, right, the people with the culture that isn’t broken?
so now we’re back to thinking that black culture exists in absolute isolation from the rest of the world?
Brett, you are nothing but a clown who has limited reading comprehension.
If you just took a moment, you might understand that the italics are what we adults call a ‘quote’, which means that this is something that another person said.
You transfer that opinion to me, and then try to disprove it by typing in ‘black people in the Tea Party’ into google image search. The links that Charles points out all suggest that overwhelmingly white is a pretty good description, but for you, it is all camera angles and there are a million African Americans just out of the camera line of this picture or this one. You ask me
You claim that the Tea Party is overwhelmingly white. What, precisely, did you mean by that?
I didn’t ‘claim’ it, but I do think it is the case. Now, I’m not in the US, so I’d certainly be interested in some evidence. Charles provides some that seems to contradict your eyes, which are attached to your brain, which seems to do a remarkable job filtering out contrary evidence.
It’s hilarious, in a dark way, watching them choose their camera angles
at the 2012 conventions, the GOP had 47 black delegates (2%); the Dems had 1452 (26%).
they make up 6% of “tea party” dingbats.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/tea-partiers-fairly-mainstream-demographics.aspx
next time you see a picture of a black person at a GOP convention or a tea party event, do try to keep those numbers in mind: 2% and 6%.
No, we’re back to attributing absurd positions to anybody who disagrees with us.
Does a culture have to exist in utter isolation, like some undiscovered tribe in the Amazon, in order for the poverty associated with it to be a consequence of it, rather than being attributed to the culture of the people around it doing well? If that larger culture is so impoverishing those who aren’t members, how did the Asian-Americans rise above it?
Why is it so incredibly important to you, to deny that blacks could have anything, anything AT ALL, to do with their own problems? Why do they have to be the only group in society utterly incapable of bettering themselves without outside help?
Maybe because you belong to a party with relies on their votes, and needs them as reliable clients? And people who rely on themselves don’t need to be clients? Maybe there’s more self-interest involved in attributing all the problems of blacks to other people’s racism than you’d care to notice.
Oh, and just to note again: Another instance of “black culture”, and again, who’s using it? You, not me.
There’s a culture of poverty in the US, several, actually. Nobody acquainted with the demographics of poverty in the US would be surprised that blacks are disproportionately members of it. Nobody acquainted with the demographics of poverty in the US would be surprised that the majority of it’s members are not black.
Are you under the impression that all “gang-bangers” are black, so to refer to “gang-bangers” can only be a reference to blacks? Maybe you think only blacks join urban gangs, or rap, or eat fried chicken, too?
What a mess of racist stereotypes you are.
Why is it so incredibly important to you, to deny that blacks could have anything, anything AT ALL, to do with their own problems?
it’s not, and that’s not what i’m doing.
i am pointing out that there are factors involved which you seem unwilling to admit to. you always go straight to “it’s all their fault”, without even a hint of consideration that nothing blacks do exists in isolation from whites (and vice versa). despite TNCs long article full of evidence to the contrary, you insist that it’s their fault.
yes, many Asian-Americans have done well. and that would be a great strike against blacks if white attitudes towards Asians were the same as they were towards blacks or if Asians had the same history in the US as blacks. or if the (ongoing) history of institutionalized racism against blacks was something Asians had to suffer, too. but none of that is true.
Maybe because you belong to a party with relies on their votes, and needs them as reliable clients?
excellent. points off for not using the GOP-approved word “plantation” in there, though.
Are you under the impression that all “gang-bangers” are black, so to refer to “gang-bangers” can only be a reference to blacks?
i’m pretty sure i’ve never responded to anything you’ve had to say about “gang-bangers”, so i don’t know why you’re asking.
Maybe you think only blacks join urban gangs, or rap, or eat fried chicken, too?
again, not a fncking clue why you think i need to answer this.
What a mess of racist stereotypes you are.
you’ve lost the plot. you’re arguing with someone who exists entirely within your skull.
“at the 2012 conventions, the GOP had 47 black delegates (2%); the Dems had 1452 (26%).”
“they make up 6% of “tea party” dingbats.”
So, you’re tarring as racist the Tea party, for merely having 3 times as many black members as the GOP?
Maybe the problem is that Brett hears someone talk about overwhelming difficulties and he thinks ‘94%? That doesn’t sound like overwhelming to me’.
So, you’re tarring as racist the Tea party, for merely having 3 times as many black members as the GOP?
no, i’m pointing out that it takes some “camera angles” to show 2% or 6% of any sample.
Oh, btw, the 2012 GOP convention had 2286 delegates and the Democratic convention had 5554. So if the Republicans doubled the number of delegates, how many folks think that this would have meant that the GOP would have had 94 black delegates?
Brett: Why is it so incredibly important to you, to deny that blacks could have anything, anything AT ALL, to do with their own problems?
Why is it so intensely important to YOU to ASSERT it?
Is it racism or is it race that afflicts “blacks”?
I know: it’s the racism of Democrats or liberals or leftists or statists that’s to blame: what oppresses black people nowadays is the social safety net and affirmative action. The racism of unreconstructed confederate rednecks has nothing to do with it.
–TP
lj, you need to understand. When someone gets attached to a conspiracy theory, all evidence gets divided into three categories:
– things which support their theory
– things which appear not to support their theory, but which are simply false. (Anything not perfectly accurate, such as 6% vs 2%, invalidates that evidence. Even is if both numbers actually still conflict with their theory.)
– things which conflict with their theory, and which therefore are necessarily due to a conspiracy as well.
No amount of data, no reasoning based on data, will convince a conspiracy theorist. Even if, as with Brett, they are engineers who otherwise are true believers in data as the last word.
I’m pretty impressed that its documented at 6%, although I suspect there is an over/under on that. You know, it is much closer to the 12% of the population that blacks make up than the 26% of black delegates to the Dems convention.
You know, it is much closer to the 12% of the population that blacks make up than the 26% of black delegates to the Dems convention.
should be easy enough to prove. i’m sure there have been dozens of similar surveys done.
here’s a survey that says one percent are black.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tea-party-supporters-who-they-are-and-what-they-believe/
here’s one that says two percent:
http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2010/images/02/17/rel4b.pdf
here’s a somewhat different question – “Percentage of Black likely voters who are likely to vote for Candidate supported by Tea Party” – and gets 27%:
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=178
i’d love to see the actual question, but i’m not giving PJ media $5 to get it.
this one says 14% are supporters (vs 38% who say they are opposed):
http://www.gallup.com/poll/148940/tea-party-sparks-antipathy-passion.aspx
most of these polls are three or four years old, though. and TP support has generally declined everywhere since 2010.
Are you under the impression that all “gang-bangers” are black, so to refer to “gang-bangers” can only be a reference to blacks?
i’m pretty sure i’ve never responded to anything you’ve had to say about “gang-bangers”, so i don’t know why you’re asking.
The original reference here did not come from cleek, it came from me.
I referred to African American culture as a sub-set of American culture.
Brett replied with:
Yes, you could say that the culture of inner city gang-bangers is a “sub-set” of American culture, while the culture of Asian-American math nerds is a different sub-set of that culture.
The ensuing impression that you, Brett, were conflating African Americans and gang-banging follows fairly logically from that.
If you don’t want to be misunderstood, perhaps be more careful in what you say.
And yes, the Tea Party and the (R) party attract black participation at rates less than their proportion of the population, and the (D)’s attract them at higher rates.
You don’t need to look for either racism or a plantation-style “client” relationship to explain that, it’s readily explainable from the relative policies of the groups in question.
(R)’s and Tea Party folks claim their policies are better for blacks, and poor or struggling communities in general, but folks haven’t found that convincing.
The argument that a racist element is absent from either the Tea Party or the (R) party, or the militia movement for that matter, is unfortunately not true.
Those folks may not be racist, but racists do find a home there.
We all have our crazy uncles in the attic.
Those folks may not be racist, but racists do find a home there.
This is, unfortunately, a feature of many (most?) discussions about politics and racism. On one hand, particular groups (including political parties), tend to be home to disporportionate numbers of racists. On the other, it is frequently true most of the members of those are not racists.
Where the problem arises is that those on both sides tend to take this to mean that the entire group is, or is being accused of being, racist. Naturally those who are accused of being racists when they are not take offense. But they really should spend a little time considering why it is that so many racists find a home in their group. The reasons might be benign; then again….
“But they really should spend a little time considering why it is that so many racists find a home in their group.”
I’m sure you imagine that advice is only applicable to one party in America. Racists come in all colors, and quite naturally they tend to join parties which advance their causes, or at least don’t oppose them, which both major parties do for different groups of racists.
Your party doesn’t need to redefine racism in terms of “power relations” if it doesn’t have a racism problem.
Actually, I don’t believe that adivce only applies to one party. Both attach people who most of the country consider far outside sensible. (Although on the issue of racism, one party has a pretty strong lock.)
And, FYI, my party remains, as it has been for decades, the Republicans. You may feel I am wrong about the GOP on this issue. But partisanship isn’t the reason.
“Although on the issue of racism, one party has a pretty strong lock.”
Only if you define “racism” the way the other party prefers to define it. There are some pretty vicious racists in the Democratic party, to the point where they had to formulate a new “definition” of racism to pretend otherwise.
The liberal Wikipedia definition of racism: consists of both prejudice and discrimination based in social perceptions of biological differences between peoples. It often takes the form of social actions, practices or beliefs, or political systems that consider different races to be ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently.
That pretty well conforms to what I understand the word to mean.
Brett, I am curious about what “new definition” you talk of?
I am always amazed by those who agree that blacks are “disproportionately” poor, yet still refuse to acknowledge past and ongoing white supremacy as a causal factor.
Who benefited most from Social Security? Whites.
Who benefited most from the GI Bill? Whites.
Who benefited most from the interstate highway system? Whites.
Who benefited most from federally guaranteed mortgages? Whites.
Who benefits most from our lunatic “local” school funding? Whites.
Who benefits most from job discrimination? Whites.
Who benefits most from housing segregation? Whites.
Who benefits most from the absurdly high cost of a college education? Whites.
Who benefits most from disparate sentencing guidelines in our justice system? Whites.
On and on and on and on……..
How much special treatment do whites need to stay ahead of blacks? I look at this and wonder if whites are actually the “inferior race”. They sure do appear to require a lot of policy crutches.
Why is that?
Nay, instead we get risible hogwash about unwed mothers and the asserted “lack of commitment” to education (undocumented, naturally). And of course, “gangbangers” and “standing on street corners”.
It is simply bullshit.
Furthermore, when I refer to black culture, I am thinking of this. Perhaps some here are thinking of something else.
And never, ever, lecture me about lecturing you. Kiss my ass.
Thank you. Have a good day.
It may also hold that members of different races should be treated differently.
How inconvenient…
Third paragraph, Jeff; Run into that silly definition almost every time I point out that racism isn’t exclusively a white phenomenon.
Bobbyp, you’d calling programs whites benefit more from only because there are more whites situated to benefit from them “special treatment”. Most people aren’t determined to warp the language to that extent.
WTF is this BS about “redefining” the word “racism” ?
this is racism:
that is the kind of thing that keeps blacks from enjoying the same wealth and progress that others do. did Wells Fargo run a similar program against Asians? no.
this is what the f’in article is about.
and “conservatives” dare not even discuss it.
If we could only hook up Brett to some kind of energy-capture device and get him started up with something like “reparations” or “reasonable firearms control” or “voter identification”, our energy problems would be solved.
My position on this was stated up front. There really isn’t much else to say. That there has been (and still is) racial discrimination against African Americans in this country is beyond dispute but not, apparently, beyond denial.
How to make that all right again is the question. Convincing Brett that there have been wrongs committed; that there is just a distraction. And, by appearances, a Sisyphean task.
thanks slarti.
this, via balloon juice, seems on topic.
also, perhaps, proverbs 26:4.
there are only so many hours in a day.
Why do they have to be the only group in society utterly incapable of bettering themselves without outside help?
Why are do they have to be the only group to overcome so many obstacles and so much ill-treatment? Despite what you may think, no other group really compares, other than possibly Native Americans, who aren’t doing so well either.
I want to revisit a quote Marty pulled from the TNC article – perhaps one of the prime examples of something I would say he misinterpreted, but that’s not why I’m re-posting it (with added emphasis).
“There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people. There is significantly less evidence for the proposition that culture is a major part of what’s wrong with black people. But we don’t really talk about white supremacy. We talk about inequality, vestigial racism, and culture. Our conversation omits a major portion of the evidence.”
Brett focuses on culture, as well as efforts ostensibly intended to help Black Americans, which he thinks were either ill-conceived (and some may have been) or sly programs crafted to keep Blacks down, secretly, to secure their votes (no evidence necessary for this conspiracy theory, natch).
As far as TNC’s intent, I think he’s trying to address something he sees lacking. If what he writes seems to skew in a particular way, it is because of that. He doesn’t simply emphasize white supremacy out of the blue, as if he were in a vacuum left purely to his own musings.
He’s addressing a particular aspect of the national conversation that he sees as being inadequate, and it is not of his making.
OK, Brett, you think that’s a silly definition. Fair enough.
So, what would you use for a definition? One which would capture real racism, but nothing more?
Sorry hsh, from your/my quote:
“There is massive, overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people.”
This is pretty unequivocal. I am absolutely certain that I could not possibly misread that statement. Massive, OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE that white supremacy is the ONLY thing wrong with black people.
Full circle, my first and primary objection to the article and Coates, he makes no such case.
That’s actually an interesting quote, and the way it is structured seems to simultaneously infuriate (marty) and bolster (well, me, I guess). To try and make it bullet points
-in a debate of ‘what is the problem with African-Americans there is
-massive (overwhelming,total, pick yer adjective) evidence for proposition X
-scant evidence for proposition Y
Yet the first set of evidence is ignored
The way the paragraph is structured is that TNC seems to imagine a debate between 2 propositions, finds one can draw on a lot of evidence while the other has to rely on suppositions and emotive images and then suggests we are ignoring the evidence for the first proposition while only discussing the evidence for the second.
TNC has spent a lot of ink pointing out that folks from Bill Cosby to Obama as well as the larger spectrum of liberalism seems to do the same thing, so it’s not simply a Republican thing, it is an American thing. Perhaps that makes you even angrier, but I find it rather chastening.
I can see how, if you stop at the first sentence, this might seem like an unequivocal reading that there are no other factors. But if you read the whole paragraph, I believe that there is a different sense here. You may disagree with that, but I’m not sure how you read the next part of the paragraph and still hold on the idea that it is an unequivocal statement.
Full circle, my first and primary objection to the article and Coates, he makes no such case.
No, he doesn’t make that case. He presents just some examples of such evidence in support of that statement. He then makes a case for a change in the national conversation.
What he makes is a statement, provides some support for that statement, and then makes a case that many people are ignoring a great many things, which perpetuates the damage to Black Americans.
Presenting all of the overwhelming evidence for the proposition that white supremacy is the only thing wrong with black people (as a people – not as individuals, to a person) would be beyond the scope of an Atlantic article.
It would be good lj if you stopped guessing about my emotional state. There is nothing in the article that “infuriates” me. If there were anything in this discussion that causes an emotional reaction of any import it is you making it clear that anyone who disagrees with you must be angry or unstable. I am neither.
And, everything after the first sentence is word count. He leads with his thesis, as is appropriate.
My apologies, I’m not trying to prod you, substitute whatever word or phrase you like for ‘infuriate’. ‘strongly disagree with’ ‘take issue with’. For ‘angrier’, ‘disagree even more’ or ‘really disagree with’
However, I would suggest you avoid ALL CAPS if you wish to make it clear that this thesis doesn’t bother you.
cool lj, the caps were my attempt to point out the TNC was not vague or subtle in presenting his proposition.
Full circle, my first and primary objection to the article and Coates, he makes no such case.
noted.
and now, what about the case that he does make: that there is ongoing, systematic, institutionalized discrimination against blacks by whites. and, that there are a good number of whites who absolutely refuse to acknowledge it, and would instead prefer to talk about ‘black culture’ (because, obviously, that’s much kinder to white folk, and much easier for them to deal with).
how about that?
“So, what would you use for a definition? One which would capture real racism, but nothing more?”
The belief that it is appropriate to treat people as instances of a (racial) group, rather than individuals. A racist, knowing your race, believes that he knows something about you beyond your race, and treats you accordingly.
If only black people could get their shit together, they wouldn’t need reparations.
Which is not to say or even imply that black people don’t have their shit together. Because that would be racist.
A take on racism then and now:
‘Racism’ Today Looks Little Like Racist Ideology of Yore
A racist, knowing your race, believes that he knows something about you beyond your race, and treats you accordingly.
But Brett, suppose we take that a tiny step further, to “treats you, or believes that you should be treated“. Wouldn’t that, on your definition, make your statements about “black culture” racist? Not, note, saying that *I* think you are racist. Just trying to understand what your definition means in practice.
See, the thing is, I know that “black people” don’t need to get their shit together, because I know enough black people to know that, just like people of any color, some of them have it together, and some of them don’t. And that statistics don’t tell you anything about the individual people you meet.
And denying that last is the essence of racism. It may even, in some cases, be based on statistically valid observations, the problem is that a racist will treat the individual before them as if that statistic told them something about the individual.
“Blacks have been wronged, you are black, therefore you have been wronged.”
“Whites have wronged blacks, you are white, so you have wronged blacks.”
Both these are wrong, and they are wrong in the exact same way that it was wrong to string up some random black guy if you heard of a crime being committed by a black. Because people are not simply instances of a group. People are individuals, each with their own, unique history, entitled to be treated as individuals.
Not regarded as victims OR victimizers, downtrodden or priviledged, based on nothing more than skin color.
Yes, that is the core of racism: Treating people as instances of a race, rather than as individuals. And it matters not a bit whether that treatment is positive or negative, only that it is based on race, rather than themselves.
“Wouldn’t that, on your definition, make your statements about “black culture” racist? ”
I haven’t made any statements about “black culture”. You’re debating the me in your head.
See, no, that’s still cool, Slarti. He’s not talking about individuals. He’s talking about the racial group. The racial group “black people” needs to get its s#|t together, but he’s not saying anything about individuals needing to get their $#it together. And so when you point out the individuals he’s studiously not talking about comprise the group “black people”, it’s only reasonable for him to call you out because it goes to show how racist you are. Up until you racistly opened the box, the waveform hadn’t collapsed, and the individual’s group identity was simultaneously black and not-black. You d@mned racist.
Thanks Marty, and again, I wasn’t trying to provoke. We seem to have diametrically opposed reactions to the piece and I was just trying to represent that. My apologies
I’d like to see which black people anyone on this thread has addressed individually to tell them they’ve been wronged. I haven’t really noticed that, myself.
Thought I might say that the depth and breadth of racism against black people in this country makes it hard to avoid if you are black. Maybe someone has managed to avoid it, miraculously enough.
I would tend to doubt that, so I guess I’m a racist, because I acknowledge pervasive and seemingly inescapable racism.
I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again – you’re a real hoot sometimes, Brett.
though, not thought
I haven’t made any statements about “black culture”.
so, when you said this…
you weren’t talking about black culture? or if you were, you weren’t making a statement about it despite the obvious implication of “That’s verging on insanity” ?
No, I was addressing something said by TNC, who apparently DOES believe in “black culture”, even if he denies it has anything to do with anything.
Let me be clear: There is no such thing as “black culture”. There are a variety of cultures in America that blacks may be members of, but there is no culture people automatically belong to by virtue of being “black”.
This doesn’t mean that, if you’re trying to explain some statistical fact about “blacks”, the distribution of cultures they belong to won’t have any explanitory power regarding the statistics.
TNC responds to a critic.
the case for American history
Brett, my memory may have played me false; it so, I certainly apologize. (Although I do note the following from you: “Yeah, culture. Asian-Americans recovered from legal discrimination, and even the Japanese internment, because of culture. Blacks did not, again, because of culture.” — May 28, 1:10 PM)
But whoever made the “black culture” comment, does that fit your definition of racism?
Heh. Indeed.
Sure. Those who belong to the culture of fail, belong to the culture of fail, and those that you know don’t, do not.
It’s tautologically true.
I don’t think anyone, anywhere, is claiming that black people are all equally discriminated against, in all places, and in all situations. Because that would be stupid. You appear to be arguing counter to an argument that, so far, has not been presented.
I think Brett’s getting to the point of reductio ad absurdum against his own position, inadvertently. It’s becoming very pretzelly and gymnastic.
“But whoever made the “black culture” comment, does that fit your definition of racism?”
If they actually think there’s such a thing as “black culture”, yeah, but my impression is that all uses of this phrase consisted of people attributing it to others. Dismissing any reference to culture as a belief that there’s a “black” culture, rather than just noticing that culture matters.
Donald, Interesting piece, more adamantly declaring that reparations should be paid and that the people it is owed to can be identified. I can see why he chose that person to respond to, they weren’t very clear.
But here:
“My heart bleeds for the white child injured by the departure of parents. But God forbid the injury of racism be added to the burden.”
Is, again, where he loses me. He is great at black history, but simply refuses to recognize that poor people of all colors have been taken advantage of by most of the evil culprits he names post Civil War. I certainly don’t have the time to document the numbers of white people who had subprime mortgages, or were burned in the S&L scandal or were the victims of ruthless real estate swindlers in the early sixties. But I know all those things happened, to white people.
Where he loses his way is that he doesn’t recognize that some bad things happen because people are poor.
Also, he keeps going back to how most middle income Black people live in 30,000 neighborhoods instead of 100,000 neighborhoods. That is NOT because of white supremacy or whatever inflammatory word he wants to use intentionally today. That is pretty widespread self segregation if that fact is true.
If you want to convince me that middle class black families that can afford to live in upscale neighborhoods are being “pushed” into lower class neighborhoods, I ain’t buying it. These are reasonable successful, educated people who are certainly capable of deciding where to live.
In the end I guess it is this kitchen sink aspect of what he writes that just makes me doubt the breadth of the injury he claims for those not poor.
Let me be clear: There is no such thing as “black culture”. There are a variety of cultures in America that blacks may be members of, but there is no culture people automatically belong to by virtue of being “black”.
True as stated.
This doesn’t mean that, if you’re trying to explain some statistical fact about “blacks”, the distribution of cultures they belong to won’t have any explanatory power regarding the statistics.
No doubt.
The only thing wrong with your argument here is that you’ve left everybody else in the world out of it.
The problem with your argument, is that you’ve dragged everybody else in the world into it.
Look, when TNC tells blacks, “Every problem you have is somebody else’s fault!”, he’s also telling them, “Fixing your problems is up to somebody else!”.
Does that strike you as a helpful thing to tell somebody? Who ever got ahead thinking that?
Look, when TNC tells blacks, “Every problem you have is somebody else’s fault!
he didn’t do that.
Also, he keeps going back to how most middle income Black people live in 30,000 neighborhoods instead of 100,000 neighborhoods. That is NOT because of white supremacy or whatever inflammatory word he wants to use intentionally today. That is pretty widespread self segregation if that fact is true.
If you want to convince me that middle class black families that can afford to live in upscale neighborhoods are being “pushed” into lower class neighborhoods, I ain’t buying it. These are reasonable successful, educated people who are certainly capable of deciding where to live.
http://www.longislandpress.com/2014/05/17/long-island-segregation-drives-educational-inequality-60-years-after-brown-v-boe/
“So when she was meeting with different realtors, she would tell them, ‘I’m a professor at Touro. I hear these are good places,’” Gross continued. “And then she realized after the fact that they never seemed to show her places in those communities. They showed her places that were majority black. I know Huntington Station was one of the places they took her to. And they showed her houses that were less expensive than what she’d told them she could afford. So that, you know, was the other tip off. “
The professor’s experience is not unprecedented. According to a 2012 ERASE Racism study, “58 percent of respondents said that African Americans miss out on housing because real estate agents will not show blacks homes in white areas.”…
You might also find this illuminating (along with the lengthy list of references at the end):
http://www.academia.edu/6937670/Divided_We_Fall_The_Story_of_Separate_and_Unequal_Suburban_Schools_60_Years_after_Brown_v._Board_of_Education
The problem with your argument, is that you’ve dragged everybody else in the world into it.
Look, when TNC tells blacks, “Every problem you have is somebody else’s fault!
he didn’t do that.
I agree.
But whether TNC did or not, I sure as hell did not.
Brett seizes on his favorite scrap of information, and every other thing must therefore be false.
The king of hedgehogs.
Who ever got ahead thinking that?
Also, not for nothing, but whatever else you want to say about Coates, he’s a guy who grew up in a seriously dangerous working class neighborhood in Baltimore, during the height of the crack days. Mom was the breadwinner, dad, a former black Panther, stayed home with the kids and published books about the dreaded black studies.
Now he’s a senior editor at the Atlantic, teaches writing at MIT, and is fairly widely respected as one of the best contemporary writers on race and the experience of blacks in the contemporary US.
He achieved these things by *working his ass off*.
He’s not an advocate of, and does not demonstrate in any aspect of his personal or professional life, the idea that black people should just sit around and wait for handouts from Uncle Sugar.
TNC’s elegant reply to his critics:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-american-history/371723/
Yeah, me too. That’s probably why I hold him to a higher standard than I feel most others do.
Nigel, why am I rereading this? In your own words:
:And then she realized after the fact that they never seemed to show her places in those communities. They showed her places that were majority black. I know Huntington Station was one of the places they took her to. And they showed her houses that were less expensive than what she’d told them she could afford. So that, you know, was the other tip off.”
My gosh, a university professor figured out she hadn’t been shown houses in the areas she asked, my point exactly. Tiresome anecdotes about real estate agents. I wanted to move to Sarasota a few years back, the agent I was working with really wanted me to buy further south, so every house I saw in Sarasota was a sty. I had to insist on seeing better houses in Sarasota. See this is one of those places where I expect the professor to be able to interact with the world, however it may be leaning and take responsibility for seeing the houses in the neighborhoods she wants to see. Like everybody else.
If you want to go beyond anecdote, Marty, do some work yourself.
There are plenty of links out there.
You might also like to point me in the direction of hard evidence for the “widespread self segregation” that I’m not buying.
See this is one of those places where I expect the professor to be able to interact with the world, however
You’re incorrectly assuming she didn’t – and at the same time suggesting that discrimination by estate agents is no big deal.
Just because some might be able to overcome discrimination doesn’t mean its effects aren’t real.
No Nigel, I correctly assumed she did so how would I calculate her reparations, for buying the house she wanted after having to change real estate agents.
Nigel,
I read TNC’s response to a single critic and I read the critic’s article. TNC bounces from one non sequitur to the next, employing assertion as fact and rewriting those few substantive observations his critic makes to enable him to make a point–or what passes for a point.
Bottom line: TNC will not change a single mind in his favor and is likely to move others even farther away from any efforts to reach across.
Further to Marty’s point: argument from anecdote is all well and good if it supports TNC’s thesis; however, counter-anecdotal evidence is dismissed outright, see, e.g. LJ above. And woe to the person who questions the efficacy of the TNC-supportive anecdote. Racism!
Maybe real estate sales in the NE haven’t made its way to the internet. In Houston, go to har.com and shop away! Call your agent and tell him/her what house you want to see and he/she will make the appointment. Or, at least that’s how I assume it’s done, since I live in a diverse, transitional neighborhood with diverse neighbors moving in, not out. Damn anecdotes.
Problem is, I am not the only one with my experience, which only makes TNC’s case that much harder to sell.
see, e.g. LJ above.
Errr, could you point out which comment that was? I’d just like to know exactly what evidence I’m rejecting outright.
No Nigel, I correctly assumed she did so how would I calculate her reparations, for buying the house she wanted after having to change real estate agents.
Indeed – heads you win, tails they lose.
Either someone rises above a single piece of discrimination – in which case it is insignificant – or they don’t, which case they are not ‘taking responsibility’.
In any event, the ‘tiresome’ anecdote is disposed of.
Nigel, yes, you are correct. That is exactly how I think about it. There is no deficiency in power or educational equilibrium, so the professor SHOULD be able to deal with a real estate agent. Racism is a public institutional concern when there is the inherent capacity to enforce harm. A power inequity. It is a cultural concern otherwise. Real estate agents don’t rise that high in the power structure. They are easily fired and directed.
McT, I’ve gone through all my comments, and the only thing I’ve rejected is using a google image search as evidence. Surely that’s not what you are talking about? I suppose that it would be evidence if it was something like ‘Justin Bieber smoked pot’ and there was a picture of him puffing on a spliff, but that doesn’t work when you are arguing about membership in a group. If that’s the case, the existence of one African American doing well is a refutation of the existence of racism.
TNC will not change a single mind in his favor
you are, in fact, wrong.
“….so the professor SHOULD be able to deal with a real estate agent.”
One would think so. However, when you pull back to take a larger view, stunning irregularities appear. For example, a HUD study found that housing segregation was highest in those area where the most minorities lived; that whites were significantly less willing to move into mixed neighborhoods than minorities were; and that differences in income do not explain housing segregation. Surprisingly, in one city, they found that as one went up the income scale, the separation of the races was greater….something one would intuitively not expect (i.e., one would expect more blacks living in white neighborhoods….not the reverse that is observed).
One sees the “culture dodge” in economics also. The claim is “anybody can get rich”. Anecdotal examples of rags to riches are cited. Nonetheless, in reality, one’s chances of climbing the ladder of wealth are pretty much determined by where you started from, and the effects of “the culture of the poor” are not what is driving observed wealth disparities.
The apparent inability of one black professor to browbeat an asshole realtor does not speak to the case of the vast majority of those with less wealth and power to realize their desires to move into a better neighborhood, even if they could afford it.
Racism still matters. Not as much as it used to, but it’s still there, and remains a powerful force in our society.
TNC bounces from one non sequitur to the next…
The inability or unwillingness to cite even one example from what is claimed to be an ample sample is telling.
Comedy gold. Thanks, Tex!
bobbyp,
“one’s chances of climbing the ladder of wealth are pretty much determined by where you started from, and the effects of “the culture of the poor” are not what is driving observed wealth disparities.”
The first half of this statement has been true across races for a while.
Nigel posted a link earlier that referenced a survey of black people on what kind of neighborhoods they would be willing to move into. The vast majority answered predominantly black neighborhoods, the authors thought it showed exceptional willingness to be integrated that there were many who would be willing to move into a neighborhood that was 50% black and 50% other. Yet, if every black person lived in a 50/50 neighborhood then 80% of the countries neighborhoods would still be all white, or not black.
I keep coming back to the complete inadequacy of statistical measurement on 12% of the population where 58% of that 12% lives in 5 Southern states. 3 million in California. 3 million in Texas. Now your up to 6 states and 70% of the black population and you get to well over 90% by adding in the top 5 cities not covered in those states. Mostly in places where there are almost no blacks outside the cities.
The apparent ability of that professor is significant, that professor and middle class and higher income blacks should not be our focus. They should be able to deal with the world around them.
They should be able to deal with the world around them.
even in cases where “the world around them” doesn’t want to deal with them?
The apparent ability of that professor is significant, that professor and middle class and higher income blacks should not be our focus.
Focus for what? Discussing race relations in detail or making public policy?
Focus for what? Discussing race relations in detail or making public policy?
Policy for sure, the discussion should focus on public and private institutional racism. Private racism as per the real estate agent is tangential to say, ensuring mortgage equity.
Private racism as per the real estate agent is tangential to say, ensuring mortgage equity.
and institutionalized racism, as per Wells Fargo ?
Focus for what? Discussing race relations in detail or making public policy?
Policy for sure, the discussion should focus on public and private institutional racism. Private racism as per the real estate agent is tangential to say, ensuring mortgage equity.
This is IMO a reasonable point.
At a minimum, if you’re looking for bang-for-the-buck from public initiatives, it makes sense to focus on cases of institutional discrimination, rather than on the actions or attitudes of individuals, one by one.
To cleek’s point, I would say that the Wells Fargo case is a clear example of institutional racism. Folks there were acting in an organized and systematic way to target black people and communities, specifically, with predatory financial products.
If “predatory” seems to harsh to you, pick you own adjective.
To circle back to Coates, IMO that is his focus also – baked-in, institutional discrimination. I don’t think he’s looking for changing the hearts and minds of every individual person in the US.
To address some of McK’s points, I think there are regional differences in the pattern of racial and/or ethnic integration between the south – probably including TX – and the north and northeast.
My impression, in a nutshell, is that the boundaries between black and brown neighborhoods, and white neighborhoods, are less permeable in the north than in the south. And, my impression is also that the economic profile of the different neighborhoods is also sharper up here.
All of this is just my impression, I don’t have statistics. I could be wrong.
In any case, your experience may actually be different than that of folks in other parts of the country.
sorry – *differences* in the economic profiles of the different neighborhoods are sharper.
An Times article from 2002 that I thought was of relevant interest. America’s most integrated city. http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,340694-1,00.html
an old but tangentially-related Straight Dope:
How can Korean-Americans afford to start so many grocery stores?:
culture!
To cleek’s point, I would say that the Wells Fargo case is a clear example of institutional racism. Folks there were acting in an organized and systematic way to target black people and communities, specifically, with predatory financial products.
I am less sure that this is a case of “institutional” racism. In TNC’s discussion there were clearly some racist people involved, the name calling shows that. But, the banks had a product that was designed for low income people that they were marketing to. Going to churches etc. was a reasonable marketing plan. The loans were also marketed to low income white people, I am sure in different ways, but the mortgage crisis pretty much showed that it wasn’t just black people.
So, while I am sure that there was a negative impact on the black community, I think they can join with the rest of those that got these loans in complaining.
AND, I will add that the people who got these loans for houses they couldn’t afford bear SOME responsibility. That share is based on the individual educational level and financial understanding of each individual. But I suspect that a lot of people knew that this was a risky proposition and chose to go ahead.
Bearing in mind that I am also not upset that Wells Fargo and others were called on the proverbial legal carpet over some of these things.
Marty,
Will reply to 10:18 after work.
However, with all due respect, we cannot simply have herded African americans north to get actual good or at least better paying jobs than sharecropping or domestic service, excluded them from the New Deal (see Ira Katznelson’s When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History Of Racial Inequality In Twentieth-Century America), confined them into certain neighborhoods, denied them market rate financing, taxed ourselves to form a big pot of money to pay for the interstate highway system so whites could move to the ‘burbs and take most of the good jobs and education resources with them, and leave them in the inner city to basically rot….and then now, here, in the present simply answer Coates and other interlocutors with, “What? who me? Gangbangers!” (not you personally, but the response is, as we see in this thread, fairly common.)
I have no illusions of reparations becoming a reality. Nonetheless, a just society would seriously consider them.
I do believe that widening this conversation would be of some value.
A jobs guarantee would do more. Dunno’ if you agree with that. You have not said.
The loans were also marketed to low income white people, I am sure in different ways…
Then one would expect the same rate of sales and/or foreclosures for similarly stationed people on the income ladder due to the purchase of these toxic products.
Did we observe this?
Predictions have consequences.
if Wells Fargo was scamming all poor people equally, they probably shouldn’t have settled with the DOJ:
nor should they have settled a similar suit with Shelby Co, TN.
no, settlement is not an admission of guilt. but it does suggest they didn’t want to fight too hard to prove their innocence.
some they settle some they don’t
LJ wrote on 5/30/14 at 11:33 p.m.
McT, late to the party, tells us that he knows African Americans who have done well and explains that he doesn’t like being ‘lectured to’.
This is what I had in mind.
I do believe that widening this conversation would be of some value.
What about a conversation that begins in the first grade and continues, with increasing levels of detail and emphasis through high school, to students of every race that begins with the sentence, adjusted for age: doing your best in school, doing your homework, obeying the rules and respecting every person is the best and really the only way to do well in life.
By the time kids are in early middle school, we could be very blunt: this is a critical time in your life. Each of you are going or will go through changes as you mature. These changes are important, but they are also a challenge. You are on the verge of becoming adults. We are going to treat you, in many ways, like adults. We have rules and you must follow those rules. You are expected to pay attention and to work in class and to do your homework as assigned. There are very real consequences to failing to take advantage of the only real educational opportunity you are likely to have.
Why don’t we drive that message, or something similar, home everyday to every kid in the country and see, after ten years or so, how necessary the discussion of “how white supremacy drives the nation” is?
At age 13, we tell kids, in addition to the foregoing, this: if you have a child and quit school, you are almost certainly dooming yourself to a life of hard, low paid work and the life that comes with that. You are bringing a child into the world whose chances at a decent life are significantly reduced because of your bad decisions. There are few, if any, happy endings in that story. It is worse for young women. Young men who help make a baby and then fail or refuse to be a good father deserve every bad thing in life that ever happens to them.
We also tell them: you may think it’s cool to live on the edge, to drink or do drugs or both, to maybe take something that isn’t yours, to join a gang, to carry and even use a weapon. All of the above can and will land you in jail. Doing these things is the first step in ruining what could and should be a happy, productive life. As you get older, you get to make choices. Bad choices equal a sad life.
We could make variations on these themes a constant. Give young people a chance to make informed decisions.
Sound like a plan? A good conversation to have and keep on having?
sounds like a good idea.
do you have any evidence that this isn’t already happening?
do you have any evidence that this isn’t already happening?
I’ve seen no evidence of it. I seriously doubt that it is.
no, settlement is not an admission of guilt. but it does suggest they didn’t want to fight too hard to prove their innocence.
This isn’t the first time I’ve had pending litigation that is germane to a topic under discussion. For reasons that should be obvious, I cannot go into any detail. I can say that small, isolated facts can and do get spun into large, BS allegations that may or may not be relevant to a pending matter. I can also say that the cost of litigation often drives settlement. Settlements in less than 10mm range aren’t even rounding errors for large companies and the internal administrative cost of responding to discovery is highly disruptive.
McT, my point about recapping was not to dismiss your evidence, it was to point out that coming in late after the mood is established should make it unsurprising that you get piled on. I realize that you are busy and I don’t expect you to be on call, but if you walk into a place where someone is doing his best clown impression, don’t be surprised if your serious declamation of your experiences doesn’t get the reaction you think it deserves.
McT, my point about recapping was not to dismiss your evidence, it was to point out that coming in late after the mood is established should make it unsurprising that you get piled on. I realize that you are busy and I don’t expect you to be on call, but if you walk into a place where someone is doing his best clown impression, don’t be surprised if your serious declamation of your experiences doesn’t get the reaction you think it deserves.
So, enter the conversation early or just stay out?
I’m good with that.
Does this principle cross ideological lines?
Just wondering.
Does this principle cross ideological lines?
I shall refrain from commenting on the “sluts and insults” thread. Have at it.
McKinney (re yours at 5:24),
Those are all good things to say. But I suspect what is more critical is doing; doing things which demonstrate the lesson that, in practice and in the kids lives, actions have consequences.
Way too many kids get sheltered from that reality for too long. And then suddenly they are in a gang or have a kid or are in jail . . . and they learn the lesson the hard way and too late. No doubt their parents thought they were “protecting” their children by shielding them from the consequences of their actions. But their approach is counterproductive in the extreme.
I’ve seen no evidence of it.
None? This risible claim mocks your otherwise harmless little parable and is an insult to the overwhelming majority of parents in this country. It is also contravened by the fact that even the most well behaved and otherwise upstanding male offspring of black middle class parents get treated like shit from time to time just for being black.
I, too, have anecdotes. You want some? You appear to enjoy them, and there are plenty to pick from.
Regards,
So, enter the conversation early or just stay out?
No, but don’t accuse folks of ‘piling on’ where a clown is throwing pies to the face. Or don’t be surprised if one of those pies hits you in the face.
I haven’t actually seen a big movement towards telling kids to be irresponsible, join a gang, take drugs, ignore their studies, and have illegitimate children. In fact, I think I’ve seen lots of people, black and white, say that this is a bad idea. Most if not all would agree with McKT’s recommendation here. Including TNC. Where he objects is when this recommendation is coupled with the all-too-convenient notion that the problems of black America are almost entirely the result of black irresponsibility.
I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. Nobody (that I am aware of) is telling their kids to do things like that. Certainly I did not mean to imply that.
What they are doing is shielding their kids for the consequences (the far smaller consequences) of their actions as children. Your kid fails to turn in homework, because he didn’t do it, and gets assigned to extra study hall after school. Do you agree that he should have been? Or do you go to bat for him, so he won’t have to miss some extracurricular activity that he is fond of? If you do something like the later, the message is that actions (or inactions) should not have consequences. That was what I was attempting to say.
McKinney,
Congrats to Texas. Your state does well in judicial diversity.
Naturally, those liberal do-gooders twist their conclusion:
Minority and women judges may have been more successful in merit selection systems because it is possible to structure these systems to prioritize diversity.
Oh nohs….affirmative action. Yikes. Racism! Well this might not apply in Texas. How are judges selected there?
“one’s chances of climbing the ladder of wealth are pretty much determined by where you started from, and the effects of “the culture of the poor” are not what is driving observed wealth disparities.” (bobbyp)
The first half of this statement has been true across races for a while.(Marty)
I’m not quite sure what your point is, but clearly if the first half is true, then the importance of the “culture of the poor” as the explanatory factor driving the extent of poverty in this country is reduced accordingly. To argue otherwise is to refute the very agreement with my statement that you have expressed.
Nigel posted a link earlier that referenced a survey of black people on what kind of neighborhoods they would be willing to move into. The vast majority answered predominantly black neighborhoods, the authors thought it showed exceptional willingness to be integrated that there were many who would be willing to move into a neighborhood that was 50% black and 50% other. Yet, if every black person lived in a 50/50 neighborhood then 80% of the countries neighborhoods would still be all white, or not black.
I did not see any such survey result in either of the articles cited by Nigel. Perhaps you can be more specific. The article I have referred to is here. Written in 2000 it conducted similar surveys. Findings? If given a choice, blacks were more willing to move into mixed neighborhoods than whites, and the fact that fewer of them (as a percentage) were able to do so (i.e., achieve their preference) vs. whites ability to achieve this to a greater extent is telling. How do you explain this?
I keep coming back to the complete inadequacy of statistical measurement on 12% of the population where 58% of that 12% lives in 5 Southern states. 3 million in California. 3 million in Texas. Now your up to 6 states and 70% of the black population and you get to well over 90% by adding in the top 5 cities not covered in those states. Mostly in places where there are almost no blacks outside the cities.
Absurd. Measurements are measurements. Also, this is akin to claiming that election surveys of 0.005% of American voters has no predictive power. That, too, is an absurd claim. The sample size is more than adequate. The findings have statistical validity. The “measurements” are in line with historical data and comport to historical evidence. Neither you nor I are statisticians or social scientists, but your claim of “inadequacy” is not placed in a suitable framework. Perhaps it would help if you cited a specific “statistical measurement” that you object to based on your analysis of the inadequacy of the underlying sample. Otherwise, you have lost me, as I don’t see this claim making any sense.
wj: What they are doing is shielding their kids for the consequences (the far smaller consequences) of their actions as children. Your kid fails to turn in homework, because he didn’t do it, and gets assigned to extra study hall after school. Do you agree that he should have been? Or do you go to bat for him, so he won’t have to miss some extracurricular activity that he is fond of? If you do something like the later, the message is that actions (or inactions) should not have consequences. That was what I was attempting to say.
I don’t agree with this, but I’m not quite sure how it relates to the question of poverty, especially black poverty. My impression – from a great distance, I must say, since it’s been a long time since I’ve had any direct contact with the US school system – is that the parents most likely to “go to bat” for their children with their teachers and principals are NOT those most at risk, but those already enjoying the sense of entitlement that relative prosperity brings.
IOW, the patterns you describe may well suggest reasons why the US economy & society in general are f**ked up, especially at the top, but not why those on the bottom continue to get screwed.
I welcome anyone with evidence to the contrary. Seriously – I’ve got no idea of what US schools today are really like, taken as a whole.
My first line should start “I don’t disagree with this . . .,” rather altering the intended meaning.
Further lines should include:
I will proofread before I post.
I will proofread before I post.
I will proofread before I post.
I’ve seen no evidence of it. I seriously doubt that it is.
noted sociologist McKinneyTexas has spoken: black children are not told what growing up means.
perhaps he’ll share his data with us someday.
Another, extended ‘anecdote’…
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/05/where-blacks-suffer-under-stop-and-frisk-on-steroids/371869/
Sound like a plan? A good conversation to have and keep on having?
It’s a great plan.
Whether it is likely to be effective depends to some degree on the evidence available to the kid that doing all the right things will actually make a difference one way or the other.
That’s not a race thing, BTW, it’s just a thing.
Way too many kids get sheltered from that reality for too long.
I would say that being sheltered from reality is among the least of the problems that disadvantaged kids have.
Again, not a race thing, just a thing.
This is off the subject, but ‘sheltered from reality’ brings up an anecdote that has absolutely nothing to do with race or being disadvantaged, but it’s been on my mind so that maybe if I write about it, I can let it go.
We got a tenor sax for my daughter, and she’s been playing it for about 2 or 3 months (she was on a borrowed tenor for about 3 years). She came home the other day, sniffling and I asked her what was wrong and she burst into tears and said that she had dropped the sax and it was bent. I told her not to worry, these things happen and why was she crying. She said, in between sobs, ‘but it cost so much money’. I found myself touched that she realized the value of things, but also wanting to shelter her from the reality. Yes, things cost money, and I was both pleased at her concern and really wanted to have her not feel bad.
Fortunately, it wasn’t too badly damaged and was fixed and it didn’t cost too much. You can tell something happened, but I told my daughter that it gives her instrument character. Still, if there was a magic wand to wave to shield her from her feeling bad about it, I would have done it, so I imagine that any parent is going to do something similar.
TNC replies to David Frum (whose article I thought pretty weak, as he spent a large part of it arguing that black people watch too much TV and therefore…no reparations ??):
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/06/the-radical-practicality-of-reparations/372114/
…David treats Japanese-American reparations as an open question or a thought experiment. But it isn’t. It’s just American history—and people charged with analyzing America should know it.
People who take up reparations arguments should especially know it because it presents us with some provocative questions. The collective ills of housing segregation—block-busting, redlining, segregated public-housing, the G.I. Bill, terrorism—continued long after Japanese-American internment. A serious interlocutor of reparations can not thoughtlessly muster a melange of historical wrongs, but must directly explain why the Japanese-American case is compelling, but the more recent African-American case is not…
…Perhaps David wants to ask “Do black people with direct ‘white’ ancestry qualify?” The correct reply to this is “Were black people with direct ‘white’ ancestry victims of racist housing policy?” The answer to that question is knowable. But it is not the question we ask. Instead we focus on the myth of “race,” while ignoring the demonstrable fact of injury.
dr ngo,
you are correct of course. My comment was directed at a specific suggestion as to what was wrong with the culture of poverty (or with black culture, I misremember which) that caused poverty to continue. I should have made clear that I saw it as a general problem. And that the case of schools was an example; a specific case of something that occurs all too often and in other contexts as well.
Another post from Coates, dealing with
A) whether reparations should be extended to others (they should make their case is his answer)
B) whether we can identify particular victims who deserve money (yes, he says)
link
This risible claim mocks your otherwise harmless little parable and is an insult to the overwhelming majority of parents in this country.
I’m talking about schools, not parents. If parents were doing a better job, schools wouldn’t have to take on this load.
A conversation about reparations is one thing. An ongoing conversation in which all students are given clear, advance warning of what awaits them if they do not buckle down and study, do not avoid crime, drugs and early, out of wedlock pregnancy does not seem to be in place. If it is, too damn many kids are not paying attention, in which case the situation is hopeless.
Well this might not apply in Texas. How are judges selected there?
Elected.
The pernicious effects of school “re-segregation” are here in the present for all of us to see.
It is to weep for the injustice of it all. I am ashamed of my country.
More ‘anecdote”…
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2014/06/the-long-shadow-poverty-baltimore-poor-children?
Perhaps more striking in his findings was the role of race in upward mobility. Alexander found that among men who drop out of high school, the employment differences between white and black men was truly staggering. At age 22, 89 percent of the white subjects who’d dropped of high school were working, compared with 40 percent of the black dropouts.
These differences came despite the fact that it was the better-off white men who reported the highest rates of drug abuse and binge drinking. White men from disadvantaged families came in second in that department. White men also had high rates of encounters with the criminal justice system. At age 28, 41 percent of the white men born into low-income families had criminal convictions, compared with 49 percent of the black men from similar backgrounds, an indication that it is indeed race, not a criminal record, that’s keeping a lot of black men out of the workforce.
an indication that it is indeed race, not a criminal record, that’s keeping a lot of black men out of the workforce
see, it is culture! white culture.
More from the “what blacks need is a decent respect for the uplifting possibilities of a good education” front.
There are two ways to go here. Either whites wake up, or minorities simply become the majority and seize “equality” by political means.
Now don’t blame me. Somebody has to pick up the ball now that Brett is gone. 😉
Thanks for the link, bobbyp. It’s almost as though she were reading this thread–or a bit more likely, she’s heard it all before countless times.