Unfortunately, parental income can be a terrible proxy.
High income doesn't necessarily indicate wealth or high class. It usually indicates highly educated, high level working class, like doctors and software engineers.
Families with generational wealth often have very little direct income. All wealth is in assets that they borrow against, which doesn't count as income. Even when they take income or realize capital gains, they often do it erratically, so it can be fairly easy to game a university admission that looks at parental income by avoiding income for the years universities request.
Meanwhile, I know people whose parents had very high incomes, but didn't actually have any real, accessible wealth saved, didn't save for their children's education, and had slept walked into too expensive of a lifestyle to divert any of their income.
Because their parents made too much, they got zero financial aid and ended up covered in mountains of loans because their parents didn't actually have the money to give them.
To be fair though, the fault in this case lies exclusively on the irresponsible parents who had the option to provide for their children's education, but opted to leave them to the wolves.
Parental income is a terrible proxy? The abilities of ones guardians growing up is a huge factor in what opportunities someone is offered and a lot of that is dictated by how much money is available for the child. Other aspects like the intelligence, love, care, wit of the parents and child may be larger factors, but that's not something one can quantify on a form.
My oldest will be applying to college in 2027. If it would maximize their chances of admission, I could arrange for my 2026 income tax return to show any 5 or most 6 figure sums that I needed. If I really needed to, I could do the same for 2025 as well.
Showing a household income of $75K in that year/those years won't change the more comfortable financial situation they grew up in.
Brilliant and accomplished people don't always pursue wealth. In certain subcultures it's crass, uncouth, one might even say low class to pursue something too practical or employable, to be too interested in material things and conspicuous consumption. These people aren't rich on paper but they are rich in genetics, habits, attitudes, values, vocabularies, media diets - and they raise brilliant, accomplished kids. Affirmative action for high academic performers subject to low family income would be an almost perfectly tailored handout for this cohort.
Filtering on parental education level might knock most of them out & get better at targeting kids who outperformed their circumstances in more surprising ways. But is the legibility or surprisingness of the kid's outperformance really the point? I think maybe what you'd want to do is give some slots in the meritocracy to kids who are not outperformers at all, but chosen randomly, without regard to academic performance.
For wealthy people, the listed income can be arbitrarily changed if there is a motivation to do so. If having low income benefits their kids admissions to Harvard, then this year the family business will issue no dividends and rather just loan money to the owners, and the CEO compensation will be temporarily adjusted to $30k/year.
I assumed by class they were speaking about the delta between doctors/software engineers at Amazon and warehouse workers at Amazon. I assume generationally wealthy families applying to colleges are already identified by admission departments and their less qualified children's admission is (and would remain) predicated on donating to the library fund.
That's a great way to get a class full of front-line gentrifier families whose breadwinners are academics, journalists, artists, nonprofit staffers, political aides, social workers, etc.
Class is not income, and finding the highest-performing kids from lower-earning families and neighborhoods is an almost perfect strategy for demonstrating the gaps. Of course that's my own background, so I'd take it!
That adds another datapoint. And the schools attended. A lawyer with a JD from Yale and an undergrad from Harvard is in a different class from someone from a low-tier lawschool.
How do you determine the race of a student? "Class" can be designated by objective measures like family income, whether or not parents are university graduates, etc.
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
Race is by definition self-reported, and is easily gamed, as recent high profile stories show. 1950s America everyone wanted to be white. 2020s America everyone wants to identify as something else. This should tell you how the incentives have inverted.
Class is also easy to game and hard to define.
And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3?
How do you conclusively determine educational attainment of parents beyond what they self-report, in an automated, accurate, low-cost way?
Income could be low for high status jobs like professors, journalists, non-profits, etc. Some of the highest status people you meet in blue cities have seemingly little income but high income.
Assets are self reported and hideable.
Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
Educational attainment is pretty easy to judge. Parents almost certainly have linkedin profiles. Census data also asks for education attainment. Incomes and assets are also attainable via tax info. Sure, they can cheat on income taxes, but usually that's making $100M in assets look like $60M. Just based on address they can at least determine the value of your home. An applicant attending Deerfield Academy that reports a family of low income and no parental education is going to ring some alarm bells, and probably isn't going to pass muster.
We don't need to conclusively define class, but we can at least quantify it relative to other applicants. Is the plumber making $90k upper classic? We don't need to pin a label onto it, but we can say they're higher than someone making $40k a year and not as high class as someone making $500k a year.
Both of your examples (linkedin profile & census response) are the very definition of self-reported. Once they become a measure that has negative consequences for your childs college admission, they will stop being as accurately self reported. Further - a single social network is not an objective measure.
You are conflating income & assets. Income is generally hard to hide, assets is much easier. Income is reported to the government by employers. Assets can be infrequently marked to market and illiquid, offshore, etc.
Clearly the examples you use of multi-million assets and prestigious private schools are clear signals, but most of these things are on the margin.
The argument is not so much about the 5% vs the 95%.
It's the tougher decisions about who is in the 30% vs 55% vs 70%.
No, distinguishing between the 30%, 55% and 70% is not really relevant. It's mostly about distinguishing the top 5-10% from the rest of the applicant pool. As per the article:
> A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%.
It is not nearly so simple for someone in the top 1% to try and pretend to be part of the bottom 60%. Their home address alone would usually be enough to mark them as upper income. Work history is not so easy to hide or fabricate. The government has employment records, and people need to disclose their work history to get future employment.
Separating the 30%, 55%, and 70% isn't really relevant. All of them are lower-class in the context of university admissions. Furthermore, these people wouldn't have the means to hide their assets, and they wouldn't even have that much assets to hide. The median net worth in 2019 was just over $120k [1]. For these people, you mostly just look at income.
> Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
idk, these seem like things that can be reasonably calculated based on current statistics
not a great indicator, but good enough proxy for class: family income.
class is, of course, not about income. class is about your position in the productive system and ownership. very rich people might have NO income at all.
but let's say that for most, family income is a good enough proxy.
We probably have very different definitions of class that's causing this confusion. The definition of class I'm using is laid across a spectrum from those who sell their labor on one end to those who make money from the ownership of property on the other.
The reason I use this definition is because the economic relations are reflected in social relations. The social relations one has when they primarily live off the earnings of property are qualitatively different from those who don't - this difference forms the basis of class.
Know that this isn't an idiosyncratic definition - the cradle it was born in was the same cradle that bore sociology itself.
My cousin couldn't afford to go to college because his mom made peanuts and his dad ran off. Couldn't get financial aid because he needed both parents' tax returns. Forcing kids to prove they're poor means rejecting poor kids with absentee parents.
Antisocialism is the root of so many of America's problems. Tax wealth, seize inheritance, and don't charge for higher education. Guillotines only work for the people who can afford them.
I mean, it basically boils down to money. Set prices high enough and you get those who can afford it. And if you've always been elitest, then alumni admissions will all be upper class as well.
Elite schools practice need-blind admissions and have generous need-based financial aid. The more elite the school, the higher and gentler the taper to full price as you go up the family income scale. Poor kid gets a full ride anywhere. Middle class kid gets a full ride from Harvard, half off Chicago, sticker price at Northeastern.
Only the mediocre private schools (or stingy rich parents) actually price kids out. Almost all of the SES filtering is based on grades, test scores, and essays.
Many people have given answers to this very good question.
But I'm going to ask another: WHY does the admission process need to take into account the social class of the student?
- Fairness? College admissions at Ivy Leagues are not a fair process. It advantages legacies, donors.
- Diversity? Then why not also account for race or national origin too?
- An attempt to fix the inequities of US society? Why do this at the college level when 90% of the scars of a poor childhood are already set in stone? Why do it with a student class of only 5000? Why not admit 50,000 into Harvard each year then?
Ivy Leagues' admissions standards are designed to optimize one thing only: the prestige of the institution. That's it. That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. That's why it admits some black and brown students even if their SATs are not that high - so it can make it look like it's an institution that promotes racial justice.
Society should not look to Harvard and Yale to fix all its racial and economic inequity problems. Parents of Asian kids should not look to Harvard and Yale as the ultimate universal badge of academic merit - it's not. Harvard and Yale are going to look after their own interests - and it's all about prestige.
And yes I went to both an ivy league and state university. I know the game.
> That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place.
The way I see it, the admissions design goal for prestigious universities is to ensure that the smartest students in the country and the richest students in the country get the same indistinguishable diploma - their diploma - and that way they sustain and reinforce both their prestige and funding.
Meritocracy basically. You want the hardest working and/or smartest at the top in your country to compete with other countries. Let them work hard, take taxes and distribute to the other classes pensions. Everyone wins.
Having PhDs that are presidents seems like a great indicator that the democratic system is not corrupt.
LMAO at these journalists pretending they're so surprised to find this. As if they had no hand in creating this environment... and as if this wasn't the whole point to begin with. The upper class owns journalism and this state of affairs was very much the goal.
I think this is right. They tend to have alternate ways to circumvent the systems they put in place --such as "donor" privileges in university admissions.
I remember when the elites did a Jedi mind trick on the Occupy Wall Street folks and made them change their focus to race and what bathroom people get to use. It was remarkable.
My anecdata is that as soon as the mega-corporations started waving their pride flags and doing race sensitivity training the masses on my FB/Twitter feed changed their emoji usage right along with them. To be fair this is the same people who immediately forgot that black lives mattered when they traded their BLM fist emoji for a Ukraine flag.
That book was written by authors with a noted conservative agenda so I’m
not sure I would take them at face value, especially given the hyperbolic title.
> He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess
That is a very disingenuous if not flat out incorrect summary of what he said.
That may be one group of people who might be outside of “this mess” and in his category X, but I don’t think that university intellectuals are categorically in class X.
For folks who are interested in a more contemporary class summary, I recommend Michael O’Church’s version:
It's because class in America has always been fluid, with people going from poor to rich or middle class, and from rich to poor, based on their life decisions, and seizing opportunities.
Perhaps the current events have strangled these opportunities for enough people so class can now be used to divide the population against itself?
Of course it's the truth. Success does not just fall into anyone's lap, save a very few minority of cases that get trumpeted as-if they're normal. There are no shortcuts. Hard work and persistence are what is required to be successful in this country - full stop. And hard work doesn't mean you sweat more...
There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful. Are there advantages some children's parents provide - of course - but that does not preclude rising up based on one's own merit. Your children should do better than you... because they build off your life's work.
People like to criticize the American Dream from their couch while watching TV... bemoaning how unfair life is and how the deck was stacked against them. They do this instead of working to better their own future... ten years later and they're still complaining, having done nothing to change their situation.
Look at the most successful people in this country. What do they all have in common?
Opportunity is only available to those who are in the right place at the right time speaking to the right people. If we consider the fact that the universe is entirely deterministic we can see that the ideas of free will and meritocracy evaporate.
Complete nonsense. You literally make your own opportunities - although not all opportunities are obvious when present and some do not reveal themselves unless other opportunities are taken first.
How do you think the "right place, right time" people get to the right place and right time? It's not an accident - it's years in the making for most people. Some never even realize they're in the right place or at the right time, and miss opportunities. That's just how it goes...
The people we're talking about do not seek opportunities, do not make themselves ready for opportunities and do not posses skills to capitalize on opportunities. This is why they sit at home complaining about life instead of studying harder and working harder or building their own opportunity. They literally expect one day something grand will fall into their lap and they'll be the next billionaire. Life doesn't work that way...
Having both a mother and father at home while growing up is one of the premier biological indicators of future success. Wealth helps, sure, but it's very easily lost if you grow up without perspective.
Is a cell deterministic? Is the physics on which cells operate deterministic? From my understanding, yes
What does that mean for neurons? Those must be deterministic, which means that the complex organisms which cells create are also deterministic. Their behaviors is entirely deterministic
Sufficiently complex systems take on a life of their own. A rock rolling down a hill is deterministic. That same rock rolling down the hill a thousand times, has a statistical distribution pattern.
That's ignoring the trees for the forest and saying that forest growth and death patterns are entirely inexplicable because the system is too complex.
Psychologists use statistical models because we lack the full understanding of the brain, but that doesn't mean that behavior can't be predicted if we did have a full understanding.
Saying that the rock rolling down the hill has a distribution pattern completely ignores complexity. Did it have the same exact starting point each time? How strong was the wind blowing and in which direction? Did a pebble move out of the rocks path from the last run?
If all conditions of the rock rolling down the hill are exactly the same that means that the rock will take the same path each time. Differences create that statistical distribution.
There actually are systems that prevent people from becoming successful and it, at least partially, has to do with quality of education for poor people in certain areas. It isn't explicit, but the purpose of a system is what it does
An alternative explanation of decreasing class mobility is simply that an extended period of relatively high class mobility has left most people presorted into the class they belong in.
That only works if your definition of class is purely economical, and you stop looking at the 0.01%
If your definition of class is more European, it's perfectly possible to be upper class and have a down generation, economically speaking, while your network remains upper class, and your children go right up again, as they don't make the same relatively low salary choices of their parents. This is a well measured situation all over the world, and the US is not special. See the well known studies in Italy, where ancestry and class correlations are linked for over a dozen generations.
But let's say all you care about is income, and look at intergenerational income mobility. It's not as if the United State does all that well, and most of the difference is emigration of high class immigrants. The doctor that can't get a job in the US as a doctor, but whose children vastly outearn them, becoming relatively high class quite quickly. See https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergeneration....
If you could capture the public's attention and make tons of money focusing on class, someone would do it and dominate discourse. Maybe not existing institutions, but certainly there's nothing preventing someone else from taking to the field. Indeed, there is no shortage of media that do focus on class issues, but they are invariably small & marginalized.
Media will literally eat poop in exchange for attention and the wealth and influence that comes with it. Pretending that the reason they're not talking about class is because of some misguided focus of those in the industry is absurd.
It's just... if you don't pretend, then you have to place the blame elsewhere, and nobody wants to.
To clarify, I wouldn't deny that the bar is lowering (as you said, it shows). The narrative scapegoating of the media invariably implies that the media is detached from the public and is following its own agenda on this matter. There's lots of ways that the "media elite" are detached from the public and consequently are disconnected from the marketplace; this is NOT one of them.
The unacknowledged truth behind "Actual news outlets covering actual news have an enormous incentive to cut corners on this stuff", and "that all sells better than Lehrer’s guidelines do" is that it's consumers of media who are firmly driving this trend. If the audience valued Lehrer's guidelines more, there'd not be an enormous incentive to cut corners. If anything, the folks who work in media overvalue Lehrer's guidelines as compared to the market. It's not them who is doing it.
Almost anything a politician does anymore, they can basically always bypass accountability by claiming the impetus is to help advance some racial or other marginalized agenda.
I didn't make that infographic and I don't have another one without the bottom right part, but it would be weird to invalidate the whole point because whoever made it has said the taboo word.
I also think that it's extremely stupid to blame "all Jews" for anything. But it's equally stupid to call "all white people" privileged, especially if we need to use 2 different definitions of "white" when arriving at the privileged conclusion vs. applying the penalty for it. Both approaches are stupid, divisive and inconstructive, and the more someone pushes in one direction, the more pushback it creates. Focusing on class, or especially "self-made wealth vs. inherited wealth" could do wonders in terms of actually uniting people.
This was interesting until it blamed Jewish people.
If you don't like class systems, blame those who perpetuate them. The extremely wealthy, the royalists and the supporters of caste type systems. Otherwise you're just being antisemitic when you could be making an interesting point.
I agree that it's fascinating, but the race issue is more like a pornography for America. And Americans would prefer to consume the porn than the substance.
No, there are certainly times where the media reporting is “top-down”. This latest recession has produced some strange reporting around justifying raising fed rates to cause unemployment to reduce inflation, for example.
A more historical example would be on the early days of the 2nd Gulf War and the war drums beating for Iran perhaps a year later (that never materialized into a war)
Interesting; I didn't think the article author was "pretending they're so surprised" about anything. Do you have any reason to think that they've expressed opposing views in the past?
>I didn't think the article author was "pretending they're so surprised"
it's not as dramatic as feigning surprise, but the mere act of choosing a specific topic to report on makes known the ideas of what a specific journo may think the public will find intriguing.
in other words, "Water is Wet." gets no viewership, but "5 Ways You May Not Know How Water Can Kill" does get views -- likewise when a journalist has a topic like "Why X is Y", we (the reader) can presume that the work holds some novelty other than stating the obvious.
'pretending to be surprised' comes from the premise that class is such an obvious distinction in the United States that stating such is about obvious as stating 'Water is Wet.'
The goal of whom? Please don't vaguely hand wave about the .1%.
Who specifically with means has had this goal? Because without any kind of evidence or idea of who is doing it, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.
I ask because whenever I see instances of the ultra rich trying to control the narrative, it always comes off as obvious and ham fisted. The obvious rebuttal is "well you don't see when they succeed", but I don't think they would torpedo a cause they believe in in order for other causes to be successful. Unless they are truly playing 4d chess.
Bezos for one. He specifically bought newspaper to massage the image of billionaires like him. I don't think he's beneth that tactic given that Amazon has huge employee rotation by design because they haven't anticipate running out of people.
I don't think they were particularly successful in that, there was quite a bit of backlash about billionaires blowing millions of dollars on useless vanity projects so they can fly to space on giant space dicks: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/20/jeff-bezos-r...
Possibly I guess, but from my perspective, as someone who reads a wide range of viewpoints, it appears that it's the central and left leaning papers that are the ones pushing the importance of race in America, not the conservative ones like the ones that murdoch owns. The perspective I get from his papers seems more of just generally disliking any black complaint about the society's treatment of them, with the implication that anything wrong with black people is their own fault.
Isn't this case only when the thing really is obvious and just because you can spot couple of those "obvious cases" does not mean you have spotted every attempt, only the obvious ones.
Just wait until they find out the inter-generational conflict they've been fomenting for decades gets the same treatment. Every "Boomer this" or "GenZ that" is a diversion of class-resentment.
> as if this wasn't the whole point to begin with. The upper class owns journalism and this state of affairs was very much the goal
There's more to it than that. Intellectuals look at the parallels between race and class and see potential for "yes, and" solidarity; political professionals see the danger of splitting and confusing the limited mental space that non-professionals have for politics. A competing truth is worse than a lie. The time was ripe for significantly enriching the public understanding about race, and they were ruthless in not letting anything else get in the way. Their desires dovetailed nicely with the social media bullies (high school bullies grown up, or not grown up) who enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their favorite pastime, shaming people into conformity. It's hard to balance political priorities; it's easy to denounce talking about class as a racist ploy to derail threats to white supremacy.
How you feel about the outcome depends on your expectations of people. I don't have high expectations. I think it's pretty cool that race has been getting the attention that it has.
Identity politics was manufactured to distract from the income inequality and divide people so they couldn't focus on the increasing shafting of the American middle class.
Whenever I hear these totalizing opinions I do some searching. The NYT has published an imperial ton of articles on class in the last several years. About the effects on income inequality, on how wealth inequality is now at its highest since WWII, a breakdown of guaranteed income programs by city, a synopsis of a study on poverty reduction, a synopsis of De Blasio's mixed successes and failures on addressing New York income equality, how the effects of New York heat weaves are worse for poorer people...
I think the 'upper class' has a lot of influence, but it clearly isn't stopping the NYT from giving enough information to readers to build some pretty strong opinions on the effects of class in the United States. Journalists are clearly spilling a ton of ink over it.
I think the blame must be spread more broadly. There is a tremendous anti-socialist, anti-labor force in American discourse, and parts of the media are helping to drive it, but other parts are resisting it. And regardless of its provenance, it is quite entrenched in the day to day, non-journalist culture.
I've been active in reforming voting systems since I think that makes a difference to how politics works.
Is there a path or actions that address class issues other than the standard "run for office" and "vote for people who will address class-related issues"?
Find a way to educate lower-class Americans about class, not just race. Ultimately, that should be more effective than reforming voting... if you can figure out how to do it.
(Note that it doesn't matter whether they have a point or not. What matters is that now, either way, you'll have to talk about it whenever RCV comes up. There is similar contention around IRV and some other methods; basically anything that disrupts existing power arrangements.)
There isn't one, and this thread is going to be absolutely full of similar unsourced claims and leaning into stereotypes, either intentionally or not, so just keep that in mind.
The difference in health insurance coverage between whites and blacks is 4 percentage points. The difference in health insurance coverage between high and low income households is 10 percentage points.
I can make one up. Kanye is black and wealthy and gets much more negative attention than Jimbob over here who is on disability and sometimes even mows the grass around his trailer.
Otherwise, it seems kind of suspicious. Extremely so.
There are some data regarding worse outcomes for children (especially boys) of wealthy black families, compared to poorer white families.
For example, they are more likely to go to jail. [1] I believe there may be similar data regarding income/wealth outcomes as well, but the best I could find quickly relates to middle class black families, not wealthy ones. [2]
Of course, this doesn't mean the families are worse off overall, but it does tend to indicate that there are some things working against black families, even middle- and upper-class ones.
Wealthy black people are worse off than poor white people? Do you have any references for that? I can't imagine anyone would rather be starving and white than rich and black.
I don't think that's true. But the data does show that if you control for most factors, race still plays a factor. That is, it's better to be poor and white than poor and black. That said, I'd rather be a black billionaire than dirt poor and white.
Controlling for income doesn't work well, because whites at the same income level tend to have much more wealth than blacks at the same income level. Controlling for wealth, blacks still tend to poorer access to resources (clean water, prenatal care, etc...).
It would be a great achievement if we could simply say that poor blacks were finally as well off as poor whites, but we're still quite a ways away from that.
That said, I don't think the country has the stomach to realistically try to fix that problem any longer.
But these effects are well studied and I'm sure these institutions have plenty of sociologists that could help come up with some models that work at least as good as stereotyping based on skin color.
The idea that generalizing based on race is just easier leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why do we tell racists that they shouldn't prejudge people based on race at the same time that people with good intentions do the same thing?
There was a study I saw as an undergrad that used all the standard factors and also used zip code -- and that worked surprisingly well to explain a lot of the differences. But using race rather than zip code, actually was still better -- and of course zip code may well have simply been a race proxy.
I think zip code though will likely be more satisfying to people. Although the conservative wing of the supreme court has already said that they don't like the top 10% rules for admission, so I suspect they'll also not be kind to zip code since the idea is similar in spirit.
There’s a reason that banks have compliance departments that have to review any statistical models inputs and assumptions for implicit violations of the Fair Lending / Fair Housing acts.
The solution is not to create ever more complicated adjustments but to make sure that all children get great education (and nutrition) from early childhood, even if they are disadvantaged at home.
Rolling it up from the other side by giving top college spots to kids who were disadvantaged in the first place never made sense to me.
Yeah growing up in Germany gave me this illusion that all children can actually get a decent (even if not super spectacular) publicly funded education somewhat independent of social background.
If you can't determine if someone is disadvantaged then I guess they aren't. Labeling someone disadvantaged because of their skin color is just racism. In fact, if ANYTHING is racism, it's that.
If 50% of the nation's wealth was mine, I'd talk about race, skin color, eye color, haircut styles - I'd talk about anything to distract attention from the only fact that matters.
Because historically race was used systemically to limit opportunities for people of color. The last school to be desegregated was in 1963. Think about that.
That's a pretty straightforward disadvantage. The only solution is to make public schools accept people of color. There's no other way around that. If you don't, they won't.
What we're dealing with now is the legacy of those decisions. They made sense in that context but the context has changed.
What is a disadvantage is that some people of color experience limited opportunity due to differences in generational wealth and other factors.
These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged on their college application than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
My point was, that less than 60 years ago, it very clearly was a disadvantage, because of the system.
> These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
> The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
I agree -- but a college application isn't for an average black student or an average white student. Each application is for one individual student, who had an individual life experience. If we want to help students who struggled in poverty -- let's measure their individual poverty. Then we'll help everyone at exactly the correct rate, rather than on some generalized presumption.
Forced busing worked too. Got the money more evenly distributed and fostered healthier, more heterogeneous cultures in the schools. Parents just weren't ready for interracial marriage, and were terrified their kids would date 'other'.
> A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.
> Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.
Busing was so unpopular among black Americans that it had about as many supporters among them as continuing school segregation:
> The poll indicated that 18 per cent of the nation opposed public school integration. Nineteen per cent of the whites and 9 per cent of the blacks in the poll were in this category.
The fact is that busing was forced on the nation by people like you, who neither had much idea what the people, who they claimed to help, actually wanted, nor cared to learn.
Busing was extremely unpopular policy, and this is a well known fact to anyone who actually paid attention to the history of social reform in US. Granted, public reception to busing is not one of those facts about history of black discrimination that every American ought to know, especially if they are too young to either remember this, or learn it from their parents. However, one should not express opinions on whether it worked, or throw some extremely simplistic takes about intermarriage worries, without knowing that people hated busing, white and black.
People once wanted slavery and explicit segregation, that doesn't mean it's evil to force them to stop. Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities. I've lived in the south where busing had been forced and the north where it wasn't. It does work.
> When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children.[1]
People may have opposed busing for a variety of reasons. Yet the results suggest it was segregation. IME even desegregationist parents flinch once an 'other' comes home for dinner with their child's family.
> People once wanted slavery and explicit segregation, that doesn't mean it's evil to force them to stop.
Sure, but if it was the slave themselves who preferred slavery to what your courts were forcing on them, one should really step back and ask oneself if he is doing the right thing.
> Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities.
And there is an ample evidence that it made their lives worse, that one could obtain by simply asking them how they feel about the policy. The fact is that you remain completely uninterested in what the people you claim to be helping actually want, and instead prefer to force your preferences on them because you believe it’s better for them and the society. You know who else claimed the same about their policy, and ignored the protests of people affected by it? The segregationists.
Race is very easy to focus on without making any structural changes in society. A black man was president. So long as it's the right black man, it doesn't change much.
There is still structural codified racism within US borders. For instance, it's illegal for non-native US nationals/citizens to own most property in American Samoa, in effect perpetuating racism against outsiders who are also US nationals.
The "US national" status is a legacy of the Insular Cases, and all the other cases formerly in this bucket have either gained independence (Philippines) or become full US citizens (Guam, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands).
So in the hypothetical case that American Samoa is returned to Samoa, the logical options are to either make all American Samoans citizens of Samoa, or to give them the option to choose between Samoan and American citizenship. In either case the weird "national" status will cease to exist.
Hawaii's housing law that allows historically disadvantaged outsiders like the US-naturalized Filipinos who came in as cheap farm labor to actually OWN land are why half my family even has their own meager slice of property today.
Under American Samoan rules non-native minorities like blacks and filipinos are in effect excluded from property ownership rights of nearly all of American Samoa. I can't believe people here are effectively pro-racism in housing. Codified racism of property rights are not acceptable within US borders.
I was describing the motivation, not supporting it.
But sure, I can understand why a nation wants to preserve some of its self determination, rather than become a remote province with a 75% foreign population.
I can also understand the plight of the local foreign underclass.
I appreciate you "not supporting it" even though you've very selectively chosen to express "understanding" in instances where that understanding aligns with racism. To be clear, you are against racist property ownership laws and thus against the racism of the local government of American Samoa, correct?
>the plight of the local foreign underclass
The disadvantaged minorities (such as Filipinos) I'm referring to who thankfully were actually allowed to own land in Hawaii are almost all US nationals, not foreigners. Under the racist laws of Americas Samoa they would be excluded from land ownership, even as fellow US nationals residing in American Samoa.
> For more than 40 years the court had allowed some positive discrimination
I’m not a fan of the term “positive discrimination” at all. It tries to hide the fact that the “positive” effect to one group is necessarily at the expense of another. Whether it’s positive or negative just depends on which group we’re talking about.
Agreed, if you have a finite amount of resources and "positively" favor one group over another, this automatically disfavors another group. When skin color is used for this "positive" favor, we have a term for the impact on the other group: racism. Have we not learned that racism is ALWAYS bad?
Based on comments I read on here this morning about how some people think it’s ok to be racist because you’re basing your disdain for them on the way other people who look like them behave, no.
(To clarify, the comments said, “I dislike people of X color because of the behaviors I’ve observed in people of X color.” And they argued that it wasn’t the same as just hating people based on color, although that’s exactly what it is.)
Isn't it though? I think that's the point: a well-off or even rich black kid from two black lawyers or doctors or whatnot is being favoured over a poor white kid from a (former) coal mining community in West-Virginia. The number of university openings, job openings, grants, etc. are all finite in number, so there is some amount of "competition" involved.
And you can talk about statistics and averages and whatnot all day, but once you start applying averages to individuals – which is essentially what "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" amounts to – you're always going to be wrong in a very substantial number of cases.
>Surveys show that majorities of African-Americans, Californians, Democrats and Hispanics all oppose the use of race in college admissions (and in other areas).
And this is why the term "white privilege" sells so poorly to whites. And why CRT is attacked so vigorously. Everyone likes to think they made it on their own. The guy who inherited a multi-million dollar business thinks he has had no more real advantage than then guy who was raised in an orphanage in Uganda. While I firmly believe that this privilege exists, you just can't legislate based on it, because you'll get no support.
There's white privilege in Pensiltucky? Elon Musk knows he wouldn't have made it big without family connections, but the white guy from Western Pennsylvania knows that he was up against a whole lot and made it anyway, against all odds.
Right, and I think generally the high status whites who profess it about whites actually don't mean themselves. They mean all those low status whites who have wrongthink.
Ironically many of them live in liberal, multi-cultural cities filled with rich people who are much more high status than vast swathes of inland rural white people.
I agree. Let me give you another example of privilege -- being able-bodied. It doesn't seem like a privilege, because there are still obstacles you must overcome, but it's just one less obstacle.
IMO, the only thing that makes "white privilege" somewhat interesting, is the extent to which the country made laws and regulations around race. If it were merely tribal preferences of liking people who were genetically closer to you, I'd view it more like being tall as a privilege. But the fact that we used the government and other legal instruments to prop one above the other gives me a certain level of discomfort that I don't have with all the other forms of privilege that exist.
What's the point of playing this privilege game? You know where this ends? Comparing intelligence and other genetic traits and it intersects with eugenics, which as we all know is a great road to start on... Sometimes I really wonder if the privilege olympics people ever took the time to think through where their logical reasoning would lead to.
Ultimately we need to allow everyone to have a life with dignity while creating a system that rewards hard work. It'll never be perfect, and trying to play the "luck" / privilege game ends up in the biggest lottery of all, genetics.
A Pensiltuckian will be keenly aware of the fact, no matter where on the political spectrum they are. The distinction is really between traditional left/right and the "woke left", for want of any better term.
Musk also left South Africa at a time when race relations were boiling and South African racism against whites were heating up. So ironically anti-white racism probably contributed to Musks' rise in North American continent.
"White privilege" is like a DSM-5 diagnosis. It's only brought up with a treatment (or remedy) in mind. It's intended more as a tool to bring about a particular outcome, and less as a description of a scientifically measurable reality.
I don't object to the use of "white privilege" to attempt an objective description of reality.
I do object to the notion that more discrimination on the basis of race is the answer. You don't solve a structure fire by adding gasoline.
I object to the use of "white privilege" on first principles:
Interpreted literally, it implies all whites are privileged. This is categorically untrue.
It encourages racism through associating an immutable trait with a negative word. "White privilege" is no more true than saying "Jewish privilege" or "Asian privilege" when referring to trends that do not reflect the whole. For the latter two one would be accused of anti-semitism or racism but for the former it's common parlance. Therefore, to be logically consistent, "white privilege" must also be racist. Associating a negative trait of a minority of a race with the entire race, is in fact, the very definition of racism.
To further exemplify the point whites still hold a majority in the US. This means, by the numbers, there are many more disenfranchised whites than literally any other race. Consequently, there are more very disenfranchised whites who are probably experiencing the same, if not worse, conditions as others races. The right wing gets it wrong, the largest welfare recipient group is in fact low income whites. This makes sense when you actually look at the numbers.
The entire structure of the term "white privilege" is designed first to divide and then to discourage. During the BLM riots you had white people groveling, begging for forgiveness, like this so-called "privilege" is some sort of original sin (which is how it is sold) that can only be cleansed through constant, deliberate self-flaggelation. This repentance ceremony is further promoted (and even incited) by the bigoted and racist Kendi and D'Angelo. Both suggest the only solution to this privilege is constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation. CRT is rightly criticized because being encouraged to denigrate yourself for some alleged (in reality, manufactured) original sin is simply gaslighting.
No one should be made to feel this way on the basis of their skin color. It is simply the race hustlers promoting such terms to sow further division. Division among races means they cannot unite and focus on class issues. Racism, as a tool, is the perfect way to induce this division. "White privilege" is one of many examples of this racism.
Why do you believe "privilege" is a negative word?
Also, assuming you mean Robin DiAngelo, what of hers have you read? She's pretty clear in both White Fragility and Nice Racism in advocating against "constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation" because they center the person doing it and take energy away from productive action.
It's essentially saying 'It was an honor to meet him;' that could mean that you were undeserving, or simply that it was something unusual that most people didn't get to do; if it were common, it wouldn't be a privilege, would it?
In the thread's context, usually it's associated with not granting the privilege to someone else, as well - you have a privilege that others do not, one that you do not do anything to deserve.
I don't know about you, but I don't really believe that 'white privilege' is intended as a positive. It's intended to have a negative connotation, otherwise there would be no impetus for change.
I also agree that terms like "white privilege" are intended as criticism. However I don't see them as criticism of the individual who has the privilege, but rather of the society whose circumstances gave them that privilege. The term is an attempt to promote systems thinking.
"White privilege" means that you fit in the particular mold that American society pours and casts people out of. Nothing more and nothing less. If you want to object to the jargon on the grounds of being jargon, fine, but I've yet to find better terminology than this.
It doesn't mean that all white people are rich, it means that poor white people are in less of a shitty situation than equally-improverished black people. It could be as simple as just living in a better ZIP code with more opportunities in it[0], for example. But it's still a shitty situation, in the same way that third-degree burns are bad but different from a broken arm.
The constant self-flaggelation approach is actually opposed by a lot of anti-racists specifically because it takes focus away from the victims of racism and to people who benefit from it.
>If you want to object to the jargon on the grounds of being jargon
"Jargon" like that is not accrptable. Would you allow it for any other group? And many people use the term white privilege to mean an intrinsic power held by white people as a result of their oppression of blacks. So you are wrong on all acounts.
>but I've yet to find better terminology than this.
It's hard to come up with a name for something that barely exists in tbe first place. "You're zip-code is privileged" doesn't invoke the same guilt does it?
Police killing black people for being black as some sort of racist unwritten policy is a myth. The rates shown here make perfect sense. And most (99%?) were armed. Also consider that there are hundreds of millions of Americans. It's difficult to fully grasp just how large that is. The media likes selling stories but that doesn't change the facts. A dozen news articles won't change that.
First, those are cases of black people being arrested or detained, sometimes violently, by police. Not killed. Further, many of them resulted in a successful lawsuits against the police, which should tell you something about the quality of police actions.
Second, keep in mind that data about police violence, including deaths, are complete shit because police are not required to report data and no one has an incentive to do so. (I don't know what Statista's data sources are, but did you notice how the number of "unknown" race deaths increased in 2020 and 2021?)
"Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study." (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6..., https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-pol...)
Here's another good article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z I'd suggest following the endnotes. "About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."
>By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime.
That is because they commit more violent crimes. Did you know that?
>Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed.
See the last point.
In 99.9% of cases, people killed by police are commiting crimes.
Also note that asians have the lowest rate of being killed by police. I suppose it was asians that were the real whites all along? Or perhaps you simply can't make sweeping conclusions from this data.
I did read it. Being killed by police is a function of police encounters while commiting crimes. Additionaly, there will be more police in higher crime areas in the first place. What is the rate when no crime is being commited, and what is the total amount of cases? My guess is the rate is the same and the sample size is really low. Although who knows what the "estimates" your study has "found" are. Also, why do asians have more white privelage than whites? At least under your definition.
Do I need to post a list of articles showing white people being bashed, brutally raped, murdered, pushed under a train or even tortured by black people while they were:
- being in their garden
- going to their car
- jogging
- walking their dog
- eating out at a restaurant
The absurd idea that whites are the ones brutalizing blacks in America is an extremely offensive joke.
This is an argument I have with some of my more lefty friends.
There are problems that have no legislative solution.
I saw this as someone who has voted blue no matter who..
Sometimes the current left wing of the Dems work at cross purposes to themselves. On the one hand we need to legislate laws for everything, and on the other hand enforcing laws is discriminatory & abusive and whats a little broken windows here & there, you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette!!
My favorite example is all the gun control rhetoric in NYC while at the same time the Manhattan DA announced he was not going to seek jail terms for non-violent illegal gun possession charges. "LOL nothing matters" is how it feels.
I think the left has fundamentally gotten crime wrong. And I say this as a strong progressive. I understand the rationale with bias in everything from the laws, to police enforcement, to the judicial system, to ability to be gainfully employed after conviction, to impact on family -- but I think it's one of those areas where getting a few constant factors wrong in our calculus made us go in the wrong direction. But that obviously is completely tangential to this article.
"Two days after being sworn in, Alvin Bragg shared a memo with staff Monday noting that his office will not prosecute low-level offenses like marijuana misdemeanors, refusal to pay for public transportation fare, prostitution and resisting arrest, unless given alongside a felony charge. Instead, they would be offered a community-based diversion program."
Does that sound unreasonable? When about 1 in 150 Americans are currently incarcerated?
The heavy use of the crude tool of locking people up as a solution for crime is a peculiarity of the American judicial approach, in contrast to other Western nations. Certainly there are crimes that warrant it, but possession of something that hasn't caused harm may not meet the bar for this approach, when you look at how counterproductive 'corrections' like this measurably are, and the larger history of its use as a tool of prejudice, poor police work, and the profit motive of privately owned prisons.
John Oliver recently put out an explanation of how bail reform is desperately needed in this country, if you're interested in learning that way. An alarming takeaway I had from it is that half a million Americans are currently in jail awaiting their case to be heard, unable to post bail. They are not convicted, only charged. Some non-zero number of them are innocent, their lives completely upended and in indefinite limbo.
gausswho says >"Does that sound unreasonable? When about 1 in 150 Americans are currently incarcerated?"<
Incarcerated for what and for how long? You're just giving numbers without specifying their offenses nor whether they are locked up awaiting trial or the end of their sentences.
While I completely agree about bail reform, I think you may have a misconception about prison populations (people actually convicted.)
Of the roughly 1 million people incarcerated in state prisons, over 60% are there for violent crimes. About 3.8% are in prison for drug possession - about 40,000. So yes, too many, but not 1 in 150. Now, 1 in 5 people are in jail for some kind of drug offense, but that's not simple possession.
It's definitely worth having the conversation about what to do about that, but don't think that 'possession of something that hasn't caused harm' is the cause of most incarcerations.
Yes, anyone who has walked around NYC in the last 10 years and thinks that theres some sort of mass incarceration of marijuana users is delusional. The smell is basically on any block on any given day, and theres open selling of it from unlicensed mobile dispensaries.
Pretending the jails are filled with non-violent simple drug offenders is someone either ill informed or not wanting to have a serious conversation. Either way, they are probably not in a position to be harmed one way or the other by increased criminal violence because they are high status enough to believe their zip code or income insulate them from it.
Further, to your stat of 60% of incarcerated being their for violent offenses probably undersells how many were "violent". The NY bail reform laws were passed by pols who said it only applied to "non violent" offenses.
However the criminal law definition & intuitive civilian understanding of "non violent" do not necessarily align. There were plenty of cases in NYC post 2019 of people getting pushed down the stairs of subways, or sucker punched on the sidewalk which somehow fell into the "non-violent" bucket, for the purposes of the law.
The whole argument on bail reform would be moot if suspects were getting a speedy trial. We shouldn't be hearing of cases where people are out on the streets able to commit 5 different offenses over 9 months while still awaiting trial on the first charges.
Agreed that if speedy trials were a thing, the local jail and bail reform problem would be greatly reduced. But there has been some refuted talking points around someone commiting 5 or 9 (or whatever made up number) of multiple distinct crimes while awaiting trial. If it happens it's exceedingly rare. Please link me to them if you find them.
It is much closer to 2 million those who are incarcerated with about 400,000 of those from drug possession. Less than half for violent offenses and that's probably an overcount.
I mentioned in 1 in 150 Americans because that's the ratio of 2 million to ~300 million of the US population.
I think it's really, really important to be careful with words when discussing things like this.
PPI did not estimate that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug possession. They estimated that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug related crimes. In the state system, among people convicted (again, we agree about bail reform, so I wasn't talking about the 500,000 people not convicted, and fed is a totally different animal so focused on what is most likely), only 40,000, according to the PPI estimates, are there for drug possession.
And again, though yes, entering someone's home at night for the purpose of theft is considered a violent crime in some jurisdictions, 600,000 people are estimated to be incarcerated in state prison for violent crimes - of those, maybe you could say that there is an exaggeration in some of the 120k there for robbery. According to that PPI sheet, 140,000 or so are in state prison for murder.
Removing those currently incarcerated while awaiting trial, you have 1.5 million in all prisons and a 453/100k incarceration rate. That's about 4X Canada's. Removing all drug convictions, not just possession, would decrease that number to about 1.25 million. To match Canada's rate, we'd need to have about 350k incarcerated individuals; right now, according to that PPI sheet, we have about 290,000 incarcerated for rape/sexual assault, murder, and manslaughter alone.
>And this is why the term "white privilege" sells so poorly to whites.
It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege.
>And why CRT is attacked so vigorously.
Have you read any CRT "scholars?" I have, and they are sickening.
Because one does not imply the other. A minority of whites are disproportionately wealthy. Associating the trait of a minority of a group with the majority is racism.
I'm not suggesting one implies the other. Are you saying the only advantage one could possibly have is economic? Or maybe that you'd expect all advantages and disadvantages to be reflected in wealth or lack thereof?
Sue for one, and really the whole of "whiteness studies." I don't know if that's CRT proper, but that's what I was refering to. I read some of "the future of whiteness" and some shorter articles posted in various "communications" journals. From Sue:
>Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence.
Or from another "scholar"
>How can we account for the ways in which white people refuse to acknowledge their possessive investment in whiteness even as they work to increase its value everyday? We can't blame the color of our skin. It must be the content of our character.
I can't find it now, but I once read a passage from one of these CRT nutjobs' work that really shed light on their insanity. It went something like
>whiteness and white supremacy is not seen directly but rather is society itself. It is the tapestry we are woven of, and we are therefore blind to it. It exists even where it cannot be seen as it is the source of rather than a detail within society.
They are all somewhat careful with what they say. But their effect is real. They are turning being white into an evil, one that cannot be rectified but is an irremovable stain on one's being.
Of course there is this classic response: "I don't think white people are evil, just whiteness, which you are by necessity a part of because you directly contribute to it."
> It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege.
Whites get advantages that have nothing to do with being more wealthy.
For example, once in the '80s I was driving around the Los Angeles area around 3 AM (I had insomnia and decide to just drive around randomly, and maybe pick up a snack at a 7-11) when I got pulled over for having one of my tail lights out. I was driving a cheap car, had a full unkempt beard and long hair, was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and was in my early 20s. Anyone who saw me would probably think druggie.
I gave him my license and told him the registration was in the glove compartment. He shone his light on the glove compartment while I opened it and dug the registration out from under the $1000 in $20 bills that it was under.
He asked me why I had so much cash.
I told him that I'd responded to a classified ad from someone selling a modem for $1000. I was meeting them later that day and that was the money to pay for it.
He gave my license and registration back, told me to get the tail light fixed, and let me go.
I have no confidence that if I had been a young black man driving a cheap car looking like a druggie at 3 AM with $1000 in small bills in the glove compartment that things would have been so hassle free.
While that is anecdotal, the overall statistics of police stops based on race are damning. This is just in the realm of policing, let alone workplace social dynamics, education, and the list goes on. So while class and white privilege are a venn diagram, their overlap is not at all total.
I don’t necessarily think the research agrees the stats are damning. For example, here is Roland Fryer’s study which concluded blacks are more likely to be pulled over than whites but are actually less likely to be shot.
It seems many people from both sides just decide the data that refutes their opinion is misinformation. The topic of police discrimination is far more nuanced than either the left or right makes it appear.
And it is easy to find anecdotes that support any narrative you want so your links do little to sway me in the same way if I were to share a link of a white person being harassed it would likely do little to sway you.
An empirical survey showing use of lethal force is similar but use of any force is 50% more likely based on race seems to support my point.
Agree about anecdotes. Disagree my opinion cannot be swayed (this is not twitter and I certainly don't fully agree with "the left").
If the assertion is that all rich people are treated the same, regardless of race, then only examples are needed to refute it.
But, beyond anecdotes, the national statistics indicate there are disparities in policing based on race ((1) your citation strongly supports this assertion (2) as an aside and without reference, there are similar damning statistics for incarceration rates and jail sentences, and this is still just in the realm of criminal justice):
"ABC News analysis of police arrests nationwide reveals stark racial disparity
Black people were arrested at a rate five times more than white people in 2018."
"In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts"
Quick point: CRT have nothing to do with "white privilege". CRT is a subset of critical theory, which basically is a method of research in "humanities" (history, linguistics, archeology, probably others).
Critical theory is a postmodernist (postmarxist?) method, also used by rightwing researchers (Furet immediatly come to mind) to improve our knowledge of certain "facts" beyond the myths our ancestors built.
For example, we applied critical theory to old European cairns, and decided to do more analysis on squeletons we found in the 70s and 80. It appears that we misgendered some, and just because someone was buried with weapons did not mean it was always a man, it could also (in some, limited cases) be a female.
This discovery is actually aligned with the discovery of Celtic law texts (which are very rare, as Celts were mostly an oral culture, sadly).
CRT is basically the same thing, but applied with race. Its basically says "lets review this experiment/discovery from the 50, what could have been a bias of the researchers at the time".
In my opinion, this shouldn't have been separated from critical theory: CRT suffer the same syndrome most of the US does, and the focus on race hide the class issues. My pet theory is that liberals kinda liked the method, but disliked the fact that it was heavily inspired by historical materialism (and carries with it the idea of classism).
Taking a marxist global concept and applying it to a limited scope to avoid disturbing everything too much is basically what they did when they transformed the concept of "emancipation" into "empowerment" for feminism. Sure, short-term it works to keep everything still, at what price though.
Most white people of course don't have multi-million dollar businesses. The real issue is that many white folk just aren't all that privileged in the first place, and once you start applying such broad generalisations to entire populations without nuance it just becomes silly, even if the generalisation is broadly true.
Many people who strongly argue in favour of things like white privilege tend to be well-off, so from their experience the generalisation holds true, but they fail to realize that their experience is not universally shared and dismiss people with things like "racists" or "handbasket of deplorables", without even attempting to understand where the opposition might be coming from.
The entire thing is a catastrophic failure of empathy, which is ironic because the concept of privilege is useful IMHO exactly to understand that your experience is not shared by everyone.
Also, in a society so bent on making money, what do you want the "guy who inherited a multi-million dollar business" to do? Give it up?
No. He is going to do what everyone is doing. Compete with every tool in his arsenal.
And from his point of view, the competition is a whole bunch of people who inherited THEIR wealth and plenty of people MORE wealthy. Does he see himself as having a privilege compared to all of those people?
Is he going to want to give up any privilege he's got? Especially if some of his competition aren't affected?
I'm not saying it is right. But you'll never get them to agree.
Because it seems like the pro-affirmative action camp is strong. If most people are against it, who is supporting it?
Last year a geophysicist, Dorian Abbot, was invited to give a lecture at MIT about some new results in climate science. His invitation was rescinded because he had once criticized affirmative action in a magazine article.
On one hand, it is telling that even states as culturally blue as CA and WA don't have majority in support of affirmative action. On the other hand, that is still a lot of people in support.
My guess is most people don't want to say yes to _everything_ on a survey because it's equivalent to not answering. So it's unsurprising that this would come out low when lumped in with academics. When asked straight up about race I'd imagine the response would be stronger. But of course that's just a hypothesis.
The survey specifically asks about racial discrimination. There is indeed more widespread support for "affirmative action", but not race-based affirmative action. I don't think the supreme court is going to strike down policies favoring first generation college students or low income students, only those focused on race.
The Economist, FT and Bloomberg are obsessed with both race and class. Not content with the meager profits of economic reporting on a budget, they have become peddlers of social ressentment for a long while.
They are sociologists / journalists / non-technical economists earning 50k (barely percentile 60), and telling us daily how action X is immoral (exactly what bishops and priests used to do).
oh come on! all are well known as being right-wing. and all of them are support organs for capitalism. i'm not saying there anything wrong with that - i enjoy reading both the ft and economist. and i like living in a basically capitalist society - the UK
are well known as being right-wing. and all of them are support organs for capitalism
If anyone who believes in capitalism is "right-wing", sure. But by US standards, these are center left publications (like unofficially Democratic party affiliated left, not Bernie/Socialist/Occupy left).
If you want to call them right-wing, show me an article critical of global warming, endorsing a republican besides Liz Cheney, or acknowledging Trump did at least one good thing (without caveats or apologies).
there is a difference between being right-wing and being a complete swivel-eyed loony. those publications are the former. also republicans and democrats are both right-wing (both part of the "money-party", as Gore Vidal called them). sadly.
Journalists don't decide the editorial stance of the publications they write for. In the short term, it's up to an editorial board or editor-in-chief. In the long term, it's up to the owners.
Depends. For instance, if I went to American Samoa, I would be in effect racially barred from owning most property despite being a US national just like the locals. Real estate ownership is a common element of measurement of success.
In the words of Immortal Technique - Philosophy of Poverty:
"As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue.
Many of us are in the same boat and it's sinking, while these bougie motherfuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole".
As Warren Buffet once said, "There is a class war in America, and we won." The race wars and culture wars the upper class have fomented with their corporate media were designed to keep the working class fighting with each other while they changed the tax rules and absconded with everything they could.
This was a pretty core topic of conversation around Bernie's run for president, and Marxist lefties have been saying this quite consistently. Would be fascinating to see the Economist actually engage with some of that directly.
the problem with the marxists isn't their evaluation of the problem, it's that they can study history and still somehow have picked the 2nd worst solution possible.
Well, 99% of Marxism is "evaluation of the problem." It's highly descriptive, barely prescriptive. The more prescriptive offshoot of Marxism would be Leninism, and I agree that authoritarian command economies are a pretty bad idea.
Class can be a big part of racism--often what appears to be racism is really more about class. There are many people who look down on anyone they perceive to be "low class", regardless of race, and who will accept people of other races if they perceive them to be "high class". In areas where the lower classes are over-represented by racial minorities, this can look like racism, when classism is much more the culprit.
I’m in the top 10% of income percentile. But I still got looked at suspiciously as a Black person living in a county that’s 3% Black and as recently as the late 80s was a famous “Sundown town”
(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYKQdPMeJjk)
I once took my team to lunch and the waitress asked would we be on one check or separate, I spoke up and said one, started reaching for my wallet and she still
handed the check to the older looking White guy that I hired.
No matter how much money I have, there will always be assumptions about me. I have seen this a lot more when working for companies in the South than I do now when I travel to customer meetings now that I work for BigTech and I’m leading projects.
Thought experiment: if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
> if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
Presumably neither of you since in this straw-man neither party has done anything wrong
So you think a Black guy has to “do something wrong” to be considered “acting suspiciously”?
Just like Ving Rhames, was “suspiciously” living in his own house when SWAT knocked on his door because someone thought he had broken into his own house.
That misses how even being rich does not protect you from significant racism. Just look at the well documeted experiences comparing a white or black person driving an expensive car. The black person is multiple times more likely to get stopped by police.
For sure, I completely agree with you there. There is significant racism out there, sadly, regardless of where you look in the socio-economic hierarchy.
> Nothing the Supreme Court says about the consideration of race in college admissions will affect the more basic problem, that too few Americans from poorer families are sufficiently prepared to apply to college.
About sums it up. Though if there are any visible disparities in the populations that produce poor children who are prepared, I expect a loud argument.
What's interesting to me is that people like that seem to pretend as though other places on earth and other models don't exist.
Running schools for profit is questionable on its own and I think it's tolerated because historically University/College education was seen as optional. We've moved away from that in a lot of the sectors that drive the economy these days though and the system hasn't been tweaked (regulated I suppose) appropriately.
It's also straw-manning the very obviously fair observation that college is crazy expensive in the US. He also said that it's good "to have skin in the game" and that debt affords the opportunity to receive a quality education. Yeah, it is good to have skin in the game. No one disagrees with that. The criticism is that it costs 50k/year and you leave with a liberal arts skillset (IE, not uniquely qualified for anything). I'm not even saying liberal arts is bad, but at 50k a year it should have a direct path to a direct, obvious path to a high paying job. It doesnt.
Instead we get platitudes that leave the very obvious problem of rapidly rising tuition unaddressed. Honestly people need to just stop taking out debt for things like that. You mention needing a degree for everything. In some sense you do, because people ask for it, but I don't think you need it. It's just oversaturated.
The last time I looked at the financials for the University of Texas system, they could charge zero tuition for every student and they'd still make a profit every year (mostly from their massive amount of money in investments).
Many Americans are made believe that they are temporarily embarassed billionaires, and if they are just a little bit more comfortable than the next black or other minority, they are on the top of the world.
Lol this is why Trump was elected… it’s what makes the “establishment” of both parties oppose him. It’s why we are constantly reminded by the economist that “republicans and trump are racists”.
Steve Bannon actually explains this quite well in a PBS Frontline interview
It’s infuriating to constantly have the Economist pushing the idea “the country is racist” or “so and so is racist” for many years now. Only to point out what most people know - a poor person in west Virginia is likely to be white, and have more in common with a poor black person from DC than a wealthy white person from DC.
Racism was invented long before that, as a proxy of the invention of race (specifically "white" as a racial category) to justify chattel slavery under the pretense of white supremacy.
So you're correct, for certain definitions of "working class," but I find attempts to dismiss anti-racism (and increasingly LGBT ) progressive efforts as being merely a distraction from class struggle to be tone-deaf at best, and counterproductive at worst.
Intersectionality is a thing. Race shapes class - especially in the United States where class was literally built around racial caste and identity - and class shapes race. We can have praxis along more than one dimension.
There's a (conspiracy) theory out there which describes this as intentional. If society is focused on race, it will continue being divided, which is more-or-less going to ensure that peasants won't unite and/or revolt.
You can see this across companies at a lower level (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/amazon-lab... and https://archive.ph/1khJw). Discussions about race will suck all the air out of the proverbial room, will sow division and create resentment. Regardless of political color, people will always have a tiny bit of resentment when it comes to stuff like affirmative action. So instead of being mad at their boss, they're going to be mad at their colleague (who's completely innocent in this) and slowly but surely start accepting right-wing narratives as truth. Holy crap, even more division, right? Nice.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 540 ms ] threadHigh income doesn't necessarily indicate wealth or high class. It usually indicates highly educated, high level working class, like doctors and software engineers.
Families with generational wealth often have very little direct income. All wealth is in assets that they borrow against, which doesn't count as income. Even when they take income or realize capital gains, they often do it erratically, so it can be fairly easy to game a university admission that looks at parental income by avoiding income for the years universities request.
Because their parents made too much, they got zero financial aid and ended up covered in mountains of loans because their parents didn't actually have the money to give them.
To be fair though, the fault in this case lies exclusively on the irresponsible parents who had the option to provide for their children's education, but opted to leave them to the wolves.
Showing a household income of $75K in that year/those years won't change the more comfortable financial situation they grew up in.
Filtering on parental education level might knock most of them out & get better at targeting kids who outperformed their circumstances in more surprising ways. But is the legibility or surprisingness of the kid's outperformance really the point? I think maybe what you'd want to do is give some slots in the meritocracy to kids who are not outperformers at all, but chosen randomly, without regard to academic performance.
Class is not income, and finding the highest-performing kids from lower-earning families and neighborhoods is an almost perfect strategy for demonstrating the gaps. Of course that's my own background, so I'd take it!
By comparison, how do you determine if an applicant is Black or Latin? Do you have them prove ancestry all the way back to Africa? Brazil is experiencing this issue [1]:
> And that's when this story gets even more complicated. Because in order to "prove" that he was Afro-Brazilian, his lawyers needed to find some criteria. He went to seven dermatologists who used something called the Fitzpatrick scale that grades skin tone from one to seven, or whitest to darkest. The last doctor even had a special machine.
> A few weeks ago, these race tribunals were made mandatory for all government jobs. In one state, they even issued guidelines about how to measure lip size, hair texture and nose width, something that for some has uncomfortable echoes of racist philosophies in the 19th century.
1. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/09/29/495665329/...
Class is also easy to game and hard to define. And what is class - educational attainment, income, labor vs capital, all 3, 2 out of 3?
How do you conclusively determine educational attainment of parents beyond what they self-report, in an automated, accurate, low-cost way?
Income could be low for high status jobs like professors, journalists, non-profits, etc. Some of the highest status people you meet in blue cities have seemingly little income but high income.
Assets are self reported and hideable.
Is a plumber who didn't graduate high school but runs his own business making $90k in a LCOL area where homes cost $150k upper or lower class? What about a plumber working under someone else in a HCOL area making $120k but where homes cost $500k?
We don't need to conclusively define class, but we can at least quantify it relative to other applicants. Is the plumber making $90k upper classic? We don't need to pin a label onto it, but we can say they're higher than someone making $40k a year and not as high class as someone making $500k a year.
You are conflating income & assets. Income is generally hard to hide, assets is much easier. Income is reported to the government by employers. Assets can be infrequently marked to market and illiquid, offshore, etc.
Clearly the examples you use of multi-million assets and prestigious private schools are clear signals, but most of these things are on the margin.
The argument is not so much about the 5% vs the 95%. It's the tougher decisions about who is in the 30% vs 55% vs 70%.
> A study published in 2017 found that most of Harvard’s undergraduates hailed from families in the top 10% of the income distribution. Princeton had more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60%.
It is not nearly so simple for someone in the top 1% to try and pretend to be part of the bottom 60%. Their home address alone would usually be enough to mark them as upper income. Work history is not so easy to hide or fabricate. The government has employment records, and people need to disclose their work history to get future employment.
Separating the 30%, 55%, and 70% isn't really relevant. All of them are lower-class in the context of university admissions. Furthermore, these people wouldn't have the means to hide their assets, and they wouldn't even have that much assets to hide. The median net worth in 2019 was just over $120k [1]. For these people, you mostly just look at income.
1. hhttps://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/saving-and-b...
class is, of course, not about income. class is about your position in the productive system and ownership. very rich people might have NO income at all.
but let's say that for most, family income is a good enough proxy.
The reason I use this definition is because the economic relations are reflected in social relations. The social relations one has when they primarily live off the earnings of property are qualitatively different from those who don't - this difference forms the basis of class.
Know that this isn't an idiosyncratic definition - the cradle it was born in was the same cradle that bore sociology itself.
Antisocialism is the root of so many of America's problems. Tax wealth, seize inheritance, and don't charge for higher education. Guillotines only work for the people who can afford them.
Only the mediocre private schools (or stingy rich parents) actually price kids out. Almost all of the SES filtering is based on grades, test scores, and essays.
But I'm going to ask another: WHY does the admission process need to take into account the social class of the student?
- Fairness? College admissions at Ivy Leagues are not a fair process. It advantages legacies, donors.
- Diversity? Then why not also account for race or national origin too?
- An attempt to fix the inequities of US society? Why do this at the college level when 90% of the scars of a poor childhood are already set in stone? Why do it with a student class of only 5000? Why not admit 50,000 into Harvard each year then?
Ivy Leagues' admissions standards are designed to optimize one thing only: the prestige of the institution. That's it. That's why it has mostly rich kids but also a few poor ones to make it look like it's an egalitarian place. That's why it admits some black and brown students even if their SATs are not that high - so it can make it look like it's an institution that promotes racial justice.
Society should not look to Harvard and Yale to fix all its racial and economic inequity problems. Parents of Asian kids should not look to Harvard and Yale as the ultimate universal badge of academic merit - it's not. Harvard and Yale are going to look after their own interests - and it's all about prestige.
And yes I went to both an ivy league and state university. I know the game.
The way I see it, the admissions design goal for prestigious universities is to ensure that the smartest students in the country and the richest students in the country get the same indistinguishable diploma - their diploma - and that way they sustain and reinforce both their prestige and funding.
Having PhDs that are presidents seems like a great indicator that the democratic system is not corrupt.
Horowitz: Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn [0].
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Occupy-Wall-Street-Communist-Movement...
He closes by positing that university intellectuals are above the whole mess ...
That is a very disingenuous if not flat out incorrect summary of what he said.
That may be one group of people who might be outside of “this mess” and in his category X, but I don’t think that university intellectuals are categorically in class X.
For folks who are interested in a more contemporary class summary, I recommend Michael O’Church’s version:
https://indiepf.com/michael-o-churchs-theory-of-3-class-ladd...
Perhaps the current events have strangled these opportunities for enough people so class can now be used to divide the population against itself?
There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful. Are there advantages some children's parents provide - of course - but that does not preclude rising up based on one's own merit. Your children should do better than you... because they build off your life's work.
People like to criticize the American Dream from their couch while watching TV... bemoaning how unfair life is and how the deck was stacked against them. They do this instead of working to better their own future... ten years later and they're still complaining, having done nothing to change their situation.
Look at the most successful people in this country. What do they all have in common?
How do you think the "right place, right time" people get to the right place and right time? It's not an accident - it's years in the making for most people. Some never even realize they're in the right place or at the right time, and miss opportunities. That's just how it goes...
The people we're talking about do not seek opportunities, do not make themselves ready for opportunities and do not posses skills to capitalize on opportunities. This is why they sit at home complaining about life instead of studying harder and working harder or building their own opportunity. They literally expect one day something grand will fall into their lap and they'll be the next billionaire. Life doesn't work that way...
Is a cell deterministic? Is the physics on which cells operate deterministic? From my understanding, yes
What does that mean for neurons? Those must be deterministic, which means that the complex organisms which cells create are also deterministic. Their behaviors is entirely deterministic
Psychologists use statistical models because we lack the full understanding of the brain, but that doesn't mean that behavior can't be predicted if we did have a full understanding.
Saying that the rock rolling down the hill has a distribution pattern completely ignores complexity. Did it have the same exact starting point each time? How strong was the wind blowing and in which direction? Did a pebble move out of the rocks path from the last run?
If all conditions of the rock rolling down the hill are exactly the same that means that the rock will take the same path each time. Differences create that statistical distribution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory
> There is no system or mechanism in America that prevents a poor child from growing up into one of the nation's wealthiest or most powerful.
How is that different from most other western countries?
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/hair-br...
If your definition of class is more European, it's perfectly possible to be upper class and have a down generation, economically speaking, while your network remains upper class, and your children go right up again, as they don't make the same relatively low salary choices of their parents. This is a well measured situation all over the world, and the US is not special. See the well known studies in Italy, where ancestry and class correlations are linked for over a dozen generations.
But let's say all you care about is income, and look at intergenerational income mobility. It's not as if the United State does all that well, and most of the difference is emigration of high class immigrants. The doctor that can't get a job in the US as a doctor, but whose children vastly outearn them, becoming relatively high class quite quickly. See https://www.chicagofed.org/research/mobility/intergeneration....
"American Media is Focused On Everything But What They Should Be (And Are Paid Well For It)"
This is yet another example of how many of the elites live in a bubble. Well educated, yet oh so ignorant.
If you could capture the public's attention and make tons of money focusing on class, someone would do it and dominate discourse. Maybe not existing institutions, but certainly there's nothing preventing someone else from taking to the field. Indeed, there is no shortage of media that do focus on class issues, but they are invariably small & marginalized.
Media will literally eat poop in exchange for attention and the wealth and influence that comes with it. Pretending that the reason they're not talking about class is because of some misguided focus of those in the industry is absurd.
It's just... if you don't pretend, then you have to place the blame elsewhere, and nobody wants to.
Well...Both Bobby Kennedy and MLK tried to shift the narrative and...the only thing they dominated was the graveyard.
Point made. Lesson taught. And learned.
re: Misguided focus??
Lol. You missed the point. They are lazer focused on...exactly what they're told and paid to stay focused on.
Else it's negligence and incompetence and that just doesn't make sense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Estate
https://kottke.org/20/01/jim-lehrers-rules-of-journalism-1
Conclusion: We're not being harsh enough. We've been lowering the bar, not raising it. And it shows.
The unacknowledged truth behind "Actual news outlets covering actual news have an enormous incentive to cut corners on this stuff", and "that all sells better than Lehrer’s guidelines do" is that it's consumers of media who are firmly driving this trend. If the audience valued Lehrer's guidelines more, there'd not be an enormous incentive to cut corners. If anything, the folks who work in media overvalue Lehrer's guidelines as compared to the market. It's not them who is doing it.
I also think that it's extremely stupid to blame "all Jews" for anything. But it's equally stupid to call "all white people" privileged, especially if we need to use 2 different definitions of "white" when arriving at the privileged conclusion vs. applying the penalty for it. Both approaches are stupid, divisive and inconstructive, and the more someone pushes in one direction, the more pushback it creates. Focusing on class, or especially "self-made wealth vs. inherited wealth" could do wonders in terms of actually uniting people.
Or are these graphs just reflecting the rise of the social justice movement, which the news would obviously report on?
Basically this doesn't really tell us anything about cause and effect.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith%E2%80%93Mundt_Act
If you don't like class systems, blame those who perpetuate them. The extremely wealthy, the royalists and the supporters of caste type systems. Otherwise you're just being antisemitic when you could be making an interesting point.
It’s all of our fault. If we didn’t click on it, they would stop publishing it.
A more historical example would be on the early days of the 2nd Gulf War and the war drums beating for Iran perhaps a year later (that never materialized into a war)
it's not as dramatic as feigning surprise, but the mere act of choosing a specific topic to report on makes known the ideas of what a specific journo may think the public will find intriguing.
in other words, "Water is Wet." gets no viewership, but "5 Ways You May Not Know How Water Can Kill" does get views -- likewise when a journalist has a topic like "Why X is Y", we (the reader) can presume that the work holds some novelty other than stating the obvious.
'pretending to be surprised' comes from the premise that class is such an obvious distinction in the United States that stating such is about obvious as stating 'Water is Wet.'
Who specifically with means has had this goal? Because without any kind of evidence or idea of who is doing it, it just sounds like a conspiracy theory.
I ask because whenever I see instances of the ultra rich trying to control the narrative, it always comes off as obvious and ham fisted. The obvious rebuttal is "well you don't see when they succeed", but I don't think they would torpedo a cause they believe in in order for other causes to be successful. Unless they are truly playing 4d chess.
Not from Washington Post though.
Isn't this case only when the thing really is obvious and just because you can spot couple of those "obvious cases" does not mean you have spotted every attempt, only the obvious ones.
There's more to it than that. Intellectuals look at the parallels between race and class and see potential for "yes, and" solidarity; political professionals see the danger of splitting and confusing the limited mental space that non-professionals have for politics. A competing truth is worse than a lie. The time was ripe for significantly enriching the public understanding about race, and they were ruthless in not letting anything else get in the way. Their desires dovetailed nicely with the social media bullies (high school bullies grown up, or not grown up) who enjoyed the opportunity to indulge in their favorite pastime, shaming people into conformity. It's hard to balance political priorities; it's easy to denounce talking about class as a racist ploy to derail threats to white supremacy.
How you feel about the outcome depends on your expectations of people. I don't have high expectations. I think it's pretty cool that race has been getting the attention that it has.
I think the 'upper class' has a lot of influence, but it clearly isn't stopping the NYT from giving enough information to readers to build some pretty strong opinions on the effects of class in the United States. Journalists are clearly spilling a ton of ink over it.
I think the blame must be spread more broadly. There is a tremendous anti-socialist, anti-labor force in American discourse, and parts of the media are helping to drive it, but other parts are resisting it. And regardless of its provenance, it is quite entrenched in the day to day, non-journalist culture.
But for the bulk of their articles, yes, the Economist is famous for its anonymous bylines.
It makes somewhat of a sense if you’re trying to disconnect the message from the speaker.
(Among numerous others.)
https://www.economist.com/the-economist-explains/2013/09/04/...
Is there a path or actions that address class issues other than the standard "run for office" and "vote for people who will address class-related issues"?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/nyregion/ranked-choice-la...
(Note that it doesn't matter whether they have a point or not. What matters is that now, either way, you'll have to talk about it whenever RCV comes up. There is similar contention around IRV and some other methods; basically anything that disrupts existing power arrangements.)
Citation desperately needed.
https://equityhealthj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12...
The difference in health insurance coverage between whites and blacks is 4 percentage points. The difference in health insurance coverage between high and low income households is 10 percentage points.
Otherwise, it seems kind of suspicious. Extremely so.
For example, they are more likely to go to jail. [1] I believe there may be similar data regarding income/wealth outcomes as well, but the best I could find quickly relates to middle class black families, not wealthy ones. [2]
Of course, this doesn't mean the families are worse off overall, but it does tend to indicate that there are some things working against black families, even middle- and upper-class ones.
1: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/03/23/poor-...
2: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/01/how-bla...
Pardon my ignorance but you seem to know more about this topic.
that sounds ignorant to me.
But, why do we need to use race as a proxy? Presuming something about someone based on their skin color is prejudice regardless of your intentions.
If people are disadvantaged, let's measure those disadvantages directly and adjust for those factors.
Controlling for income doesn't work well, because whites at the same income level tend to have much more wealth than blacks at the same income level. Controlling for wealth, blacks still tend to poorer access to resources (clean water, prenatal care, etc...).
It would be a great achievement if we could simply say that poor blacks were finally as well off as poor whites, but we're still quite a ways away from that.
That said, I don't think the country has the stomach to realistically try to fix that problem any longer.
But these effects are well studied and I'm sure these institutions have plenty of sociologists that could help come up with some models that work at least as good as stereotyping based on skin color.
The idea that generalizing based on race is just easier leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Why do we tell racists that they shouldn't prejudge people based on race at the same time that people with good intentions do the same thing?
I think zip code though will likely be more satisfying to people. Although the conservative wing of the supreme court has already said that they don't like the top 10% rules for admission, so I suspect they'll also not be kind to zip code since the idea is similar in spirit.
Highly motivated parents would have a reason to move into neighborhoods that they previously would not have lived in.
There's also a fraud incentive since it's not super difficult to pretend to live in a different zip code. Plenty of politicians do it.
There’s a reason that banks have compliance departments that have to review any statistical models inputs and assumptions for implicit violations of the Fair Lending / Fair Housing acts.
Rolling it up from the other side by giving top college spots to kids who were disadvantaged in the first place never made sense to me.
So yea, the consensus is that edu, knowledge and exp make a difference
Because historically race was used systemically to limit opportunities for people of color. The last school to be desegregated was in 1963. Think about that.
What we're dealing with now is the legacy of those decisions. They made sense in that context but the context has changed.
These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged on their college application than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
> These disadvantages can be measured directly. There's no need to erroneously presume that Sasha and Malia are more disadvantaged than a poor Appalachian white kid with the same test scores.
The rate of poverty of black children is much higher than that of white children, so black children will ultimately get more benefit because it's needed more. The problem is that we think this is a zero sum game when it isn't. We can help them both.
I agree -- but a college application isn't for an average black student or an average white student. Each application is for one individual student, who had an individual life experience. If we want to help students who struggled in poverty -- let's measure their individual poverty. Then we'll help everyone at exactly the correct rate, rather than on some generalized presumption.
They're still not really integrated. At all.
Do you think this is why black parents were mostly against forced busing?
Here is, for example, a NYT article from 1973, describing result of a Gallup poll:
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/09/09/archives/gallup-finds-few...
> A majority of Americans continue to favor public school integration, but few people—black or white—think that busing is the best way to achieve that goal, the Gallup Poll reported yesterday.
> Five per cent of the people in a recent survey by the organization—9 per cent of the blacks and 4 per cent of the whites—chose busing children from one, district to another rather than several other alternatives.
Busing was so unpopular among black Americans that it had about as many supporters among them as continuing school segregation:
> The poll indicated that 18 per cent of the nation opposed public school integration. Nineteen per cent of the whites and 9 per cent of the blacks in the poll were in this category.
The fact is that busing was forced on the nation by people like you, who neither had much idea what the people, who they claimed to help, actually wanted, nor cared to learn.
Busing was extremely unpopular policy, and this is a well known fact to anyone who actually paid attention to the history of social reform in US. Granted, public reception to busing is not one of those facts about history of black discrimination that every American ought to know, especially if they are too young to either remember this, or learn it from their parents. However, one should not express opinions on whether it worked, or throw some extremely simplistic takes about intermarriage worries, without knowing that people hated busing, white and black.
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED571629
> When people call busing ill conceived or the worst means of ensuring integration, they conveniently obscure that busing was almost always a tool of last resort, mandated by courts only after lengthy battles with school boards and state officials, by black parents and civil rights groups, failed to produce even modest integration for black children.[1]
People may have opposed busing for a variety of reasons. Yet the results suggest it was segregation. IME even desegregationist parents flinch once an 'other' comes home for dinner with their child's family.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/sunday/it-was-nev...
Sure, but if it was the slave themselves who preferred slavery to what your courts were forcing on them, one should really step back and ask oneself if he is doing the right thing.
> Gallop polls not withstanding there is evidence busing improved the lives of minorities.
And there is an ample evidence that it made their lives worse, that one could obtain by simply asking them how they feel about the policy. The fact is that you remain completely uninterested in what the people you claim to be helping actually want, and instead prefer to force your preferences on them because you believe it’s better for them and the society. You know who else claimed the same about their policy, and ignored the protests of people affected by it? The segregationists.
that people will stop using one variable for such a complex, full of entrophy processes?
>But, why do we need to use race as a proxy?
There are two possibilites:
1. They dont see the logical fallacy, perhaps because they are clouded by empathy.
2. They fully understand that they are discriminating by race and think its good.
I think we should just jettison the colonial baggage and hand the islands back to actual Samoa next door, but here we are.
So in the hypothetical case that American Samoa is returned to Samoa, the logical options are to either make all American Samoans citizens of Samoa, or to give them the option to choose between Samoan and American citizenship. In either case the weird "national" status will cease to exist.
They don't want to end up like Hawaii.
Under American Samoan rules non-native minorities like blacks and filipinos are in effect excluded from property ownership rights of nearly all of American Samoa. I can't believe people here are effectively pro-racism in housing. Codified racism of property rights are not acceptable within US borders.
But sure, I can understand why a nation wants to preserve some of its self determination, rather than become a remote province with a 75% foreign population.
I can also understand the plight of the local foreign underclass.
>the plight of the local foreign underclass
The disadvantaged minorities (such as Filipinos) I'm referring to who thankfully were actually allowed to own land in Hawaii are almost all US nationals, not foreigners. Under the racist laws of Americas Samoa they would be excluded from land ownership, even as fellow US nationals residing in American Samoa.
I’m not a fan of the term “positive discrimination” at all. It tries to hide the fact that the “positive” effect to one group is necessarily at the expense of another. Whether it’s positive or negative just depends on which group we’re talking about.
(To clarify, the comments said, “I dislike people of X color because of the behaviors I’ve observed in people of X color.” And they argued that it wasn’t the same as just hating people based on color, although that’s exactly what it is.)
And you can talk about statistics and averages and whatnot all day, but once you start applying averages to individuals – which is essentially what "positive discrimination" or "affirmative action" amounts to – you're always going to be wrong in a very substantial number of cases.
This was surprising to me.
That's why "white privilege" sells so poorly.
Ironically many of them live in liberal, multi-cultural cities filled with rich people who are much more high status than vast swathes of inland rural white people.
IMO, the only thing that makes "white privilege" somewhat interesting, is the extent to which the country made laws and regulations around race. If it were merely tribal preferences of liking people who were genetically closer to you, I'd view it more like being tall as a privilege. But the fact that we used the government and other legal instruments to prop one above the other gives me a certain level of discomfort that I don't have with all the other forms of privilege that exist.
Ultimately we need to allow everyone to have a life with dignity while creating a system that rewards hard work. It'll never be perfect, and trying to play the "luck" / privilege game ends up in the biggest lottery of all, genetics.
I don't object to the use of "white privilege" to attempt an objective description of reality.
I do object to the notion that more discrimination on the basis of race is the answer. You don't solve a structure fire by adding gasoline.
Do you refuse the insurance payout after a structure fire because it'd be unfair to the neighbor whose house didn't burn down?
Interpreted literally, it implies all whites are privileged. This is categorically untrue.
It encourages racism through associating an immutable trait with a negative word. "White privilege" is no more true than saying "Jewish privilege" or "Asian privilege" when referring to trends that do not reflect the whole. For the latter two one would be accused of anti-semitism or racism but for the former it's common parlance. Therefore, to be logically consistent, "white privilege" must also be racist. Associating a negative trait of a minority of a race with the entire race, is in fact, the very definition of racism.
To further exemplify the point whites still hold a majority in the US. This means, by the numbers, there are many more disenfranchised whites than literally any other race. Consequently, there are more very disenfranchised whites who are probably experiencing the same, if not worse, conditions as others races. The right wing gets it wrong, the largest welfare recipient group is in fact low income whites. This makes sense when you actually look at the numbers.
The entire structure of the term "white privilege" is designed first to divide and then to discourage. During the BLM riots you had white people groveling, begging for forgiveness, like this so-called "privilege" is some sort of original sin (which is how it is sold) that can only be cleansed through constant, deliberate self-flaggelation. This repentance ceremony is further promoted (and even incited) by the bigoted and racist Kendi and D'Angelo. Both suggest the only solution to this privilege is constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation. CRT is rightly criticized because being encouraged to denigrate yourself for some alleged (in reality, manufactured) original sin is simply gaslighting.
No one should be made to feel this way on the basis of their skin color. It is simply the race hustlers promoting such terms to sow further division. Division among races means they cannot unite and focus on class issues. Racism, as a tool, is the perfect way to induce this division. "White privilege" is one of many examples of this racism.
Also, assuming you mean Robin DiAngelo, what of hers have you read? She's pretty clear in both White Fragility and Nice Racism in advocating against "constant, deliberate, self-flaggelation" because they center the person doing it and take energy away from productive action.
It's essentially saying 'It was an honor to meet him;' that could mean that you were undeserving, or simply that it was something unusual that most people didn't get to do; if it were common, it wouldn't be a privilege, would it?
In the thread's context, usually it's associated with not granting the privilege to someone else, as well - you have a privilege that others do not, one that you do not do anything to deserve.
I don't know about you, but I don't really believe that 'white privilege' is intended as a positive. It's intended to have a negative connotation, otherwise there would be no impetus for change.
I also agree that terms like "white privilege" are intended as criticism. However I don't see them as criticism of the individual who has the privilege, but rather of the society whose circumstances gave them that privilege. The term is an attempt to promote systems thinking.
> In the thread's context
> but I don't really believe that 'white privilege' is intended as a positive
It's not. Within the context of CRT it has a pretty tight definition: "undeserved benefits"
It doesn't mean that all white people are rich, it means that poor white people are in less of a shitty situation than equally-improverished black people. It could be as simple as just living in a better ZIP code with more opportunities in it[0], for example. But it's still a shitty situation, in the same way that third-degree burns are bad but different from a broken arm.
The constant self-flaggelation approach is actually opposed by a lot of anti-racists specifically because it takes focus away from the victims of racism and to people who benefit from it.
[0] Thanks, Robert Moses.
"Jargon" like that is not accrptable. Would you allow it for any other group? And many people use the term white privilege to mean an intrinsic power held by white people as a result of their oppression of blacks. So you are wrong on all acounts.
>but I've yet to find better terminology than this.
It's hard to come up with a name for something that barely exists in tbe first place. "You're zip-code is privileged" doesn't invoke the same guilt does it?
I grew up white and lower middle class, but I've never been worried about being arrested hanging around my own house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr..., https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/0..., https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/09/17/wisconsin-bla...) or helping one of my neighbors (https://www.npr.org/2022/09/10/1121857070/black-pastor-water...) or taking out my trash (https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/News/video/body-camera-footage-re...) or going to a coffee shop (https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/4/14/17238494/what-happe...) or going to a bank (https://www.gq.com/story/ryan-coogler-bank-of-america-handcu..., https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/valley/black-man-c..., https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/banking-while-black-poli...) or even by police chasing someone completely different (https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/04/us/massachusetts-wrong-suspec...).
Fortunately, I don't jog (https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/02/us/san-antonio-black-jogger-c...), but I do like to eat out (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-apologize-after-...) and I might get sick (https://www.wbur.org/news/2021/10/12/boston-police-arrest-po..., Vt71fcAqt7 ↗ https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de... mcguire ↗ First, those are cases of black people being arrested or detained, sometimes violently, by police. Not killed. Further, many of them resulted in a successful lawsuits against the police, which should tell you something about the quality of police actions. Vt71fcAqt7 ↗ >By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. mcguire ↗ I don't think you read this one: Vt71fcAqt7 ↗ I did read it. Being killed by police is a function of police encounters while commiting crimes. Additionaly, there will be more police in higher crime areas in the first place. What is the rate when no crime is being commited, and what is the total amount of cases? My guess is the rate is the same and the sample size is really low. Although who knows what the "estimates" your study has "found" are. Also, why do asians have more white privelage than whites? At least under your definition. fknidiot ↗ Do I need to post a list of articles showing white people being bashed, brutally raped, murdered, pushed under a train or even tortured by black people while they were:
- being in their garden
- going to their car
- jogging
- walking their dog
- eating out at a restaurant mcguire ↗ No, you need to post a list of articles showing white people being arrested or detained, sometimes violently, by police while being in their garden...
Police killing black people for being black as some sort of racist unwritten policy is a myth. The rates shown here make perfect sense. And most (99%?) were armed. Also consider that there are hundreds of millions of Americans. It's difficult to fully grasp just how large that is. The media likes selling stories but that doesn't change the facts. A dozen news articles won't change that.
Second, keep in mind that data about police violence, including deaths, are complete shit because police are not required to report data and no one has an incentive to do so. (I don't know what Statista's data sources are, but did you notice how the number of "unknown" race deaths increased in 2020 and 2021?)
"Across all races and states in the USA, we estimate 30 800 deaths (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 30 300–31 300) from police violence between 1980 and 2018; this represents 17 100 more deaths (16 600–17 600) than reported by the NVSS. Over this time period, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was highest in non-Hispanic Black people (0·69 [95% UI 0·67–0·71] per 100 000), followed by Hispanic people of any race (0·35 [0·34–0·36]), non-Hispanic White people (0·20 [0·19–0·20]), and non-Hispanic people of other races (0·15 [0·14– 0·16]). This variation is further affected by the decedent's sex and shows large discrepancies between states. Between 1980 and 2018, the NVSS did not report 55·5% (54·8–56·2) of all deaths attributable to police violence. When aggregating all races, the age-standardised mortality rate due to police violence was 0·25 (0·24–0·26) per 100 000 in the 1980s and 0·34 (0·34–0·35) per 100 000 in the 2010s, an increase of 38·4% (32·4–45·1) over the period of study." (https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6..., https://www.healthdata.org/news-release/lancet-more-half-pol...)
Here's another good article: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01846-z I'd suggest following the endnotes. "About 1,000 civilians are killed each year by law-enforcement officers in the United States. By one estimate, Black men are 2.5 times more likely than white men to be killed by police during their lifetime. And in another study, Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."
That is because they commit more violent crimes. Did you know that?
>Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed.
See the last point.
In 99.9% of cases, people killed by police are commiting crimes.
Also note that asians have the lowest rate of being killed by police. I suppose it was asians that were the real whites all along? Or perhaps you simply can't make sweeping conclusions from this data.
"Black people who were fatally shot by police seemed to be twice as likely as white people to be unarmed."
The absurd idea that whites are the ones brutalizing blacks in America is an extremely offensive joke.
And do keep in mind that "White alone, not Hispanic or Latino" make up 60% of the population.
Sometimes the current left wing of the Dems work at cross purposes to themselves. On the one hand we need to legislate laws for everything, and on the other hand enforcing laws is discriminatory & abusive and whats a little broken windows here & there, you have to crack some eggs to make an omelette!!
My favorite example is all the gun control rhetoric in NYC while at the same time the Manhattan DA announced he was not going to seek jail terms for non-violent illegal gun possession charges. "LOL nothing matters" is how it feels.
"Two days after being sworn in, Alvin Bragg shared a memo with staff Monday noting that his office will not prosecute low-level offenses like marijuana misdemeanors, refusal to pay for public transportation fare, prostitution and resisting arrest, unless given alongside a felony charge. Instead, they would be offered a community-based diversion program."
Does that sound unreasonable? When about 1 in 150 Americans are currently incarcerated?
The heavy use of the crude tool of locking people up as a solution for crime is a peculiarity of the American judicial approach, in contrast to other Western nations. Certainly there are crimes that warrant it, but possession of something that hasn't caused harm may not meet the bar for this approach, when you look at how counterproductive 'corrections' like this measurably are, and the larger history of its use as a tool of prejudice, poor police work, and the profit motive of privately owned prisons.
John Oliver recently put out an explanation of how bail reform is desperately needed in this country, if you're interested in learning that way. An alarming takeaway I had from it is that half a million Americans are currently in jail awaiting their case to be heard, unable to post bail. They are not convicted, only charged. Some non-zero number of them are innocent, their lives completely upended and in indefinite limbo.
Incarcerated for what and for how long? You're just giving numbers without specifying their offenses nor whether they are locked up awaiting trial or the end of their sentences.
Of the roughly 1 million people incarcerated in state prisons, over 60% are there for violent crimes. About 3.8% are in prison for drug possession - about 40,000. So yes, too many, but not 1 in 150. Now, 1 in 5 people are in jail for some kind of drug offense, but that's not simple possession.
It's definitely worth having the conversation about what to do about that, but don't think that 'possession of something that hasn't caused harm' is the cause of most incarcerations.
Pretending the jails are filled with non-violent simple drug offenders is someone either ill informed or not wanting to have a serious conversation. Either way, they are probably not in a position to be harmed one way or the other by increased criminal violence because they are high status enough to believe their zip code or income insulate them from it.
Further, to your stat of 60% of incarcerated being their for violent offenses probably undersells how many were "violent". The NY bail reform laws were passed by pols who said it only applied to "non violent" offenses.
However the criminal law definition & intuitive civilian understanding of "non violent" do not necessarily align. There were plenty of cases in NYC post 2019 of people getting pushed down the stairs of subways, or sucker punched on the sidewalk which somehow fell into the "non-violent" bucket, for the purposes of the law.
The whole argument on bail reform would be moot if suspects were getting a speedy trial. We shouldn't be hearing of cases where people are out on the streets able to commit 5 different offenses over 9 months while still awaiting trial on the first charges.
Agreed that if speedy trials were a thing, the local jail and bail reform problem would be greatly reduced. But there has been some refuted talking points around someone commiting 5 or 9 (or whatever made up number) of multiple distinct crimes while awaiting trial. If it happens it's exceedingly rare. Please link me to them if you find them.
I mentioned in 1 in 150 Americans because that's the ratio of 2 million to ~300 million of the US population.
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2022.html
PPI did not estimate that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug possession. They estimated that 400,000 are currently incarcerated for drug related crimes. In the state system, among people convicted (again, we agree about bail reform, so I wasn't talking about the 500,000 people not convicted, and fed is a totally different animal so focused on what is most likely), only 40,000, according to the PPI estimates, are there for drug possession.
And again, though yes, entering someone's home at night for the purpose of theft is considered a violent crime in some jurisdictions, 600,000 people are estimated to be incarcerated in state prison for violent crimes - of those, maybe you could say that there is an exaggeration in some of the 120k there for robbery. According to that PPI sheet, 140,000 or so are in state prison for murder.
Removing those currently incarcerated while awaiting trial, you have 1.5 million in all prisons and a 453/100k incarceration rate. That's about 4X Canada's. Removing all drug convictions, not just possession, would decrease that number to about 1.25 million. To match Canada's rate, we'd need to have about 350k incarcerated individuals; right now, according to that PPI sheet, we have about 290,000 incarcerated for rape/sexual assault, murder, and manslaughter alone.
It's because the privilege is being more wealthy, not being white. If the privilege only applies to rich whites and also applies to rich Asians and blacks then it's not white privilege but simply privilege.
>And why CRT is attacked so vigorously.
Have you read any CRT "scholars?" I have, and they are sickening.
It's really that simple.
>Whiteness is an invisible veil that cloaks its racist deleterious effects through individuals, organizations, and society. The result is that White people are allowed to enjoy the benefits that accrue to them by virtue of their skin color. Thus, Whiteness, White supremacy, and White privilege are three interlocking forces that disguise racism so it may allow White people to oppress and harm persons of color while maintaining their individual and collective advantage and innocence.
Or from another "scholar"
>How can we account for the ways in which white people refuse to acknowledge their possessive investment in whiteness even as they work to increase its value everyday? We can't blame the color of our skin. It must be the content of our character.
I can't find it now, but I once read a passage from one of these CRT nutjobs' work that really shed light on their insanity. It went something like
>whiteness and white supremacy is not seen directly but rather is society itself. It is the tapestry we are woven of, and we are therefore blind to it. It exists even where it cannot be seen as it is the source of rather than a detail within society.
They are all somewhat careful with what they say. But their effect is real. They are turning being white into an evil, one that cannot be rectified but is an irremovable stain on one's being.
Of course there is this classic response: "I don't think white people are evil, just whiteness, which you are by necessity a part of because you directly contribute to it."
Whites get advantages that have nothing to do with being more wealthy.
For example, once in the '80s I was driving around the Los Angeles area around 3 AM (I had insomnia and decide to just drive around randomly, and maybe pick up a snack at a 7-11) when I got pulled over for having one of my tail lights out. I was driving a cheap car, had a full unkempt beard and long hair, was wearing a tie-dyed shirt, and was in my early 20s. Anyone who saw me would probably think druggie.
I gave him my license and told him the registration was in the glove compartment. He shone his light on the glove compartment while I opened it and dug the registration out from under the $1000 in $20 bills that it was under.
He asked me why I had so much cash.
I told him that I'd responded to a classified ad from someone selling a modem for $1000. I was meeting them later that day and that was the money to pay for it.
He gave my license and registration back, told me to get the tail light fixed, and let me go.
I have no confidence that if I had been a young black man driving a cheap car looking like a druggie at 3 AM with $1000 in small bills in the glove compartment that things would have been so hassle free.
Counter-example: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/black-woma...
<edit> Another example indicating the dependent variable is not always wealth:</edit> https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/michael-bennett-las-vega...
While that is anecdotal, the overall statistics of police stops based on race are damning. This is just in the realm of policing, let alone workplace social dynamics, education, and the list goes on. So while class and white privilege are a venn diagram, their overlap is not at all total.
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/empirical_anal...
Roland is a black economist from Harvard.
It seems many people from both sides just decide the data that refutes their opinion is misinformation. The topic of police discrimination is far more nuanced than either the left or right makes it appear.
And it is easy to find anecdotes that support any narrative you want so your links do little to sway me in the same way if I were to share a link of a white person being harassed it would likely do little to sway you.
Agree about anecdotes. Disagree my opinion cannot be swayed (this is not twitter and I certainly don't fully agree with "the left").
If the assertion is that all rich people are treated the same, regardless of race, then only examples are needed to refute it.
But, beyond anecdotes, the national statistics indicate there are disparities in policing based on race ((1) your citation strongly supports this assertion (2) as an aside and without reference, there are similar damning statistics for incarceration rates and jail sentences, and this is still just in the realm of criminal justice):
https://abcnews.go.com/US/abc-news-analysis-police-arrests-n...
"ABC News analysis of police arrests nationwide reveals stark racial disparity Black people were arrested at a rate five times more than white people in 2018."
"In 250 jurisdictions, black people were 10 times more likely to be arrested than their white counterparts"
This one is more anecdotal since it is localized to just one (large) town, but is quite clear and damning: https://www.yahoo.com/now/beverly-hills-police-sued-racist-1...
Critical theory is a postmodernist (postmarxist?) method, also used by rightwing researchers (Furet immediatly come to mind) to improve our knowledge of certain "facts" beyond the myths our ancestors built.
For example, we applied critical theory to old European cairns, and decided to do more analysis on squeletons we found in the 70s and 80. It appears that we misgendered some, and just because someone was buried with weapons did not mean it was always a man, it could also (in some, limited cases) be a female.
This discovery is actually aligned with the discovery of Celtic law texts (which are very rare, as Celts were mostly an oral culture, sadly).
CRT is basically the same thing, but applied with race. Its basically says "lets review this experiment/discovery from the 50, what could have been a bias of the researchers at the time".
In my opinion, this shouldn't have been separated from critical theory: CRT suffer the same syndrome most of the US does, and the focus on race hide the class issues. My pet theory is that liberals kinda liked the method, but disliked the fact that it was heavily inspired by historical materialism (and carries with it the idea of classism). Taking a marxist global concept and applying it to a limited scope to avoid disturbing everything too much is basically what they did when they transformed the concept of "emancipation" into "empowerment" for feminism. Sure, short-term it works to keep everything still, at what price though.
Many people who strongly argue in favour of things like white privilege tend to be well-off, so from their experience the generalisation holds true, but they fail to realize that their experience is not universally shared and dismiss people with things like "racists" or "handbasket of deplorables", without even attempting to understand where the opposition might be coming from.
The entire thing is a catastrophic failure of empathy, which is ironic because the concept of privilege is useful IMHO exactly to understand that your experience is not shared by everyone.
No. He is going to do what everyone is doing. Compete with every tool in his arsenal.
And from his point of view, the competition is a whole bunch of people who inherited THEIR wealth and plenty of people MORE wealthy. Does he see himself as having a privilege compared to all of those people?
Is he going to want to give up any privilege he's got? Especially if some of his competition aren't affected?
I'm not saying it is right. But you'll never get them to agree.
Last year a geophysicist, Dorian Abbot, was invited to give a lecture at MIT about some new results in climate science. His invitation was rescinded because he had once criticized affirmative action in a magazine article.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/10/why-latest...
https://ballotpedia.org/Washington_Referendum_88,_Vote_on_I-...
https://ballotpedia.org/California_Proposition_16,_Repeal_Pr...
On one hand, it is telling that even states as culturally blue as CA and WA don't have majority in support of affirmative action. On the other hand, that is still a lot of people in support.
They are sociologists / journalists / non-technical economists earning 50k (barely percentile 60), and telling us daily how action X is immoral (exactly what bishops and priests used to do).
If anyone who believes in capitalism is "right-wing", sure. But by US standards, these are center left publications (like unofficially Democratic party affiliated left, not Bernie/Socialist/Occupy left).
If you want to call them right-wing, show me an article critical of global warming, endorsing a republican besides Liz Cheney, or acknowledging Trump did at least one good thing (without caveats or apologies).
"As much as racism bleeds America, we need to understand that classism is the real issue. Many of us are in the same boat and it's sinking, while these bougie motherfuckers ride on a luxury liner, and as long as we keep fighting over kicking people out of the little boat we're all in, we're gonna miss an opportunity to gain a better standard of living as a whole".
Splitting the hair between marxism and leninism isn't helpful in 2022, and marxism takes you to bad ends anyways.
> marxism takes you to bad ends anyways.
How so?
https://youtu.be/z6IlGoeDIUQ&t=0m42s
I once took my team to lunch and the waitress asked would we be on one check or separate, I spoke up and said one, started reaching for my wallet and she still handed the check to the older looking White guy that I hired.
No matter how much money I have, there will always be assumptions about me. I have seen this a lot more when working for companies in the South than I do now when I travel to customer meetings now that I work for BigTech and I’m leading projects.
Thought experiment: if I walk into a convenience store with a visible gun in an open carry state and a “lower class” White person does the same and a policemen happens to be in the store, who do you think will be harassed?
Presumably neither of you since in this straw-man neither party has done anything wrong
Just like Ving Rhames, was “suspiciously” living in his own house when SWAT knocked on his door because someone thought he had broken into his own house.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/actor-ving-rhames-said-...
This isn’t just a random anecdote
https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2020/may/bl...
About sums it up. Though if there are any visible disparities in the populations that produce poor children who are prepared, I expect a loud argument.
Running schools for profit is questionable on its own and I think it's tolerated because historically University/College education was seen as optional. We've moved away from that in a lot of the sectors that drive the economy these days though and the system hasn't been tweaked (regulated I suppose) appropriately.
Instead we get platitudes that leave the very obvious problem of rapidly rising tuition unaddressed. Honestly people need to just stop taking out debt for things like that. You mention needing a degree for everything. In some sense you do, because people ask for it, but I don't think you need it. It's just oversaturated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FENqQN5kaHM
Steve Bannon actually explains this quite well in a PBS Frontline interview
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pm5xxlajTW0
It’s infuriating to constantly have the Economist pushing the idea “the country is racist” or “so and so is racist” for many years now. Only to point out what most people know - a poor person in west Virginia is likely to be white, and have more in common with a poor black person from DC than a wealthy white person from DC.
So you're correct, for certain definitions of "working class," but I find attempts to dismiss anti-racism (and increasingly LGBT ) progressive efforts as being merely a distraction from class struggle to be tone-deaf at best, and counterproductive at worst.
Intersectionality is a thing. Race shapes class - especially in the United States where class was literally built around racial caste and identity - and class shapes race. We can have praxis along more than one dimension.
You can see this across companies at a lower level (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/04/amazon-lab... and https://archive.ph/1khJw). Discussions about race will suck all the air out of the proverbial room, will sow division and create resentment. Regardless of political color, people will always have a tiny bit of resentment when it comes to stuff like affirmative action. So instead of being mad at their boss, they're going to be mad at their colleague (who's completely innocent in this) and slowly but surely start accepting right-wing narratives as truth. Holy crap, even more division, right? Nice.