S
I'm not sure how familiar you are with Bret Stephens. He's a rare conservative columnist for the NYT. He was featured recently with Robert Wright on Bloggingheads here if you're interested.
Anyway, he's taken the very unusual step of criticizing a piece written by a fellow NYT writer - the 1619 project. This may be a little too much inside baseball for you, but the paper has strict guidelines against this practice, so it's a fairly big deal internally.
You'll likely be sympathetic to his argument, but give it a read just the same. I thought it was quite compelling as well. I've downloaded and attached it, so you won't have to contend with the paywall.
By the way, I read the essay on the myth of the stolen country. I really liked it, so thanks for passing it along.
Me:
I’m pretty familiar with Stephens. I’ve read him on and off but not much lately. I don’t pay attention to Bloggingheads anymore but thanks for the link to him on it. I’ll check it out.
I’ve only today heard about his piece criticizing 1619. I’ve just read it. It’s good but I would have been happier if it was more hard hitting. I didn’t know about NYT restrictions against criticizing colleagues’ work. I can see a rationale for that but it doesn’t make overwhelming sense to me. Those restrictions seem something of a joke considering what happened to Bari Weiss, years in the making and culminating in her leaving, and what happened because of the publication of Tom Cotton’s op ed calling for National Guard action against the rioters.
Stephens has a mild journalistic sensibility except when he’s inveighing against Trump. I can see that mildness plus institutional/internal-political constraints causing him to tamp down his criticism of 1619 and go out of his way to stress the good it’s done, as he sees it. Yet to be fair to him, he does make the points against 1619 and Hannah-Jones that need to be made.
In a recent WSJ columns Jason Riley asks, where all the liberal voices given Critical Race Theory and the theory of Anti Racism, both despicable theories.
S:
I don't know. You think these are "despicable theories"? I'm watching a Glenn Loury/Heather MacDonald conversation about this same sort of stuff, and they just go too far for my taste. I'm not conversant in critical race theory or anti-racism theory (what would that be, exactly?), but the idea that it's all a hustle can't be quite right. MacDonald is talking about the end of Western civilization if these ideas take hold, and gives no validity whatsoever to the claims of injustice. I've shown you data and so have others that indicate there are problems to do with race, here. Until that evidence is meaningfully contended with, I think it's just a silly shouting match.
Me:
That there are problems to do with race is quite beside the point. Who denies it?
But CRT holds whites are ineradicably socialized in the biases, values, mores, folkways, attitudes, norms etc. etc. of the hegemonic power they have wielded since the beginning of American time.
In fact, on some CRT iterations, we can’t transcend our inherited racism.
The measure is disparate outcome rather than equal opportunity. So that any black white gap—of which gaps there are many, with “white” seemingly including any group that ascends, whites, Jews, Asian and with blacks low man on the totem pole, except for crime and like dysfunction, where they sit on top—is attributable only to racism operating subtextually underneath supposed de jure equality.
Otherwise, goes CRT, the only gap explanation is black genetic inferiority. Which is unthinkable.
And as that is so, it’s insufficient to “be against racism” as a matter of attitude. That can’t begin to encroach on your own inherited racism, your socialization into it, your breathing it in as you breathe in the hegemonic air.
No, you must be an activist against it, marshalling your efforts to combat it, starting with the baby step of recognizing and disclosing your own near-to-irredeemable racism. That in a nutshell is the theory of anti racism.
As I say, both despicable theories.
Capisce?
S
You've written a lot here, and I'm not sure how far we'll get untying all these threads. Suffice it to say, you accept none of the criticisms of the right, and all the criticisms of the left. CRT and its proponents are despicable and a scourge. That's fine.
You've asked me to point to an example of "de jure" racism as well as what work "we" have to do.
If I understand "de jure" racism, it concerns an actual law on the books. Is that the only standard you'd accept for racism on a systemic level? This is part of the point I was getting at earlier. I linked you to a ton of examples of how racism can persist in our legal system, in spite of colourblind laws. You've either chosen to ignore it or you've dismissed all these studies. Below are just a few. Doesn't this suggest something important about the state of the law and race in America to you?
A survey of data from the U.S. Sentencing Commission last year found that when black men and white men commit the same crime, black men on average receive a sentence almost 20 percent longer. The research controlled for variables such as age and prior criminal history.
A 2016 review of nearly 474,000 criminal cases in Hampton Roads, Va., found that whites were more likely to get plea deals that resulted in no jail time for drug offenses. While facing charges of drug distribution, 48 percent of whites received plea bargains with no jail time, vs. 22 percent of blacks. Among those with prior criminal records who pleaded guilty to robbery, 36 percent of whites got no jail time, vs. 8 percent of blacks.
In Delaware, according to a 2012 study, “black defendants who kill white victims are seven times as likely to receive the death penalty as are black defendants who kill black victims. … Moreover, black defendants who kill white victims are more than three times as likely to be sentenced to death as are white defendants who kill white victims.”
Most recently, American Public Media’s “In the Dark” podcast did painstaking research on the 26-year career of Mississippi District Attorney Doug Evans and found that over the course of his career, Evans’s office struck 50 percent of prospective black jurors, vs. just 11 percent of whites.
According to figures from the National Registry of Exonerations (NER) black people are about five times more likely to go to prison for drug possession than white people. According to exoneration data, black people are also 12 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of drug crimes.
As for what work "we" have to do, I don't have any easy prescriptions about this. The first step, it seems to me, is recognizing we have a problem, and that it hasn't been solved by government program liberals or bootstrap conservatives. In the case of policing, I think there's common ground for the right and the left in getting social workers or mental health workers more involved. Advocating for that would be a good thing, I think. Having people in the criminal justice system grapple with some of the disparities mentioned above, and how they might go about gradual reforms that might ameliorate some of this would also be good. But it's undoubtedly thorny.
Me:
I’ll respond point by point but my abiding sense is that you haven’t grappled sufficiently with the heart of both these theories and that you’re conflating the good of wanting to try to ameliorate racial problems with the theories themselves. One can want that amelioration, recognizing that there are such problems, and still reject CRT and Anti Racism, which is a term of art, as despicable, which they are.
Tell me what the criticisms of the right are; pinpoint them and tell me where they fall short. For example, if, say, the right, which btw isn’t a monolith, says racism is only the gross and obvious kind, and uses that as an argument against the despicable theories, then that’s a blinkered criticism to which I don’t subscribe. And so on that basis, you’d be wrong to say my views are parallel to those of the right. Btw, that specific criticism is flawed for at least two reasons: it’s empirically wrong; and even if it were empirically right, it doesn’t get at the essence of what’s despicable, the innards of the theories that make circular arguments, constitute whiteness as near to ineradicably racist by definition—in some versions it’s ineradicable, not near to, it conflates inequality of outcome with inequality of opportunity, has a power based view of society characterized at its core by the dynamics of oppression, with culture as its hegemonic superstructure and others such unlovely, I’d say despicable, notions.
So you tell me to which of these foundational ideas do you subscribe?
In fact, in your last email you tried to strike a middle ground between the theories and their critics. This betrays a fundamental misreading of the theories. It’s zero sum, in my view. You’re either with them or against them. Partial views of the theories, some kernels of insight, are insufficient. If you rest on those alone, you land outside their perimeters.
Btw, I did not say the proponents are despicable. Some are and some aren’t. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
I can’t deal with your studies/examples. I don’t know the studies. I don’t know what the responses to them are. I don’t know what the surrounding statistical context is. Do the studies show improvement or worsening disparities? Coleman Hughes notes that in incarceration rates for blacks, for example, are dropping.
But analytically there is a way of understanding disparities and unequal treatment short of concluding systemic racism exists. I’ll give you an example but need to make an initial point. When I challenged you to name an example of de jure racism, at least two things are notable.
First, it seems, you can’t, which goes a long way to show how much things have improved from slavery to de jure racism to comprehensive institutional and legal equality. That’s important because under the despicable theories nothing has changed. It’s functionally still slave times, with masters, oppressors, hegemonic whites, and slaves, the oppressed, people of colour.
Second, where do I say that de jure racism exhausts the meaning of systemic racism. I didn’t and don’t.
But as to your studies, here’s an example, Scott introduced a long list of studies in the criminal justice system showing differential treatment including that white cops proportionally kill more unarmed white men then black men, that black men up to a certain level of violence get harsher treatment at the hands of the cops than white men. And the assertion under the theories and by many others is that police are systemically racist. But consider: there are about 350,000,000 yearly cop civilian interactions in the US. How many are problematic? Of those that are problematic, how many are racially so? How many of the bad cases involve innocent victims? How many involve dealing with criminals, and which raise ambiguous fact situations.
As the numbers dwindle by this kind of slicing and dicing, then as against the whole we move further and further away from anything that can fairly be called systemic. We’re forced to recognize the distinctions between problemic and systemic and therefore reform and revolutionary type overhaul, that leads to its reductio ad absurdism of “defund/abolish the police.”
“Systemic” is way overused because it’s ready to hand and delusionally distills complex, problematic issues into a simple encompassing formulation explaining everything. In his debate with Trump Biden said most cops are good but there’s systemic racism in policing. That circle simply won’t square.
Think of the rhetoric of rape culture to describe what was going on campuses and in society at large. The theory of rape culture is that society taken as whole promotes rape, that’s that what campus culture was and what North American culture was. The term has faded and rape was so overused as to lose meaning such that an unwanted touching was assimilated to rape under the aegis of sexual assault. I think there are analytic parallels between the notion of rape culture and systemic racism. And it’s not just words. Different remedies flow from the characterization.
Your ideas about what “we” have to do are revealing in a few ways. First, you don’t answer what you personally have to do, what efforts you have to make, how you need to recognize your inner socialized racist. I don’t think you have to do any of those things. But the theory of Anti Racism says that we who don’t individually do any of those things are racist, simply masking it rhetorically by our swell liberal ideas. It’s zero sum. I think that notion is horse shit. And I think further it’s despicable.
Secondly, the same point really, no one reasonable will gainsay ideas for reform, whether what you briefly point to, or others. But for CRT, that’s just nibbling at the edges of things. No, I’m sorry, you need sensitivity training to help you confront your inner white racism and either transcend it on some versions of CRT or at least better manage it on others. In fact attending sensitivity sessions and declaiming racist, racist, racist, is easier than the hard work of rolling up sleeves and trying to implement incremental reform.
Which all leads me to conclude where I started this long note, that you really haven’t come to terms with the innards of these theories and your comments reveal it.
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