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BLM ('racism is a crisis!') should be understood as another post-modern spectacle put on by failing institutions just like the the Trump 'crisis,' current hysteria with COVID, and, my guess for what is up next, the climate 'crisis.'

All of these issues are real (racism, Trump's unique incompetence, COVID, climate change), but they have been repurposed to suit institutional, economic, ideological, administrative, and cultural needs.

The organic social protest movements against class disparities during early industrial capitalism, the inequities of colonialism, and true systemic racism that the Left venerates (as it should) are long dead and gone. The sooner we all realize the state of hyperreality politics operates in and start using appropriate language and conceptual frameworks, the better. Perhaps we should all be reading our Foucault and Baudrillard.

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Racism is barely real, and what racism exists in this country is in its rhetoric and effect primarily anti-White.

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author

🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

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Per the spirit of your article, let's use as the starting point things you can measure with a needle: that's to say, if a tax credit is effective for a certain race, it is a good thing for that race, regardless of whether or not it's called Child Tax Credit or Child Of This Race's Tax Credit.

If you looked at a culture completely alien to ours, and looked at how its once-dominant demographic was collapsing in its birth rate, collapsing in its percentage of the whole, and declining in its life expectancy, you'd start to ask questions. You'd plot those against other demographics and in *some* of those cases - such as birth rate - you'd see declines, but in most cases not as severe. But overall you would see jumping off the page a reduction in not only this group's numerical strength, but its life. And, as we're measuring with needles, you'd be concerned about these effects and why the impact is disparate. Wouldn't you?

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That alien might also notice that the massive wealth gap between black and white Americans, and that increased wealth is associated with a lower birth rate across the world. They might also notice that when a white and non-white person have a kid, that kid is considered non-white.

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1. They would certainly notice the wealth gap. It is glaringly apparent. They would then look for how wealth is amassed at the population level (as opposed to the family level.) They'd see that it is first via income, then via capital investment. They'd see that the most predictive variable for income potential is education. They would then find that the greatest causal - not correlational - factor for education success is raw intelligence - g. And for this our most accessible predictor (to the extent that we can, for this specific exercise, treat it almost as a direct proxy) is intelligence quotient, IQ. They would then, finally, discover a difference of almost one standard deviation in IQ between Black and White Americans.

They would of course be completely remiss not to factor in generational wealth, and the very real institutional structures (which makes slavery sound like a mere technocratic problem; you know what I mean when I say 'structures', many of them were so dehumanizing as to be evil) that prevented amassing of wealth in years past. These cannot be hand-waved away. But nor can they be treated as a substitute for the above.

2. The reduction in birth rate must be measured by degrees in two ways; reduction from a previous high, and reduction beyond TFR. These effects are not uniform globally, nor within societies. A curious society, one where questions were permitted, would ask why.

3. They would indeed notice that. They'd probably - again, assuming they're permitted to ask questions - ask why in a society where the Whites have somehow amassed all of the power and wealth for themselves, people are so eager to distance themselves from a White identity. They'd probably ask why 'passing' is now a thing of the past, and why enterprising youngsters aren't simply lying and saying they're White on application forms.

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I have a rule against arguing on the internet: I only reply to things I disagree with once, no follow-ups. As such, I won't present an argument here. I would just ask you to think if this sounds more like a hypothetical alien or a random conservative pundit.

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Link doesn't show up for me, just five unrenderable character symbols. Other links in comment thread are fine. ??

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emoji!

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I dunno - my take is that racism will always be an issue in relation to black Americans because of our history.

But I agree with Wesley Yang that current race discourse feels like a 'last gasp' of something that is being eclipsed by demographic change. I don't think Asians or Hispanics feel too invested in the racial framework we've had since the '60s. Look what is happening in California, for example.

We will see, but I just don't see the framework of discourse on race digesting, in particular, a huge Hispanic influx that is working class, intermarries, is increasingly affluent, intermarries at an extraordinarily high rate by historical standards, and has been labelled 'of color' by elites despite often considering themselves white.

We will see I guess.

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For those foundational Black Americans descended from the slave stock, sure. There's a debt of history there. Yet is it owed by the Whites, or by the WASPs? A very high percentage of this country's Whites have little to no pre-Ellis Island blood. (I am one of these.) And we now have countless millions of Black people in this country who were far likelier to be on the side of slave traders than the enslaved. As for Jim Crow and the Civil Rights era, our reparations - paid by a primarily White economically productive class to the public purse for disbursement via welfare programs - is well into the 13-figures since the 1960s. And the lack of overt hatred towards Black people - admittedly a low bar to cross - is now so drastic that there is a cottage industry in hate hoaxes to meet the demand for White racism.

I dunno, I kinda feel that we've paid our dues here in every sense. And I think that Hispanics and Asians - those smart enough to avoid liberal arts colleges, anyway - are less enchanted of racism as the one thing to rule them all for the very simple reason that it barely exists and as such they barely notice it.

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Yeah, I suspect that I'm less susceptible to the enthusiasms of woke politics because my (white) family immigrated recently.

Also, I'm in a well paying industry with an extraordinarily disproportion of West Africans and Caribbean immigrants (or second generation). There is going to be segment of West Africans in particular over the next 20 years who will rise to the top of every important profession and economic sector. It's already happening. I can't imagine this won't change discourse on race.

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Yeah I'm curious to see what the answer would be if people were forced to guess what percentage of Americans are Black. I'm assuming because of the massive overrepresentation of Blacks in sports and entertainment, as well as the cultural dominance of NYC, there seems to be a belief that the issue of racism against Blacks is big not just in a moral sense (which it is) but also in a quantitative sense (which it is not). The way Hispanics (and the hilariously overbroadly termed) Asians messes with the convenient picture is not one that really helps anyone but is very real.

I'd be interested in learning more about this last grasp concept. On the one hand, I do think that you can just see from the way so much of racism is being redefined from real things to fake things is a sign this is true.

On the other hand, Systemic Racism, which seems to be the real problem where all the real shit that actively hurts Black communities comes from, seems unlikely to go away. I was hyped to see this become part of the mainstream conversation but then those people chose to elect the person most committed to systemic racism in America and redefine systemic racism as "ESPN having too many white male anchors" or some dumb shit. This is the stuff we need to be working to solve but would cost money, be hard, and actively bother entrenched interests. So we definitely won't solve it.

Just when it comes down to it, who is actually helped by us dismantling systemic racism? The frank answer is "people no one really cares about but it's beneficial to pretend to care about" whereas conversely a lot of people with actual power would be harmed. Or make less money and/or lose societal influence. So I can't see that stuff ever going away. And as long as there's a buck to be made off it, people will beat the drum of ending racism without actually doing anything to do that.

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The study's been done: https://news.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-black-hispanic-populations.aspx

Americans, on average, estimate that a third of Americans are black (the actual number is about 13%).

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"And Here's Why That's A Good Thing" (Salon.com)

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I think "structural" racism against black American descendants of slaves definitely exists in that there is significant current deprivation and poverty directly connected to the heritage of slavery and domestic apartheid. However, white supremacy is a canard, lots of non-white immigrant groups have done great in this country. It's also pretty rare for whites to be explicitly racist in the personal / individual sense, it's very low-class and disapproved of, which is exactly why the accusation has such political and social power.

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Which is exactly why a class/wealth framework work better, see the child tax credit.

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Amen.

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sure, but race and racism have a legitimate place in the discussion because wealth and class are so aligned with race in the U.S., and not coincidentally or in a way that is "deserved"

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Wealth and class are correlated with race, but the causal relationship is based on education, which in turn is based on intelligence.

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When you say education is based on intelligence, do you believe that there is any amount of discrimation against black students in K-12 or college? And do you believe that poverty plays a role in educational disparities or do you beliveve educational disparities are 100% a function of intelligence?

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I think the race/class alignment is breaking down. Asians are generally better off than white people and more educated and massively overrepresented at the top of society. Even lower class Chinese immigrants massively move up in the second generation. Meanwhile white people form a large majority so they're all over the class spectrum. Many Hispanics are upwardly mobile just like many Italians and Irish were. It does seem like race and class are almost the same thing if you live in NYC or LA for example. But include upstate NY in the picture and it gets way more complicated.

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A lot of people think Black people are inferior in terms of criminality, academic achievement, general competence, etc. You disagee?

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Without trying to avoid your question, I think "inferior" is too loaded, especially when it comes to "general competence."

Crime: Yes, Black people commit more crimes than the average, often shockingly so.

Academic achievement: Yes, Black people have poorer education outcomes than the other "main" racial and ethnic groups in American society (Non-Hispanic White, Hispanic (All Races), AAPI.)

General competence: No, because I think this is too loaded, and frankly mean. Our society is too heavily biased towards people who are well-educated, and being well-educated is too biased towards those with high IQs. Economic results scale almost parabolically with educational attainment. The line from high school educated, to two-year degree, to four-year degree, to graduate degree etc. is hardly linear at all. It's more of rocket. It wasn't always like this; it was possible, well into the 1980s in fact, for someone with a high school diploma to secure unionized, skilled manufacturing work, and to raise a family off it. That is not possible now. As such, as Black people do not achieve educational outcomes relative to their population, this impossibility is far more keenly felt. And I regard this as unjust, and a far more legitimate complaint that Black people have than some boogeyman racist.

So severe is our "smartocracy" that (and I'm not saying you're doing this, just that it's very common) educational attainment is taken as a direct shorthand for general competence. If you don't have money, it's because you don't have a good job, and if you don't have a good job it's because you don't have a degree, and if you don't have a degree it's because you're dumb - and if you're dumb, you're useless. This is profoundly unfair, it didn't always used to be this way, and the stratification of our society disproportionately affects Black people in a way that it should not.

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Overall a valid point.

But you seem to be saying that even though Black people are pose a statistically greater risk to police, that never influences how the police treat a 30 year old Black accountant or software developer.

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There are some areas of life where White privilege does exist. This would be one of them. It is unjust. It is also - in the aggregate - not a big deal, and barely related to "Black lives" at all. If we're talking about police encounters at all, such cases are a tiny percentage of the whole. If we're talking about ones with lives at stake, they're almost literally a non-issue.

Do we need a fundamental, societal reckoning about "Black lives" if an accountant gets pulled over and spoken to brusquely? If so, can we have one for me as well, because when I drove with an expired registration you'd think I'd burned down an orphanage, the way I was handled.

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But you would agree that it’s fairly common for people to associate others with the racial or ethnic groups to which they belong. When hiring a new accountant, for example, Ben Cohen might get a boost and DeShawn Jackson nightly get unfairly downgraded. Based on the stereotypes associated with each.

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The best thing about invisible enemies is that the good guys always need totalitarian political power to fight them on our behalf, and they can never be verified to have been defeated, so the emergency powers never need to be relinquished.

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When a politician tells you they need totalitarian powers so they can fight an invisible enemy on your behalf, reach for your wallet. When they tell you they need totalitarian powers so they can fight your neighbors on your behalf, reach for something else.

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Ah, yes, the nation built on black slavery is actually so pro-black that it's white people who are the new slaves.

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The nation that existed then comprises a very small percentage of today's population. I am not descended from it, and there's a very good chance you aren't descended from it either.

That nation also fought a bloody, costly, internecine war over the very issue. Many of its sons fought and died to liberate others. As well they might have done: slavery is a moral evil and cannot be tolerated in a country. But it's worth remembering what price that nation paid for being so wrong as to implement it in the first place.

And that's a price most of the world never did. Students of irony may enjoy reflecting on how many of the professional anti-racist class come from cultures with slaveholding in decades past, rather than centuries. They may wish to meditate further on why these cultures are never asked to apologize for it even once, much less in perpetuirty.

Few are the nations that have fought for the freedom of someone else. And the gratitude they get for it is to proclaim that the entirety of the nation was built on the practice they fought to end. As if it weren't sufficient to say, there was slavery. Some people had slaves. Slavery was part of the economy. No, it was the definition of the nation, the very building of it, and of that original sin they will never be free, no matter how many died to make it so.

That I never came close to saying "white people are the new slaves" - and nor would I - hopefully gives you pause for thought. Why would you attribute that viewpoint to me?

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Stepping back from my sarcastic and absurd claim, what current US policies do you believe are anti-white?

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My contention is not restricted this to "US policies", so please don't take the below as anything exhaustive. I am answering the question you asked, and no other question, so please do me the courtesy of not saying "oh, is that all? That's nothing!" or something similar. I am taking "US" to mean something either federal, or so prevalent at state level that it might as well be. And I am taking "policy" to mean something that either has the force of law behind it, or at the absolute least has the bully pulpit behind it (that is, this policy must result in something Actually Happening, rather than be mere rhetoric.) Were your question less restrictive, so too would be my answers.

The first is that federal law enforcement places undue priority on anything with a tinge of Whiteness to it. Some of this is darkly comedic: the FBI, smelling blood, last summer sent 15 (fifteen!) agents to the Talladega NASCAR track, because they thought they'd finally find an Actual Racism in the form of a noose directed at a Black driver; instead it was the kind of garage door pull-loop any homeowner is familiar with. (I wouldn't need to ask fourteen of my neighbors to help close the case on that one.) As comic as this incident was, it sets the tone for what is a top priority of the G-men: accuse whitey, demoralize whitey, arrest whitey. If you recall the Governor Whitmer "kidnapping plot", we were informed that the perpetrators had ties to White Supremacy. In reality, they had ties to the FBI, which egged them on every step of the way. Sadly this also goes beyond law enforcement: our main institutions, such as the Army, are now run by people who reject things like "Whiteness", whatever that is.

But education is my big one. White students, by and large, enjoy less classroom expenditure than other cohorts; of far greater concern to me is that anti-White curricula now exist even at the grade school level in places that were, until even ten years ago, pretty sane, such as Evanston, Ill. These things start in college towns and radiate outwards, so I think we're only just getting started. At the college level this is already damaging, with increasing numbers of schools seeking not parity in admissions - itself a dubious goal - but classes increasingly "of color" beyond what the census would predict. This has real ramifications in the real world and is, in my view, one of the biggest upcoming crises of policy in the US, given the correlation between educational attainment and economic success.

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What constitutes anti-white curricula?

The FBI investigating something is not even remotely a policy.

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I don't really see how climate change fits into this. The climate crisis is legitimate, super important, and receives much less attention.

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Well, I don't think it's a question of whether the problem is legitimate. It's more an issue of the response: creating bureaucratic processes, sinecures, consultants, employment, culture product, an ideological framework, etc. to 'address' the problem. Personally, I can't make sense of the global warming discourse. I mean, if carbon is the issue and we were serious we would immediately just scale up nuclear. It's what all the engineers and scientists say when they are being candid. But the policy proposals never touch that - they always focus on less effective rent-seeking options. So, I think global warming has already taken on the economic aspects of being the next 'crisis' and I think ideology and culture will follow.

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I agree with scaling up nuclear, but that's a long-term process. It takes years to build a nuclear power plant. I also don't think there's enough nuclear energy material in the world for that to be the sole solution.

I also think making our cities traversable by mass transit rather than cars would be good for climate change and our general well-being, but I don't see any movement on that.

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Yeah, I mean 'degrowth' is a fantasy. With nuclear people can consume as much power as they want - they could drive their electric cars all day long. It would be fine. If someone said, 'Let's spend $1 trillion for a nuclear energy grid,' that would be awesome. Never the discussion though.

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Ah, okay, I see what you mean now. It's like the culture of "minimalism" and boasting about how low-carbon one's consumption is. I agree, that shit is useless.

Like, wow, you bought a green car. You know what would be way better for the environment? Walking on a bus/train and not having a car in the fucking first place. But that would mean the upper-middle class would have to share transit with those icky working class people. Not gonna happen.

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I like flying to exotic vacation locales, preferably in business class. But I weep a single tear into my little plastic champagne cup when I think of my carbon footprint. See, I know I'm doing it, so that makes it OK.

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Also I don’t know that US can effect climate change because carbon is coming from China and India burning coal, but I think you can make case for nuclear in US just on basis of cleaner air.

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climate change cannot be 'solved' by American policy decisions, it's a global problem (esp. China and India, etc.) -- the best we can do is hope for technology to ameliorate the worst effects. any other policy response is fantasy politics and will never be passed in any Senate that I can foresee for the next decade (and probably ever)

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Might be nice to have more nuclear power. It doesn't pollute the air, is reliably priced, works at night and when it's not windy, and stays on when it's cold.

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oh I agree, nuclear would be great for a thousand reasons, but it won't solve the effects of climate change (and also isn't in the Green New Deal, indicating that GND is a symbolic belief, or hyperreality politics, as you said)

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I work in a university. We had a fairly strong Office of Diversity before summer of 2020. Since since summer 2020 the Office has added staff and is giving a lot of zoom trainings and sending a lot of e-mails to faculty. More speakers are on the university speaker docket. Same for my professional association. There is a lot of overlap (of speakers). Most journals have had special issues. Many CFP on these topics. What I really need tho is funding for grass roots student recruitment and I haven't been able to sort through that maze. If I had one speaker fee for those "on the circuit." I could do a lot of good, but "the professionalism" gets in the way of a ground game. No, I can't write a paper or give a talk about going to community meetings to talk with support staff about careers because I want to do the work, not get academic credit for it. If only these activities could be seen as intrinsically valuable on their own and not a means to have another conference or juried paper.

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Box-checking

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If BLM were run by the most grass-roots and the most caring, pro-Black people alive, it would still have failed to meet the goals of its initial founding for one very simple reason: the police in the US, in the aggregate, simply aren't going around killing Black people in any disproportionate manner. Ancillary to this, Black people are arrested more - again, in the aggregate - because they commit more crimes, particularly violent crimes, on a per-capita basis than anyone else does. (Shockingly so, in fact.)

But as Freddie says, it went beyond the police and to a fundamental re-organization of society, at least in spirit. Scratch the surface of our society, however, and it becomes a large case of 'be careful what you wish for'. Freddie laments the "toothlessness" of police reform and then laments, seconds later, that failure to prosecute will result in a reactionary backlash. Both true, in isolation. Yet they are toothless because - and Freddie knows this full well - the people who actually live in the cities don't want wholesale police reform; and the reactionary backlash to which he refers comes in large part from the Black people who have to live in crime-riven neighborhoods.

It's an obvious racial truth in our society, so naturally you can't say it out loud, so naturally a lot of people have never even considered it: Black people are among the strongest advocates for visible, active policing in their neighborhoods because their neighborhoods are where the crime is. White liberals, on the other hand, can go literally their entire lives without even witnessing violent or property crime, much less being personally affected. The three variables here - White, Black, and crime - only coexist in a very small number of places in the country, affecting a decimal point of the country's population and an insanely tiny percentage of its geography - parts of San Francisco, parts of New York, very small parts of Chicago. That's really it. So when White liberals are instructed by media culture, NY-driven as it is, to disband the police, it's an easy call for them because they haven't needed the police in their lives and probably look down on them for being poorly-educated anyway (in a way that they wouldn't do of, say, postal workers.)

So let's reverse the question - why would you *expect* success of an organization founded on a fraudulent basis, and with goals antithetical to even the most basic aspects of harm mitigation among the community it purports to elevate? A fool and his money etc.

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There *are* tons of issues with policing in the U.S., though I think one could argue the racism of the police is a secondary effect of the biggest issue, which is a total lack of accountability. Police departments in major U.S. cities basically run themselves (and have for most of their history). Past attempts by mayors and city councils to bring them to heel have almost always resulted in failure. Police culture is almost universally based upon a siege mentality - that it's cops standing together not only against criminals, but a hostile to uncaring civilian population. They have excellent solidarity within their ranks - to the point they will almost always help cover up the wrongdoings of individual bad cops - but no solidarity outside of it (the worst sort of craft unionism).

I've always wondered how things would be different if we had a national (or even just statewide) police forces with frequent rotations. The armed forces put into place rotation of troops pretty early on because it was discovered if you let soldiers serve together for decades, they had greater loyalty to their comrades in arms than to the chain of command.

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I agree completely, especially with the lack of accountability. The police, all too often, police themselves. (With the obvious caveat that, police being a local thing, these things vary in effect and severity across the country.) And what about civil forfeiture? And it would be churlish not to acknowledge the existence of some PDs that Are Actually Racist. The issue is that these PDs number probably in the low two figures, and that this is a much weaker explanatory factor of Black outcomes than the fact that Blacks, proportionally, just do a ton of crime a lot of the time.

The militarization of our PDs and the Left's newfound admiration for unaccountable police forces with a nationwide brief - say hello to your friendly Capitol officer today! He'll be in an ill-fitting suit, not riot gear, and by God if there's no White Supremacy out there he'll make it himself, so important is it that he catch some - has been at emergency status for years now. BLM, far from improving these matters, will in all likelihood make it worse.

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Even within BLM, few people would argue the issue is individual racist police officers. Lots of black police officers also brutalize and kill black suspects (look at Freddie Gray in Baltimore).

The issue is more that for a myriad of reasons, we historically really have treated the premature deaths of black people at the hands of the police as if they matter less. It's just something that happens sometimes, cause black life is cheap. You could have a dirty cop - a barely restrained psychopath - who isn't technically "racist," but understands if he wants to play bully and rough someone up that he'll be way less likely to get flack if it's a black suspect. Meaning it's about the systematic racism of the criminal justice system, rather than the individual racism of the cops - that really causes the issue.

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I'm not a social scientist, but I think talking of proximate vs. ultimate causes is helpful here. I think part of the, or even the main, reason why black communities are poorer, on average, than non-black communities is PAST racism. But I think the contemporary reason for why police are likelier to get away roughing up black people rather than non-black people is CURRENT poverty and concomitant lack of political power in certain black communities.

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Yup. And you can draw it out past race and involve class as well, as I'm sure cops will treat white middle-class teenagers arrested for drunk/disorderly much more gingerly (who knows who their daddies are?) than they would a random crazy bum (regardless of race).

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It's very difficult to determine when CURRENT starts and PAST is over with, isn't it?

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Do you think that the # of PDs who are actually racist really numbers in the low two figures? I would bet it's much higher than that, for reasons you yourself outline in your previous post: black men, are, on average, much more violent than other men (from what I recall, the average man is 7 times likelier to commit murder than the average woman, and the average black man is 8 times likelier to commit murder than the average white man).* Consequently, if you're a cop, especially is you're a cop in a city where there are lots of black men, you're almost certainly likely to form the belief that young black men are dangerous and to-be-avoided, no?** I mean, think how ready people are to generalize from one or two instances of something to the whole class; now, imagine how ready they would be to generalize from HUNDREDS of instances to a whole class.

*--Obviously, this talk of averages is somewhat misleading; the MODAL black male is completely unlikely to murder anyone, just as the modal male is, too. We're talking small percentages of men and small percentages of black men.

**--And isn't that textbook racism?

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There's also the classic case of the largely "accidental" police shootings - where cops legitimately believe (albeit falsely) that someone is armed and/or reaching for their gun, when in fact they are not. There have been cases where police, upon realizing they shot an unarmed person, broke down in tears.

At the same time, lots of studies have shown that all sorts of people who don't even have explicitly-held racist beliefs hold implicit racial associations. Like, someone who subconsciously believes that black people will be more likely to be criminals will "see" imaginary guns more often on black people than white people.

Most of this, though, boils down to flaws in human cognition, along with flaws in police training which explicitly train officers to be constantly paranoid regarding threats to their lives. Implicit racism just comes along for the ride.

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You would expect this implicit racism to manifest itself in the figures, but by the percentage of Black people shot by the police is lower than is suggested both by their police encounter rate and eventual conviction rate.

It is possible, I guess, that huge numbers of Blacks are being shot non-fatally by the police afeared of non-existent guns, but these figures are harder to track down than those for fatalities.

The hair-trigger of many American PDs is indeed a problem. But it doesn't manifest itself in any kind of anti-Black way that nationwide figures can detect. In fact the opposite is true. (Steve Sailer posits that this is because Whites are more likely to commit "suicide-by-cop", which could be a contributing factor, but it seems a bit insufficient as a total explanation.)

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Para 1 should say "fatally shot".

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To quibble, we have no idea the extent to which black suspects actively resist arrest vs white suspects. Certainly anecdotally speaking it seems all the stories of perps going out "guns blazing" in shootouts with the cops tend to be white guys. To the extent I follow these stories locally, black suspects just tend to run for their lives - unless they are mentally disturbed, but presumably there's not a big racial factor in mental illness either way.

I'd also say that even if you can show that racism didn't play a role in police shootings in aggregate, it does not mean it doesn't play a role in individual cases, in much the same way that most white-on-black murders are not directly racist, but a subset of them definitely is.

Finally, to a certain extent, reality doesn't really matter here, because we live in a world of the perceptions filtered through the media. If as a society a subset of the population believes they are oppressed, we collectively have to deal with those feelings. You can't just say "but actually..." and dismiss feelings with facts. And to be clear, I believe this just as much about white rural Trump voters. I don't believe that objective justice exists, but I do believe individual suffering does, and any society which doesn't figure out how to alleviate (and preferably minimize) such discontent will reap the whirlwind.

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My husband was a beat cop for five years. In that time, he almost shot one man—but didn’t. The man was Black, reported to have a weapon, and he had run into the woods to evade law enforcement. It was dark out. My husband was one of the pursuers, and the first to encounter him. Turns out, he had tossed the weapon. My husband had a split second to decide as the man turned around toward him—in the dark, in the woods—whether or not to shoot.

I invite anyone who has hard criticisms of police and their “hair trigger” to engage in police training exercises and see how they’d do. I’m not saying we don’t need more accountability—we do. I’m not saying there’s never any racism in any departments—there is. But based on the amount of crime and particularly gun crime in our country, it’s frankly incredible there aren’t more people shot by police.

I also believe that civilian accountability board members ought to be required to ride along with police regularly. Once a month, certainly, at all different shifts.

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You are leaping from a statistical probability to a categorical certainty. Any cop in, say, Chicago, who assumes that the next Black man he sees is *more likely* to commit a violent crime than the next White man he sees is correct. It would be in no way unreasonable for a cop to profile based on this information, provided it is used along with other pertinent information. Would it be racist? Who cares: The scenario as presented is ludicrous. Any cop who takes a single piece of information - race - and then decides "this specific Black man I see in front of me is, ipso facto based on his race and no further information, a threat to be avoided" is behaving unreasonably because no matter what, only a small minority of people commit dangerous, violent crime. Failure to realize that is of much greater import to *anyone*, White or Black, than profiling based on race.

Anything else here is just window-dressing to get people to stop believing their lying eyes. That's what charges of racism are intended to do.

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Obviously, a cop won't look at an elderly black man and think, "danger!" He won't even look at a young black woman and think that. But won't he, because of his many experiences, overgeneralize about black males (dressed in certain ways) between the ages of 15 and, let's say, 45 and think "definitely danger!", rather than just "greater chance of danger!"?

I mean, I could be wrong, but I suspect that for most people, their probability-detection mechanisms aren't as fine-grained as those of superforecasters.

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Why is that obvious? I'm going off the scenario that you prevented. If there are considerations beyond race - and you've cited two, gender and age - why are we discussing this as an incident of racism and not sexism or ageism?

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I'm not trying to defend the police. Like anyone, particularly people who have done criminal defense, I've dealt with awful cops and good ones.

But, they're really just convenient scapegoats. Sure, Derek Chauvin was a bad person doing a bad thing. And so was that Abu Ghraib girl. They both deserved to be punished. By why aren't we punishing the people who are actually at fault? The people who set the policies that inevitably lead to this abuse?

Oh, cause we like those people. Or they're powerful. Or convenient. Why don't we do anything about the War on Drugs? Well, Biden and Kamala love it, so, let's keep quiet. Why don't we invest heavily in creating jobs and economic development in our inner cities? Well, that would cost money and we really need to spend that on defense.

We allow these horrible situations to exist, impose this ridiculous mandate on police, send them in to occupy, then act outraged when abuses occur. But, it's definitely the fault of the individual cops. Or Republicans. Or, uhh, Joe Manchin? Hey, look over there!

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The other obvious racial truth in our society is that Black people are, by far, the most socially conservative members of the Democratic coalition. It is therefore vitally important that they be whipped into hating Republicans with a white-hot passion, or they will rapidly stop reliably voting Democrat.

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Press X to doubt for two reasons: the first is that Black people have very good economic reasons for voting Democratic. They disproportionately work for federal and state governments, for example. The second is that the Republicans are by and large really, really bad at social conservatism, having failed to conserve anything at all since roughly 1961.

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Black Americans tend to self-identify as socially conservative, but IIRC polling has shown that outside of same-sex-marriage support they're pretty much left-leaning on everything else. Similar to the national average on abortion, a bit to the left on the environment, and significantly to the left on issues of foreign policy, affirmative action, and criminal justice.

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Interesting. And with same-sex marriage now being a done deal, I expect this supposed social conservatism to manifest itself even less at the ballot box. I mean, are Black people supposed to vote Republican in case the libs make marriage even gayer?

We're still in the midst of the post-Obama realignment, much less ready for a new one, but any socially conservative party that includes Blacks as part of the coalition will bear only a slight resemblance to today's Republican party. The economics just wouldn't support it.

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If current trends continue, I do suspect the GOP will eventually drift somewhat to the left on economics, if only because it's exchanging higher-income voters for lower-income ones, and the historic relationship between the GOP and big business is slowly uncoupling. You arguably saw the beginnings of this during the teacher's strikes of 2018-2019, where a fair number of pro-teacher (but otherwise conventionally Republican) candidates won primaries for state office and even knocked off incumbents in states like Oklahoma, Kentucky, and West Virginia.

But I think it would take a few decades even after that before a substantive number of black Americans will vote Republican.

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Gay marriage is a done deal, but trans issues remain to threaten social conservatives with traditional and strict notions of masculinity.

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And the GOP will do nothing to counter that threat. And then they'll start taking credit for trans rights in a few years. And then they'll say Dems r the real transphobes. In fact I think they already tried that when Caitlyn Jenner came out as something truly shocking - a fiscal conservative!

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Last year was an op connected to trying to defeat Trump in the 2020 election. Under a Democratic president BLM just merges into the foundation world and is no longer visible on the street. It will again become visible closer to the 2024 election when useful to defeat a Republican again

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You are absolutely right. The fun part is when the golem escapes its masters and keeps going. Just look at Portland!

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Yep. Same thing with "open borders" discourse. People who LARPed as open border maximalists during Trump have magically rediscovered their "inner Burkean" during Biden -- whose border policy is more or less the same as Trump's (whose policy was more or less the same as Obama's and Bush's).

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That was different. The cages have tinsel now.

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There's actually a lot of disgust with Biden on the left right now in regards to immigration. He's sort of fucked both ways, as his actions are portrayed as too lenient in the right-wing media, and too much a continuation of Trump-era policy in left circles. This likely in part contributes to his falling approval ratings, which are mostly driven by those on the left now disapproving of him.

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My reading of the polling is different. It is admittedly hard on tracking polls to zero in very precisely because they're quite broad. But among those who identify as Democrats, and (separately) those who identify as Liberal, Strongly, their tilt away from Biden, while noticable, is significantly less drastic than the tilt away by Independents and Moderates. I'd be more inclined to say it's the wealthy suburbanites who fled the Republican Party in the age of Trump that are showing their displeasure. That some on the left are doing the same is undeniable, but numerically they're not the ones driving the polling.

This is based off YouGov/The Economist and a little bit of Rasmussen.

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Oh, related: YouGov/Econ shows that of the four educational groups (HS, Some College, College Grad, Postgrad), the only one with whom Biden enjoys net approval is... well, go ahead and guess. You'll get it right first time :)

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Nate Cohn just had an article on this in the NY Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/politics/biden-approval-ratings.html

His findings were Biden's performance is dropping most with women, blacks, Latinos, and young people, but he has experienced little slide with me, college-educated whites, or older voters.

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This is why I'm struggling to get a handle on this - because while that is directionally correct, Blacks are a small percentage of the country and Latinos are a small percentage of Likely Voters (much smaller than their share of the population would suggest.) Older Whites outnumber both and College Whites tilted Democratic in such startling numbers in 2020 that they have a larger effect on the net approval ratings than in almost every prior election since reliable polling began (since, for the most part, they started off Approving whereas previously they may not.)

Biden is doing badly with everyone, but those newfound Democrats are - perhaps unsurprisingly - very fickle. So my take is that old-guard Democrats within that white, college cohort are standing by, but the new ones, perhaps spooked by Afghanistan, are fleeing.

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He's dropping among women, blacks, latinos and young people because of...the immigration issue? Am I misunderstanding what you're claiming? Because Cohn certainly doesnt make that claim in your linked article.

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No, I wasn't explicitly claiming that immigration was the primary cause for this. Though Biden is caught in a bind here, as the activist Democratic base has zoomed far, far to the left on immigration of the general public, to the point that anything other than general amnesty is seen as a sellout move.

I know I saw lots of angry posts (some forwarded memes) a few months back on my Facebook feed about "kids still in cages" - even though logically speaking we can't just release unaccompanied minors (citizen or non-citizen) out into the streets - they have to stay somewhere until someone is willing to foster them.

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When 9 out of 10 left-wing tweets support Biden and the 10th tweet criticizes something he ordered on some issue, you can call that "disgust with Biden on the left", but the problem you, and other people insistent that there's still a liberal/left distinction, have going forward is the 2020 has demonstrated what the left is really like when it cares. When it cares it's not a low-energy "occasionally tweet against Biden" bloc, it's an extremely high-energy bloc.

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<Insert pictures of AOC's crying at the border photoshoot here>

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Last year was an op connected to trying to re-elect Trump in the 2020 election. As soon as it failed, it just dissolved back into ordinary citizens and is no longer visible on the street. It will become visible closer to the 2024 election when useful to try to elect a Republican again.

Hey, everyone can play the totally evidence-free assertion game!

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Yeah but some people (e.g. you) are really bad at it

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Thanks for your input!

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Excellent essay Freddie. One quibble I have however is I don't think Occupy was ultimately transitory and useless as a movement, because a lot of the rhetoric (and some of the activists themselves) went right over to Fight for $15, which has been pretty amazingly successful, as far as left-populist organized movements go.

Though I suppose this isn't something BLM could do, is it? I mean as a reformist position Fight for $15 has a pretty simple, singular demand, which is both popular and broadly achievable in policy terms. In contrast, the closest thing to a simple slogan for BLM (defund the police) was both radical within the U.S. context, and unpopular even within the majority of the black community. There are all sorts of incremental reforms which can help make police more accountable (and restrict their role so they don't do things like incite the mentally ill) but they can't be summed up in single sexy slogans.

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I guess this is true, but man- they squandered such an amazing opportunity. This was a time when the country was actually pretty united against the big banks. Mainstream news coverage of OWS - at least at the beginning- was actually pretty favorable. What if they had solidified against one demand- “break up the banks” (meaning a hard asset cap)? I think that was achievable and would have had immense benefits. But instead we got… drumming.

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In Graeber's Bullshit Jobs, one of the five types of bullshit jobs is the "box-checker" - someone who makes an organization feel like they're doing something that they're not actually doing. This goes well beyond diversity, of course. I work in data science, and the majority of my job isn't gaining insight from data, it's making different leaders look or feel like they're using data. These people think that making PMC roles more diverse or garnering an anti-racist statement qualifies as actual work because similar things earn them plaudits at their actual job. I mentioned this in the digest post: my career prospects improved a lot when I focused less on my actual job and more at appearing competent and strategic. I have to wonder how many people in the diversity spaces share a similar cynicism. As in, would these diversity consultants take a job at Fox News tomorrow if it increases their salary.

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I read an essay years ago which pointed out a lot of overwork in white-collar jobs is due to too many pointless meetings being scheduled, which forced people to do their actual work outside of normal work hours. It also made the point that generally speaking, talking about doing work feels as "real" (in terms of the intellectual labor taken) as actually doing something - which is why someone can be astonishingly unproductive and still overworked.

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"It also made the point that generally speaking, talking about doing work feels as "real" (in terms of the intellectual labor taken) as actually doing something - which is why someone can be astonishingly unproductive and still overworked."

I've seen this multiple times. I worked at Fortune 500, and we had a particularly incompetent executive (made like $2M per year) who was always scheduling meetings, making last-minute demands for reports, and changing plans all the time. He claimed to work like 80 hours per week, and many of those hours trickled into our time. We had to push aside our goals to work on his ad-hoc nonsense.

One day, he was fired. Suddenly, everything ran more smoothly. We could focus on long-term projects rather than his short-term bullshit. We didn't need to fit our workflow around his meetings and arbitrary requests.

In short, it's not just that many of these people are unproductive. They're negative-productive! Their nonsense prevents others from getting real work done.

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One point to add: this issues make more confident with socialism. While I'm sure socialism would present new and unforeseen organizational issues, it would remove our current slate of anti-productive executives.

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What makes you think that?

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Workers wouldn't devote a large amount of resources to suit-wearers who waste their time. I mean, let's say you could elect the leadership of the company or department you work at. Would you want your current slate of leaders? Would want to them to have as much power as they do?

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I wasn’t aware that employees electing their bosses was a core component of socialism.

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Also, can you link to this essay? I love this topic.

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No, it was in a hard copy of Businessweek that I read around ten years ago. Can't even remember the title unfortunately.

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Ah, that's unfortunate. The weird thing is that everyone knows this stuff. We all know that white-collar life is filled with pointless meetings, projects, etc, but we feel powerless to change it.

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PMC? Potential Man Candy? Post Meal Cigarette? Private Military Contractor? https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PMC ?

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Professional Managerial Class.

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I was wondering if you were going to bring up Occupy ha. I think the structurelessness issue applies to the BLM protests as well. Watching the evolution of BLM has convinced me that hierarchy and leadership is a requirement for any social movement. There was very little leadership of the events last summer (basically whoever had a megaphone), and what leadership did exist was essentially just social media influencers. I think that showed itself in the lack of real demands. There were surprisingly few straightforward demands from the protests except the police should stop killing people (reasonable of course) and "abolish the police" (not so reasonable to most people). Like...disarming the police wasn't even a demand was it? I would love that, but I never heard those words at the many protests I went to.

That said, I think one outcome has been just cranking up what were already existing police and prison reform campaigns and maybe getting more liberals on board at least rhetorically. There was already quite a bit of momentum around prisons particularly but also policing in NYC, and now it's almost certainly going to be an issue in next year's Council. Deblasio was forced to leave his house and visit Riker's the other day! He hates doing any work at all, so he must have been facing serious pressure. Quite a few City Council and State level pols in New York are on board with DSA's Defund agenda, although I don't expect it to become law.

And maybe that's just how it works. The professional orgs have campaigns, and a small percentage of the people that were out in the streets last year will stick with it and join a more professionalized org and be outside City Hall next year when the next budget vote happens, and maybe it will be enough to cut the NYPD budget or close Riker's. It's not as fun as the radicalism in the streets or tweeting about elevating black artists or whatever but at the moment I'm pretty convinced that the lame stuff is what works.

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I think, fundamentally, any successful social movement which challenges ruling class (as opposed to merely wanting to accommodate the ruling class) needs to have organizers - probably paid organizers at that. This is because discontent alone is often inchoate, and you need to be able to steer people to both understand the potential menu of demands to be put in front of those in power, along with different constructive ways to get there. This is particularly the case in this social movement era, where so few people seem to understand how to effectively wield collective power.

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yep. there's a reason that unions are hierarchical (it's effective) and there's a reason that the capitalist class has been on the warpath against unions for 100 years (they're effective).

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Unfortunately, union leadership itself sold out, signing on with the american anti-communist project and going along with things like taft-hartley, supporting the war in vietnam etc, and here we sit.

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And police unions are very effective at preventing police reform.

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I really agree. Freddie wrote about this in March (What is the #BLM ask?) and I think it's a bigger problem than professionalization. A movement with lots of employees and cash can be successful, but at minimum they need a demand that isn't DOA like "defund the police."

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“… my sense is that a large-scale redistributive program that is not racially targeted at all does not qualify as anti-racist for many.”

It is strange that structures and policy resulting in disparate impacts between racial groups (even when unintended) are seen as racist systems when POC don’t benefit disproprtionately, but not as anti-racist systems when they do benefit disproportionately. Even if this is the intent.

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No professional activist ever made it by saying, "ah, that's that problem solved!"

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The thing is, I knew all this was gonna happen too. I knew last summer we wouldn't achieve any substantial police reform. Given the trajectory of the culture war in the Trump years, I knew right then and there that all we would get from Summer 2020 is a giant religious-esque moral panic from liberals and even more vicious enforcement of Social Justice politics.

And lo and behold, that's exactly where we're at.

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Eh, I don't think you're fully wrong, but I think there's a bigger issue here: COVID. Every plague in history has ushered in social unrest. This one was no different.

I live in Minneapolis. The riots here weren't really about change. Much of it was bored, pandemic-anxious people glad to finally have some excuse to do something, see their friends, and vent a bunch of nervous energy. The bulk of the rest was mass hysteria. I'm talking upper-class black women who own highly successful businesses and are friends with the mayor suddenly having panic attacks because they're convinced they're going to be shot if they step outside. I'm talking multiple professional meetings with people having literal, hysterical, sobbing breakdowns over some dude they'd never met and wouldn't have had a lick of sympathy for if he'd been begging on the side of the street.

This isn't a political movement, which is likely why it was so easily captured. Political movements have actual concrete goals that aren't amorphous crap like "re-imagine society". Political movements have adherents that don't burst into sobbing fits whenever they're questioned.

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I'd be very interested in reading more about this. From my bunker here in the micropolitan South, it sounds like another planet. I have no problem believing you, of course. (Although I have no idea how I'd react to seeing such sobbing breakdowns and panic attacks in person. I wouldn't doubt the sincerity of feeling behind them, but frankly I'd question the mindset of someone who felt moved to that sincerity.)

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Unfortunately I don't know anyone except Michael Tracy who really bothered to do any sort of post-riot journalism, and I believe Michael Tracy's is still behind a paywall on Patreon. He did a fairly long series of video interviews of residents. He also has a follow-up here (https://mtracey.substack.com/p/one-year-after-george-floyd-minneapolis).

The rest is my personal encounters, which obviously have selection bias and aren't necessarily generalizable, yadda yadda. But...the riots were extremely unpopular with people who actually live on Lake Street (there are a handful of video interviews from eg CNN with residents asking for peace). From people I know, the huge deployment of the national guard was greeted as good, but also too late. Violence has gone up dramatically since, with police refusing to even go into certain areas. Events downtown are being cancelled or moved, and some businesses are leaving. The Minneapolis Police are now horribly understaffed, and there's a ballot initiative coming up to defund them completely, which is unpopular but also it's an off-election year so who knows what'll happen. People are extremely unhappy with the city council, but it seems split between "they're not radical enough" and "they're too radical", so who knows.

The whole thing was honestly surreal. It felt like everyone had gone insane. And much of the insanity came loaded with "wokespeak". Lots of talk of "we need to make space for the community to heal" with no one having any real idea what that meant or what it would look like or why it was necessary. Lots of people talking about how "traumatized" they were, and I kind of get it--I haven't ever watched the video because I feel it's disrespectful, but I've been with people when they died and it's a difficult process to watch. But like--I watched people get more upset about a stranger's death than I got when actual members of my family died. I can't classify it as anything but hysteria.

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I am subscribed to Michael Tracey. (I'm reading with growing horror his COVID Stasi dispatches from expensive colleges. Coming soon to a city hall near you!) Tracey's work in the Midwest was absolutely required reading last summer, which of course explains why hardly anyone read it and why you have to go seeking out independent Substacks to learn about the reality on the ground in hitherto-sleepy midwestern burgs like Green Bay. Smashing up windows in Fort Wayne, Indiana somehow failed to prevent White Supremacism from pervading this country's institutions, whoda thunk it?

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It is a really crazy time to look back on. I became a rabid idpol anti-cop dude for a few months before realizing how useless it is. I still have a lot of problems with policing (end the drug war, pleaase), but I'm no longer concerned with Paw Patrol.

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"there's a ballot initiative coming up to defund them completely"

I agree with much of what you say, but this is not true except in a very technical sense. The League of Women Voters Minneapolis has a good explainer on this ballot question (as well as question 1) at https://lwvmpls.org/2-14-the-charter-amendments/. The actual proposed charter amendment text is at https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/File/5456/Public%20Safety%20Department%20Charter%20Petition-Ballot%20Resolution%20(if%20only%20Yes4Minneapolis%20Charter%20amendment%20on%20ballot).pdf

This amendment "eliminates the Police Department", but replaces it with a Department of Public Safety, which can include police. Is there any chance that if this passes that the police will be entirely eliminated? No, definitely not.

So saying that this will "defund [the police] completely" is sort of barely technically true, but in reality not at all what will happen. In fact, I think it's realistic to think that absolutely nothing will change in practice even if this passes!

I plan to vote yes on this amendment, though I think the Council has made a mess of this. It would have been much better to have a concrete plan for police reform that this amendment supports first. However, the city charter as it stands does seem to make reform incredibly hard, so changing it seems like a good thing. But my concern is that the real obstacle to reform is the police union. It's not clear if this charter change will do anything to help eliminate that problem.

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We're just eliminating the police. Oh, you thought that meant eliminating the police? Oh! *patronizing chuckle* No, no, why would you think eliminating the police means eliminating the police? Here, have this "explainer."

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This reply doesn't address any of what I actually and is unnecessarily rude and snarky.

But if you _really_ think that if this amendment passes, the result will be no police, I'd be happy to make a bet with you on this. I'm sure we can find a platform to do so.

Something like:

If charter amendment #2 passes ...

Always Adblock believes that within one year of its passage, Minneapolis will have entirely eliminated its police department, meaning that the city no longer pays for police staff in any way, either through a city police department or by contract with a larger entity such as the county or state.

Dave Rolsky believes that the city will continue to pay for police staff in some way, either through a city department or by contract with a larger entity such as the county or state.

How does $1,000 sound?

Of course, there's a big question as to whether the charter amendment will pass at all. I think it will, but it's quite close, so I won't be particularly surprised if it doesn't pass.

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You're a lying sophist. I wouldn't bet with you on whether or not I take a breath in the next 10 seconds.

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Yes, as another Minneapolis resident, calling this a defund the police amendment is pretty disingenuous. Also voting yes in November, primarily to remove power from the mayor. Which means we also need to pay attention to the other ballot measure that consolidates power under the mayor! Because if both pass, then we literally end up with the same structure we have now but with an extra layer.

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It's very important that the Mayor's nomination and the Council's appointment of the police chief be replaced with the much less consolidated, much more democratic Mayor's nomination and Council's appointment of the chief of public safety.

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I keep going back and forth on question 1. On the one hand, it seems like a naked power grab by some people. OTOH, what justification is there for Minneapolis to have such a weird government structure? It's not something you see elsewhere. Is there some reason to think that this structure is much better than what we see other cities use?

The only argument for this structure that I've heard is that a strong mayor system further disenfranchises minorities and the poor. According to one analysis, the mayor is basically elected by (very white and wealthy) southwest Minneapolis, because of much higher voter turnout in that part of the city. But the Council represents much smaller chunks of the city, so this gives poorer and minority areas more power in city politics than with a strong mayor system.

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My personal view is that a more democratic system is better than a less democratic one, even if it leads to imperfect results.

I think it clearly was a naked power grab by city council, but I don't think that necessarily makes it a bad thing. The council, for all its many issues, needs to be reactive to its constituents in a way the mayor doesn't necessarily have to, for the reason you mentioned.

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tbh I'm no longer sure what will happen. There is an activist class that rabidly wants the police gone, damn the consequences. I do not trust them not to go ahead with their desires. What is the point of the ballot measure if it doesn't get rid of police? All this just for a bit of rebranding? It really seems like a cudgel, to me: a way for the people who want abolishment to sneak through a ballot initiative that they can point to whenever people bring up how unpopular police abolishment is with the general public. "Oh, but the amendment passed!"

I no longer feel like I can count on the common sense or goodwill of politicians or activists on this issue.

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I think you may be overinflating the power of the activist class. They tried to get this amendment on the 2020 ballot and couldn't. The year delay is going to temper a lot of people on the issue and many of those temporary radicals are going to be moderates come this November, especially with Trump off the ballot.

Right now, the police department is only answerable to the mayor's office. The amendment's goal is to change this. There are many reasons why people may want this, but the fact that 4 mayors in a row have unsuccessfully attempted to reform the police department is a big factor.

As I said in a different comment: to me, more democracy is better than less democracy. With the city council in charge of the police department, it increases civilian oversight which will, hopefully, lead to accountability when the police commit crimes.

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Yes, but there's no presidential election on the ballot, which is likely going to result in only people who are very engaged showing up.

I would rather much more energy go into _why_ the reforms are unsuccessful than just throw up our hands and say "didn't work, make someone else do it and see if they can!" Handing control to the city council seems to me like a move more likely to result in gridlock and failure. I guess I see your point about democracy, but it seems like a very minor point.

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I don't think changing the reporting is the headline change in the amendment.

The amendment _also_ removes the requirement for the city to have a specific number of police per population. That seems like the bigger deal to me.

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Do you read any local Minneapolis news?

Michael Tracy is not the only one paying attention to our city. It's slightly alarming that you would even think that's true.

Some local news organizations that have been covering the city pretty extensively:

https://minnesotareformer.com/

https://sahanjournal.com/

https://www.minnpost.com/

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I read the local paper and occasionally the StarTrib or CityPages or that little whatever paper that you can get for free at Cub.

I've never even heard of these other papers except MinnPost. Did they do any coverage of what residents thought about the violence? A quick search is turning up "this happened" journalism, but not interviews with residents or the like, although I might not be using the same terms. I was meaning Michael Tracy is the only one I saw interviewing a bunch of residents to find out what they experienced and what they thought of it. If these papers did, good on them.

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I mean, all of their reporting comes from talking to people. They have local reporters who have interviewed people on every side of the George Floyd protests and aftermath, including the Chauvin trials.

I'm not sure why your googling wouldn't find this, but here are just a few:

https://sahanjournal.com/policing-justice/minneapolis-george-floyd-protestors-u-s-capitol-riot/

https://sahanjournal.com/news/minneapolis-suicide-violence-police/

https://sahanjournal.com/the-killing-of-george-floyd/u-of-m-medical-school-george-floyd-vandalism/

https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/05/26/neighbors-feeling-bullied-want-activists-to-leave-george-floyd-square/

https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/03/08/demonstrators-call-for-justice-as-trial-is-delayed/

https://minnesotareformer.com/2021/03/08/qa-with-soren-stevenson-who-was-blinded-in-one-eye-during-george-floyd-protests/

There are countless articles written over the last year where they interview everyone from local residents to activists to politicians.

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These are somewhat randomly selected. I wasn't looking for specific articles. And I don't think they've written one article that's meant as an explainer of the last year of the city, because they cover the city every day and are not writing for a national audience of people unfamiliar with the city and metro and beyond.

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IMHO, Minnpost is not to be trusted. They do lazy writing that lets subscribers fill in the blanks and project their agenda onto any piece. For example, there was that guy that ran against Ilhan for US rep last year and wrote that he had "republican financial backers," which lead to him being cast as a republican stooge and friends yelling at me not to vote for him. I looked into all the contributors and found one guy that is a super rich gay, Jewish business man, that contributes mostly to LGBT candidates or causes and Jewish candidates or candidates that support Israel on either side of the aisle. So, think what you will of that, but it that's not "republican backers" to me.

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Fellow Minnesotan. Can confirm.

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One of my unfalsifiable beliefs is that the large summer protest movement could have easily instead been about some other subject (MeToo? Transgenderism? Climate Change? Something else?) had there been a different trigger. The streets were empty and the nervous energy you talk about was tinder for a fire.

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This is such a great point. I hesitate to include it in my criticisms of the Biden rallies aka BLM protest because I can't prove it. But it just feels like it's correct.

I was still using social media back then and if you look at the social media posts of the people who attended the protests, these were also the "stop the spread!" people. They'd spent months sitting inside, having Zoom meetings, never seeing people. Then they got this chance and it's just a coincidence that we chose this exact moment in time to protest racism?

The other part of this is the Trump stuff. The overlap between the people I know who went to these and the people I know who were obsessed with Trump is one circle. They'd spent four years obsessing over this guy and just spent three months obsessing over how he personally created and spread COVID-19. With the election looming there was no chance in hell they weren't going to have one more orgy of anti-Trump activism.

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While there's undoubtedly some truth to the idea that the protests were in part affected by COVID-related factors, the idea that this was, I don't know, just another wild, dance-away your-pandemic-blues block party seems... not supportable.

Anecdotes aside, the polls at the height of the protest clearly showed a degree of sympathy for BLM, and skepticism-to-antagonism towards the police, that would warm the heart of the most jaded radical. Sure, it faded, but not entirely, and no doubt driven by the same reactionary forces that have been telling us our whole lives that the cops are the good guys and not bureaucrats with weapons.

As for the idea that BLM isn't a political movement - again, not remotely true. You can argue with their goals, their tactics, and their leadership, but to claim that this wasn't political is just flatly wrong.

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Black Lives Matter began in 2013, not 2020. Why do we talk about it like you do here, like it was something new in 2020? As if it were still early days, and there's still time for BLM to mean something in policy terms?

Wasn't 2020 just a rerun of 2013? Shouldn't we have learned some time in the intervening years that BLM is an empty slogan, that marching on its behalf won't bring about any meaningful change?

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2014, right? Am I getting the history wrong. But yes I agree with your comment.

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I think you're right. Did a quick Google, and it seems people had started using the phrase as a hashtag in 2013, after Trayvon Martin was killed, but the large street protests didn't start until 2014, when Michael Brown was killed.

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But yes, the core idea idea of what you're saying is quite right, and Ive said the same in other comments and it seems to be a widespread idea in this comment thread. In 2014, it was actually the *same* dynamic where a already-professionalized activist bloc makes a bunch of claims about police shootings being allegedly racial in nature; the claims don't cohere with what the data actually says which is pointed out ad infinitum by "data nerds online"; but this "data discourse" doesnt matter because the professionalized activists are professionally networked with media actors who have the power to amplify one message and not the other. Same dynamic as 2020, only at smaller scale.

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Whither BLM? It's not really all that complicated.

Six months before the probable re-election of a President who is hated with a historically unique intensity by the opposition party [I have theories as to why, but they're not germane to this post], race riots "spontaneously" break out in major cities controlled by opposition-party-affiliated local governments. The stated aims of these riots are enthusiastically endorsed by the opposition party, who implicitly (and in a few cases, explicitly) state that the riots will continue until the opposition party wins the upcoming election. The opposition party proceeds to win the election (under extremely dubious circumstances, I might add) and, lo and behold, the riots stop. Agatha Christie this ain't.

You don't need a degree in political science [or even marine cartography) to draw a line between point A and point B.

This wasn't intended to be subtle, even by the people who did it. The message was very clearly heard by everyone who doesn't receive a paycheck to pretend they didn't: "We have the power to create riots in major cities, and we have the power to end them. We have demonstrated this power, and we will use it again, if you ever dare to elect a politician whom we consider to be an existential threat, or even anyone outside our party at all."

This seems to me to be a terribly compelling reason to never vote for this party ever again, even if I might share significant policy agreements with them.

[Something something something don't need to burn the Reichstag once you've been elected to it something something.]

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> The opposition party proceeds to win the election (under extremely dubious circumstances, I might add)

this is an unfounded an irresponsible statement.

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You're absolutely right. People who would intentionally foment race riots would *never* commit election fraud. I withdraw the statement.

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Nah, check it- the rhetoric from the Trump camp since before the Election Day in 2015 was that every election they win is legitimate and every election they lose is fraudulent. They committed to the accusation that the Dems were stealing public offices BEFORE anybody voted and therefore before there could possibly be evidence for actual fraud, let alone fraud widespread enough to flip a county, let alone a state, let alone a whole country.

You would claim fraud with equal fervor whether the evidence points for or against or exists at all, so why would anybody believe you? Trump was claiming fraud when he WON, so what cause to think that four years of his personal bullshit and haphazard governance couldn’t tilt a few million fence sitters into the other camp? Why do you need to resort to “enemy action” to explain why it rained after seeing stormclouds for days?

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If papering over the windows of the observations rooms, if ejecting observers from the counting rooms and then opening more cases of ballots, if 5 swing states [that all changed their processes using dubiously legal procedures] all simultaneously stopping their counts, if states and counties that have all been bellwethers for 150+ years suddenly stopped being so, if the numbers doesn't pass a basic forensic accounting test, if counts being stopped due to a plumbing failure that literally never happened, if tens of thousands of president-only ballots all having the same address all voting for the same person, isn't sufficient to make the situation at least seem "a little odd", let alone "dubious", you will never have any opinion the people on tv don't want you to have. You will own nothing, and you will be happy. I wish you well.

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I can see how it's much easier to mind-read evil intent into people you disagree with than actually engage with their points. The important thing is, you figured out how to feel superior to me.

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I thought the statistical evidence showed that BLM was a net drag on Democratic electoral performance, insofar as Trump did about 2% better than expected in all cities which had substantial riots over 2020.

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That's good news. That means they *might* reserve this particular strategy for dealing with politicians whom they consider to be existential threats, and not roll out race riots in every single election season.

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'We're going to destroy Oakland if you don't vote for Democrats' is not a very well grounded conspiracy theory.

1. Race riots have always been politically advantageous for the right - that's precisely why a left-aligned media downplayed the extent of what happened.

2. Republicans don't care about what happens in 90% Democratic cities, and if anything are looking for more evidence for them being social and economic disasters.

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The wishcasting I've seen on the right that 2020 would lead to a 1970s redux has been...odd. Particularly since another "everyone runs for the exits" would mean tons more nonwhite people in suburbia.

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I didn't say it was even a good strategy. But it definitely happened. And it can hardly be called a "conspiracy" if Time can report on the whole thing, at length and quite triumphantly. It was part of a grass-roots campaign among local politicians, community leaders and activists to "fortify" the election. And they're really quite proud of what they did: https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

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The premise of this piece is that there's a "pre-professional" or "authentic" BLM which became "corrupted" (by those nefarious white progs!). But the donations and elite-level message-amplification of BLM began not in 2020, but in 2014. BLM's status went up by an order of magnitude (or even two) in 2020, but theyd been invested in as a promising, potentially useful, activist bloc for a number of years. In 2020 they became useful, mainly as a way of browbeating white normies into voting for Biden, and were used. It worked pretty well I'd say. In 2021 they're not so useful again, so they've been put back on the shelf for a while. In a few years they'll probably be deemed useful yet again.

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"But certainly I am hoping to see them articulate and fight for a concrete policy agenda that gets beyond diversifying tiny elite spaces and which actually improves the economic and material fortunes of the average Black person. It’s just difficult to see how it happens from here."

Will Wilkinson manages to pretty consistently be an establishmentarian twerp toward other writers I admire, and the YIMBY smug is pretty strong in him. Still, I live not too far from Evanston, IL, and Wikinson's observation that BLM seems to have galvanized the YIMBY movement appears true:

https://modelcitizen.substack.com/p/does-zoning-cause-racism-does-negative

My own little window onto insane NIMBYism in suburban Cook County politics after the housing crash left me rather YIMBY, and YIMBY or NIMBY, I'd recommend William Fischel's work on the homevoter (I don't know about Fischel's more recent work, but the work that made his name is pretty NIMBY-sympathetic). I think it's factually true that the insanity of homevoter politics makes race relations worse. I don't know how practically useful it is to trumpet that truth, though.

Individual homeowners don't become homevoters, with all their hypersensitivity to anything which might remotely smack of "freeloading" or the teensiest risk to property values, because it sounds like a good time, but because that's how the system is set up for them. Political pressure is intense to make housing appear a safer investment than it is, and not just because homeowners demand it. "We must convince them — the white ones, that is — that homeowning is a safe investment, lest they all become Bolsheviks," seems to have been early 20th-century policy, and it snowballed from there. Being good little homevoters has been sold to us as patriotism. However true systemic racism may be as an abstract descriptor, "racist" is too convenient as a personal smear for people to trust the accusation isn't meant personally. "Your homeowner anxieties are raaaacist!" seems like a tough sell. Even a tough sell to those who kindasorta already believe it, and find themselves turned off by Trumpian "suburban lifestyle dream" fearmongering.

I'm happily neoliberal enough to hold out hope that perhaps some good can come of zoning reform, and insights like Raj Chetty's into opportunity zones. There's another small-scale project I'm interested in which could, if done, disproportionately benefit black teen girls. I'd feel like a grifter for selling that project as "BLM" — perhaps because I have idiotic levels of moral delicacy.

Getting back to housing, Evanston, which has no shortage of "panicky white liberals practice ever-more unhinged shows of deference towards their Black colleagues, deference which is of course absolutely stuffed with condescension" is now offering local real-estate reparations:

https://www.cityofevanston.org/government/city-council/reparations

These first reparations are offered as remedy for specific harms done by city housing policy between 1919 and 1969, and it looks like a new reparations committee will be seated in spring to make ongoing policy. Evanston politics has a peculiar prog-v-prog, town-v-gown dynamic I only dimly understand, and which tends to be framed by national commentators, at least if they lean right, as prog-v-beleaguered-conservative. It looks like most suburban Chicago-area libraries will be hosting a Zoom presentation by Richard Rothstein on his book "The Color of Law" (an excellent read) on Oct 13. I don't know how long zoning-reform-as-antiracism will last around here, but for now, it seems to be The Thing.

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It’s really a shame that the momentum of June 2020 was squandered on an unpopular demand (“defund the police”) and performative gestures. “Things MUST change” became about elites so fast, in part because self-interested individuals capitalized on the moment in a way you almost have to admire – using a literal murder to demand more professional opportunities and accolades for themselves. Robin Diangelo is probably a billionaire by now.

The biggest long-term impact seems to be the removal of statues. It’s great that we got rid of some odious monuments, and it was fun to watch the vandalism and toppling in real time. But removing a statue doesn’t change the behavior of police, obviously.

I don’t believe anything can truly change until we improve the conditions in poor neighborhoods. Poverty = gangs, narcotics, gun violence, theft. Then we send police into these neighborhoods with guns and say, “Stop the crime.” Of course it gets hostile and violent when two groups with opposite interests clash every day, and everyone has guns, and everyone feels threatened.

Training, reform, cameras, etc. are nice—we should do all that stuff. Perhaps it will make monsters like Chauvin hold back out of fear for their freedom. But when drugs and liquor are the economy, this is still going to happen, because there are countless heated confrontations every day, that happen much faster than the Floyd murder.

I know an older cop who told me he could think of eight different times when he could have fired his gun, and the shooting would have been ruled justified by the department. Because the person was waving a knife or had a visible gun or whatever. Cops are in these situations all the time. It’s never going to stop unless we change the conditions, which means investing financially in these communities.

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I still remember in the Fall of 2020 turning on NPR while in the car, and being subjected to a whole discussion regarding having only people of color cast as voice actors for POC characters, and I was left completely flummoxed how we got from Point A to Point B.

I mean, yay for those voice actors who got jobs though I suppose.

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Which anti-statue events did you find fun? The defaced Cervantes statue in SF? The anti-Lincoln push in multiple cities? The vandalization of the Robert Shaw (commander of the all-black Massachusetts 54th) memorial in Boston?

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I live in the south where there is Confederate crap everywhere, much of it installed in the 20th century for political purposes. So no, I'm not talking about Robert Shaw.

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I have not been back home to Philadelphia in years. But now that the statue of former Mayor Frank Rizzo was removed from out front of the police building, I expect North Philadelphia is now Shangri La. I look forward to no longer seeing rotting rowhomes, drug deals on corners, and immense poverty. It's gonna be great!

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Lol. Yep as it happens Philly is where I live and North Philly is where my university is.

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Philly is an instructive case-study in the limits of the intellectual or political imagination of the left. North Philly's core problem is a crisis of livelihood, and has been for two generations. In a sensible country, like Germany, if there were a former industrial city with a livelihood crisis, there would be investment seeding in new industries and getting the population trained for those new industries. In the US by contrast ever since Trump mentioned the idea of "reindustrialization" (which he wasnt even serious about!) the left has been totally squeamish around the idea. "Green New Deal" (which isnt even emphasized much anymore anyway) could have meant having lots of solar battery factories in North Philly, but never really referred to that. I'm not even sure the left really wants high speed rail anymore.

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I'm thinking you may be a fellow Temple Owl, in which case we're pretty much exactly aligned on this. North Philadelphia is a tragedy that we let unfold for decades and it's embarrassing how you can very simply lay out things we could do but instead we substitute naked symbolism.

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I live in the south, so I'm talking about Confederate monuments. I'm not saying the removal of statues made conditions better for anyone (my point is the opposite). But all else equal, I believe it's better to not have Confederate statues looming over public spaces where everyone should feel welcome.

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I'm sorry in my zeal to make fun of particular Philadelphia City Councilpeople, I perhaps obscured my point. I understood your point and actually agree with it. My problem is we clearly can't walk and chew gum simultaneously and we substituted statues for real change.

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That's fair -- the statue debate did suck up a lot of oxygen for a while, certainly more than I wanted given the other things going on. Like Freddie wrote once, perhaps we cannot do both -- I mean we could have, but that's not how our national media work right now.

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During peak anti-statue hysteria, people were claiming to be made to feel "unwelcome" by a statue merely because of the demographic identity of the person presented, or the "western" aesthetic style of the statuary, or the past being less progressive in general, etc. This rationale for removing public artwork doesn't cut it in my view. The more coherent case against the Confederate monuments is the South lost the war. If that had been the rationale given, there wouldn't have been this idiotic spillover effect where the same energy was unleashed on statues outside of the Confederate statue issue.

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"The nonprofit industrial complex is not in the business of selfless altruism." That's right. But what needs to be recognized is that most times you're seeing an apparent "groundswell of protest," that protest is itself a department of the "nonprofit indistrustrial complex" -- i.e. it's the "protest-industrial complex." This is a very bitter pill for good-faith radicals to swallow, they want to think that all protests map onto their romantic ideas of the IWW a century ago; but if they don't start to think about this problem clearly and honestly, their good faith will always be misapplied, again and again and again.

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