Depends what you mean by "left". The identitarians are extremely influential, for better or (most of the time) worse. The MSM is drowning us in evil republicans stories. Every day is another "trans" kids or abortion story. The Biden administration cannot prosecute Trump enough. I'd say they are very influential.
But, you may be referring to "socialism" left, in which case I'd agree not very influential. Personally, that makes me happy, but that's just me.
this is baffling to me. I think Freddie is honest and has positions that I sometimes disagree with. PragerU as a media platform straight-up lies often - I can make common cause with conservatives but the reason PragerU specifically is so popular is *because* it is dishonest, and it is always easier to persuade people with snappy lies than complicated truth.
Even beyond the explicit lies, their meaningless graphs are so goofy that I genuinely do not understand how anyone can take them seriously as anything other than useful propaganda for ideologies a person already agrees with for other reasons
I honestly don't understand why you would post this. Why be preemptively snarky to the people who subscribe? You've written eloquently about the nastiness of people online and the smug self-satisfaction of our self-appointed woke overlords but this is the the fourth or fifth time recently where I've seen you leaning into becoming what you often (properly and correctly) rail against.
Whether it's banning a poster for their "overly familiar" tone (dude WAS a bit of a wanker, but ban him for THAT, not the crime of lack of deference to the online nobility) or borderline mean-spirited replies to comments that brought up fair points, you're starting down the path of the bullied kid who, finally having achieved some social status in his own group, excitedly sets about showering those below him in the social scale with the very injustice that had recently been heaped on him.
You're a brilliant writer and, while I'll never endorse socialism as anything other than perfect cover to murder hundreds of millions of innocents under the guise of compassion, I'll tell you that your writing, more than anything in the last couple decades outside of Reason Magazine, has led me to reexamine my beliefs about a the topics of the day.
(Side note: Nick Gillespie needs to get you on The Reason Interview; it would be amazing and possibly bring about the end of days.)
If you believe that this honest opinion from a fan of your work merits a ban then fair enough; it's your space and I'll take my banishment like a champ. (Which means reading the free stuff while browsing privately, naturally - Hey, good writing is good writing). But I think if you take an honest look at what I've said, I think you might find some common ground in my argument as I have many times done with yours.
Cheers, a hopefully-not-former subscriber.
PS> As a member of Generation X who just spent what feels like eons typing my magnum opus into mobile, I feel like I should get some kind of achievement badge...
Buddy, these are the terms: I write what I want, at my whim, and allow the conversation I want to have in my comments section. Those who can't abide by my rules can't comment. Those who can't abide by that mandate may take their money elsewhere. There's a lot of racism out there; I made it preemptively clear that I would ban people who engaged in it. I have zero regrets. Make of that what you will. And for the record I was never the bullied kid, and your dime store psychoanalysis is boring and trite.
Fred Hampton in particular had some rather choice words on racism and how it was best fought using economic and revolutionary means, such that none other than Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ) intentionally misquoted those words not so long ago.
That said, so much of "race first" really boils down to "race only!" Or "we demand more diverse oppressors!"
To me race first people are people who think races themselves (not the people in races) are units of flourishing/suffering. They seem to advocate policies that, for example, say because black people are disproportionately poor in group metrics and our racist past is a factor in that, then all black people are good targets for intervention to improve the group data whether or not they actually embody the suffering metric more common to the group. So, for example, making 10 black Elon Musks would statistically help the racial wealth gap, so this would constitute social justice. I agree more with Adolph Reed Jr., that group level data can have disparities that wouldn't exist without past racism, but it isn't like every individual in a race embodies the disparate group data of that race and shares in some metaphysical fashion the group's position. I also agree with Reed that racism wasn't the cause of slavery - white supremacy was an ideology that developed gradually to what was already in place for economic reasons. Black people were enslaved in the 16th/17th century because that is who was for sale, not because the Portugese had some desire to be mean to black people specifically. Reed has a great quote that the race people think the purpose of slavery was to grow white supremacy while class people understand the purpose of slavery was to grow cotton, sugar and tobacco and white supremacy was an effect of that.
Reed is one of my go-to thinkers for left critiques of identity politics. His son, Toure Reed also wrote a good book re these topics, I think called Towards Freedom.
Indeed, if Albion's Seed (or Scott Alexander's review) is anything to go by, the plantation owners would much rather have had white faces working their cotton - they even tried at first, but the white serfs/indentured servants died in such numbers they had to find a replacement somewhere.
Following on the observation that it's more of a tactical question than a values question, a way of identifying people as class-first or race-first is by looking at who within their own coalition they spend more time scolding. Bouie and Grim may in their heart of hearts have similar views on what causes inequality, how different types of inequality are linked, and what should be done to remedy them. But Bouie is much more likely to scold people for being too narrowly focused on class at the expense of race -- there's a reason why he's the resident Sanders voter at the New York Times.
“Race first” is such a perfect red herring to distract from class issues, because red herrings do exist and they do smell strongly. Classic misdirection.
"Your average Republican probably has some nominal commitment to dismantling racial inequality, even as everything their party does makes that task harder."
Sure. As the Democrats decry the Court's decision on affirmative action which ends blatant racism directed towards whites and especially Asians.
A sincere question - you noted that racism and classism are distinct, and I agree. But I have often thought that there is some linkage between the two. I would perhaps put it as the two are mutually reinforcing - that maintaining an economic system that deprives people of colour reinforces negative perceptions and stereotypes *partly* through classism.
With this in mind, might it be reasonable to posit, whilst maintaining that the two are distinct, that addressing classism might *partly ameliorate* racism?
Well, yeah, that's the contention of this piece. If Black people had more economic security the depravations of racial inequality would hit them with much less force. The failure lies, in part, in seeing racism as an expression of classism - as if Black people only endure racism because they're poor. Which is... not correct.
Isn't economic security obtained through the development of productive capacities? Can any entity/government just bestow economic security on any group of people?
And who, exactly, is saying that we don't need "productivity value"? I'm once again not sure what would be the point of arguing absolutely basic points of leftist belief; if you don't hold those beliefs, fine, but it's weird to act like you've never heard of redistribution before.
My issue with redistribution to solve class gaps are two fold.
One - id does not work. Has been tried before many times. From those that can to those that cannot always degrades into from those that do, to those that don't... and the system runs out of other people's money because there is not enough productive value.
Two - Read Beggars in Spain. People do not have their psychological needs met with handouts. They have to have meaningful work and a path to personal growth. A very small percentage of people would use their UBI to advance themselves... most would stew in resentment that they are locked out of the higher rungs of social status. Classist divides are only solved by opening and multiplying the paths toward economic and class advancement for the majority. Just consider what it takes today, for example, if an urban black with a crappy public school experience decided he wanted to open a barber shop. The elites have made it almost impossible to do that... with fees, credentials, requirements, complexity, regulations, taxes, costs, etc. If you want to solve racism by solving classism the move would be to break down the barriers put in place by the upper class to block and horde all the economic opportunity. Taxing the elites to hand out to the lower class isn't the solution... we already do a lot of that and it does not work.
I consider myself proudly class-first, but it seems to me the potent argument is that as long as certain aspects of our society dislike class activism because they don’t want POC to disproportionately benefit, since they are “different” and need to fix their own problems, attacking the cultural foundations of racism is the only way to build a political bloc that can effectively agitate for class changes.
Which fits right in with your title to the piece, of course, but it kind of explains why going after how people feel about race might make more sense.
(But why am I steelmanning this, we all know that the main reason for the 2020 approach is that class wars are hard but telling people that they are racist and evil is easy)
I think this debate really emerged because Bernie Sanders, the class-first left-wing candidate, performed very poorly with Black voters, and this poor performance cost him the nomination twice.
There are a lot of interesting reasons for this - you could look at why most Black voters identify as Democrats but not as left-wing, the role of Black churches in shaping voting behavior, building trades and other institutions in Black neighborhoods, the conservatism of many Black voters, and the real strategic reasons Black voters often seek to vote as a bloc.
Leftists between 2016 and 2020 ignored all of this, and instead listened to a bunch of NGO/academic types who promised Bernie could do better with Black voters if he adopted a left wing social justice platform. Bernie courted these social justice leaders, they all endorsed Warren anyway, and Warren got essentially no Black votes.
Almost all of the academics I know were die hard Clinton dead-enders who despised Sanders. The few I knew who liked Sanders tended to be over-exploited adjunct professors.
Adolph Reed points out that many of the things recited as race oppression were actually class oppression and only appeared racial if you are obsessed with proportional disparities. You see this in the woke efforts to "problematize" the New Deal (which should actually be a model for the Democratic party) and the provisions that excluded certain categories of workers - considered racist because blacks were affected at levels higher than their numerical presence in the population, but in absolutely fewer numbers. You see this in discussions of redlining where more whites were actually redlined than blacks, although not at the same rate as their population representation. You even see this in Black Lives Matter - more whites than blacks are killed by police each year, but you dare not say violent crime commission/victimization rates could possibly have anything to do with the disparity and that perhaps our real problem is we think throwing cops at the problem is our only answer to crime for everyone. When you have a high amount of colateral damage in allegedly racist policies harming white people, you gotta start to think you might actually have a class issue on your hands.
Although I know it’s not inherently true, every time I see someone say they’re “problematizing” something I immediately assume they’re a postmodernist psychopath who has no clue what they’re talking about because they think they learned something “radically leftist” from Twitter University.
It is worse, because not only are you identifying something as problematic, you’re (in the cases I’m making fun of) creating the problem yourself to further a point.
It’s people behaving pseudo-intellectually. Not actually interrogating a withstanding narrative that’s worthy of challenge, but pushing an ulterior motive or narrative while trying to sound smart.
I actually like "problematizing" in its place, which is taking something people erroneously think was fine and cool and explaining how fucked-up it really was. For example, "problematizing" the British Empire makes total sense.
I was explicitly claiming that some people don’t use the term in such a manner. The term gets distorted from the form you have provided, which is fine, into a hollow placeholder that couches for one’s own agenda and lack of subject matter knowledge.
Yeah I think I submitted that comment without its tail end about how people have shifted from using it for things *most people think are good and don't think too deeply about* to things they, the speaker, just don't like.
I think the concept of problematizing means that on the surface it doesn't seem like a problem, like you wouldn't "problematize" slavery. Its more like finding the sin in things not commonly regarded as sins or even regarded as positive goods.
The issue is, knowing about disparate impacts allows people to discriminate by proxy while claiming other intentions. Also, a policy can create a very problematic disparate impact and people can say it’s just a coincidence while justifying the policy on its own terms.
This is why the heuristic was developed on the left to treat disparate impact as default unacceptable, to eliminate these cop-outs.
Of course some disparate impacts could be coincidences, and policies that create them might be justified on their own terms, but the decision was made to err on the side of vigilance given how slippery racist policies and how stubborn racial outcome gaps have turned out to be.
I don't think you're wrong, but I find the way you express this point galling, because I think it mirrors a common way these ideas are misinterpreted (on the right especially, but also by people on the left). If we're looking at an individual policy and trying to determine the impact, "woke" frameworks would tell you that racial/gender/other disparities are important evidence to examine. I don't know of any framework that says "racial disparities always demand race-based mitigation and always are attributable to racism" but that's how the right often describes the definition of the framework - there's no daylight between "assume it's racism" and "actually take a look and see if maybe there's some racism there". People see "this law was created within a white legal framework and it is worthwhile to examine those impacts, as well as considering how other frameworks might create more just results" and read it as "I want to dismantle this law because it's racist". It's probably attributable to our incredibly poor media literacy as a society, but people are frustratingly unable to read "I have concerns about this" as anything other than "I think this is inherently and irredeemably bad".
I'm not saying that you're specifically doing this, but I'm triggered (heh) by "the decision was made to err on the side of vigilance" as though there was a decision made (by who? who agreed to it? who follows it?) to "always" err on the side of "vigilance". It depends what you mean by "vigilance" but I'm sure some people read that statement as "a decision was made to err on the side of always assuming it's racism" rather than "a decision was made to err on the side of actually investigating to determine whether race played a role" - both are "vigilance" but with very very different implications for both ideology and action.
And the difference is important - when discussing race with right-wingers, I can usually get them to agree with most provisions of "wokeism" because the thing they vehemently disagree with is largely a made-up scapegoat created specifically for the purposes of riling them up.
Sadly there are actual group data racial differences on some metrics that explain the disparity. I was a public school teacher for a while and if I had held students at black schools to the same behavior standards as at white schools, I would have disciplined way out of racial proportion. But then other black students were the victims of that classroom disorder so by trying not to create disparities in discipline I shortchanged the black students who were victims of the disorder. I risked creating a disparity in structure and safety for the other students. There are simply real "group averages" differences on some metrics that are creating the downstream disparities. I can easily tell a compelling causal story of how racism set the causal chain in motion to get to that point (see for example Adaner Usmani's research), but referencing that solves no extant problems.
I just don't care about racial outcome gaps perse. I care about the individuals who suffer from the suffering metrics. Groups are not units of suffering. Slavery wouldn't have been better if those imported and worked to death had just been from random ethnic groups. The Holocaust wouldn't have been better if the Nazis had just killed people randomly. In the US today, disparate impact is almost always more likely a reflection of real group human capital differences than racism. There are differences between groups in success valent traits - if there wasn't why do we care about history? I assume the misery inducing effects of slavery is that it set in motion circumstances that led to human capital differences, but you can't ignore them just because you can tell a causal story of how they came to be that included oppression.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that BLM has not acknowledged the problem of policing as social policy. It's been there from the beginning. It's exactly the argument of the Angela Davis and Alex Vitale books that Freddie mentions and the intent of defunding the police. Whether these politics are viable or not is a different question, but it is disingenuous to ignore them.
As you reference, one major problem - and the reason we have debates on sort of ancillary issues like this - is that so many “thinkers” never get to the how, or execution strategy. Some are intentionally on the grift, but many just don’t think in concrete terms, i.e., how we get from Point A to Point B.
"Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books."
And sadly, educated white liberals tend to drive the discourse, and as a result the discourse flatters educated white liberals and does little or nothing for black people or poor people or poor black people.
No lie. Much of the remedies proposed are either feel-good pablum (my pronouns are "Your Imperial Feline Majesty!") or basically just a PMC jobs program.
It is simply pragmatic to recognize that what you “can” do is a smaller circle than,(and hopefully with some overlap with), the larger circle of what you “should” do on life’s Venn diagram. Those who focus only on “should” without allowing for “can” are useless navel-gazers. That’s most of the “anti-racists” today, except they are harmful as well as being useless.
Great point about the simple math of race vs class. You will simply have more support for class based initiatives just based on numbers….and raising the tide among the lower class will lift a lot of black boats along the way.
The problem with a "race first" approach is that it's not a question of whites on one hand and minorities on the other. It's actually Asians and whites (in first and second in terms of earnings) and then Hispanics and then blacks, hence the need to specifically single out "anti-black" racism. Faced with a complicated reality ideologues are compelled to define carve outs such as labeling Asians as "white adjacent", tie themselves into logical knots in an attempt to defend affirmative action despite the fact that Asians are probably the group most injured by racial quotas in colleges, etc. etc.
What's the class based alternative? A narrative that Income inequality is on the rise and is approaching levels that could potentially have serious repercussions for the country at large. Pretty cut and dried by comparison.
Depends what you mean by "left". The identitarians are extremely influential, for better or (most of the time) worse. The MSM is drowning us in evil republicans stories. Every day is another "trans" kids or abortion story. The Biden administration cannot prosecute Trump enough. I'd say they are very influential.
But, you may be referring to "socialism" left, in which case I'd agree not very influential. Personally, that makes me happy, but that's just me.
this is baffling to me. I think Freddie is honest and has positions that I sometimes disagree with. PragerU as a media platform straight-up lies often - I can make common cause with conservatives but the reason PragerU specifically is so popular is *because* it is dishonest, and it is always easier to persuade people with snappy lies than complicated truth.
Even beyond the explicit lies, their meaningless graphs are so goofy that I genuinely do not understand how anyone can take them seriously as anything other than useful propaganda for ideologies a person already agrees with for other reasons
I've got an itchy blocking finger today. Please don't test me.
I honestly don't understand why you would post this. Why be preemptively snarky to the people who subscribe? You've written eloquently about the nastiness of people online and the smug self-satisfaction of our self-appointed woke overlords but this is the the fourth or fifth time recently where I've seen you leaning into becoming what you often (properly and correctly) rail against.
Whether it's banning a poster for their "overly familiar" tone (dude WAS a bit of a wanker, but ban him for THAT, not the crime of lack of deference to the online nobility) or borderline mean-spirited replies to comments that brought up fair points, you're starting down the path of the bullied kid who, finally having achieved some social status in his own group, excitedly sets about showering those below him in the social scale with the very injustice that had recently been heaped on him.
You're a brilliant writer and, while I'll never endorse socialism as anything other than perfect cover to murder hundreds of millions of innocents under the guise of compassion, I'll tell you that your writing, more than anything in the last couple decades outside of Reason Magazine, has led me to reexamine my beliefs about a the topics of the day.
(Side note: Nick Gillespie needs to get you on The Reason Interview; it would be amazing and possibly bring about the end of days.)
If you believe that this honest opinion from a fan of your work merits a ban then fair enough; it's your space and I'll take my banishment like a champ. (Which means reading the free stuff while browsing privately, naturally - Hey, good writing is good writing). But I think if you take an honest look at what I've said, I think you might find some common ground in my argument as I have many times done with yours.
Cheers, a hopefully-not-former subscriber.
PS> As a member of Generation X who just spent what feels like eons typing my magnum opus into mobile, I feel like I should get some kind of achievement badge...
Buddy, these are the terms: I write what I want, at my whim, and allow the conversation I want to have in my comments section. Those who can't abide by my rules can't comment. Those who can't abide by that mandate may take their money elsewhere. There's a lot of racism out there; I made it preemptively clear that I would ban people who engaged in it. I have zero regrets. Make of that what you will. And for the record I was never the bullied kid, and your dime store psychoanalysis is boring and trite.
Point stands, "Buddy".
Fred Hampton in particular had some rather choice words on racism and how it was best fought using economic and revolutionary means, such that none other than Sen. Corey Booker (D-NJ) intentionally misquoted those words not so long ago.
That said, so much of "race first" really boils down to "race only!" Or "we demand more diverse oppressors!"
To me race first people are people who think races themselves (not the people in races) are units of flourishing/suffering. They seem to advocate policies that, for example, say because black people are disproportionately poor in group metrics and our racist past is a factor in that, then all black people are good targets for intervention to improve the group data whether or not they actually embody the suffering metric more common to the group. So, for example, making 10 black Elon Musks would statistically help the racial wealth gap, so this would constitute social justice. I agree more with Adolph Reed Jr., that group level data can have disparities that wouldn't exist without past racism, but it isn't like every individual in a race embodies the disparate group data of that race and shares in some metaphysical fashion the group's position. I also agree with Reed that racism wasn't the cause of slavery - white supremacy was an ideology that developed gradually to what was already in place for economic reasons. Black people were enslaved in the 16th/17th century because that is who was for sale, not because the Portugese had some desire to be mean to black people specifically. Reed has a great quote that the race people think the purpose of slavery was to grow white supremacy while class people understand the purpose of slavery was to grow cotton, sugar and tobacco and white supremacy was an effect of that.
I’m so glad Reed gets quoted so often in these comments sections.
Reed is one of my go-to thinkers for left critiques of identity politics. His son, Toure Reed also wrote a good book re these topics, I think called Towards Freedom.
Indeed, if Albion's Seed (or Scott Alexander's review) is anything to go by, the plantation owners would much rather have had white faces working their cotton - they even tried at first, but the white serfs/indentured servants died in such numbers they had to find a replacement somewhere.
Following on the observation that it's more of a tactical question than a values question, a way of identifying people as class-first or race-first is by looking at who within their own coalition they spend more time scolding. Bouie and Grim may in their heart of hearts have similar views on what causes inequality, how different types of inequality are linked, and what should be done to remedy them. But Bouie is much more likely to scold people for being too narrowly focused on class at the expense of race -- there's a reason why he's the resident Sanders voter at the New York Times.
“Race first” is such a perfect red herring to distract from class issues, because red herrings do exist and they do smell strongly. Classic misdirection.
"Your average Republican probably has some nominal commitment to dismantling racial inequality, even as everything their party does makes that task harder."
Sure. As the Democrats decry the Court's decision on affirmative action which ends blatant racism directed towards whites and especially Asians.
A sincere question - you noted that racism and classism are distinct, and I agree. But I have often thought that there is some linkage between the two. I would perhaps put it as the two are mutually reinforcing - that maintaining an economic system that deprives people of colour reinforces negative perceptions and stereotypes *partly* through classism.
With this in mind, might it be reasonable to posit, whilst maintaining that the two are distinct, that addressing classism might *partly ameliorate* racism?
Well, yeah, that's the contention of this piece. If Black people had more economic security the depravations of racial inequality would hit them with much less force. The failure lies, in part, in seeing racism as an expression of classism - as if Black people only endure racism because they're poor. Which is... not correct.
Isn't economic security obtained through the development of productive capacities? Can any entity/government just bestow economic security on any group of people?
https://www.nber.org/sites/default/files/summary//aginghealth/summer04/w10466.jpg
Social security is funded from payroll taxes. Productive value is needed in order to have social security
And who, exactly, is saying that we don't need "productivity value"? I'm once again not sure what would be the point of arguing absolutely basic points of leftist belief; if you don't hold those beliefs, fine, but it's weird to act like you've never heard of redistribution before.
My issue with redistribution to solve class gaps are two fold.
One - id does not work. Has been tried before many times. From those that can to those that cannot always degrades into from those that do, to those that don't... and the system runs out of other people's money because there is not enough productive value.
Two - Read Beggars in Spain. People do not have their psychological needs met with handouts. They have to have meaningful work and a path to personal growth. A very small percentage of people would use their UBI to advance themselves... most would stew in resentment that they are locked out of the higher rungs of social status. Classist divides are only solved by opening and multiplying the paths toward economic and class advancement for the majority. Just consider what it takes today, for example, if an urban black with a crappy public school experience decided he wanted to open a barber shop. The elites have made it almost impossible to do that... with fees, credentials, requirements, complexity, regulations, taxes, costs, etc. If you want to solve racism by solving classism the move would be to break down the barriers put in place by the upper class to block and horde all the economic opportunity. Taxing the elites to hand out to the lower class isn't the solution... we already do a lot of that and it does not work.
I consider myself proudly class-first, but it seems to me the potent argument is that as long as certain aspects of our society dislike class activism because they don’t want POC to disproportionately benefit, since they are “different” and need to fix their own problems, attacking the cultural foundations of racism is the only way to build a political bloc that can effectively agitate for class changes.
Which fits right in with your title to the piece, of course, but it kind of explains why going after how people feel about race might make more sense.
(But why am I steelmanning this, we all know that the main reason for the 2020 approach is that class wars are hard but telling people that they are racist and evil is easy)
I think this debate really emerged because Bernie Sanders, the class-first left-wing candidate, performed very poorly with Black voters, and this poor performance cost him the nomination twice.
There are a lot of interesting reasons for this - you could look at why most Black voters identify as Democrats but not as left-wing, the role of Black churches in shaping voting behavior, building trades and other institutions in Black neighborhoods, the conservatism of many Black voters, and the real strategic reasons Black voters often seek to vote as a bloc.
Leftists between 2016 and 2020 ignored all of this, and instead listened to a bunch of NGO/academic types who promised Bernie could do better with Black voters if he adopted a left wing social justice platform. Bernie courted these social justice leaders, they all endorsed Warren anyway, and Warren got essentially no Black votes.
Almost all of the academics I know were die hard Clinton dead-enders who despised Sanders. The few I knew who liked Sanders tended to be over-exploited adjunct professors.
Adolph Reed points out that many of the things recited as race oppression were actually class oppression and only appeared racial if you are obsessed with proportional disparities. You see this in the woke efforts to "problematize" the New Deal (which should actually be a model for the Democratic party) and the provisions that excluded certain categories of workers - considered racist because blacks were affected at levels higher than their numerical presence in the population, but in absolutely fewer numbers. You see this in discussions of redlining where more whites were actually redlined than blacks, although not at the same rate as their population representation. You even see this in Black Lives Matter - more whites than blacks are killed by police each year, but you dare not say violent crime commission/victimization rates could possibly have anything to do with the disparity and that perhaps our real problem is we think throwing cops at the problem is our only answer to crime for everyone. When you have a high amount of colateral damage in allegedly racist policies harming white people, you gotta start to think you might actually have a class issue on your hands.
Although I know it’s not inherently true, every time I see someone say they’re “problematizing” something I immediately assume they’re a postmodernist psychopath who has no clue what they’re talking about because they think they learned something “radically leftist” from Twitter University.
Is that worse than 'problematic'? It seems worse.
It is worse, because not only are you identifying something as problematic, you’re (in the cases I’m making fun of) creating the problem yourself to further a point.
It’s people behaving pseudo-intellectually. Not actually interrogating a withstanding narrative that’s worthy of challenge, but pushing an ulterior motive or narrative while trying to sound smart.
It also has an upper social class, look down the nose, passive-aggressive tone to it: "We find your ideas to be 'problematic.'"
I actually like "problematizing" in its place, which is taking something people erroneously think was fine and cool and explaining how fucked-up it really was. For example, "problematizing" the British Empire makes total sense.
I was explicitly claiming that some people don’t use the term in such a manner. The term gets distorted from the form you have provided, which is fine, into a hollow placeholder that couches for one’s own agenda and lack of subject matter knowledge.
Yeah I think I submitted that comment without its tail end about how people have shifted from using it for things *most people think are good and don't think too deeply about* to things they, the speaker, just don't like.
I think the concept of problematizing means that on the surface it doesn't seem like a problem, like you wouldn't "problematize" slavery. Its more like finding the sin in things not commonly regarded as sins or even regarded as positive goods.
The issue is, knowing about disparate impacts allows people to discriminate by proxy while claiming other intentions. Also, a policy can create a very problematic disparate impact and people can say it’s just a coincidence while justifying the policy on its own terms.
This is why the heuristic was developed on the left to treat disparate impact as default unacceptable, to eliminate these cop-outs.
Of course some disparate impacts could be coincidences, and policies that create them might be justified on their own terms, but the decision was made to err on the side of vigilance given how slippery racist policies and how stubborn racial outcome gaps have turned out to be.
I don't think you're wrong, but I find the way you express this point galling, because I think it mirrors a common way these ideas are misinterpreted (on the right especially, but also by people on the left). If we're looking at an individual policy and trying to determine the impact, "woke" frameworks would tell you that racial/gender/other disparities are important evidence to examine. I don't know of any framework that says "racial disparities always demand race-based mitigation and always are attributable to racism" but that's how the right often describes the definition of the framework - there's no daylight between "assume it's racism" and "actually take a look and see if maybe there's some racism there". People see "this law was created within a white legal framework and it is worthwhile to examine those impacts, as well as considering how other frameworks might create more just results" and read it as "I want to dismantle this law because it's racist". It's probably attributable to our incredibly poor media literacy as a society, but people are frustratingly unable to read "I have concerns about this" as anything other than "I think this is inherently and irredeemably bad".
I'm not saying that you're specifically doing this, but I'm triggered (heh) by "the decision was made to err on the side of vigilance" as though there was a decision made (by who? who agreed to it? who follows it?) to "always" err on the side of "vigilance". It depends what you mean by "vigilance" but I'm sure some people read that statement as "a decision was made to err on the side of always assuming it's racism" rather than "a decision was made to err on the side of actually investigating to determine whether race played a role" - both are "vigilance" but with very very different implications for both ideology and action.
And the difference is important - when discussing race with right-wingers, I can usually get them to agree with most provisions of "wokeism" because the thing they vehemently disagree with is largely a made-up scapegoat created specifically for the purposes of riling them up.
Sadly there are actual group data racial differences on some metrics that explain the disparity. I was a public school teacher for a while and if I had held students at black schools to the same behavior standards as at white schools, I would have disciplined way out of racial proportion. But then other black students were the victims of that classroom disorder so by trying not to create disparities in discipline I shortchanged the black students who were victims of the disorder. I risked creating a disparity in structure and safety for the other students. There are simply real "group averages" differences on some metrics that are creating the downstream disparities. I can easily tell a compelling causal story of how racism set the causal chain in motion to get to that point (see for example Adaner Usmani's research), but referencing that solves no extant problems.
I just don't care about racial outcome gaps perse. I care about the individuals who suffer from the suffering metrics. Groups are not units of suffering. Slavery wouldn't have been better if those imported and worked to death had just been from random ethnic groups. The Holocaust wouldn't have been better if the Nazis had just killed people randomly. In the US today, disparate impact is almost always more likely a reflection of real group human capital differences than racism. There are differences between groups in success valent traits - if there wasn't why do we care about history? I assume the misery inducing effects of slavery is that it set in motion circumstances that led to human capital differences, but you can't ignore them just because you can tell a causal story of how they came to be that included oppression.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that BLM has not acknowledged the problem of policing as social policy. It's been there from the beginning. It's exactly the argument of the Angela Davis and Alex Vitale books that Freddie mentions and the intent of defunding the police. Whether these politics are viable or not is a different question, but it is disingenuous to ignore them.
As you reference, one major problem - and the reason we have debates on sort of ancillary issues like this - is that so many “thinkers” never get to the how, or execution strategy. Some are intentionally on the grift, but many just don’t think in concrete terms, i.e., how we get from Point A to Point B.
So many!
"Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books."
And sadly, educated white liberals tend to drive the discourse, and as a result the discourse flatters educated white liberals and does little or nothing for black people or poor people or poor black people.
No lie. Much of the remedies proposed are either feel-good pablum (my pronouns are "Your Imperial Feline Majesty!") or basically just a PMC jobs program.
"And sadly, educated white liberals tend to drive the discourse"
I think this is the actual point behind DEI - white people maintaining control of the civil rights discourse.
It is simply pragmatic to recognize that what you “can” do is a smaller circle than,(and hopefully with some overlap with), the larger circle of what you “should” do on life’s Venn diagram. Those who focus only on “should” without allowing for “can” are useless navel-gazers. That’s most of the “anti-racists” today, except they are harmful as well as being useless.
Great point about the simple math of race vs class. You will simply have more support for class based initiatives just based on numbers….and raising the tide among the lower class will lift a lot of black boats along the way.
The problem with a "race first" approach is that it's not a question of whites on one hand and minorities on the other. It's actually Asians and whites (in first and second in terms of earnings) and then Hispanics and then blacks, hence the need to specifically single out "anti-black" racism. Faced with a complicated reality ideologues are compelled to define carve outs such as labeling Asians as "white adjacent", tie themselves into logical knots in an attempt to defend affirmative action despite the fact that Asians are probably the group most injured by racial quotas in colleges, etc. etc.
What's the class based alternative? A narrative that Income inequality is on the rise and is approaching levels that could potentially have serious repercussions for the country at large. Pretty cut and dried by comparison.
Asians are "white-adjacent" when it comes time to play "Victims And Victimizers" down at the admissions office or "HR Wokemon".
Asians are suffering from a terrifying wave of anti-Asian attacks when it comes time to round up Asians in support of Team D in the upcoming election.