Systemic RACIAL Barriers; Part 1-The Big Lie
Interrogating the notion of systemic factors as guarantors of inequality
This is an uncomfortable conversation to have for some people. Not, in my experience, capable women or working-class black people, but rather for privileged white (and non-white) progressives. This essay is full of generalizations but they are all true as generalizations and I have little sympathy for your offense on behalf of a group that you don’t belong to. You tend to think that defunding the police is what black people want and you regularly introduce the notion of ‘over-policing’… while black people themselves overwhelmingly support the same or MORE police in their neighborhoods. Stop romanticizing groups that you’ve barely even met and stop trying to be ‘allies’ of these demographic abstractions. If you really want to know what struggling black people want go talk to some. You won’t find many in your Sociology 101 survey course. A lot of them will harbor positive feeling for Donald Trump so please make sure you relieve the pressure gradually so your head doesn’t explode. Ditto for women. Women are as likely to have negative as positive associations with the label ‘feminist’. That’s a pretty terrible record after 7 decades of struggle on behalf of a certain group. The Left should examine whether their ideological attachments really benefit the groups they claim to champion. In most cases they do not.
On those rare occasions (and they are rare) when third-wave feminists or ‘anti-racists’ (actually pro-minority racists) debate their opponents there is often now an awkward point at which the pro-meritocracy, pro-status quo, anti-’sexual and racial discrimination’ parties ask what should be the operative question: what barriers are you talking about?
The uncomfortable fact for the Left is that there are very few hard barriers remaining in the United States. Women can choose more or less any academic major or profession they want… yet very few choose to lay asphalt or be plumbers or armorers. Not only are there no racial barriers remaining to occupational selection or promotion but schools and companies are desperate to have black graduates and managers and executives. It is a fact that, for Ivy League schools, being a black male affords an applicant the equivalent of about 300 points on the SAT (relative to being Asian).
We can take two identical applicants: one male and one female. In almost every contemporary context the female applicant would have an advantage.
We can consider two identical applicants: one black and one white. In EVERY context the black applicant would have a significant advantage. (There is some social science data indicating that applicants with ‘black-sounding’ names get less calls than those with names like ‘James’ and ‘Charles’ and ‘Sarah’ but that data is quite old and it seems to be a case of natural stereotyping and not racism per se. The same pattern holds when black managers are selecting the applicants. If there is a racism problem here than it is roughly equal for black and white employers. I encourage you to dig deeper into this data-you might be surprised. Or you could diagnose a problem of anti-black racism in the black community and assign prosperous white people as trainers to teach black people how they should feel about their own racial category. This is, comically, not far from the current situation.)
Yet inequalities and disparities persist. Why? For sex (male and female competitors) I think the reasons are broadly different than for race. This essay will focus on race. For the purposes of this essay we will focus ONLY on two groups: white and black. Ironically this is much how the Left prefers it. Jewish Americans and East Asians and South Asians groups all exceed white performance in measured business ownership and academic performance and family stability and conformity to the law. This would be a strange outcome if, indeed, the problem was white racism. A white supremacist system would position whites as, well, supreme. The more urgent (and never discussed) fact is that many black immigrant groups also outdo white Americans (Haitians, Nigerians, Ghanaans…). They don’t ALL exceed white metrics is all things, but that would be a strange feature of even a random distribution. But they outdo white Americans in most (and, in the case of Nigerian immigrants all) categories by which we measure social achievement and stability in this country. Nothing else needs to be established to ascertain that racism is NOT a serious (by which I mean top-5) concern for achievement in the U.S. Literally anyone (in the average statistical sense, leaving aside remarkable bad luck) can start a business, go to college (even if it’s community college for two years!), avoid prison, and avoid early pregnancy. If you do those things your chance of ending up poor in the U.S. is less than 1%… that applies to ANY person of any race or background. So why do we see such a spread in the numbers… and why are certain populations of African-Americans often near the bottom (or the top, as it were)?
First: I don’t ask these questions with some gloating or morbid curiosity. I am in recovery. I have been arrested, many times. I have driven so impaired that I couldn’t even remember the disastrous trips and I have spent days in jail for this. I have bought drugs and sold them and committed other crimes. I (a white man) have been stopped for being in certain neighborhoods simply because of my skin color. I have been attacked and beaten, simply because of my skin color (more than once). I have faced hate and slurs. I have had police draw their weapons on me, while I was calmly walking down the block (committing no crime). I have been financially and romantically irresponsible in 100 different ways throughout my life. I consider myself in the bottom or next to the bottom quintile of American society in terms of earning and stability (although not education).
But I also believe-I KNOW-that this country has plenty of opportunity for those willing to do the work, get their lives together, and save money; take night classes; drive Uber; deliver for Amazon. There DO seem to be aspects of American society that continue to display racism: house appraisals, criminal sentencing, perhaps employment hiring (in certain cases). That doesn’t mean that the current, massive mathematical advantages already mentioned don’t outweigh those burdens in the aggregate. But please don’t misunderstand-I’m not claiming racism doesn’t exist… only that each person has a tremendous freedom and power to improve their own lives. Even IF racism was a pervasive and disastrous factor for black Americans, personal action would STILL be the best route to better the conditions of each person. Changing ‘systemic’ factors is a slow process. A change in your study or spending habits can start today and the results can amaze you.
In the rooms of recovery I learned that no one can improve me. I must do it myself. If the Left acknowledged that personal action was a powerful factor and simultaneously advocated for legislative and financial (and educational!) changes I would respect that. I would help them. Instead, ANY hint that personal agency or individual decisions have bearing on the well-being or conditions of groups is considered akin to racism. Even though these ideas are very common in the black community!
What I object to is prosperous young people with graduate-level educations and $90,000 of student loan debt for their M.A. in social work ponderously explaining to me the terrible barriers standing in the way of huge chunks of American society. In my experience the people who believe and spread these ideas mostly grew up with two parents and went to good schools and NEVER spent time inside. I know people who know three people (personally) who have been killed by police. Two were unarmed. No charges were ever pursued. So why do I regularly face young women who’ve never had ANY contact with police lecturing me about police behavior? It’s certainly not driven by a careful reading of the social science data. I can tell you that with certainty. It’s nearly always because of an idea they learned in college… or learned from a person who learned it in college. These are not realities of our society. They are ideological lenses which have been crafted and fitted to push certain drastic and unpopular changes.
We have an intellectual elite in this country which is possessed of some very bad ideas, disconnected from real people and the real world. These ideas could never improve or reform our systems because they’re not meant to. They’re meant to sweep it away and replace it with… well, that’s never really made clear. At the same time these pampered radicals benefit every day from the criminal justice system and the education system and the financial system that they condemn. And they never even make any effort to personally share their wealth or privilege.
But that doesn’t answer the question: why do we see such disparities in outcomes between certain groups in our country?
You will read my thoughts on that in: Part 2-The Souls of Poor Folk
