Constructive Dialogue Concerning Racism

[nc-1701]

I think to a very large extent Warpus is correct. As much as the "I have black friends!" trope has been maligned it's converse is quite accurate. If you don't regularly deal with people from a particular race/ethnic group you are almost certain to hold some amount of racist views towards them. But if you know and respect many of them of them on an individual level it gets very hard to hold significantly prejudiced views.

For example nearly all of my friends are either black, white, or asian... These are also the three ethnic groups I'm most comfortable around and hold the fewest stereotypes about. As long as we have distinct communities along racial lines that don't really interact with each other we'll have a problem. (protip: serving each other burgers and fries doesn't count)

Now that's pretty hard, but one thing it does mean is that we have fix the socioeconomic issues to have a chance at fixing the racial ones. But there are ways to start that process without going full blown Communist. Put real money into schools, cut back police harassment/end the war on drugs (benefits everyone, but benefits minorities more), and generally invest in infrastructure.
These are things that are good for everyone, but are in particular good for helping build stability in minority regions.

In general Farm Boy is right as well, I'll also add that the "privilege" trope is incredibly unhelpful. It takes a good metaphor about walking a mile in someones else's shoes and turns it into an unsupportable pseudoscience disaster. Especially since the largest 'privileges' any individual has are going to be unrelated to race/sex/etc.

 

[Traitorfish]

In general Farm Boy is right as well, I'll also add that the "privilege" trope is incredibly unhelpful. It takes a good metaphor about walking a mile in someones else's shoes and turns it into an unsupportable pseudoscience disaster. Especially since the largest 'privileges' any individual has are going to be unrelated to race/sex/etc.

I think the concept of "privelge" is often deployed in quiet a confused way by its advocates. It originates in two different traditions, neither of which were quite getting at the same thing: the first was among social historians who developed the concept of "white-skin privelege" to explain anti-black racism among poor whites in America, the basic idea being that investment in white supremacy offered tangible short-term benefits to poor whites, material and pyschological, even when their long-term interests appeared to lie in alliance with poor blacks. The second was the concept of epistemological privelege that came out of critical theory and postructuralism, which argued that certain experiences (male, white, straight, etc.) occupied a privelege, normalised position in public and literary discourse. (Note that the former conception of "privelege" is applied quite narrowly, to a specific historical problem, while the latter is applied very broadly, as a general description of how discourses form in unequal societies.)

The two have tended to become confused and simplified and merged into a vulgarised version of the concept by which "priveleged" people always have more than they deserve and "marginalised" people always have less than they deserve, leading to problems such as the "priveleged" pauper and the "underpriveleged" millionaire noted by Cybrxkhan. Or, at least, it's presented in ways which are not readily distinguishable from this vulgarised version by an outside observer. This is a real problem for advocates of the concept of "privelege", especially given that there is real benefit to applying the two concepts together in a more subtle way, and one which they've been largely unable or unwilling to address, or at least to address in any way that's been widely taken-up.

I'm tempted to blame the unhealthy and often counter-productive relationship between academics and activists. The latter often treat the former as a sort of priesthood of critical thought, becuase irony died with Marx, but the concerns of the latter concerns tend towards the concrete and material, while the former are very often concerned with the ethereal discourse, you find a lot of activists trying to apply scholarly ideas in ways which were never intended, trying to squeeze explanations for income inequality from articles about how the camera lingers on women's butts more than on men's. I think people are getting better at this, especially since recent political and economic developments have tended to push activists away from an incestuous subculture and towards something more open and less reliant on third-hand scholarship, and to some extent in bringing more socially-engaged academics to prominence, but this is a little slower to emerge on the internet, the natural home of incestuous subcultures of all types.

 

[Domen]

Hi everyone, I noticed the following excerpt in the article that Gary linked:

maintaining white domination in places like Ferguson.

Then I checked wikipedia to see if this is true - and I found the following (citation):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson,_Missouri

"In 1990, residents of Ferguson who were identified in the U.S. Census as White comprised 73.8% of the total, while those identified as Black made up 25.1% (the remainder, 1.1%, identified with other racial categories.) In the 2000 census, 44.7% were White and 52.4% were African American. In the 2010 census, 29.3% were White and 67.4% were African American."

It does not really look like "maintaining white domination" to me.

So what did the author of the article mean? Can you explain please?

Are, for example, whites overrepresented among Police officers in Ferguson?

 

[Borachio]

94% "white", yes.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/119070/michael-browns-death-leads-scrutiny-ferguson-white-police Oh, blow me down, that link says 94% in google but then doesn't let you access it!

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-2849695/Ferguson-police-officer-says-clean-conscience.html

On Monday, a grand jury decided not to indict Wilson, sparking a night of rioting in Ferguson, a mainly black town of 21,000 with a mostly white police force.

 

[Domen]

Hmmm, OK. It's clear now. The city is 29% white but the Police is 94% white... ?

What happened that Police families did not emigrate when others did and / or that no blacks were recruited to the Police?

=========================================

BTW - this entire "white flight" phenomenon seems to have a very ancient background (if Hollywood movies are accurate):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJZIBx1fpUU#t=39

This one is not a very accurate movie, though. And of course in that movie there was no flight, but invasion.

However, emphasis on preserving the homogeneity of neighbourhoods was the same.

 

[Borachio]

Well, that's the point, isn't it? Why don't "black" people get employment in the Police Force?

I'm not sure that would be an easy question to answer without being controversial.

Are they actively denied it, or don't they seek it?

 

[Domen]

Well, the exchange of inhabitants was pretty rapid (during 20 years proportions of white/black changed from 74/25 to 29/67).

On the other hand, I doubt that all Police officers in Ferguson are still the same people who were employed in Police in 1990.

So, logically, the proportion of black policemen should be gradually increasing just like the proportion of black inhabitants.

Not to mention that in 1990 whites were not 94% of inhabitants of Ferguson, but only 74%.

 

[Borachio]

Well. I do agree that the demographics have changed rapidly. But maybe the turnover of police staff is exceptionally low. This would make some sense, since it's generally a very well-paid job. And to be in the same job for twenty years, if it's a good one, is still not all that exceptional.

Also, there's likely to be some inertia in the system vis-a-vis recruitment. Those doing the recruiting are going to continue recruiting the same sorts of people that they've always recruited, and favour people, and relatives of people, that they've known for the longest time.

Maybe? I'm guessing really.

 

[Farm Boy]

It's an o.k. paid job. If the black population in an area is less well-heeled than the white population then those that are exceptional enough to rise above the disadvantages of their youth are probably not going to be dreaming about a job as a patrol officer. Compounded by the cultural tensions those youth are likely to have.

 

[Borachio]

Those exceptional enough to rise above the disadvantages of their youth will likely move out of the area as soon as possible.

But isn't it also possible that the reason for the influx of "black" people is precisely because they've sought out a better area to live in? Or is it that they're gravitating towards a lower rent area?

You see this in areas of London, and elsewhere. As the housing stock ages and rents fall, various ethnicities move in (generally in the order of the immigration periods: so first it was, say, Jewish people, then Carribeans, then Pakistanis, then Eastern Europeans), and move out again as they become more prosperous. Then a developer moves in, buys up lots of cheapish property, refurbishes it, ups the rent and the yuppies move back in. And then the cycle repeats. With a different bunch of waves of ethnic migrants.

 

[Farm Boy]

The cycle here that seems to generally get played is the whites who can afford to move the hell out as the schools go to crap as the tax base dries up. The neighborhood runs down until either a decently funded gentrification program yuppifies the area some or it becomes a Detroit, or East St. Louis, or Gary, or Ford Heights, etc.

 

[Borachio]

But what's attracting "black" people in? Is it simply lower rents?

In which case, why wouldn't those young "black" people who are "exceptional" enough (but not so much that they leave the area) seek a reasonable job in the police force anyway?

 

[Farm Boy]

But what's attracting "black" people in? Is it simply lower rents?

Ferguson's population hasn't really moved in 20 years. Low income people seem to have had enough kids to almost, but not entirely, offset the flight of the mobile. Detroit's population has tanked.

 

[Borachio]

You're saying the demographics have shifted so much towards a "black" population overwhelmingly through birth rates?

 

[Farm Boy]

No, I'm saying the shift is likely caused in large part through flight. Which will bring down rents, like you say. Maybe even section housing gets put in place.

Anecdote about that: For the 3 or so years I lived in the south suburbs of Chicago rent was not a lot of fun. Coming from much farther out when I started looking for housing with my wife I didn't understand what section housing was, so all the places we visited the first couple days were section areas. Mind you we made little enough that we could have legally lived there, but pretty much to a T all the managers we met with pretty much rode the line of what they were legally allowed to say that pretty much got across the idea, "Dude, you can't move your newlywed 22 year old white wife in here. It's just not a good idea." We wound up paying far more than we should have been spending on rent living in Tinley Park.

 

[Borachio]

What's section housing?

 

[Farm Boy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_8_(housing)

I believe there are multiple types of section housing depending on the income level and state level assistance available in the area.

 

[Hygro]

Here's something random to a lot of white folk don't think about. White people, think about how much we love to be like "I'm Irish, Scottish, and German" "Really? I'm Irish too! I'm also Italian, English, Russian, Danish, and Dutch." We'll be counting off our fingers and making a show of it trying to remember them all.

So imagine someone asked your heritage and how it's fun to list your many Germans/Englishes/Polishes you've got plus that speculation of being "1/32nd Cherokee." Now imagine you're someone else and whose answer is "I wouldn't know, they were abducted and brought here as slaves."

I really would give you a cookie for this very well-written post, Hygro.

As with everything - time is money, time is energy spent and investing into becoming a non-racist in every way possible, is it something you can put in a CV? Of course, not.

However, there are people who like to contemplate naturally. They like to think, to analyze, they arrive at more tolerance first.

And then there is other group of people who just do. They are workers, not thinkers. Approaching this group is harder, because you really have to give them any eventual benefit if they change their rationale.

Thanks, d. Yeah, contemplating a lot makes it easier to reach these conclusions than waiting for inspiration to strike. It is something you can't put on a CV.

I think lots of people do figure it out intuitively and then pass it off to their kids. A lot of people know who to listen to off the bat, or were lucky to randomly. There's lots of ways to be virtuous or at the forefront.

But for those who aren't going to sacrifice their productivity to think their way to another path, and are resistant to change, but insist on reinforcing the system that causes harm, I wish we had a better way of reaching them.

Spoiler rambling more :

As warpus points out, a healthy economy, good schools, healthcare—basically Aristotelian freedom precepts—is probably the most effective way of making the transition away from racism smoothest.

As Chris Rock says better than I, the history of improving race relations is the history of white people being less bad. Right now those feeling the squeeze, especially in perceived future opportunity, are the most resistant to hearing about how to change for the sake of others.


On the other hand, it's this cold economy that is reversing white flight and sending so, so many people back into the heart of the cities. While it brings the pain of gentrification, it rebuilds communities and diversity. +1 for neoliberalism I guess.

.....
Blah, I spent too much time typing this. Hopefully it's useful to someone.

Awesome post. I think people also forget

 

[Borachio]

Here's something random to a lot of white folk don't think about. White people, think about how much we love to be like "I'm Irish, Scottish, and German" "Really? I'm Irish too! I'm also Italian, English, Russian, Danish, and Dutch." We'll be counting off our fingers and making a show of it trying to remember them all.

As far as I know I'm English. And that's pretty much it. But I've really no idea whether I really am or not. I only ever met one grandparent; and only saw photos of the other three, plus one picture of two of my great grandparents.

My other ancestors could have been literally anyone.

Maybe what you describe is a peculiarly "white" American characteristic: due to a history of immigration it may have been more important to you to keep track of your roots. I've really no idea why this should be so, if it is.

Which perhaps makes it even more poignant that the descendants of slaves (immigrants, in spite of themselves) don't have the same history.

 

[Hygro]

As far as I know I'm English. And that's pretty much it. But I've really no idea whether I am or not. I only ever met one grandparent. Only saw photos of the other three, plus one picture of two of my great grandparents.

My other ancestors could have been literally anyone.

Maybe what you describe is a peculiarly "white" American feature, due to a history of immigration it may have been more important to track your roots.

Which perhaps makes it even more poignant that the descendants of slaves (immigrants, in spite of themselves) don't have the same history.

Whoops, yeah, meant to include "American" before "white". Interesting point at the end there.