Tag: Commentary

Thoughts on “Cancel Culture”

Posted on by Scott

On Twitter, I’m one of those guys who tweets “At-will employment” every time someone loses their job because they did something stupid enough publicly enough that their employer decides the cost of their continued employment is too high. Lately that stupid thing tends to be something racist, and given the various and sundry ways at-will employment has put people–including myself–out of work in the past, I’m 100% okay with racist deeds being added to the list of things that can make you unemployed. Amy Cooper getting fired from her job at Franklin Templeton because she went viral for calling the cops on Christian Cooper (a black man) under false pretenses isn’t “cancel culture”. That’s the downside of at-will employment.

In October 2017, Juli Briskman was out cycling one weekend in northern Virginia when President Trump’s motorcade passed her on the road. She gave the motorcade the middle finger. When she informed her employer (a government contractor) that she was the woman in the picture that had gone viral on social media, they fired her. That wasn’t “cancel culture” either, just the downside of at-will employment (the wrongful-termination lawsuit she filed the following year was dismissed for that reason). The same is true of the white supremacist and neo-Nazi attendees of the Unite the Right rally who were fired by their employers after being identified. So how do these examples connect to the Letter on Justice and Open Debate?

The signatories of this letter (at least a few of whom went on Twitter to withdraw support from it after they learned who else had signed) purport to be concerned about the weakening of “our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity”. This begs the question of what is being debated, and what differences people are refusing to tolerate in favor of ideological conformity. “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces;” hints at one such example, but gets the key fact wrong. James Bennet, who did not read the Tom Cotton op-ed he chose to publish, resigned as the head of New York Times Opinion–he was not fired. The piece in question was updated with a 317-word editors’ note indicating the piece “fell short of our standards and should not have been published”. Another example “a research is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study”, refers to the firing of David Shor for retweeting the work of Professor Omar Wasow. Jonathan Chait writes about it at length in this piece, and argues far more persuasively against “left illiberalism” than the vague and anodyne Harper’s letter because he is specific. When I first learned of the Shor firing, it seemed unjust to me–and still does. His employer did wrong in firing him, and doing so smacks of precisely the sort of “woke liberalism” that those to the right on the political spectrum often decry.

Another friend of mine asked for my thoughts on J.K. Rowling and Noam Chomsky signing the letter, so I’ll address them specifically here. From the little I’ve seen on Twitter, Rowling is receiving backlash for some tweets and more detailed opinions regarding transgender people that could be characterized as transphobic. To me it is unsurprising that Rowling would sign the Harper’s letter. There is no downside I can discern to signing onto a vague letter about free speech and tolerance for differing views, but it will not prevent those who see Rowling’s positions as transphobic from being any quieter or less vehement in their opposition to her opinion. Chomsky is a scholastic giant who has influenced multiple fields of study. He has been an activist for many causes above and beyond free speech, subjected to multiple arrests, and earned a place on Nixon’s enemies list for that activism, so unlike many others on the list he has demonstrated the courage of his convictions for decades.

I think Mansa Keita was on target regarding the objectives of the Harper’s letter when he tweeted the following:

The term “cancel culture” is simply a rhetorical device meant to control the contours of acceptable speech. The speech and values of those telling you how you should speak is not more privileged than your own.

Another friend of mine quite recently described cancel culture as being “seated somewhere between McCarthyism and market forces”. I find this description quite apt as well.

There are certainly other examples beyond those I’ve listed where the expression of one’s opinion resulted in them losing a job. James Damore’s firing by Google is one example from my line of work. Rush Limbaugh getting fired by ESPN some years ago is another. Twenty years before Colin Kaepernick began the silent protest against police brutality that would ultimately cost him his career, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf was suspended by the NBA for refusing to stand during the anthem. Whether “cancellation” for one’s expressed opinion is as prevalent or permanent as some claim is an open question. So is the assertion that many people are self-censoring due to fear of consequences for speaking out. Anecdotes (including those I’ve shared) are not data.

The signatories (all of whom have substantial platforms of their own from which to convey their opinions) seem to be asking for themselves, and presumably other less-powerful people that controversial speech be somehow more privileged than other speech. They seem to be asking for a “freedom from consequences” that Juli Briskman (and certain Unite the Right rally attendees) were not exempt from. This piece on Digg goes much further in exploring that ground, and deals more specifically with some of the letter’s endorsers. If freedom from consequences is at heart what the Harper’s letter is asking for, how do we square that demand with the current nature of at-will employment? Instead of vague open letters in magazines with a vanishingly small total circulation, do we reconsider the current nature of at-will employment? Do we ask employers to be braver? Do we go so far as to change laws? Or do we continue to complain about the status quo?

Academic tenure is the concept I think comes closest to what the endorsers of the Harper’s letter are asking for. The intent of academic tenure as I understand it (not being an academic myself) is to preserve the freedom of academics to hold a variety of views. Academic tenure is not a guaranteed job for life however, though it is purposely difficult to fire a tenured professor. By the same token, academic tenure is exceedingly difficult to achieve. While this does not mean that a tenured professor expressing opinions I find abhorrent would not bother me any less, the difficulty of achieving tenure limits that possibility quite significantly.

Gatekeepers in spheres beyond academia no longer command the same power they once did. First blogging, then social media platforms disintermediated news organizations as ways of getting one’s opinion heard more broadly. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms added virality to the mix. These platforms combined with ubiquitous cellphone cameras have disintermediated the police as the only source of information about their activities, providing brutal documentary evidence of the need for the police reforms the Harper’s letter calls overdue. These platforms also make the letter’s assertion that the free exchange of ideas is becoming more restricted a somewhat dubious one. There is probably more free exchange of ideas than ever–but within echo chambers of the like-minded. Those who believe in all manner of conspiracy theories can easily find their tribe in the same way fans of particular sports teams, musicians, or hobbies can. Those of us on different sides of any number of issues are more likely to talk past each other–or at each other–than with each other. The echo chambers and the absence of a shared set of facts may be as much of a danger–if not more so–than “cancel culture”.

An Imperfect Dividing Line for Honor

Posted on by Scott

America still wrestles with names, symbols and statues.  But in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, some of the nation’s idols are falling faster than I can type.  Just today came news that Princeton University is removing Woodrow Wilson’s name from their school of public policy and a residential college.  Woodrow Wilson famously screened the pro-Klan Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915.  Earlier this week, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina voted unanimously to remove a statue of John C. Calhoun from their city square (and the removal work has already started, likely with a museum as its final destination).  In addition to serving as Vice President, Secretary of State, and senator, Calhoun was perhaps this country’s most ardent defender of chattel slavery. The reckoning has even spread abroad, with protesters in Bristol, England pitching a statue of Edward Colston (a slave trader) into the harbor and Belgium beginning to remove statues of King Leopold II (brutal colonizer of the Congo).

Resistance to removing these men and certain symbols from places of honor still continues however.  While Mississippi has begun the process of considering a new state flag (minus the Confederate flag insert), the current flag still has its defenders. A bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest (whose Confederate troops massacred black soldiers who surrendered at Fort Pillow, and later led the Ku Klux Klan) still stands in the Tennessee state house after an 11-5 vote against removing it in favor of another Tennessee historical figure.

Two things prompt my attempt to craft a dividing line (however imperfect) for honor:

  1. The toppling of a Ulysses S. Grant statue in San Francisco
  2. News of protesters’ demands for the removal of an emancipation memorial in Washington, DC.

In my view, if someone fought to create the country in the Revolutionary War, fought to preserve the country during the Civil War, supported Reconstruction, or were responsible for desegregating anything at all, that is sufficient cause to leave up any statue of them or leave their name on any building or public facility where it may be–whatever other flaws and shortcomings that individual may have.

Adam Serwer’s defense of Grant is reason enough that no state of Grant should ever be abused in such a fashion.  Professor Aderson Francois adds Grant’s role in the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and in a congressional commission that studied post-Civil War terrorism against black men and women in the South.

Professor David Blight (perhaps the best living authority on Frederick Douglass), writes an eloquent defense of The Freedmen’s Memorial.  Before reading his column, there was so much about the monument I did not know:

Professor Blight closes with a most constructive idea of how to add context to imperfect monuments to flawed men:

Rather than take down this monument to Lincoln and emancipation, create a commission that will engage new artists to represent the story of black freedom from one generation to the next. Let today’s imaginations take flight. Perhaps commission a statue of Douglass himself delivering this magnificent speech. So much new learning can take place by the presence of both past and present. As a nation, let’s replace a landscape strewn with Confederate symbols with memorialization of emancipation. Tearing down the Freedmen’s Memorial would be a terrible start for that epic process.

In response to the Blight column (which I shared with friends on Facebook), one of them asked me if I felt monuments to Thomas Jefferson should be torn down. Here is my response to him:

The short answer is no. The longer answer is while the hypocrisy of certain of the founders of the United States re: chattel slavery is obvious, they were trying to build a nation. I favor Dr. Blight’s approach of adding more context. The Confederate States of America and those who led it (by contrast) betrayed the nation the founders built and had the explicit goal of breaking this nation in two for the purpose of preserving and expanding the institution of chattel slavery. Statues of those who supported the Confederacy were erected to support the myth of the Lost Cause, and in concert with violence and terrorist acts against black people, despite the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War. With the exception of tombstones and gravesites, I would not preserve a single Confederate monument on public land were it up to me. Strike Confederate names from every military base, every road, every school, and/or other public facility as well.

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial on the Tidal Basin is a place I’ve visited many times.  The words of the Declaration of Independence inscribed on one of its panels are clearly at odds with Jefferson’s treatment of the enslaved and profit from chattel slavery.  Monticello, Jefferson’s primary plantation, is attempting to address this contradiction even today.   When it comes to the Founding Fathers, hagiography has characterized too much of our treatment of them.  As more is revealed, it seems that what we have been taught as history looks more like propaganda.  Continued denial of the unsavory, hypocritical, and contradictory beliefs and actions of America’s founders serves the nation poorly.  But destruction of their monuments may not serve us any better.

My First Juneteenth

Posted on by Scott

Today marks the date in 1865 when General Gordon Granger read General Order 3 to the people of Galveston Bay, Texas, informing the enslaved there and in all of Texas of freedom that had been rightfully theirs two years earlier.  That was essentially the full extent of my understanding of Juneteenth until recently, so I’ve taken the additional time off my employer gave us today to dig a bit deeper.  Juneteenth.com, the Wikipedia entry about Juneteenth, and this explainer by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. have been my starting points.  I shared these links with my direct reports as well as my co-workers before our 2PM close today, and was heartened by how generously they were received.

In today’s national discussions of and writing about Juneteenth, the role of Texas and black Texans doesn’t get nearly the prominence it should.  Even as someone who has read The Warmth of Other Suns, and the way that aspects of black southern culture migrated north and west out of the South along with its people, it didn’t occur to me that holidays would or could migrate too.  Once I looked at the map of dates when different states granted it official recognition however, it made sense that Minnesota and Florida were among the first states outside of Texas to grant that recognition before the year 2000.  In reading a story like this one, it reinforces yet again that we in this country are fundamentally miseducated about its history when it comes to the Civil War, Reconstruction, its failure, and the consequences of that failure.

Even a widely-acclaimed documentary like Ken Burns’ The Civil War–which my high school classmates and I watched parts of in history class on VHS after each episode aired–can’t convey just how determined some in this country were to preserve the institution of slavery.  Only in reading about Juneteenth did I learn of plantation owners and other slaveholders migrating to Texas and bringing those they enslaved along with them to escape the fighting (and leveraging their distance from Union troops to extract years of additional labor from them).  This thread by Aderson B. Francois, professor of law at Georgetown University, tells a story I definitely did not know about concerted efforts to make it unconstitutional to abolish slavery.  Not only was the Corwin Amendment passed by both houses of Congress by the necessary margin to proceed to ratification, not only did Abraham Lincoln support it, but my home state was among five that ratified it (and only rescinded that ratification in 2014).  Thanks to a friend I met back in grad school, I learned that some of the defeated Confederates attempted to preserve the Confederacy in Brazil.

Spending the time to learn more about Juneteenth has unearthed quite a few things done in previous years to focus attention on it, and the story of black people in this country more generally.  This interview with Isabel Wilkerson from 2017 leads off with audio from the 1940s housed at the Library of Congress from a formerly-enslaved woman old enough to remember the original Juneteenth, and reflects upon the death of Philando Castile at the hands of police in the previous year.  This piece on the National Museum of African American History and Culture website talks about the legacy of Juneteenth.  A brief story from The History Channel originally published in 2015 talks about the Emancipation Proclamation and Juneteenth.  I’m not sure how many other holidays have their own flag, but Juneteenth does and has for over 20 years.

Another interesting thing Juneteenth has done in the wake of George Floyd’s murder is spark good faith questions from white friends and co-workers about aspects of black history in the United States.  While my heritage makes my connection to the term “black” more complicated, I refer friends to documentaries like 13th, and to the scholarship of Dr. William Darity to learn more about reparations.

In addition to spending at least a part of today learning more, I donated to two non-profits and encouraged friends to do so as well.  The Innocence Project works to free those wrongly convicted of crimes.  The Equal Justice Initiative operates The Legacy Museum and The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which seek to educate about the history of enslavement, lynching, and mass incarceration of black Americans in the United States.  Perhaps this Juneteenth will be the beginning of an annual tradition of learning and contributing to the cause of justice.

COVID-19 Doesn’t Care About Our Politics

Posted on by Scott

A friend on Twitter asked the following question:

Does the shortage of ventilators/mask[s] show the cruelty and inefficiency of capitalism?  If so, would a centrally planned economy have better outcomes?

My response:

It’s nothing to do with capitalism being cruel or inefficient, and everything to do with what can happen when the profit motive is the main driver of private sector companies involved in the healthcare supply chain, and in healthcare provision.

That combined with incompetently led governments both at the federal level and in some states are why the United States finds itself leading the way in the number of [novel] coronavirus cases.

Even as the total of coronavirus cases worldwide has exceeded 1 million (as of April 2, 2020), it’s too easy to find people trying to use the pandemic in favor of their preferred ideology and against others.  From my vantage point, no ideology is faring particularly well against coronavirus.  Most of the countries at the top of the charts for total cases and new cases are democracies, but the top 10 also includes China (communist), the Islamic Republic of Iran, and Turkey (effectively a dictatorship).

What the coronavirus is highlighting (in addition to the problem of allowing the profit motive to take primacy in healthcare) is the importance of competent government–regardless of what ideology they claim or operate under.  Many articles (including this one) have pointed out that South Korea and the United States reported their first positive COVID-19 case on the same day.  The differing results of their responses couldn’t be more stark.  South Korea has a tiny fraction of COVID-19 deaths compared to the United States, and a very low number of new cases.

Puerto Rico was a harbinger of the botched response to covid-19

Posted on by Scott

In reading this excellent Financial Times piece, I was struck by this paragraph in particular:

People often observed during Trump’s first three years that he had yet to be tested in a true crisis. Covid-19 is way bigger than that. “Trump’s handling of the pandemic at home and abroad has exposed more painfully than anything since he took office the meaning of America First,” says William Burns, who was the most senior US diplomat, and is now head of the Carnegie Endowment.

It struck me as incorrect because I thought almost immediately of the poor federal response to the devastation in Puerto Rico wrought by hurricanes Irma and Maria in September 2017.  Plenty of news stories at the time (including this one from the year after the storm) focused on Trump throwing paper towels at a crowd of hurricane survivors.  But a closer look at such stories yields many examples of Trump, his administration, and others connected to them operating the same way nearly 3 years ago as they are now in their response to covid-19.

Looking at how the Trump administration talks about death tolls from covid-19 today, I see many similarities to how they talked about death tolls from the hurricanes in 2017. In this US News & World Report story from last month, Trump is quoted saying he’s proud of what his administration has done, as well as insisting the death toll could have been much worse and that no one could have done better. In 2017, the BBC News story I linked earlier recounts Trump telling Puerto Rican government officials that they should be proud of the low reported death tolls from the two storms. This led me to another similarity between the handling of the two crises: under-reported death tolls.

The aftermath of the storms in Puerto Rico is when I first encountered the term “excess mortality”. Researchers from Harvard did a study (including interviews with some 3000 randomly-selected Puerto Rican households the year after the storms) and estimated that some 4600 people died as a result of the damage done by Hurricane Maria due to interruptions in medical care caused by infrastructure damage such as power cuts and impassable roads, and suicides, as compared to the same time period in the previous year. The power cuts led me to yet another similarity between the aftermath of the hurricanes in Puerto Rico and the federal response to covid-19: contracts granted due to political connections instead of competence.

There have been numerous stories (like this one) about GOP fundraiser Mike Gula getting out of the fundraising business to start a company called Blue Flame to sell N95 masks, ventilators, and PPE despite having zero relevant experience. My home state (Maryland) and Trump’s DOJ have both begun investigations into the company after it failed to deliver on contracts it signed. Nearly 3 years ago, a 2-year-old company with 2 employees named Whitefish Energy won a $300 million no-bid contract to restore Puerto Rico’s wrecked power grid. The Interior Department insisted that Secretary Ryan Zinke played no role, despite his personal connections to the CEO of that company. Whitefish would ultimately lose that contract and Secretary Zinke would ultimately resign due to pressure from over a dozen different investigations launched into his conduct while serving as interior secretary.

Another way that Trump’s response to covid-19 was predicted by his response to the hurricanes in Puerto Rico is in how he praised political leaders who played to his ego and blamed those who did not. In this story, Trump is quoted praising then-governor Ricardo Rossello (who had no criticism of federal recovery efforts) while attacking San Juan’s mayor (Carmen Yulin Cruz). His complimentary words to the GOP governors of states (and his attacks on governors Whitmer, Inslee, and others) are very similar.

Further exploration would probably yield more similarities between the botched handling of Puerto Rico’s recovery from the hurricanes and the federal government’s continuing response to covid-19. Sadly, the island is not fully-recovered after 3 years and is now suffering the additional burden of covid-19. Denials of housing assistance by FEMA in the immediate aftermath of the hurricanes is inflicting consequences on Puerto Ricans–all US citizens–to this day.

Philanthropy is Marketing

Posted on by Scott

This post is the product of a conversation with some friends on Slack, on the topic of billionaires and their philanthropy.  What kicked off this thread of our ongoing conversation was this New York Post piece on Elon Musk.  The column (which is worth reading in full) strings together some of Musk’s frankly stupid tweets regarding CoVID-19 before correctly (and brutally) pointing out a few ways his attempts to “save the day” have fallen far short of what he promised.  Here’s the pull-quote from the piece added to our conversation:

Elon, it’s time to take a breath and think — and possibly research work that may not have been done by you — before you speak. Take a page from the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, and put your money where your big mouth is (without constantly crowing about it). Dorsey, who has teamed up with Rihanna and Jay-Z to donate $6.2 million to CoVID-19 relief funds, recently announced the creation of Start Small LLC, using $1 billion of his own equity to “disarm this pandemic.” After that, the fund will “shift to … health and education” for girls.

According to Wikipedia, Jack Dorsey’s net worth is slightly south of $4 billion, making his $1 billion offering against the pandemic at least a quarter of his net worth.  The number of other billionaires donating that proportion of their current net worth to such a cause is zero.  While that level of generosity is commendable, American society has become far too dependent on the noblesse oblige of billionaires.

Here’s the comment from our conversation that prompted the title of this post:

But whining they [billionaires] aren’t donating then whine when they do donate and most people haven’t donated is also a double standard.

Right, the tax code needs to be fixed but the [R]epublicans have basically twisted the logic of “if you remove these billionaire tax writeoffs and loopholes it’s gonna affect average joe making 40k a year” into the mind of their base.

It’s some of the best marketing I’ve ever seen.

Scott Galloway has said something along these lines on at least one occasion: “philanthropy is marketing.”  For the various and sundry “tech bros” (and others) who do it, it represents a tiny fraction of their net worth for immense reputational gains.  Consider Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million gift to reform public schools in Newark, or the Sackler family’s support of the arts.  Whether or not the money had the desired effect is incidental to how the public regards the people who gave the money–it “launders” their reputations (a necessary washing in light of what we now know about how they earned their billions).  Even the amount Charles Kushner spent to buy Harvard a building with his name (and incidentally get his son a spot at the school he didn’t earn with his grades) somehow counts as philanthropy.

Unfortunately, philanthropy doesn’t just rehab reputations.  More and more often it seems to be offered as a substitute for government involvement.  Philanthropy has been offered as a substitute for a social safety net funded with taxes before.  But it hasn’t been (nor will it ever be) adequate to the scale of certain problems American society faces, whether we look at schools, poverty, pollution, public health, or any number of other challenges.  The degree to which we have built an expectation of, if not a dependence on, the largesse of the very wealthy for key things is not merely sad but dangerous.  Not only can their interests and focus change in a flash, but we have no mechanism for holding them accountable for failure.  A properly-functioning society cannot and must not let this status quo regarding philanthropy continue.  

Jamaican Anatomy

Posted on by Scott

I remember having a good, long laugh about this particular image when one of my cousins shared it on Facebook awhile back.  It reminds me that my parents were right about me being Jamaican, even though I was born and raised in America.  When I became a dad, among the many parenting things I did (and still do) was baths.  And while I was washing the twins (moreso when they were smaller than now), I would find myself calling out their body parts in patois as I washed them.  “Come mek me wash your neck back”, and so on.

When I was growing up, I made no effort at all to speak patois–not even when we were in Jamaica visiting for weeks at a time.  I even teased my younger sister for her attempts.  But now the joke’s on me–in more ways than one.  The patois that sneaks out when I’m not even thinking about it isn’t the only way the heritage is more firmly embedded than I realized in my youth.

Does Diversity & Inclusion Disadvantage Poor Whites?

Posted on by Scott

I came across a Twitter thread today (it begins here) which argued that diversity & inclusion is “systematically marginalizing disadvantaged people from majority groups”.  Having read the full argument and thought about it, the assertion has a number of problems in my view.  The argument suffers from a fundamental error of attribution.  If any member of the majority is disadvantaged, it is in economic status—and capitalism is the primary culprit there.  The diversity part of D & I only began in the 1970s and 1980s, adding barriers to inclusion as a focus in the 1990s.  Capitalism by contrast has a head start of approximately 300 years.

Capitalism has always exploited the economically-disadvantaged.  Ethnicity is a variable often used to determine which of the poor to exploit first.  This doesn’t mean that white people could not be disadvantaged—some of them certainly are.  We should be clear that whiteness did not always include Eastern Europeans, Italians, Scots-Irish people, etc—they faced real limits in what kind of work they could do, where they could live, etc for many years until whiteness expanded to include them.

That said, Thomas Chatterton Williams (among many others) has already noted that historically, economic alliances between the poor that span ethnicities have been purposely attacked and broken by those who serve the interests of capital.  If you’ve read about The Great Migration (black people fleeing north to escape domestic terrorism from the KKK and others between 1915 and 1970), black migrants arriving in the north often faced discrimination and violence from newly-arrived immigrants not yet even fully-included in whiteness.

Beyond the attribution error, the argument fails on a second but related front—the assertion that a single ideology built around D & I is marginalizing poor whites.  At least one other ideology exists regarding D & I—an ideology built to oppose D & I.  This ideology scapegoats some immigrants for blame when it comes to the economic disadvantage suffered by certain members of the majority—even as the capitalists it supports continue to exploit cheaper, non-white labor for increasing profit.  Perhaps even more insidiously, it selects certain other immigrants as proof that capitalism is somehow meritocratic and just when quite often it is not.

To extend the analysis to higher education, the argument against D & I weakens even further by skipping over the gigantic inflation of tuition prices, the continuing existence of legacy admissions (which predominantly favor the majority group, and the wealthiest members of that group), and the role that gifts to schools from wealthy donors have in admission of their children, you should question it.  Selective (if not dishonest) arguments like this are why my alma mater (which still uses legacy admissions) was ordered by a court ruling to open its Benjamin Banneker scholarship to non-black students. It’s how Abigail Fisher received a ruling 7-1 in her favor from the Supreme Court on the basis of the 14th Amendment—one of 3 passed during Reconstruction to recognize and protect the citizenship of newly-freed slaves.

I will extend my observations further, into K-12 education.  The author of the Twitter thread touched not at all on residential segregation—or the funding formulas primarily dependent on property taxes—which have the effect of reinforcing and perpetuating inequitable access to quality teachers and facilities.      I’ve read any number of news stories and watched a documentary about wealthier, whiter school districts breaking away from poorer and more diverse ones. This cannot help but impact what every incoming freshman class at colleges and universities nationwide looks like.  This doesn’t mean that there aren’t white people suffering from poverty as well. But a combination of deliberate government action, followed by neglect, combined with white flight does mean the impact of poverty is disproportionately felt by black and brown people.  Zoning decisions as well (for example) tend to result in facilities with negative health impacts being situated near neighborhoods that are predominantly populated by black and brown people.

The reality of residential segregation prompts me to touch on a particular pair of tweets in this thread that stood out for me:

“Another thing that bothers me about these movements is their condescending behaviors.  Yesterday, a proponent told me I was tone policing persons of color.  I wasn’t.  I was tone policing an ideology.”

“Whether you believe it or not, this ideology argues that it is totally reasonable to suggest that, systematically, a woman or POC understands *the* majority viewpoint, but members of the majority cannot understand members of minority group.”

As a black man who has navigated majority white schools and corporate environments successfully enough to begin making a six figure salary around the time I turned 33, having at least some understanding of the majority viewpoint in those particular context was necessary to achieve some level of success.  I’ve watched enough white flight in real time—even in an allegedly liberal place like Montgomery County, Maryland—over the decades I’ve lived here to be relatively sure that a majority that doesn’t even want to be my neighbor probably isn’t terribly interested in understanding me either.   

Whatever you think of D & I efforts in either the academic or corporate spheres (and as an aside I don’t personally believe that representation can or should match nationwide demographics in every field), the argument made in the thread suggests that D & I is somehow more powerful than capitalism—an assertion which beggars belief (to put it mildly).

A Thought on Black American Culture and the Racial Wealth Gap

Posted on by Scott

I listened to this conversation between Dr. Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes with great interest.  I found it to be at times thoughtful, challenging, frustrating, and maddeningly incomplete.  One example of the incompleteness, if not flawed nature of the conversation was the discussion of correlation between blood lead levels and levels of crime.  Hughes cited a book titled Lucifer Curves on this subject, but there is additional scholarship that seems to support lead-crime hypothesis (with lead as a contributing, but not the only factor in crime increasing and decreasing).  The incompleteness and the frustration I had with the argument was how quickly Hughes tossed off the assertion that “we’ve already removed lead from fuel”.  Absent from this throwaway line are factors like:

  • Sources of lead well beyond just fuel, including pipes, paint, dust, toys, pottery, imported canned goods, industrial waste, and batteries.
  • In addition to being highly-toxic, there isn’t really a “safe” level of lead exposure.  Damage from lead exposure is cumulative.

There are thousands of communities (not just Flint, Michigan) with lead in older housing stock (in paint dust or other sources).  Fairly often, these homes are where poor people live.  Fairly often, these poor people are black and brown.  And despite Dr. Loury’s stated desire for social remedies to be implemented on individual terms instead of racial ones, arguments about culture have been (and still are) used to stigmatize black and brown people who are poor as lazy and morally inferior in terms rarely applied to white people who are poor.  This “deserving poor” framing makes it that much easier to deny social remedies (and the government funds that enable them) to such communities–including remedies like lead abatement.  It also makes it easier to police such communities disproportionately compared to others, as seen in the case of Freddie Gray (who came from a community in Baltimore with a much higher prevalence of lead poisoning than elsewhere in my home state).  It’s also worth noting that in a previous episode of The Glenn Show, his guest  (Thomas Chatterton Williams) made a point about the history of arguments for class-based social remedies being undermined by racism.