Tag: Commentary

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.

Retroactive Repudiation

Posted on by Scott

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’re aware that Virginia’s Democratic Party has been trying and failing to navigate a controversy about blackface because both the governor and the attorney general of the state were found to (or confessed to) having donned blackface in the past.  I mention this only to provide some context for a Coleman Hughes piece I was sent by a conservative friend of mine.  It may indicate something about the quality of the argument that it is written by a black undergraduate philosophy major at Columbia University instead of by any number of black conservatives with more of a track record.  But this 40-something graduate of a state university is going to share some of the ways in which Coleman Hughes’ opinion is not merely weak, but dishonest.

Strike one against this piece: he winds the clock back to last year to remind the reader of Megyn Kelly’s brush with blackface, and the resulting cancellation of her show.  Omitted from Hughes’ history is Megyn Kelly’s long history of racist comments with her prior employer, Fox.  There’s also her regular practice of bringing on racist ex-cop Mark Fuhrman as a guest to comment on various issues.  Despite this history, NBC not only hired her anyway, but gave her the timeslot held by two black anchors (Al Roker and Tamron Hall).  What really prompted NBC to cancel her show was a decision that the blowback they were receiving from their own staff wasn’t worth it, due to the low ratings of her show.

Skipping past Hughes brief history of blackface, we get to the heart of his issue: a proposed zero-tolerance policy toward anyone who has ever worn blackface, and the way in which it would “thin out the supply of reputable public figures rather quickly”.  To make his point, he then rolls out a long list white actors and late-night personalities who have donned blackface for commercials, movies, or TV.  He names a few famous dead actors and actresses for good measure.  That’s strike two against this piece.  It’s a complete dodge of the issue at hand (which is the past racist behavior of elected officials, and what consequences if any should result), and a transparently obvious dig not just at the left, but the “Hollywood left”.

Having chosen Bouie’s argument as representative, Hughes presumes to knock it down with this: “Anyone uncomfortable with the liquidation of much of America’s artistic class should reject the idea of a retroactive zero-tolerance policy toward blackface. Instead, we should take a more measured approach, one that, without minimizing the ugly legacy of minstrelsy, allows a modicum of mercy for the accused and accounts for the intentions of the transgressor.”  We’ll call this strike three, because as with seemingly anything involving redress of harm to black people in this country, the “more measured approach” is already regularly-applied–and the way blackface is treated will be no different.

Even as I write this, Northam remains in office, attempts to shame him into resigning having failed.  He is still deploying what others have called “the Shaggy defense”, saying he wasn’t the person in blackface or the person in the Klan hood and robe.  He’s even attempted to pivot to making some sort of racial reconciliation the theme of his remaining years in office.  That effort is off to a poor start, since he made the obvious mistake of calling enslaved Africans “indentured servants” before being corrected by his black interviewer, Gayle King.  Mark Herring remains in office as well.

A fourth strike for the piece’s omission of Republicans from among the “professionally offended”.  Despite being a party with a candidate for multiple statewide offices in Virginia who campaigned on preserving Confederate monuments, and a state senate majority leader who edited a yearbook at Virginia Military Institute chock full of racist photos and slurs, this same party (to say nothing of the President of the United States) had the audacity to call for the resignations of Northam, Justin Fairfax (the lieutenant governor facing 2 allegations of sexual assault), and Mark Herring (the attorney general).

Hughes quotes Bayard Rustin at length in advocating for his “more measured approach” to those who demonstrated sufficiently poor judgment to think blackface an appropriate thing to do.  Rustin is worth quoting in full here:

“I think the time will come in the future when the Negro will be accepted into the social, economic, and political life of our country when it will no longer be dangerous to do this sort of thing, and then, of course, we would not be opposed to minstrels per se.”

If NBC executives felt sufficiently comfortable with throwing two black anchors out of their time slot in favor of a white woman with a history of making racist comments, how accepted are black people really in the social and economic life of our country?  If voters could replace the country’s only black president with the man who spent a majority of the preceding decade cheerleading for the birther movement, how accepted are black people really in the political life of our country?  With neighborhoods and schools re-segregating and supposedly-liberal northerners fighting the integration of their schools today, it seems we are a long way from a time when we can afford to tee-hee about minstrelsy.

The Virtue Signalers Won’t Change the World

Posted on by Scott

A piece well-worth the time to read, regardless of your ideology.  I disagree with Dr. McWhorter’s characterization of anti-racism as religion (a critique made far more eloquently and convincingly by Dr. Glenn Loury) as overly simplistic.  As the eldest child of immigrants who came to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1969, my chief objection to the piece is my parents’ generation being held up as examples that anti-black racism wasn’t sufficiently onerous to prevent their success.  I see these examples held up often in conservative circles and they never seem to go beneath the surface.

McWhorter (and others) severely underestimate the degree to which having immigrant parents is an advantage–not just in terms of different expectations, worldview, and culture, but because of the absence of baggage tied to the country’s history. The mantra he blithely refers to in the beginning of that paragraph is one I only recall hearing once or twice in the 24 years I lived at home before moving out–and only in jest, not seriously.  Black people whose parents and grandparents were born in the United States almost certainly remember a time when that mantra was also a lived experience.  Interestingly enough, the very piece McWhorter links to says the following:

“While U.S. born blacks have had to battle generations of institutional racism, such as predatory lending, that has put them at a socioeconomic and psychological disadvantage that some immigrants have not experienced in this country.“

That shortcoming aside, McWhorter is making a good faith argument.  His desire is for meaningful action on the part of progressives to improve the lives of black Americans.  While I’m not a fan of the term “virtue signaling” (it’s a pejorative often found in the mouths of conservatives making bad-faith arguments), McWhorter is right in describing what one might call “performative activism” as a dead end.

Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t Voldemort

Posted on by Scott
I’m no Harvard-trained historian like Leah Wright Rigeur (https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty/leah-wright-rigueur).  I’m a 40-something black man with a wife and 3-year-old twins who has written software (and led teams that write software) for over 20 years.  That experience, my upbringing in Maryland as the son of two Jamaican parents, my travels to various parts of North American, the Caribbean, western Europe, Scandinavia, and my engagement with black conservatives both in my family and acquaintances online give me a different perspective on the topic of race.  While there are certainly mistakes black liberals make when talking about race (if not some of the same mistakes black conservatives make when talking about race), they aren’t the focus of this piece.
I focus here on black conservatives because in the Trump era, I think authentic black conservatives are perhaps the only credible voices remaining for an ideology that has otherwise been thoroughly-discredited by the actions and policies of mainstream conservatives in the form of the Republican Party.  I see merit in their pro-family, pro-faith, pro-entrepreneurial, and fiscally conservative positions.  Like them, I also hope to see a political landscape where both major parties are compelled to seek black votes to retain or gain political power with real policy changes, and I believe a black conservatism divorced from mainstream conservative could be a vehicle for that if presented more effectively.
Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t Voldemort
No one seems to live rent-free in the heads of as many black conservatives as Ta-Nehisi Coates.  I’ve heard and read criticism of him from Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Coleman Hughes, Kmele Foster, and other black conservatives.  Ali has accused him of spreading racial poison.  McWhorter has on multiple occasions mocked Coates because of how much white liberals seem to like his work.  To me, the criticism comes across as more than a little elitist.  Nearly every critic I’ve named either attended, currently attends, or teaches at an Ivy League university.  Coates by contrast dropped out of Howard University.  By simultaneously not taking the ideas Coates puts forward seriously enough, and by making their criticism more about him and those of his fans who are white than about the flaws in his ideas, all of these critics do the cause of black conservatism a disservice.  In a recent episode of the Fifth Column podcast that’s been making the rounds, the panelists (which included a number of the critics named earlier, plus Thomas Chatterton Williams) only reluctantly brought up Coates’ name, and after that skirted around it with various euphemisms as if he were a mythic figure instead of a flesh-and-blood person.
There are substantive grounds on which to challenge the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates.  Having read his essays for a few years now (along with his book Between the World and Me), I think his atheism contributes to making his worldview far too negative.  It also places him outside the traditional of the black Christian church–perhaps the key institution within the black community–which disconnects him from a critical element for understanding how and why the community acts the way it does.  And I say that as someone who respects Coates’ work greatly.  Dr. Chidike Okeem has made substantive criticisms of the work (not the man) from a conservative perspective.  Dr. Sandy Darity has also done so.
Coates’ black conservative critics would do well to follow the examples of Okeem and Darity.  Conceding that Coates is a talented writer doesn’t weaken truly constructive criticism in the least.  Acknowledging that his experience as a child in inner city Baltimore is shared by too many black boys in this country doesn’t weaken constructive criticism either.  These concessions and acknowledgements would give the criticism far more credibility than they currently have–or at least help to dispel the impression that the criticisms are due to jealousy or some factor other than fundamental disagreement with Coates’ ideas.
Maybe Actually Talk About Race, Instead of Just Dunking on Black People?
It is entirely possible (if not probable) that there are black conservatives having in-depth and nuanced conversations about blackness, whiteness, and “otherness” in America that I’ve completely missed.  But most of what I see today within mainstream conservatism, black conservatism (both authentic and fake), and from notable figures on the left is dunking on black people.  Glenn Loury at least brings data, and a genuine love for black people to his criticism, but ultimately he’s still dunking on black people.  Barack Obama did this at various points throughout his presidency.  Bill Cosby gained even more of a following than he already had for doing this (prior to his downfall for decades of predatory sexual behavior).  Dr. Ben Carson gave speeches on this topic for years before he ran for president and became HUD secretary under Trump.  It seems clear enough that dunking on black people (particularly in front of mostly-white audiences) served the interests of Obama, Cosby, and Carson pretty well (as it did for Bill Clinton during his presidency).  But it definitely didn’t help black people.
To be clear, I’m not saying that discussions of out-of-wedlock births, work ethic,  violence, or criminal behavior are somehow out-of-bounds for discussion.  Exercising agency or personal responsibility (whether your reasons are morality or simple pragmatism) can be a key ally in escaping unfavorable circumstances.  I’m saying that isn’t where the discussion should end–and too often black conservatives are in agreement with non-black counterparts.
Among black conservatives, there seems to be an impatience with the relative lack of economic progress of black people since the passage of the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Fair Housing Acts in 1964, 1965, and 1968.  They can readily cite many statistics measuring the many ways in which black people are trailing their white, Asian, and Hispanic counterparts in the United States.  Too often unexplored are the variety of ways in which the federal government retreated from full enforcement of civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing on behalf of black people in the same way it did after Reconstruction.  Housing segregation, and the ways in which school funding formulas tend to result in segregated and under-resourced schools.  It is one thing to point out the number of decades that have elapsed since the 1960s and the relatively small amount of progress for black people during that time.  But that lack of progress looks a lot different when you realize that the federal government ceased any real enforcement of those laws after a decade (if even that long).

Calling Out Racist Voters Is Satisfying. But It Comes at a Political Cost.

Posted on by Scott

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/18/bernie-sanders-racist-voters/

I’m not sure what took so long for the “broad political left” to conclude that Trump is a racist.  Before he even ran for president, there was his cheerleading for the birther conspiracy, his insistence on the guilt of the Central Park Five despite their exoneration by DNA evidence, derogatory comments about Native Americans (back in the 90s when their casinos were competition for his), and being sued (along with his father) by the Department of Justice in the 1970s for discriminating against blacks in housing.  It should also be noted that quite a bit of the so-called mainstream media still uses euphemisms to characterize Trump’s behavior.

From this point forward however, Ms. Gray seems to be playing a game.  On the one hand, there’s a subtle criticism of The Daily Beast for not publishing the full context of Sanders’ remark.  On the other, a concession that “Sanders’s comment didn’t make much sense”.  Finally, she tries to rationalize Sanders’ statement by comparing with those of other politicians.

This game doesn’t work because unlike Gillum, McCain, O’Rourke, or Obama, Sanders gave white voters who didn’t vote for black candidates solely because of their race an excuse.  He renamed their rationale as “[feeling] uncomfortable” when even the author of this piece concedes it is racist by definition.  Sanders engaged in what many in the supposedly-liberal mainstream media have done for the better part of 2 years since Trump’s election–find some reason (any reason at all) for Trump’s victory that didn’t involve racism.  Many column inches were written about economic anxiety, fear of change, change happening too quickly, etc.  How could it be that people who voted for Obama would vote for Trump, some pieces asked (not mentioning, or purposely ignoring the outcome of the midterm election after Obama’s re-election).

To be fair, the author of this piece is correct in describing the ways that racism is exploited by politicians from both parties.  Even in this election cycle, the candidates of color and women who won the nomination of the Democratic party (and the general election as well in some cases) for various seats across the country (New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Minnesota are just some examples) often had to beat the party establishment’s choice to do so.

It is one thing to argue that you shouldn’t label people as “deplorables” or “racists” even if they are.  it is quite another to essentially argue that it was ok for Sanders to equivocate because it will gain him necessary white votes in 2020 if and when he runs for president again. The sad truth is that assertions of what type of candidates “the country is ready for” continue to be driven by those with the most backward beliefs and attitudes because too many in the majority who aren’t racist, misogynist, or xenophobic are either silent, or willing to equivocate like Sanders did.  Perhaps the challenges to these old and tired stereotypes need to come from the people instead of politicians.

Thoughts on America’s Need for a Healthy Conservatism

Posted on by Scott

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/09/gop-destroying-conservatism.html

The link above is Andrew Sullivan’s latest diary entry for New York Magazine (his regular gig since “unretiring” from blogging).  Any analysis of this piece must begin with the picture that precedes the first word.  Behind Trump stand Mike Pence, the current vice president, and Paul Ryan, the current speaker of the House and 2012 vice presidential candidate on Mitt Romney’s ticket.  Any column that purports to discuss the need for a healthy conservatism and fails to even name two of Trump’s key enablers–both long-time members of the mainstream conservative movement–is already falling short of its purported goal.  There is no mention of either man in Sullivan’s column.

Instead, Sullivan puts forward the things he is for as a conservative, and references a book by Roger Scruton that he feels defines conservatism well.  While he references a few of the ideals and people I typically hear from other conservative thinkers, what Sullivan ultimately describes as conservatism is ideal mostly disconnected from both history and its current political expression.  He attempts to separate the Republican Party from conservatism as well, as if a philosophy of how a state should function can realistically be separated from a party in power claiming to hold its ideals dear. But the most telling omission from Sullivan’s hagiographic treatment of conservatism is Barry Goldwater.  Only by not mentioning Goldwater at all can Sullivan allow his false equivalency instinct to take over and blame “the left” for putting his (false) ideal of conservatism under siege and resort to the same tired, pejorative use of the term “social justice” too common among conservatives to describe the advocacy efforts of the left for those who are neither white nor male.

After getting in his requisite dig at the left regarding their attacks on conservatism, I find it especially puzzling that Sullivan’s conservatism is supposedly “anguished when the criminal justice system loses legitimacy, because of embedded racism.”  I’ve seen precious little evidence that mainstream conservatism sees the criminal justice system as somehow illegitimate because of its disparate treatment of people of color.  Other conservatives, like Sohrab Ahmari, Erin Dunne, and David French have publicly rethought certain positions regarding the criminal justice system in the aftermath of Botham Shem Jean’s senseless death at the hands of the police.  Sullivan doesn’t do that here.  Meanwhile, New Yorkers of color alone can point to the abuse of Abner Louima by the police (in 1997), the wrongful death of Patrick Dorismond at the hands of police (in 2000), the conditions of Rikers Island, and other aspects of the criminal justice system to question its legitimacy.

So-called mainstream conservatism is deathly ill precisely because it lacks sufficient diversity of race, class, gender, and faith both among its most high-profile advocates and its rank-and-file.  The small number of its advocates who are neither white nor male are given prominence only because they speak in favor of the status quo–not for a genuine equality.

Sullivan is correct in describing the degree to which the GOP is actively destroying what he sees as the tradition of mainstream conservatism.  They believe in tax cuts to the exclusion of all else–including fiscal solvency.  Their deregulatory fervor will result in an environment that will put our health at risk.  Their unstinting support of Trump lays bare the contempt the GOP has for the rule of law–unless it applies to those they dislike.  Which makes it all the more jarring when he writes: “I also believe we need to slow the pace of demographic and cultural change.”  Whether he intends the statement to do so or not, Sullivan gives aid and comfort not just to the immigration restrictionist, but to Stephen Miller and those like him who seek not to slow the pace of immigration but to reverse it.  When Sullivan writes that “the foreign-born population is at a proportion last seen in 1910″, he effectively endorses the arguments of Jeff Sessions, who spoke glowingly of a 1924 immigration law with the express purpose of keeping Asians, Africans, southern Europeans, and eastern Europeans out of the United States.  He can insist all he wants that seeking to slow the pace of immigration “is not inherently racist”, but when his arguments can’t be meaningfully distinguished from those of Jeff Sessions, he ought not be surprised when he’s not treated as arguing in good faith.

There might be something to the Sullivan argument regarding “elite indifference to mass immigration”, were it not for the fact of a Senate immigration passed with 68 votes in the recent past that didn’t become law because the GOP-controlled House refused to take it up (perhaps fearing it would pass).  No doubt some in the GOP want cheap, exploitable labor.  The Democrats may indeed encourage it because they think it will get them votes.  Neither of this changes the necessity of immigrants to our labor force.  There are plenty of difficult jobs Americans don’t want to do that immigrants will do.

The following passage of Sullivan’s latest diary is a fairly tight summary of straw man arguments and falsehoods:

“A nation has to mean something; to survive, it needs a conservative weaving of past, present, and future, as Burke saw it. And you cannot do that if you see this country as a blight on the face of the earth and an instrument of eternal oppression; or if you replace a healthy, self-critical patriotism with an ugly, racist nationalism that aims to restore the very worst of this country’s past, rather than preserve its extraordinary and near-unique achievements.”

There may be some that see the United States of America as a blight and an instrument of “eternal oppression”, but I have my doubts that the majority of the left believes this as he infers.  The idea that this country ever widely believed in a healthy, self-critical patriotism is laughable.  You need only look at school board battles of what to teach our children as history to know that many would prefer to teach them propaganda than the truth. The ugly, racist nationalism to which he refers was never truly past.  It may have retreated into the shadows or underground, but was never entirely gone.  The continuing battle over Confederate monuments and the endurance of the Lost Cause myth should be sufficient evidence of that.

Sullivan’s idea that somehow a healthy conservatism would rescue the United States from the position it finds itself in is wishful thinking.  Without an honest reckoning with Barry Goldwater’s role in shaping what conservatism has become, and how easily the purported conservative party was taken over by Trump, mainstream conservatism will be fully and deservedly discredited.