" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can und…
" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can understand the argument that you can't go straight from discrimination to equality, otherwise the effects of the discrimination are never addressed. But there's so little of that in practice. It's almost always just a vindictive game of "it's our turn to be the oppressors now."
And if there was overall a sense of wise balancing, of surgical application of temporary evidence-based interventions with a feasible and limited goal, I could support it.
However, it's hard to find such sentiments in the movement. Instead the CSJ advocates seem to be institutionalizing systemic "counter-oppression" as a perpetual right and entitlement.
I sometimes want to ask "if in 2124, 100 years from now, there was still a perceived need for substantial positive discrimination to rebalance the books, would that be a success or a failure in your worldview?". I have NEVER seen any time limit supported by advocates. (I think a supreme court justice in the 90's was talking about giving it another 25 years before it should not be needed). According to many advocates, the world is as bad for POC today as it was before Rosa Parks, they are extremely resistant to conceding any progress achieved by over half a century of positive discrimination, yet they want to continue the same policies "as long as needed" - as long as there are any disparities.
My view is: "If the unilateralist policies are objectively and measurably working to reduce the gaps, then we should be able to project how long until sufficient parity is achieved and continue on course towards that time; if they are not moving effectively towards a parity goal after decades, we should rethink the policies.".
In a democratic society, I see positive discrimination as similar to chemotherapy - inherently dangerous and unhealthy, but potentially helpful in specific cases in well calculated limited doses for limited periods with close monitoring and based on solid evidence. But I see nearly zero inclination towards that latter approach. Instead it's framed as a morality based entitlement, without regard to actual outcomes.
Alas, I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations. Not everybody, but a substantial subset. Societies need to beware of institutionalizing perverse incentives, no matter how well meaning.
“ I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations.”
I don’t think this is what’s going wrong. I don’t think black kids, for example, are holding themselves back in school so they’ll get “extra power or considerations.” Nor, in fact, do I think they HAVE extra power or considerations.
I think a selection of people, white and black, get a great deal of money and power from peddling a particular narrative on racism. This narrative has the advantage of being true in some cases. But its effects are smaller than they pretend and the causes are more complex than they pretend and they benefit from hiding this fact (I’m currently writing about Roland Fryer and his research on police violence, which is a case study in this phenomenon).
Black people in general don’t benefit from this narrative. And they don’t want to prevent themselves from healing and succeeding. Even if they received benefits, which again, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don’t, those benefits wouldn’t be worth the downsides. But the narrative is a powerful thing. And there’s a great deal of effort and money put into spreading it. Again, people of all colours are convinced by it.
We are not disagreeing, actually. The dynamics of not wanting to admit any progress and gaining power by claiming victimhood are manifested largely by a subset of the population - who nevertheless have an influence on others.
One of the things I got from recently beginning to read Dalrymple is that the concepts and framings of academia filter down to ordinary people in distorted forms. So it would not be that black school kids are weighing the benefits and advantages of claiming victimhood in their identity for themselves, but that they inherit the results of opinion leaders who are making those choices, consciously or unconsciously. For example, very few grade schoolers are comparing Roland Fryer's research with BLM's framing of society and choosing the latter for conscious advantage. But that doesn't mean that the embrace of victimhood as the path to power is not filtering down to grade schoolers. Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not.
I agree with your description of the dynamics, for example of exaggeration and minimization of some underlying kernel of truth, but I see those dynamics as being partly empowered as a manifestation of the forces I was describing, rather than as being opposed to or independent of what I am suggesting.
"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence that minority kids can wield in this way.
For starters, the majority of these kids go to schools where their teachers are also people of colour. They don't get to play the racism card. Second, how often do you think this is effective even in cases where the teacher is white? I spend a great deal of time reading about this kind of stuff, and can only think of a handful of stories where a teacher has faced any consequences because of a student's accusation of racism in the past five years. This, out of what? Around 100,000 schools?
BLM's narrative wasn't embraced as a path to power. BLM *used* the narrative as a path to power (and mainly money). Absolutely. But the people who embraced it just swallowed the narrative because they lacked the critical thinking skills to see through it. A combination of news profiteering, social media engineering, and actual racism in policing, convinced millions of people, many of them white, that there was a genuine emergency. They truly believed tens of thousands of unarmed black people were being gunned down for sport.
Speaking of narratives, the narrative that black people in general gain from crying racism is pervasive, false, and is also pushed by people trying to gain power and influence. Ibram X Kendi and Nikole Hannah Jones and Robin DiAngelo do not represent the overwhelming majority of black people. And certainly not black kids. But I keep seeing people attribute their hucksterism far too broadly.
The narrative about endless racism certainly breeds hopelessness or apathy in some kids (as do the realities of their environment in some cases), but not a sense that there's power to be gained through it. In fact, the powerlessness that it breeds is one of the key reasons why I think it harms black people far more than "systemic racism" or other forms of interpersonal racism. And these latter two don't benefit black people either.
As Fryer and others have shown, when black kids are given opportunities and have high expectations placed on them, they work as hard and perform as well as anybody else. Even if they've previously been underperforming.
Very few people are dumb enough to believe that they're better off playing the victim than taking advantage of their opportunities. But some people are cynical or stupid enough to prevent them from getting those opportunities because they're busy debating whether saying "Grandfathered in" is racist.
" What they don't take into account is that by inverting the bias and discrimination and dismissing mutual benefit and reciprocity as underpinnings of their new society, they inherently create permanent conflict - which they won't always win"
🎯 I think, in some cases there's also a genuine degree of trying to balance the books. I can understand the argument that you can't go straight from discrimination to equality, otherwise the effects of the discrimination are never addressed. But there's so little of that in practice. It's almost always just a vindictive game of "it's our turn to be the oppressors now."
Yes, that rebalancing is the part I understand.
And if there was overall a sense of wise balancing, of surgical application of temporary evidence-based interventions with a feasible and limited goal, I could support it.
However, it's hard to find such sentiments in the movement. Instead the CSJ advocates seem to be institutionalizing systemic "counter-oppression" as a perpetual right and entitlement.
I sometimes want to ask "if in 2124, 100 years from now, there was still a perceived need for substantial positive discrimination to rebalance the books, would that be a success or a failure in your worldview?". I have NEVER seen any time limit supported by advocates. (I think a supreme court justice in the 90's was talking about giving it another 25 years before it should not be needed). According to many advocates, the world is as bad for POC today as it was before Rosa Parks, they are extremely resistant to conceding any progress achieved by over half a century of positive discrimination, yet they want to continue the same policies "as long as needed" - as long as there are any disparities.
My view is: "If the unilateralist policies are objectively and measurably working to reduce the gaps, then we should be able to project how long until sufficient parity is achieved and continue on course towards that time; if they are not moving effectively towards a parity goal after decades, we should rethink the policies.".
In a democratic society, I see positive discrimination as similar to chemotherapy - inherently dangerous and unhealthy, but potentially helpful in specific cases in well calculated limited doses for limited periods with close monitoring and based on solid evidence. But I see nearly zero inclination towards that latter approach. Instead it's framed as a morality based entitlement, without regard to actual outcomes.
Alas, I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations. Not everybody, but a substantial subset. Societies need to beware of institutionalizing perverse incentives, no matter how well meaning.
“ I believe that it's human nature that if you say to ANY group "you will get extra power and considerations for only so long as you don't achieve parity", then there will be many within that group who correctly perceive their best option being not to heal or grow into equal opportunity and equal achievement so they can benefit from special considerations.”
I don’t think this is what’s going wrong. I don’t think black kids, for example, are holding themselves back in school so they’ll get “extra power or considerations.” Nor, in fact, do I think they HAVE extra power or considerations.
I think a selection of people, white and black, get a great deal of money and power from peddling a particular narrative on racism. This narrative has the advantage of being true in some cases. But its effects are smaller than they pretend and the causes are more complex than they pretend and they benefit from hiding this fact (I’m currently writing about Roland Fryer and his research on police violence, which is a case study in this phenomenon).
Black people in general don’t benefit from this narrative. And they don’t want to prevent themselves from healing and succeeding. Even if they received benefits, which again, in the overwhelming majority of cases they don’t, those benefits wouldn’t be worth the downsides. But the narrative is a powerful thing. And there’s a great deal of effort and money put into spreading it. Again, people of all colours are convinced by it.
We are not disagreeing, actually. The dynamics of not wanting to admit any progress and gaining power by claiming victimhood are manifested largely by a subset of the population - who nevertheless have an influence on others.
One of the things I got from recently beginning to read Dalrymple is that the concepts and framings of academia filter down to ordinary people in distorted forms. So it would not be that black school kids are weighing the benefits and advantages of claiming victimhood in their identity for themselves, but that they inherit the results of opinion leaders who are making those choices, consciously or unconsciously. For example, very few grade schoolers are comparing Roland Fryer's research with BLM's framing of society and choosing the latter for conscious advantage. But that doesn't mean that the embrace of victimhood as the path to power is not filtering down to grade schoolers. Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not.
I agree with your description of the dynamics, for example of exaggeration and minimization of some underlying kernel of truth, but I see those dynamics as being partly empowered as a manifestation of the forces I was describing, rather than as being opposed to or independent of what I am suggesting.
"Even a young student might observe, for example, a teacher who is afraid to punish a minority kid because they greatly fear being accused of racism, and intuit that as one of the levers they themselves can also use for power (getting their way) - consciously or not."
Again, I think you're vastly overestimating the power and influence that minority kids can wield in this way.
For starters, the majority of these kids go to schools where their teachers are also people of colour. They don't get to play the racism card. Second, how often do you think this is effective even in cases where the teacher is white? I spend a great deal of time reading about this kind of stuff, and can only think of a handful of stories where a teacher has faced any consequences because of a student's accusation of racism in the past five years. This, out of what? Around 100,000 schools?
BLM's narrative wasn't embraced as a path to power. BLM *used* the narrative as a path to power (and mainly money). Absolutely. But the people who embraced it just swallowed the narrative because they lacked the critical thinking skills to see through it. A combination of news profiteering, social media engineering, and actual racism in policing, convinced millions of people, many of them white, that there was a genuine emergency. They truly believed tens of thousands of unarmed black people were being gunned down for sport.
Speaking of narratives, the narrative that black people in general gain from crying racism is pervasive, false, and is also pushed by people trying to gain power and influence. Ibram X Kendi and Nikole Hannah Jones and Robin DiAngelo do not represent the overwhelming majority of black people. And certainly not black kids. But I keep seeing people attribute their hucksterism far too broadly.
The narrative about endless racism certainly breeds hopelessness or apathy in some kids (as do the realities of their environment in some cases), but not a sense that there's power to be gained through it. In fact, the powerlessness that it breeds is one of the key reasons why I think it harms black people far more than "systemic racism" or other forms of interpersonal racism. And these latter two don't benefit black people either.
As Fryer and others have shown, when black kids are given opportunities and have high expectations placed on them, they work as hard and perform as well as anybody else. Even if they've previously been underperforming.
Very few people are dumb enough to believe that they're better off playing the victim than taking advantage of their opportunities. But some people are cynical or stupid enough to prevent them from getting those opportunities because they're busy debating whether saying "Grandfathered in" is racist.