It’s hard not to be an activist these days. As society gets more and more passionate about more and more things (all while thinking less and less), the potential for extremism is at an all-time high. And stoking the flames of that extremism is a steady stream of information, ready to support whatever viewpoint you already hold.
This is an interesting topic. I've taken a number of those where are you politically tests and come up very close to center on both x & y axis. The thing is that's an aggerate. Depending on the individual issue I might be quite far from center. Add to that where I stand on an issue with respect to someone deciding my worldview, I might seem radical, or not. I speak in terms of myself here because that's who I have the best chance of objective evaluation of. Deciding someone's worldview based upon an aspect of a discussion is fraught with problems.
I must admit that I am prone to fall prey to an incorrect decision is when people mention a political party. I tend to dismiss them as partisan binary thinkers. That could be wrong since they can be talking about a specific thing, rather than a broad generalization - sometimes.
The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning. I find it frustrating when people do that with (to) me, so I try to be mindful of when I'm doing it. But then the extreme bias of someone is sometimes hard to ignore. I'm often not so good at the discussion thing because of this.
"The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning"
Absolutely. This is such a key point. So many people have become so confident in their mind reading skills, simply because somebody says something that can be interpreted to be left/right-wing or worse because they presented new information.
I do my best to address people's arguments without respect to their identity or their politics. Do your arguments make sense? Do you have evidence to support your claims? Nothing else is really relevant.
I have come to believe that misattribution of intention and motive to others is one of the most common cognitive pitfalls of our species. It's just extremely easy to attribute to opponents the motives, beliefs, or desires that make them look bad and easily mocked or dismissed or disparaged.
Sometimes we may be right in assessing motives, but many other times we are not.
So it's good to step back, whenever we say "the reason X supports Y is that X wants to do Z", and recognize how very often that last part is projection. This takes continual monitoring. I have come to detest neo-progressivism (wokeness) so much that I have to be careful about not doing this, or at least hold and present such characterizations as tentative, speculative, partial, and subject to change.
Let me give an example. Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind. If confronted with the fact that the large bulk (over 90%) of those in category D were white, such activists shrug it off by assuming the intention to harm Blacks was so strong that harming ten times as many whites was an acceptable cost. Ascribing the worst of motives to the policy makers is key to Reinforcing the Narrative (of Oppression), the prime directive of neo-progressivism.
"Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind."
The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅 but certainly everything I've ever read on the topic suggests very strongly that the motivation behind redlining was to keep black communities not only poor but segregated.
And given that at the time of redlining, the U.S. government was very actively engaged in numerous measures designed to do just that, I don't find it difficult to believe that the was intention to harm black people.
I think once you move back in time past 1970 or so, it's extraordinarily difficult to argue that the oppression of black people in America was a "narrative."
I'm saying it's a narrative today, to interpret the core intention of redlining back then to be keeping Black people poor. I agree with you that there was substantial racial bias in those days, so my questioning that imputed intent is not about proclaiming that the folks were too moral to do so - it's more about looking at the facts. So let's examine the fuller context, generally omitted from consideration by those seeking to Reinforce the Narrative today.
In the following, I will make some assertions. For now, please just temporarily assume for the sake of argument that we can find confirming information when needed. That is, follow and agree or disagree with the logic IF the assertions can be evidenced. If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK? Let's not get derailed by jumping on evidence until we have (conditionally) explored the reasoning first, be we can circle back.
"Redlining" involved drawing geographic districts labeled A, B, C and D, as partial guides to the security of making loans in those areas; this could be taken into account along with the individual financial status of the loan seeker. The lowest rating, D, tended to be in poor parts of town, where the default rate was considered likely to be higher, and where it could be harder for a bank to recoup their principal after a default (harder to sell at a sufficient price). The primary purpose was to benefit loan makers (banks) with some very relevant information which might help them decide on an appropriate interest rate to cover the risk (or not make the loan at all, depending on their risk tolerance).
Of course, if a bank had better knowledge that a lower rating was not justified (ie: that the default risk was actually lower than implied by the geographic district), they could still choose to make lower interest loans at a profit (even after handling the actual default rate). Banks were not loaning out their own money, they loaned out the money of their depositors, so if they made bad loans that was bad for ordinary people who used the bank for saving.
Interestingly, Black owned banks also used the ratings in their loan making; they did not in general disagree with the ratings based on their knowledge of local conditions (or they would have made more loans at lower interest than white owned banks). Black owned banks had the same incentive to not unduly risk the deposits of their mostly Black customers, but also an incentive to make competitive loans (including to Black people in their community).
The large bulk of the people living in zone D were white in some analyses, and some of the districts where 100% white. Nevertheless, since Black folks did tend to live in poorer districts, even if the system had involved zero racial bias per se, they would have shown up disproportionately in zone D - an example of reverse causation (race neutral identification of poorer districts combined with an external correlation between race and wealth, will result in relatively more people of a less wealthy race living in poorer zones).
Of course, given the era, it's likely that race DID play some part in designating the neighborhoods; the districting was done by assembling local experts (eg: realtors or loan initiators with local experience), at least some of whom would likely have had biases and stereotypes which influenced any statistical data (or accurate knowledge) used in creating the boundaries. How much this subjective influence prevailed is hard to determine at this stage; were their loan risk assessments mostly accurate, or grossly distorted by unfounded racial stereotypes or somewhere in the middle?
If that biased influence had been major, then one would have expected Black owned banks to have been less influenced by the inaccurate risk summaries implied by the zones. They might have known from their own experience that the risks of default were not as high as the biased local experts had stereotyped them to be, and made loans accordingly - undercutting the interest rates charged by the misled white owned banks, or giving loans that the white owned banks would not have. But apparently that was not the case; they apparently followed the risk ratings just as much as white owned banks did.
Note that at this point we are still talking about the primary purpose being to help banks in risk assessment, with some degree of inaccuracy being hypothesized among the local real estate experts based on unconscious racial stereotyping. That is still not a case of intending to deliberately and consciously harm Black people by knowingly misleading banks against the financial interests of those banks (accuracy was in the best interest of the banks).
In my reading of the above, I have seen absolutely no evidence that there was systematic intention by the local experts drawing up the boundaries between A, B, C, and D zones, to knowingly provide false information to (white or Black owned) banks for the purpose of hurting the minority of those living in zone D who were Black.
The parsimonious interpretation would be that the core purpose of all 4 zones was to assist banks in accurately assessing geographic-related default risk as part of their loan making decisions. That desire for accuracy could have in some cases (and for some zones) have been somewhat inaccurate due to bias from unconscious racial stereotypes - but by far most of those assessed as zone D were white so this was probably a limited effect. The evidence I have seen is consistent with this interpretation.
(Aside: by an "unconscious racial bias", I mean somebody holding a false stereotype about race, without knowing that that it's false. The bias is unconscious, and the person falsely believes their model of things to be accurate, so is not consciously deceiving anybody. This is different than conscious deception.)
Contrast that with the Narrative today: that the zones were systematically created (by The Government or by the white hive mind) for the purpose of harming Black people and keeping them from getting ahead. I see no evidence supporting this, and significant evidence countering it. However, imputing such evil motives to those drawing the maps is 100% convenient for reinforcing the narrative, not coincidentally.
Consider a different area. Observing that Asians tend to do the best on SAT and whites come in second, while Blacks tend to do the worst - the Narrative could interpret this outcome as the very motivation for creating and using the SAT from the very beginning - designed and intended specifically to keep Black people down. The purveyors of the Narrative have no interest in honestly evaluating the real motives for the SAT based on consideration of the full evidence, they thrive on ideologically driven subjectivity in Reinforcing the Narrative.
I see the imputation of nefarious racial motives to real estate default risk zoning ("redlining") as similar.
But I'm willing to hear your reasoning otherwise.
(I will note that I originally believed the Narrative on the motive behind redlining, but shifted as more evidence arrived - not from the neo-progressive sources pushing the Narrative of course.)
And one more thing - the EFFECTS of redlining, regardless of intention, may have been to make it harder for poor people of all races to rise. So I am NOT saying there is no residual problem from risk zoning left to be addressed (that issue can be discussed separately); I am using this example purely as an example of narrative-reinforcing bias in imputation of bad intention and motive.
Indeed, I believe that most of the neo-progressive ideology is well intentioned. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and likewise bad outcomes need not have been caused by bad intentions.
"If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK?"
Ooof, this is an entire essay!😅
Yeah, if your claims can be well evidenced (and there are a lot of claims here), your logic isn't necessarily flawed. But the analysis is missing important context even if everything you say here is accurate. It's not reasonable to entirely separate the practice of redlining from the society it existed in and then declare it race-neutral.
For example, you note that black-owned banks followed the same risk assessments as the white owned banks, but don't note that banks were more likely to offer loans in poor white areas than in middle and high income black areas. I find it very hard to believe that race wasn't a factor in those risk assessments. Though proving that would admittedly take more legwork than I'm ready to put in here.😄
You also don't mention practices like "blockbusting", where real estate agents encouraged white families to sell their houses at below market rate by telling them that black families were moving in. These houses were then sold at significant markups to black families.
Or contract buying, that once again, massively disproportionately (I think even exclusively?) targeted black families with onerous lending practices, leaving them homeless if they missed a single payment on their mortgages, whilst simultaneously charging obscene rates of interest that white families didn't have to pay. This, combined with redlining, is one of many reasons why black home ownership lags so far behind white home ownership.
And, of course, the biggest factor is that black families were forced into poor neighbourhoods by segregation and the lack of opportunity and upward mobility that permeated society. To argue that a system that first says "we'll make it incredibly hard for black people to succeed financially, and give them no choice but to live in these poor areas," and then says "we're just appraising these areas based on wealth, race has nothing to do with it!", isn't racist, is a tough argument to make.
But fundamentally, after a certain point, the bad intentions don't lie in applying the prevailing system. They lie in the failure to fix a system that's so transparently discriminatory. And I guess, this is where the "hive mind" framing enters the picture. So many people saw how these practices disproportionately impacted black people. And extraordinarily few did anything about it. Same with segregation. Same with slavery. The hysteria and distrust builds because of the long history of indifference to transparently racist systems.
Hanlon's Razor: we should not infer malice from conduct which can be adequately attributed to incompetence.
I temper that with the idea that it should not be an automatic default assumption. The thing is it can be malice, but not always.
The idea that people of different races cannot have the same disagreements that they have with people of their own race, and it can only be about race is an example of a default assumption of malice. Clearly, people of different races can have disagreement/problems other than race since we are all humans. It would almost be wonderful if there were no "issues" other than racism between people of different races.
Was redlining malice, indifference, or incomitance? The damage was done without regard to motivation. But motivation could be the difference in it happening, or not.
>"The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅"
Let me clarify. Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks".
There are many, many other examples, where any misdeed (real or distorted) by some white person becomes attributed to whites or whiteness. To me that bespeaks an odd kind of gross over-generalizing, or collective guilt, which would only be appropriate if the individual actors in question had obtained group consent (including that of future generations) - or if there was one white hive-mind responsible anything any white person or group does. If one white person (or 2% of white people) did something, then all white people should be held accountable.
Obviously one could do the same for any other race or population group, implying that they have a "hive mind" which justifies speaking of them as a unitary agent with shared beliefs, motivations, and responsibility. However, today at least, such imputation would likely be challenged and rightly so. "Black people" didn't carjack you, some individuals did - without first consulting with any Black hive mind. There's no collective guilt for what other people did, which was not under one's control or strong influence. And that principle should be applied to all population groups. "Right handed people" did not steal your bicycle or break into your shed, a particular person or small group did. Others in that broad group are not responsible.
Today's tendency in some quarters is to disavow personal responsibility for what one has actually done or failed to do, while highlighting the putative collective responsibility of designated other population groups.
Right handers control our destiny in every democracy. Think about it.
"Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks"."
Yeah, sadly this kind of logical fallacy is rife in all social justice movements at the moment. Men vs women, gay vs straight, trans vs "cis", black vs white. The same people who condemn people for judging them for a particular immutable trait gleefully condemn everybody whose immutable traits match their "oppressors."
Finding a bogeyman to blame for all of life's injustices (or your personal failings) on isn't a new instinct unfortunately. The tricky thing is finding the balance between recognising that some people do this, and acknowledging that others really do have genuine grievances.
"banning teachers from advocating “any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America,”
Am I the only one alarmed at this? I hope not.
The falsification and sanitization of history is called revisionism and it is immiscible with democracy, in fact it is explicitly totalitarian. This goes beyond "spin" and "perspective." This is the explicit dissemination of falsehood. I've even read some of the crazier right wingers saying that slavery was a sweet deal, slaves were fed and sheltered. Never mind that they were worked to death or that the master could take their adolescent daughters to the mansion to be sodomized.
No country has a pristine past and America's has a lot more shame than most. It was one of the last countries to abandon slavery, there was the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, native Americans were deliberately infected with smallpox.
The hysteria around CRT is predictable. The wingers claim that it's a form of Socialist indoctrination, that it's being taught to elementary school students, they stop just short of claiming that holding racist views is vital to their identities, which it is.
Yeah, as Marie points out below (and as I do in the conversation), this text isn't in the bill. In fact, I've seen no evidence that it was *ever* in the bill, and nothing like it was in any of the other bills I read while researching the article.
America certainly has plenty to be ashamed of in its history, but this is almost entirely separate to the question of the validity of Critical Race Theory. Again, the question of whether some of the more extreme stuff happening in schools is most accurately described as CRT is irrelevant in my opinion. Nobody cared about CRT until Christopher Rufo but the term in everybody's heads.
The issue is how to improve race education whilst neither hiding the truth nor creating new lies. It feels as if this point is getting lost in the noise.
Yeah... a comment I made on another Substack a few months ago applies here: 'People don’t dislike the far left’s approach to thinking and talking about racism because a sleazeball like Rufo (mis-)labeled it “CRT.” They dislike it because it’s dehumanizing, paranoid, inflammatory, and cultish. They just needed a word for it.'
I remain uncomfortable with calling anything in American politics "left," much less "far left." Far left is peasant collectives. The American political left died in 1939 with revelation of the reality of Stalin's Worker's Paradise and it has never come back.
To call someone like Ocasio-Cortez "far left" doesn't pass the laugh test.
As for the Social Justice Warriors there is nothing at all "leftist" about them; they are outrage junkies and nothing more.
We have reached the point that wanting human freaking decency and justice in governance is regarded in the same light as the killing fields (not far from where I live now).
The trouble with broad and sweeping labels is that none seem to fit. The "left" has not been the least bit liberal for many years and calling them progressive is meaningless. Progress toward what? Opinions vary if it is to something good or bad. Is the "right" conservative? Conserve what? Opinions vary if it is to something good or bad. As I mentioned in another comment, depending upon the individual issue, some would try to assign me to a political tribe, but it would be a lie since I don't check all the boxes on any tribe's statement of ideology.
There are traditional progressive causes like wealth equality, opposition to racism, environmental preservation. But the punch has a dead rat floating in it now as progressivism has come to be identified with grievances and by people who are looking for attention to themselves more than by better lives for all.
Take feminism. Please. What started out as a movement with measurable and tangible goals like wage equality—and achieved some progress toward those goals—quickly became a movement of grievance. where progress couldn't ever be claimed or measured.
When it comes to wage equality I am an ardent feminist; when it comes to "eliminating patriarchal attitudes" I'm not interested. I will continue to advocate for metrical progress but then I don't give a damn about definitions with broad consensus as having more functional utility.
Your personal concept of "left" differs from the common usage in discussion today in the US. Since my writing is motivated by desire to communicate with others based on shared definitions when possible, I will continue to use the definitions with broad consensus as having more functional utility.
The association with a label like "far left" is *always without exception* going to depend on context. There is no absolute and objective framework which transcends time and place. In the Stalinist USSR it will have a different association than in contemporary US usage. If I'm discussion issues with a Stalinist, I'll keep your concept in mind; if I'm discussing things with a contemporary American, I'll use contemporary contextual word definitions.
One of the things I dislike about the "social justice warriors" you reference is how often they focus in distracting word games, rather than agreeing to some shared definitions so we can move into the core of the conceptual disagreement. I'm a bit wary of your framing for similar reasons.
I think your underlying point ("correct" word usage aside) is that the range of political approaches humans have historically adopted exceeds the contemporary American contextual understandings of "far left" to "far right", which is undisputed. Neither Genghis Khan nor Pol Pot fit within the spectrum of contemporary US politics. However, we are not discussing them much today. If we were, I would agree with you that contemporary conceptions of "far left" and "far right" are inadequate. But within contemporary usage, AOC might reasonably be seen as on the far left end of today's mainstream politics, as the terms are used today.
I think you're right. But the point I wish more liberals would understand is that the left is at least as, if not more, guilty of generating that noise.
If we can agree that there is troubling stuff happening in schools (and I think any reasonable person can), then why are so many on the left busy nitpicking about whether it's properly described as CRT or not? Why not address the problem first and worry about terminology afterwards?
I think you've kind of answered that. I would hypothesize that it may be because not everybody is operating in good faith; some participants may use that "nitpicking" as a way to avoid engaging in real discussion, which they are not confident of succeeding at.
A major root of the problem is excessive tribalism. I see neo-progressives smugly saying "opponents of (political) CRT in the classroom are all ignorant and do not even know what (academic) CRT is".
OK, so we bought and read the most widely recommended source, *Critical Race Theory: An Introduction* by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (very important seminal figures in CRT).
It turns out that most of those smug mockers are ignorant of what CRT says. It's not so much about "accurately" portraying history, as about explicitly overturning the liberal order in favor of a post-Marxist revolution - from their own words.
Rather than defend that to the bulk of the American people who would not buy into it, nitpicking can seem like a useful tactic.
That line was removed from the NH bill… might still be in other states’ bills? I think we’re all alarmed at the overreach of some of this anti-CRT legislation, it’s possible to also be alarmed at some of the anti-racist overreach in the classroom.
Well done again. I will describe my own framing of this terminology issue, similar to what you have said but which a few tweaks.
I distinguish "academic CRT" and "political CRT". In politics, "CRT" has a wider meaning than in academia per se; such differences in usage in different domains is not uncommon. This expanded political (implicit) definition is often used BY BOTH SIDES to include practices and framings inspired by CRT, by Robin DiAngelo, by Ibram X Kendi (both very CRT influence), and other related "anti-racism" activists of similar philosophy.
Some opponents of what they perceive as "race craziness" use "CRT" as shorthand for that whole group of concepts, largely derived from academic CRT with enhancements from political activists. That shorthand for "political CRT" with its expanded coverage, is pretty much what Rufo was trying to use as a brand or label, for communicating about "the thing" that's going on in some schools.
However, those on the other side (pro-CRT) are doing the same thing, when they label legislation as "anti-CRT" even if it doesn't mention CRT or prohibit teaching academic teaching of CRT. In that, the opponents of such legislation are using the same expanded sense of political CRT, which they are implicitly defining more broadly than academic CRT.
The retreat by the pro-CRT activists, to tactically using CRT to mean only academic CRT when attacked is pretty much a "mott and bailey" argument. When they are on the attack (eg: criticizing legislation), they use CRT in the broader sense as well. If you prohibit teaching that racism is the true center of American history (eg: per 1619 project), then they believe that's anti-CRT.
Note that the NEA has explicitly endorsed the CRT framework for racial education; it's ambiguous whether they mean the narrow academic or the broader political sense of "CRT" in their endorsement. It's pretty disingenuous to say "CRT is not being taught in K12 schools anyway", when it's widely taught as truth in teaching colleges, and the largest teacher's association is advocating using it as a framework for racial pedagogy.
Damn you are good at this.
🙏 Thanks Marie! I do my best.
As are you! Please write more.
This is an interesting topic. I've taken a number of those where are you politically tests and come up very close to center on both x & y axis. The thing is that's an aggerate. Depending on the individual issue I might be quite far from center. Add to that where I stand on an issue with respect to someone deciding my worldview, I might seem radical, or not. I speak in terms of myself here because that's who I have the best chance of objective evaluation of. Deciding someone's worldview based upon an aspect of a discussion is fraught with problems.
I must admit that I am prone to fall prey to an incorrect decision is when people mention a political party. I tend to dismiss them as partisan binary thinkers. That could be wrong since they can be talking about a specific thing, rather than a broad generalization - sometimes.
The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning. I find it frustrating when people do that with (to) me, so I try to be mindful of when I'm doing it. But then the extreme bias of someone is sometimes hard to ignore. I'm often not so good at the discussion thing because of this.
"The BIG problem with that is that it tends to make us think we are mind readers and/or we assign meaning to the other person's words which may not have that meaning"
Absolutely. This is such a key point. So many people have become so confident in their mind reading skills, simply because somebody says something that can be interpreted to be left/right-wing or worse because they presented new information.
I do my best to address people's arguments without respect to their identity or their politics. Do your arguments make sense? Do you have evidence to support your claims? Nothing else is really relevant.
I have come to believe that misattribution of intention and motive to others is one of the most common cognitive pitfalls of our species. It's just extremely easy to attribute to opponents the motives, beliefs, or desires that make them look bad and easily mocked or dismissed or disparaged.
Sometimes we may be right in assessing motives, but many other times we are not.
So it's good to step back, whenever we say "the reason X supports Y is that X wants to do Z", and recognize how very often that last part is projection. This takes continual monitoring. I have come to detest neo-progressivism (wokeness) so much that I have to be careful about not doing this, or at least hold and present such characterizations as tentative, speculative, partial, and subject to change.
Let me give an example. Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind. If confronted with the fact that the large bulk (over 90%) of those in category D were white, such activists shrug it off by assuming the intention to harm Blacks was so strong that harming ten times as many whites was an acceptable cost. Ascribing the worst of motives to the policy makers is key to Reinforcing the Narrative (of Oppression), the prime directive of neo-progressivism.
"Many neo-progressive arguments presuppose that the salient motive of red-lining was to keep Black people poor, that it was primarily a tool of the white hive mind to harm the Black hive mind."
The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅 but certainly everything I've ever read on the topic suggests very strongly that the motivation behind redlining was to keep black communities not only poor but segregated.
And given that at the time of redlining, the U.S. government was very actively engaged in numerous measures designed to do just that, I don't find it difficult to believe that the was intention to harm black people.
I think once you move back in time past 1970 or so, it's extraordinarily difficult to argue that the oppression of black people in America was a "narrative."
I'm saying it's a narrative today, to interpret the core intention of redlining back then to be keeping Black people poor. I agree with you that there was substantial racial bias in those days, so my questioning that imputed intent is not about proclaiming that the folks were too moral to do so - it's more about looking at the facts. So let's examine the fuller context, generally omitted from consideration by those seeking to Reinforce the Narrative today.
In the following, I will make some assertions. For now, please just temporarily assume for the sake of argument that we can find confirming information when needed. That is, follow and agree or disagree with the logic IF the assertions can be evidenced. If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK? Let's not get derailed by jumping on evidence until we have (conditionally) explored the reasoning first, be we can circle back.
"Redlining" involved drawing geographic districts labeled A, B, C and D, as partial guides to the security of making loans in those areas; this could be taken into account along with the individual financial status of the loan seeker. The lowest rating, D, tended to be in poor parts of town, where the default rate was considered likely to be higher, and where it could be harder for a bank to recoup their principal after a default (harder to sell at a sufficient price). The primary purpose was to benefit loan makers (banks) with some very relevant information which might help them decide on an appropriate interest rate to cover the risk (or not make the loan at all, depending on their risk tolerance).
Of course, if a bank had better knowledge that a lower rating was not justified (ie: that the default risk was actually lower than implied by the geographic district), they could still choose to make lower interest loans at a profit (even after handling the actual default rate). Banks were not loaning out their own money, they loaned out the money of their depositors, so if they made bad loans that was bad for ordinary people who used the bank for saving.
Interestingly, Black owned banks also used the ratings in their loan making; they did not in general disagree with the ratings based on their knowledge of local conditions (or they would have made more loans at lower interest than white owned banks). Black owned banks had the same incentive to not unduly risk the deposits of their mostly Black customers, but also an incentive to make competitive loans (including to Black people in their community).
The large bulk of the people living in zone D were white in some analyses, and some of the districts where 100% white. Nevertheless, since Black folks did tend to live in poorer districts, even if the system had involved zero racial bias per se, they would have shown up disproportionately in zone D - an example of reverse causation (race neutral identification of poorer districts combined with an external correlation between race and wealth, will result in relatively more people of a less wealthy race living in poorer zones).
Of course, given the era, it's likely that race DID play some part in designating the neighborhoods; the districting was done by assembling local experts (eg: realtors or loan initiators with local experience), at least some of whom would likely have had biases and stereotypes which influenced any statistical data (or accurate knowledge) used in creating the boundaries. How much this subjective influence prevailed is hard to determine at this stage; were their loan risk assessments mostly accurate, or grossly distorted by unfounded racial stereotypes or somewhere in the middle?
If that biased influence had been major, then one would have expected Black owned banks to have been less influenced by the inaccurate risk summaries implied by the zones. They might have known from their own experience that the risks of default were not as high as the biased local experts had stereotyped them to be, and made loans accordingly - undercutting the interest rates charged by the misled white owned banks, or giving loans that the white owned banks would not have. But apparently that was not the case; they apparently followed the risk ratings just as much as white owned banks did.
Note that at this point we are still talking about the primary purpose being to help banks in risk assessment, with some degree of inaccuracy being hypothesized among the local real estate experts based on unconscious racial stereotyping. That is still not a case of intending to deliberately and consciously harm Black people by knowingly misleading banks against the financial interests of those banks (accuracy was in the best interest of the banks).
In my reading of the above, I have seen absolutely no evidence that there was systematic intention by the local experts drawing up the boundaries between A, B, C, and D zones, to knowingly provide false information to (white or Black owned) banks for the purpose of hurting the minority of those living in zone D who were Black.
The parsimonious interpretation would be that the core purpose of all 4 zones was to assist banks in accurately assessing geographic-related default risk as part of their loan making decisions. That desire for accuracy could have in some cases (and for some zones) have been somewhat inaccurate due to bias from unconscious racial stereotypes - but by far most of those assessed as zone D were white so this was probably a limited effect. The evidence I have seen is consistent with this interpretation.
(Aside: by an "unconscious racial bias", I mean somebody holding a false stereotype about race, without knowing that that it's false. The bias is unconscious, and the person falsely believes their model of things to be accurate, so is not consciously deceiving anybody. This is different than conscious deception.)
Contrast that with the Narrative today: that the zones were systematically created (by The Government or by the white hive mind) for the purpose of harming Black people and keeping them from getting ahead. I see no evidence supporting this, and significant evidence countering it. However, imputing such evil motives to those drawing the maps is 100% convenient for reinforcing the narrative, not coincidentally.
Consider a different area. Observing that Asians tend to do the best on SAT and whites come in second, while Blacks tend to do the worst - the Narrative could interpret this outcome as the very motivation for creating and using the SAT from the very beginning - designed and intended specifically to keep Black people down. The purveyors of the Narrative have no interest in honestly evaluating the real motives for the SAT based on consideration of the full evidence, they thrive on ideologically driven subjectivity in Reinforcing the Narrative.
I see the imputation of nefarious racial motives to real estate default risk zoning ("redlining") as similar.
But I'm willing to hear your reasoning otherwise.
(I will note that I originally believed the Narrative on the motive behind redlining, but shifted as more evidence arrived - not from the neo-progressive sources pushing the Narrative of course.)
And one more thing - the EFFECTS of redlining, regardless of intention, may have been to make it harder for poor people of all races to rise. So I am NOT saying there is no residual problem from risk zoning left to be addressed (that issue can be discussed separately); I am using this example purely as an example of narrative-reinforcing bias in imputation of bad intention and motive.
Indeed, I believe that most of the neo-progressive ideology is well intentioned. Good intentions do not automatically lead to good outcomes, and likewise bad outcomes need not have been caused by bad intentions.
"If you disagree with the logic even if the assertions were true, that's one thing to discuss. If you *conditionally* agree with the reasoning per se, then we can check whether the assertions are well evidenced. OK?"
Ooof, this is an entire essay!😅
Yeah, if your claims can be well evidenced (and there are a lot of claims here), your logic isn't necessarily flawed. But the analysis is missing important context even if everything you say here is accurate. It's not reasonable to entirely separate the practice of redlining from the society it existed in and then declare it race-neutral.
For example, you note that black-owned banks followed the same risk assessments as the white owned banks, but don't note that banks were more likely to offer loans in poor white areas than in middle and high income black areas. I find it very hard to believe that race wasn't a factor in those risk assessments. Though proving that would admittedly take more legwork than I'm ready to put in here.😄
You also don't mention practices like "blockbusting", where real estate agents encouraged white families to sell their houses at below market rate by telling them that black families were moving in. These houses were then sold at significant markups to black families.
Or contract buying, that once again, massively disproportionately (I think even exclusively?) targeted black families with onerous lending practices, leaving them homeless if they missed a single payment on their mortgages, whilst simultaneously charging obscene rates of interest that white families didn't have to pay. This, combined with redlining, is one of many reasons why black home ownership lags so far behind white home ownership.
And, of course, the biggest factor is that black families were forced into poor neighbourhoods by segregation and the lack of opportunity and upward mobility that permeated society. To argue that a system that first says "we'll make it incredibly hard for black people to succeed financially, and give them no choice but to live in these poor areas," and then says "we're just appraising these areas based on wealth, race has nothing to do with it!", isn't racist, is a tough argument to make.
But fundamentally, after a certain point, the bad intentions don't lie in applying the prevailing system. They lie in the failure to fix a system that's so transparently discriminatory. And I guess, this is where the "hive mind" framing enters the picture. So many people saw how these practices disproportionately impacted black people. And extraordinarily few did anything about it. Same with segregation. Same with slavery. The hysteria and distrust builds because of the long history of indifference to transparently racist systems.
Hanlon's Razor: we should not infer malice from conduct which can be adequately attributed to incompetence.
I temper that with the idea that it should not be an automatic default assumption. The thing is it can be malice, but not always.
The idea that people of different races cannot have the same disagreements that they have with people of their own race, and it can only be about race is an example of a default assumption of malice. Clearly, people of different races can have disagreement/problems other than race since we are all humans. It would almost be wonderful if there were no "issues" other than racism between people of different races.
Was redlining malice, indifference, or incomitance? The damage was done without regard to motivation. But motivation could be the difference in it happening, or not.
>"The "hive mind" framing is probably a little much 😅"
Let me clarify. Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks".
There are many, many other examples, where any misdeed (real or distorted) by some white person becomes attributed to whites or whiteness. To me that bespeaks an odd kind of gross over-generalizing, or collective guilt, which would only be appropriate if the individual actors in question had obtained group consent (including that of future generations) - or if there was one white hive-mind responsible anything any white person or group does. If one white person (or 2% of white people) did something, then all white people should be held accountable.
Obviously one could do the same for any other race or population group, implying that they have a "hive mind" which justifies speaking of them as a unitary agent with shared beliefs, motivations, and responsibility. However, today at least, such imputation would likely be challenged and rightly so. "Black people" didn't carjack you, some individuals did - without first consulting with any Black hive mind. There's no collective guilt for what other people did, which was not under one's control or strong influence. And that principle should be applied to all population groups. "Right handed people" did not steal your bicycle or break into your shed, a particular person or small group did. Others in that broad group are not responsible.
Today's tendency in some quarters is to disavow personal responsibility for what one has actually done or failed to do, while highlighting the putative collective responsibility of designated other population groups.
Right handers control our destiny in every democracy. Think about it.
"Rather than just suggesting that the few dozen local real estate experts who consulted on drawing the boundaries of zones A, B, C and D had the intention of harming Black people thereby - they tend to frame it as the "whites" doing that to the "Blacks"."
Yeah, sadly this kind of logical fallacy is rife in all social justice movements at the moment. Men vs women, gay vs straight, trans vs "cis", black vs white. The same people who condemn people for judging them for a particular immutable trait gleefully condemn everybody whose immutable traits match their "oppressors."
Finding a bogeyman to blame for all of life's injustices (or your personal failings) on isn't a new instinct unfortunately. The tricky thing is finding the balance between recognising that some people do this, and acknowledging that others really do have genuine grievances.
"banning teachers from advocating “any doctrine or theory promoting a negative account or representation of the founding and history of the United States of America,”
Am I the only one alarmed at this? I hope not.
The falsification and sanitization of history is called revisionism and it is immiscible with democracy, in fact it is explicitly totalitarian. This goes beyond "spin" and "perspective." This is the explicit dissemination of falsehood. I've even read some of the crazier right wingers saying that slavery was a sweet deal, slaves were fed and sheltered. Never mind that they were worked to death or that the master could take their adolescent daughters to the mansion to be sodomized.
No country has a pristine past and America's has a lot more shame than most. It was one of the last countries to abandon slavery, there was the internment of Japanese-Americans in WWII, native Americans were deliberately infected with smallpox.
The hysteria around CRT is predictable. The wingers claim that it's a form of Socialist indoctrination, that it's being taught to elementary school students, they stop just short of claiming that holding racist views is vital to their identities, which it is.
"Am I the only one alarmed at this? I hope not."
Yeah, as Marie points out below (and as I do in the conversation), this text isn't in the bill. In fact, I've seen no evidence that it was *ever* in the bill, and nothing like it was in any of the other bills I read while researching the article.
America certainly has plenty to be ashamed of in its history, but this is almost entirely separate to the question of the validity of Critical Race Theory. Again, the question of whether some of the more extreme stuff happening in schools is most accurately described as CRT is irrelevant in my opinion. Nobody cared about CRT until Christopher Rufo but the term in everybody's heads.
The issue is how to improve race education whilst neither hiding the truth nor creating new lies. It feels as if this point is getting lost in the noise.
Yeah... a comment I made on another Substack a few months ago applies here: 'People don’t dislike the far left’s approach to thinking and talking about racism because a sleazeball like Rufo (mis-)labeled it “CRT.” They dislike it because it’s dehumanizing, paranoid, inflammatory, and cultish. They just needed a word for it.'
Wow, God, that absolutely nails it! Absolutely perfect.
I remain uncomfortable with calling anything in American politics "left," much less "far left." Far left is peasant collectives. The American political left died in 1939 with revelation of the reality of Stalin's Worker's Paradise and it has never come back.
To call someone like Ocasio-Cortez "far left" doesn't pass the laugh test.
As for the Social Justice Warriors there is nothing at all "leftist" about them; they are outrage junkies and nothing more.
We have reached the point that wanting human freaking decency and justice in governance is regarded in the same light as the killing fields (not far from where I live now).
Fair enough, I take back the use of "far left."
The trouble with broad and sweeping labels is that none seem to fit. The "left" has not been the least bit liberal for many years and calling them progressive is meaningless. Progress toward what? Opinions vary if it is to something good or bad. Is the "right" conservative? Conserve what? Opinions vary if it is to something good or bad. As I mentioned in another comment, depending upon the individual issue, some would try to assign me to a political tribe, but it would be a lie since I don't check all the boxes on any tribe's statement of ideology.
There are traditional progressive causes like wealth equality, opposition to racism, environmental preservation. But the punch has a dead rat floating in it now as progressivism has come to be identified with grievances and by people who are looking for attention to themselves more than by better lives for all.
Take feminism. Please. What started out as a movement with measurable and tangible goals like wage equality—and achieved some progress toward those goals—quickly became a movement of grievance. where progress couldn't ever be claimed or measured.
When it comes to wage equality I am an ardent feminist; when it comes to "eliminating patriarchal attitudes" I'm not interested. I will continue to advocate for metrical progress but then I don't give a damn about definitions with broad consensus as having more functional utility.
Your personal concept of "left" differs from the common usage in discussion today in the US. Since my writing is motivated by desire to communicate with others based on shared definitions when possible, I will continue to use the definitions with broad consensus as having more functional utility.
The association with a label like "far left" is *always without exception* going to depend on context. There is no absolute and objective framework which transcends time and place. In the Stalinist USSR it will have a different association than in contemporary US usage. If I'm discussion issues with a Stalinist, I'll keep your concept in mind; if I'm discussing things with a contemporary American, I'll use contemporary contextual word definitions.
One of the things I dislike about the "social justice warriors" you reference is how often they focus in distracting word games, rather than agreeing to some shared definitions so we can move into the core of the conceptual disagreement. I'm a bit wary of your framing for similar reasons.
I think your underlying point ("correct" word usage aside) is that the range of political approaches humans have historically adopted exceeds the contemporary American contextual understandings of "far left" to "far right", which is undisputed. Neither Genghis Khan nor Pol Pot fit within the spectrum of contemporary US politics. However, we are not discussing them much today. If we were, I would agree with you that contemporary conceptions of "far left" and "far right" are inadequate. But within contemporary usage, AOC might reasonably be seen as on the far left end of today's mainstream politics, as the terms are used today.
Losing the point in the noise IS the point
I think you're right. But the point I wish more liberals would understand is that the left is at least as, if not more, guilty of generating that noise.
If we can agree that there is troubling stuff happening in schools (and I think any reasonable person can), then why are so many on the left busy nitpicking about whether it's properly described as CRT or not? Why not address the problem first and worry about terminology afterwards?
I think you've kind of answered that. I would hypothesize that it may be because not everybody is operating in good faith; some participants may use that "nitpicking" as a way to avoid engaging in real discussion, which they are not confident of succeeding at.
A major root of the problem is excessive tribalism. I see neo-progressives smugly saying "opponents of (political) CRT in the classroom are all ignorant and do not even know what (academic) CRT is".
OK, so we bought and read the most widely recommended source, *Critical Race Theory: An Introduction* by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic (very important seminal figures in CRT).
It turns out that most of those smug mockers are ignorant of what CRT says. It's not so much about "accurately" portraying history, as about explicitly overturning the liberal order in favor of a post-Marxist revolution - from their own words.
Rather than defend that to the bulk of the American people who would not buy into it, nitpicking can seem like a useful tactic.
That line was removed from the NH bill… might still be in other states’ bills? I think we’re all alarmed at the overreach of some of this anti-CRT legislation, it’s possible to also be alarmed at some of the anti-racist overreach in the classroom.
Well done again. I will describe my own framing of this terminology issue, similar to what you have said but which a few tweaks.
I distinguish "academic CRT" and "political CRT". In politics, "CRT" has a wider meaning than in academia per se; such differences in usage in different domains is not uncommon. This expanded political (implicit) definition is often used BY BOTH SIDES to include practices and framings inspired by CRT, by Robin DiAngelo, by Ibram X Kendi (both very CRT influence), and other related "anti-racism" activists of similar philosophy.
Some opponents of what they perceive as "race craziness" use "CRT" as shorthand for that whole group of concepts, largely derived from academic CRT with enhancements from political activists. That shorthand for "political CRT" with its expanded coverage, is pretty much what Rufo was trying to use as a brand or label, for communicating about "the thing" that's going on in some schools.
However, those on the other side (pro-CRT) are doing the same thing, when they label legislation as "anti-CRT" even if it doesn't mention CRT or prohibit teaching academic teaching of CRT. In that, the opponents of such legislation are using the same expanded sense of political CRT, which they are implicitly defining more broadly than academic CRT.
The retreat by the pro-CRT activists, to tactically using CRT to mean only academic CRT when attacked is pretty much a "mott and bailey" argument. When they are on the attack (eg: criticizing legislation), they use CRT in the broader sense as well. If you prohibit teaching that racism is the true center of American history (eg: per 1619 project), then they believe that's anti-CRT.
Note that the NEA has explicitly endorsed the CRT framework for racial education; it's ambiguous whether they mean the narrow academic or the broader political sense of "CRT" in their endorsement. It's pretty disingenuous to say "CRT is not being taught in K12 schools anyway", when it's widely taught as truth in teaching colleges, and the largest teacher's association is advocating using it as a framework for racial pedagogy.