1. Last month, James White kicked a beehive when he uploaded dash cam footage onto Facebook, accompanied by his social commentary on the antics of a juvenile delinquent.
He deleted it, but due to screen capture technology, it was too late. A KJV-onlyist wackjob reposted a doctored version (embedded editorializing) of the statement on his own blog.
Because White had deleted the original, the doctored version was the only available version, so that's what got quoted. Here's the original:
Someone might object that since White deleted the statement, it's wrong to repost it. Since, however, people continue to attack his statement while he continues to defend his statement, it's hard to see how one can fairly evaluate the statement without having the actual, verbatim statement before you as the frame of reference. Without access to the original, how can you accurately represent and comment on what he said?
2. It's challenging to find an entry point into this debate. One reason is that many people have a love/hate relationship with stereotypes. Many people resent being stereotyped by the outgroup, but the same people may stereotype the outgroup. In addition, the ingroup may stereotype its own members.
3. There's also the question of whether stereotypes are intrinsically bad. Stereotypes can be positive or negative.
A stereotype may have a basis in fact. The danger is to overgeneralize. To extrapolate from some to all.
4. It raises the question of whether we should judge strangers as individuals, or judge them in the context of a preexisting interpretive grid.
5. Let's consider some concrete illustrations:
i) Black Lives Matter thinks police stereotype blacks. However, police think Black Lives Matter stereotypes police. Whenever you have a publicized altercation between a white cop and a black suspect, many pundits automatically assume the incident was racially motivated. But isn't that prejudicial to cops?
ii) Italian-American directors (e.g. Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola) are sometimes chided for self-stereotyping Italian Americans as Mafiosi. Yet they are considered great directors of classic films. So there's a conflicted attitude.
iii) Black Hip-Hop performers are sometimes chided for glamorizing and reinforcing a negative stereotype of blacks.
iv) Woody Allen movies play on Jewish stereotypes.
v) The "angry white man" stereotype (or loner male stereotype)
vi) How the liberal establishment caricatures Christians.
vii) Asian stereotypes
viii) Canadian stereotypes
ix) Irish stereotypes
x) Russian stereotypes
xi) Latino immigrant stereotypes
xii) Southerners
xiii) New Yorkers (esp. Manhattan and the Bronx)
xiv) Texans
xv) WASPs
xvi) Valley girls and surfer dudes
xvii) Lawyer jokes
xviii) How Michael Bird stereotypes Americans
6. Take the "white privilege" meme. Except for Caucasians who are susceptible to white guilt-tripping, white folks tune out the moment someone uses that tendentious phrase. They think that's stereotyping whites. If that's how you frame the issue when you're addressing whites, you lost your audience from that point on. They stop listening. They discount what you say.
Suppose we substitute "Jewish privilege" for "white privilege". The claim that Jews are overrepresented in banking, medicine, physics, the media, judiciary, &c. Well, there's a sense in which that's true. But that's achieved status, not ascribed status. Something they had to work for.
7. Then there's the question of the reference class we use to pigeon-hole individuals. Some of what White said about this teenager is the same kind of thing black pundits like Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Juan Williams, Ben Carson, Stanley Crouch et al. have remarked about the inner city subculture.
But that's not the only frame of reference. There are different demographic perspectives. You can view it from the standpoint of juvenile delinquency in general. Age, sex, and socioeconomic status. Juvenile delinquency is more prevalent among young underclass males. Same thing with street gangs, which reflect a wide variety of races and ethnicities. And we see similar patterns developing among white working class communities, as Kevin Williamson recently noted at NRO.
8. White sees a downward spiral. But I think that says more about different places than different times. Street gangs have been a fixture of big cities for decades. The inner city has been notorious for tough schools for decades. Before driveby shootings, it used to be knife-fights. Just off the top of my head, examples include Last Exit to Brooklyn (Cubby Selby), The Cross and the Switchblade (David Wilkerson), Run Baby Run (Nicky Cruz), Black and Free (Tom Skinner), The Warriors (Sol Yurick), and Blackboard Jungle (1955 film). And if you go back further, you had the "Wild West" in the 19C (e.g. Tombstone; Dodge City).
If there's been a change, I think that's more a matter of inner city social mores spreading to the suburbs and exurbs. Personal anecdote: I grew up in a white, middle class, rural suburb in the 60s-70s. I attended white suburban public schools (just a handful of minority students).
A few years ago someone indexed the local newspaper, and put that online. Out of curiosity, I skimmed the headlines from the mid-50s to the mid-70s. I was surprised by the amount of juvenile delinquency, home-burglaries, and even armed robberies, in the small town adjacent to where I grew up. This was mostly white middle class and working class.
To some degree, I think street gangs and immigration go together. First-generation immigrants tend to band together. The boys join ethnic street gangs for protection. That's been going on for decades. In that regard, White's historical perception seems to be provincial.
9. In addition, his view of law enforcement culture is rather blinkered and dated. It fails to take into account the corruption of law enforcement and the evolving police state. I'd say he's caught in a timewarp on that issue.
The proliferation of cellphone cameras, police dash cams, and push for body cams, has revealed an alarming amount of police abuse that went undocumented in prior times. Moreover, some police knowingly do this right in front of cameras (e.g. dash cams), which makes you wonder what they do out of public view. Serpico is another iconic example.
I'm not saying that reflects a general pattern. It's hard to say how representative that is from a statistical standpoint.
But if you combine this with district attorneys who cover for police, prosecutorial misconduct by district attorneys, how the Obama administration has weaponized the Federal bureaucracy to spearhead its ideological pogroms, White's reflexive deference to the authorities is naive and out-of-touch with current realities. His viewpoint reflects a sheltered experience.
10. Although discipline and hard work are good advice, that's not a guarantee that you will get ahead in life. I'm not quite sure what he means by a "good education". Certainly a college degree is no guarantee of success in life, and college loans can set you back. Problem is, not only has tuition spiked astronomically above and beyond the inflation rate, but if more folks have college degrees, then it ceases to be a competitive advantage.
Perhaps adding to opposition to stereotypes might be the growing cultural resistance to the notion of the objectivity of the self, that the self might be defined by features that have not been chosen by it, or which render a group to some degree determinative of its identity. I doubt that such resistance was anywhere near as strong in many other ages. The problem, of course, is that groups do have shared tendencies and family resemblances and our subjectivity is powerfully shaped by unchosen forces.
ReplyDeleteKnowledge about the groups to which a person belongs is genuine probabilistic knowledge about them as an individual and often a basis for discrimination (e.g. the knowledge that a patient has a family history of an obscure condition might radically change a doctor's assessment of their reported symptoms). Much of this is a matter of basic Bayesian probability. However, translate cold Bayesian probability into the context of police engaging in stopping and searching suspects for a crime that is most widespread among a minority population or an employer looking at two identical CVs apart from the gender or race of the applicant for a role that plays to the strengths of a privileged group and, suddenly, many people are understandably concerned that the logic not be applied.
The application of Bayesian probability is not a matter of overgeneralization, but still has considerable power to disadvantage certain groups. Likewise, thinking in terms of larger population groups can disadvantage a large body of people on account of the extreme actions of a few (e.g. attitudes towards Arab Muslims in light of Islamist terrorism, as people recognize that welcoming more Arab Muslims—despite the fact most are peace-loving—probably means significantly increased terrorist threat to our societies). This penalization is especially important in cases where the group in question isn't just a set of people that share certain traits, but a population whose members are affiliated with and bound up with each other in various ways (like a nation we might go to war against). We don't always act towards individuals: often we act towards groups and innocent individuals suffer on account of their group membership.
Both Bayesian probability and penalizing a group for the actions of a few of its members can come together in phenomena such as 'Schrödinger's Rapist', where, aware of the significant danger of stranger rape posed by a very small minority of men, some women may act warily around every unfamiliar man.
All of this is to say that, even when we refuse to overgeneralize, the use of stereotypes or judgments about groups can still hurt people. The problem here is that genuine and accurate knowledge about groups and rational and accurate ways of relating individuals to such knowledge will consistently disadvantage certain groups relative to others (and the forms of knowledge in question are strongly argued for in some cases by the very people who would fiercely reject the same forms of knowledge in others—'Schrödinger's Rapist' is a good example here). The choice is often between denying people the right to act upon genuine knowledge, or tolerating regular affronts to our culture's egalitarian values and situations that seem quite inequitable.
If the reason white people tune out at the mention of white privilege is because they think it's stereotyping white people, then they have no idea what the term means. It's worth blaming the left on that, since they're the ones who introduced it and have not picked up on how it's being received, but nevertheless the term is not about saying something about what white people do or say. It's about what white people don't have to deal with that other people do, and that can be entirely because of a minority of white people's actions (the smaller number of genuine cases of outright explicit racism), because of unconscious behavior that people aren't aware of (unconsciously reading certain names in ways that negatively affect your evaluation of a person), or structures in society that are neutral on the face of it but happen to affect racial minorities negatively (e.g. hiring people you know when social circles don't overlap much and white people are disproportionately the ones doing the hiring). To think that the idea of white privilege is nonsense because you think it stereotypes white is just not getting what's being said. I have no idea if what you're doing is accurate psychology. Maybe it is. But if it is, then I think it's incumbent on anyone who is publicly writing about race issues to correct that gross misunderstanding of the concept. White privilege is not just real but obviously so to anyone who pays attention to empirical data, and it doesn't really serve the left's causes any more than the right's causes to point that out. It serves the left's causes to ignore it and not deal with it, however, because that fuels their claim that the right doesn't get race issues.
ReplyDelete"It's about what white people don't have to deal with that other people do…"
DeleteThat's an obvious overgeneralization. So that's a case of racial stereotyping.
Take "disadvantaged" lower class whites compared to, say, an Eduardo Saverin.
"(e.g. hiring people you know when social circles don't overlap much and white people are disproportionately the ones doing the hiring)."
What about Miami or Chinatown (in San Francisco) where non-white people are disproportionately the ones doing the hiring? Is that Asian privilege? Latino privilege?
"White privilege is not just real but obviously so to anyone who pays attention to empirical data…"
What does that mean, Jeremy? Outcomes? Correlations? Disparate impact?
What empirical data are you alluding to? If, say, you're making socioeconomic success the criterion, how does that select for white privilege rather than Jewish privilege or Asian-American privilege?
Or take the distinction between immigrants and natives. Generally speaking, immigrants begin at a disadvantage. So should we have a category for "native privilege"?
Jeremy,
Delete"(e.g. hiring people you know when social circles don't overlap much and white people are disproportionately the ones doing the hiring)."
Isn't there also the possibility of black privilege in these scenarios: a white liberal may be a firm believer that something called "white privilege" is a real problem. So when he is looking to hire a new employee he favors black people or hispanic people in virtue of the fact that they are black or hispanic.
Is there hard evidence that white people favor white people and that this favor is a reflection of the fact that they are hiring on the basis of whiteness?
It's not a stereotype to notice that in a situation where someone who loathes black people and will discriminate against them, black people will more negatively be affected than white people. It's also not discrimination to notice that that's going to happen more often against black people than against white people because of the kinds of people who happen to exist and how much power they happen to have. This is simply a factual issue.
DeleteIt's also not a stereotype to notice that more white employers and white hiring committees exist than black employers and black hiring committees. Yes, there are people who might find themselves in exactly the reverse situation. Nothing I said assumes otherwise. My point was that one situation happens more commonly than the other and simply has a more negative effect in one way than the other. That creates privilege for white people as a group that isn't present to the same degree for black people or non-white people as a whole group. That's not a stereotype. That's simply a fact about what social relations there are and how they work.
One piece of empirical data is the psychological consensus about unconscious ways we're influenced by the stereotypes around us. We don't even have to believe the stereotypes. We might think they're false but still be influenced by them, because we're irrational that way. We might think very few Muslims are terrorists but be scared when we see someone with darker skin than most white people wearing garb that we judge to be Muslim or hear a name that sounds Arabic. I don't have people responding to me that way, and that's white privilege not to be classified and stereotyped that way. People don't hear my name and unconsciously assume that I'm less intelligent the way they might if it were an obviously black-associated name. Empirical data supports the claim that people have these associations even if they don't want to. It's not forming a stereotype to say this. It's simply looking at the data.
I'm also not saying the only privilege that exists is white privilege. I'm not sure why you think there can't be ways that white people are more advantaged in certain ways while other groups might also be advantaged in certain ways. Advantages come in degrees, so some group might be less negatively affected than some other group by some social structure or pattern. It might occur on a spectrum. And yes, native privilege is a perfectly reasonable pattern if there are structural advantages to being a native (as there are in our society, for one thing having the right to vote and having greater familiarity with how things work from having been immersed in it for a lifetime). This is no different from a home-court advantage in basketball. No one denies that. Why deny native advantage with respect to immigrants, then?
As for Jonathan's question, I'm not saying that hiring people you know is the only factor in hiring. Sometimes someone is motivated by affirmative action reasons to hire someone of a different race than their own. Sure. But the factor I pointed to favors white people. Given that (a) we do tend to favor people we know, (b) white people are in such positions to make those decisions more often than any other racial categorization (except in narrower spheres o influence, but we're talking generally here) and (c) white people are much more socially connected with other white people than with other groups, it simply follows that white people will be more advantaged by the fact that in hiring it's to your advantage to know someone. That fact about how our society works, therefore, favors white people. That should be utterly obvious to anyone who thinks about it. It's not in itself an argument for fighting tooth and nail against hiring people you know. It's not in itself an argument that it's wrong to hire someone you know. But it's a fact about that social arrangement that it does tend to favor white people, on the whole (again, allowing that in certain spheres other decision-making factors might point other directions, and in certain spheres there might even be a privilege from knowing people that favors some other group against white people, because in that sphere some other group is making more of the decisions).
Delete"My point was that one situation happens more commonly than the other and simply has a more negative effect in one way than the other. That creates privilege for white people as a group that isn't present to the same degree for black people or non-white people as a whole group. That's not a stereotype. That's simply a fact about what social relations there are and how they work."
Deletei) You're introducing qualifications you didn't mention before. Fine.
ii) However, an overgeneralization is a stereotype, and when you say it creates a privilege for white people "as a group," that's an overgeneralization. Sure, I suppose you could say that as an aggregate statistic, that's the case, but it's very misleading, for what group or individual is actually privileged in any particular situation is highly variable. So, if we wish to be accurate, what we really need is not a blanket claim that's bound to be inaccurate in a great many instances, but something far more discriminating. That boils down to a case-by-case descriptions.
iii) You seem to agree with me that you're using "white privilege" as a synonym for "majority privilege". If so, that's problematic. To begin with, the "majority" quickly breaks down into different shifting majorities. Take the red/state blue state divide (admittedly crude, but it will suffice for purposes of illustration). Some states are majority Democrat while other states are majority Republican.
But it's not the same majority in each case. Moreover, what the majority favors varies depending on the red state/blue state differential. In that event, there's no single majority privilege. Rather, you have differing majorities with divergent interests.
iv) Furthermore, unless you think majority rule is a bad thing, why use a pejorative label ("white privilege") to characterize it?
As for hiring, let's take a prominent example. Although the CEOs of Apple and Microsoft are white, do those companies favor white job applicants over Asian or East Indian applicants? Surely many of the managers in those companies who do the hiring are, themselves, Asian or East Indian.
"I'm also not saying the only privilege that exists is white privilege. I'm not sure why you think there can't be ways that white people are more advantaged in certain ways while other groups might also be advantaged in certain ways. Advantages come in degrees, so some group might be less negatively affected than some other group by some social structure or pattern. It might occur on a spectrum. And yes, native privilege is a perfectly reasonable pattern if there are structural advantages to being a native (as there are in our society, for one thing having the right to vote and having greater familiarity with how things work from having been immersed in it for a lifetime). This is no different from a home-court advantage in basketball. No one denies that. Why deny native advantage with respect to immigrants, then?"
Jeremy, the problem is that "white privilege" is a pejorative characterization used to denote systemic injustice or unfair advantages. Something we need to rectify and reverse. Enact policies to impose equality of outcome.
If, however, you grant that there's nothing necessarily wrong with groups having certain advantages (e.g. natives), then why use the loaded term "white privilege"?
Wait, some people use the term that way, so that's what it means? Most people who use the term are meaning to point out structural social relations. What we do in response to that is not part of the term's meaning but part of how they might propose dealing with it. There are people who favor mere equality of outcome, but that's not the usual response I see. Take the issue of implicit bias in grading. I know a lot of academics who worry about giving lower grades to people because they see a name that might lead them to think unconsciously that the person is less intelligent. If you were right about what they think, then we would expect them to give everyone the same grade. That's not what they do. Instead, they implement blind grading, where they don't know which student wrote the paper until after they assign it a grade. It's an attempt to correct for something that they expect will cause an inequality. It's not an attempt to undo whatever unequal effect might happen. And I know of zero academics who expect themselves or anyone else to give everyone the same grade because they know some of the students in their classes came from socioeconomic privilege while others came from poor educational backgrounds with parents who didn't read to them. When someone produced an argument for not reading to your kids to prevent them from being privileged, academics on the left with one voice shouted the idea down as ridiculous and not remotely how to respond to facts about some groups being more privileged than others. It's a caricature the right holds about how people on the left think. It's not how they actually think.
Delete"Wait, some people use the term that way, so that's what it means?"
DeleteYes, Jeremy, meaning is based on usage. Moreover, "white privilege" is routinely and intentionally deployed to purport invidious connotations. Whites have privilege, non-whites don't. Unearned advantages are inherently unfair.
That's how it's used all the time in popular political discourse. As a weapon.
Of course it's unfair. And any harm is invidious, sort of by definition. But that's not the same thing as the other stuff you added. You're ignoring the second half of what you said, "Something we need to rectify and reverse. Enact policies to impose equality of outcome." Nothing in the analysis of white privilege itself says what we should do about it. That's not built into the notion. In fact, people on the left disagree about what to do about it as much as they disagree with people on the right about it.
DeleteAnd I don't mainly see it being used as a weapon against anyone. The people who talk about it the most are white academics who feel guilty about their privilege but who aren't sure what to do about it. When it comes up among non-whites, it's usually just used to point to the fact that racial problems are not gone, just more hidden because the more overt stuff has gotten better or to take notice of the self-perpetuating nature of structural problems in our social system. It's much more rare that you see someone insinuate that it's a deliberate tool to try to keep non-whites down and whites in power, but you do occasionally find someone saying stuff like that. But that's certainly not the majority of instances when I've come across the term, and no one using the term is building into what the term means any notion of what, if anything, we can do about it. Many of them don't think there's anything that can be done about it, as it happens.
Suppose I move to mainland China, but I don't know Mandarine Chinese. The natives know the language. We might call that Chinese privilege. An unearned advantage. That's something they naturally picked up as kids, growing up around Chinese-speakers.
DeleteIs that an unfair advantage? Should I go around, telling the locals to "check your privilege" because they are native Chinese speakers and I'm not, which gives them a signal advantage over me in that setting? Or is it incumbent on me, as an immigrant, to adapt to the dominant culture so that I can function and flourish in their society.
On the psychological claim of what does motivate white people to reject white privilege, I think it might be more complicated than just thinking it's stereotyping white people. Here's one reason why. Some of the more careful sociological studies on this have shown that white people tend to think the actual claim of white privilege is false. They tend to think nearly all racial issues have been dealt with because they have been dealt with on the legal level. That's demonstrably false, because the more pervasive and harder-to-spot issues remain and are often just as strong as they ever were, but it's something a lot of white people have deluded themselves into thinking. But then there's the further fact that a lot of the same white people think that any racism remaining is mostly anti-white racism, and they are left thinking that the real racial issue is to fight against special privileges for non-whites to even the score. The small amount of harm that might come to white people because of affirmative action or the insult to white people of having safe spaces for black people is hardly going to affect people's lives all that much. Even those who are crowded out of a top tier school and sent to a lower school are not going to be all that much worse off because of it. In fact, getting better grades at a lower-tier school is more likely to land them a better job if they were on the borderline of getting into the higher school to begin with. And no one's life is really much worse off because universities are making safe spaces for black people. Yet there really are negative forces at work (regardless of how we explain the causes, and there's disagreement about that) that increase the likelihood of negative outcomes for people born into predominantly non-white communities. Those are much more serious concerns, and we can't just ignore them. What we do about them is certainly a debate worth having, and we shouldn't just assume the left's solutions are the correct ones. But we also shouldn't pretend there aren't problems, and I wonder if one reason the right thinks there aren't any such problems is just because they're not paying attention to the facts. Given all that, is the resistance to thinking about white privilege really just because people take it to be a claim about white behavior? I don't think so. I think it's because, even if they knew what white privilege is being claimed to be, they don't think there is any such thing. And they're demonstrably wrong in that claim. But I think that's what really generates much of the right's thinking about racial issues, and it's not serving conservative goals (or conservative process either, since it's not the point of conservatism to ignore facts).
ReplyDeleteJeremy,
DeleteThe problem with your lengthy comment is that you haven't identified anything distinctively, asymmetrically "white" about lingering racial issues. What makes this an issue of "white privilege" rather than interracial relations generally (involving interracial dynamics between, say, blacks and Asians, or Blacks and Latinos, or Latinos and Asians), or intra-racial challenges?
How are you even using "white" in this context. For instance, are you using it as a synonym for, say "majority" privilege? If that's what is meant, then why not frame the issue, if it is an issue, in terms of "majority privilege" rather than "white privilege"? In that case, whiteness would be an incidental feature.
However, that won't work, you have minorities (e.g. Jews) who are disproportionately successful. So would that "Jewish privilege" be equivalent to a type of "minority privilege"?
According to Sowell, if stats on black income are broken down, one sees that Islanders and Africans do as well if not better than whites; Indians are doing quite well and are distinctly no white.
DeleteI don't see how there needs to be anything that makes white privilege an essential property of white people. That's not what's being claimed. It's a claim about what social forces happen to be at work in our society. It's compatible with other social forces that do other things, for example favoring Asians over blacks in certain ways. It's compatible with other social arrangements leading to privileges that would go in other directions or be for other groups. These are highly contingent matters, and what keeps them in place isn't necessarily going to stay the same from location to location or generation to generation. Some of the forces that keep them in place, however, are fairly pervasive. Some of them are not.
DeleteSome particular instances of a white privilege are there simply because whites happen to be the majority, and they would be present for any majority but wouldn't be present in South Africa. Having more white voters would be an example of that. Others are because whites are more in positions of power, and those would have been true in South Africa before the transition to a more black leadership but would be less in place now (although a lot of whites there remain in influential social positions, even if not so much in government positions).
Are you sure your position isn't indulging in stereotyping or even conspiracy theory; ie a white cabal keeping nonwhites down? Or are you suggesting that so-called white privilege may be more "hive" behavior? Are stereotypes without any factual basis, although allowing for exceptions (eg a "welfare queen" vs a "mama benz")? I have worked my entire professional life both along with and reporting to members of minorities, and see none of what you describe.
DeleteYes, I'm sure I don't believe in a white cabal keeping non-whites down. That's my biggest complaint about how the left handles this stuff. They often do use mere factual observations about differences in outcome as evidence of that sort of thing.
DeleteWhite privilege is simply a fact. How it got that way is sometimes a complex question, because there are lots of ways it can happen. One cause is outright explicit racism that people who hate display toward those they hate. That does have a negative impact on those of the race that is hated, and so it gives a disadvantage to them compared to those who don't end up as the object of that hatred, who in comparison have an advantage. I tend to think that's a small part of it nowadays.
Some of it comes from well-meaning people not understanding how their actions affect others. It might be unconscious bias, which we all have. Study after study shows this, and not wanting to have it or even opposing it vehemently has little effect. For example, someone sent a bunch of churches letters about moving into the area, and they varied the names at the bottom, sometimes with generic names and sometimes with racially-indicative names. There was a clear effect of names with non-white associations getting less warm responses or even no responses. The effect was particularly strong among the more progressive denominations who you might have expected to be more urgently interested in welcoming non-whites. Studies have shown that non-verbal behavior is different toward people of certain races compared with others, and this is from well-meaning, non-racist people. Studies have shown that evaluations of the argument of an essay are more negative when a woman's name or a clearly black-associated or Hispanic-associated name is on the top. None of this is racism in the usual sense of the term. All of it comes from stereotypes. It results from familiarity with the stereotype, though, not from agreement with the stereotype. All you have to do is be familiar with the stereotype that young black men are more likely to be violent, and you'll be more scared of them, even if your explicit view is that such a view is racist and wrong. Stuff like this has a significant impact on non-verbal behavior, awkwardness of interactions, whether papers get accepted for publication if they're not name-blind, whether someone gets higher consideration for being hired if the process isn't name-blind (or isn't face-blind), and so on. All of this is empirically duplicated over and over again. It's not like those studies that show something once but then never can replicate it. This is simply observable fact at this point. None of it is a conspiracy, and it's not relying on stereotypes to observe the facts about how it works. And the very nature of it is that you wouldn't notice it without doing a careful study, because it's the kind of thing that those who do it (all of us, of all races) don't notice when they're doing it. It's unconscious.
I'm not sure why you're talking about stereotypes and exceptions, such as the "welfare queen" idea. I have no idea why you would think that's even relevant to what I'm saying. It's an entirely different topic. That's about the issue of whether black people are hard workers or need the help they get from the government, and so on. That issue might involve stereotypes from either side of the debate even, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with anything I'm saying.
Your comments on white privilege are inextricably linked to the notion of stereotype; after all, to what are the whites reacting? My experience with these sorts of discussions always seem to center on the attitudes and behvior of the white perceiver without questioning the validity of the stereotype, and solutions proposed always seem to tell white perceivers to change their perception with no suggestion to the perceived to change their behavior or even question why they are so perceived and thence treated. Zum Beispiel: when I was a teen taking drivers ed, my peers and I were incensed that insurance companies stereotyped teenage males and started us on assigned risk, as opposed to the females. We wanted laws changed to suit what we called fairness; oddly enough, none of our proposals included us driving better. Many of us - my stupid self included - proved the insurers right. Were the the insurers being narrow-minded bigots, or reacting appropriately to the group stupidity of teenage boys? Was Jesse Jackass coopted by white bigotry when he quipped that he was relieved to find that the unknown person walking behind him was white? Given the high percentage of black men involved with the corrections system (regardless of why), is it racist stereotyping when whites avoid them or lock their car doors when they walk by, or an appropriate response to an horrible statistic? I think the latter, which was well covered in Dinesh D'Souza's /The End of Racism/.
DeletePS: Steve's obervation re: majority privilege is apropos to your studies: names may affect academic publishing, but so do factors like the school affiliations of authors, authorial reputations, and other editorial biases; what is the signficance of racially-identifiable names vs other factors? Per the churches' selective answering of enquiries, did these studies include responses from Mt Pisgah Baptist Church to Manny Goldstein, or just concentrate on those from Beth Messiah or Our Lady of Anglophilia to D'shawn Jones; ie did the studies include nonwhite churches responding to white enquiries, or onky the opposite? Just askin'.
DeleteJeremy, doesn't your position boil down to the trivial tautology that privileged whites have white privilege?
DeleteSo privileged whites have advantages that disadvantaged non-whites don't. True by definition.
But that's a vacuous distinction inasmuch as disadvantaged whites don't have white privilege while privileged non-whites have non-white privilege.
No, I'm not drawing a logical connection between the concepts of privileged whites and white privilege. I'm making an empirical claim, one that's demonstrable to anyone who looks at what actually happens in the world. I'm also drawing out a conceptual account of what it is to have privilege. That's not tautological. It's a definition, and I'm drawing out the definition in a way that distinguishes it from various other claims that other people are confusing it with. Then I'm claiming that something in the world fits the definition. In this case, the empirical claim is that of all the various social relations that involve privilege or advantage, the ones that give white people more advantage and privilege are the more significant ones in our current social setting, even if the others that are meant to be objections to any recognition of them are also going on. They're not objections. They're just also there. And nowhere near as life-defining or negative.
DeleteMy being passed up for a job because they wanted a black academic working on race rather than a white academic working on race is real. It's also bad for me. But it's not anywhere near as pervasive or negative to the same degree as the fact that a law-abiding, achieving young black man who happens to like the style of dress of the culture he was raised in is going to be assumed to be a criminal in split-second decisions simply because he's black or that his work is going to be judged to be lower quality merely because of his race, and that's verifiable fact even to those who pretend it's not going on because they can't see themselves doing it. The effects of this are much more noticeable to people who experience them, even if sometimes they can also assume it's going on when it's not. There's enough data to show that the phenomena I'm talking about are real but hidden to most people who perpetuate the processes that bring them about, usually unconsciously and ignorantly.
It's another step to justify left-wing solutions to these problems, and I wouldn't go there, but conservatives need to stop pretending that this stuff isn't real simply because they don't like the left's way of responding to it. If conservatives were more willing to acknowledge this, they'd probably be able to win black voters in larger numbers. You can point to the items in the Black Lives Matter movement where they're on to something without endorsing their entire program, for example. There are people who try to do that who I think go too far, but I also see people who just come across as pretending there are hardly any problems, when that's just not so, even if nearly all of the big cases people have taken on show nothing of what they're intended to show. That doesn't take away from the fact that a large number of cases do show some kinds of patterns that conservatives want to ignore.
"No, I'm not drawing a logical connection between the concepts of privileged whites and white privilege. I'm making an empirical claim, one that's demonstrable to anyone who looks at what actually happens in the world."
DeleteIt's empirically demonstrable in the sense that people with advantages are in an advantageous situation compared to disadvantaged people. But when you turn that into a blanket generalization about white Americans, you are prejudging any particular white by this statistical abstraction. That's an overgeneralization, both because many whites are disadvantaged while many nonwhites have advantages.
"the ones that give white people more advantage and privilege are the more significant ones in our current social setting"
But when that's a *presumption* you apply to whites in general, it's bound to be an overgeneralization.
"a law-abiding, achieving young black man who happens to like the style of dress of the culture he was raised in is going to be assumed to be a criminal in split-second decisions simply because he's black or that his work is going to be judged to be lower quality merely because of his race, and that's verifiable fact even to those who pretend it's not going on because they can't see themselves doing it."
i) But it cuts both ways, Jeremy. Yes, the police don't view the young black man in isolation. Rather, they view him in relation to statistical probabilities regarding criminality and gang-violence. But "white privilege" is the same side of the coin. A prejudicial characterization where you don't judge people first and foremost as individuals, but as aggregates with a collective profile that's often inaccurate once we shift from generic averages to specific cases.
ii) If, however, a white, Asian, or Latino male sports attire associated with gangs, he will be a magnet for the same attention by the police. (I'm not saying that's justified.)
"The effects of this are much more noticeable to people who experience them, even if sometimes they can also assume it's going on when it's not."
But that's very one-sided. Whites are often picked on by the police, but that goes unreported. We have an increasingly heavy-handed police presence in this country.
"That doesn't take away from the fact that a large number of cases do show some kinds of patterns that conservatives want to ignore."
Depends on what you have in mind. I think many conservatives, especially younger generation conservatives, are sensitive to the surveillance state. To rogue cops, rogue prosecutors, &c.
As I've remarked on other occasions, part of the problem is a policing philosophy that emphasizes crime prevention rather than law enforcement. That results in police hassling people engaged in perfectly lawful behavior.
DeleteI'm not prejudging any individuals. I'm not in fact judging anyone at all in my analysis of white privilege. I've given very little in the way of assigning blame or anything like that. Most of these forces are unseen and unconscious. I think we do have responsibilities regarding them, but I'm not about judging people here. That's not the point.
DeleteWhat about the blanket generalization is picking on any individuals and saying every case is the same? I made no claim of any sort like that. I just made the claim that the overall harm being done by anti-black forces is worse than the overall harm being done by anti-white forces. I don't see how anyone who pays attention can miss that. That's compatible with recognizing great complexity in the social relations.
I simply don't know what you mean by accusing me of presuming things when it comes to individuals. I'm not making accusations against individual people. I've done nothing even remotely resembling that. I'm simply giving a social analysis on a large scale. When it comes to an individual case, you have to take that as an individual case. If I were doing what you accuse me of, I would have sided with Trayvon Martin's family against George Zimmerman, but I happen to think Zimmerman wasn't guilty of murder. I would have sided with the "hands up don't shoot" people even though they were completely wrong about almost everything in that case. Nevertheless, there is a statistical fact that police officers of every race are more likely to shoot an unarmed black kid than an unarmed white kid when they pull out a wallet or cell phone. That's demonstrably so. People with no racist views test as more likely to do exactly that, regardless of their own race.
I'm not talking about the surveillance state. I don't mind increased security because of terrorism. I had no problem with looking at who called who on the phone or the CIA having access to who checked which books out of the library. I think what the Bush Administration was doing on such things was on the right track, and the way the left responded was shameful. I also don't have a lot of problem in principle with Giuliani and Bloomberg's attempts to crack down on crime in high-crime neighborhoods by randomly checking people who are engaging in lawful behavior in those neighborhoods to see if they have guns or drugs. It's what the residents of those neighborhoods were demanding. I'm not sure it was carried out as well as it could have been, and I have a lot more problem with just stopping black drivers on the NJ Turnpike as was discovered to be happening a few years back when there was no evidence that black drivers were more likely to be engaged in illegal activity.
I also have a problem with cops behaving in certain ways in such encounters that shows they assume the kids they're dealing with are criminals. There certainly is a negative effect on black kids who think cops hate them. You get people who don't know how to get through an encounter with the cops alive at the end. But it's not about surveillance for me. It's about hassling people and acting as if they're guilty. Searching people's bags at airports with greater frequency isn't wrong. But if we gave them hassle while doing it and acted as if they were criminals before they had any evidence, that would be another story, and yet it's how a lot of cops do their job. There are certainly blameworthy responses that also make things worse, as evidenced in the case of Henry Louis Gates when he tried to break into his own house. I happen not to be convinced that the cop in that case did anything wrong at all. But his neighbor would not have been as likely to report him to the police if he'd been white, I'm sure.
"I'm not talking about the surveillance state. I don't mind increased security because of terrorism. I had no problem with looking at who called who on the phone or the CIA having access to who checked which books out of the library. I think what the Bush Administration was doing on such things was on the right track, and the way the left responded was shameful. I also don't have a lot of problem in principle with Giuliani and Bloomberg's attempts to crack down on crime in high-crime neighborhoods by randomly checking people who are engaging in lawful behavior in those neighborhoods to see if they have guns or drugs. It's what the residents of those neighborhoods were demanding."
DeleteI don't mind criminal profiling. I definitely mind dragnet surveillance.
I also oppose stop-and-frisk/random checkpoints, &c. To begin with, it shouldn't be illegal to carry firearms.
But in addition, I have a problem with police going on a fishing expedition to find people who may have broken the law.
I mean, why not have random, warrantless searches of homes and bank records to see if you can catch people doing something illegal? Because it's totalitarian, that's why.
There's no probable cause that the individual is breaking the law. Instead, this is a police sweep to turn up possible illegalities, absent any prior evidence of illegality.
That's just like communist/fascist regimes where the police can accost anyone at anytime, to see if their papers are in order.
"I also have a problem with cops behaving in certain ways in such encounters that shows they assume the kids they're dealing with are criminals."
DeleteI agree. But there's a direct parallel between that stereotype and white privilege. Just as some cops see a youth black male in street clothes and automatically recontextualize that in a larger narrative of young black male criminality, social justice warriors see caucasians and automatically recontextualize that in a larger narrative of "white privilege".
In both cases, they are prejudging people as statistics rather than individuals. The cops see one black youth, but situate that instance in a generalization about disproportionate rates of crime among young black males. By the same token, social justice warriors view all whites as members of the ruling class.
Whether it's social justice warriors telling whites to "check their privilege," or cops presumptively viewing blacks as thugs, these are both features of identity politics.
DeleteNone of this takes any stance whatsoever on whether or to what extent stereotypes are true. It's all correct if the stereotypes are 100% true. It's all correct if they're 100% false. It's all correct if it's somewhere in the middle (as it is often likely to be whenever some generalization is made).
ReplyDeleteWhat it does do is observe that many people believe stereotypes to be true or at least are aware that they operate. Even awareness that they operate will affect us unconsciously. But none of this analysis assumes anything on the question of whether the stereotypes are true.
As far as your insurance example goes, that's a nice example where the generalization is by and large true but not something we could assume about a driver just from the facts about the person's age and sex. But insurance companies have to deal with generalizations, because they can't investigate every single driver, and teenage boys certainly are the highest risk group in general, even if some are better drivers than many others who get lower rates. None of that settles the question of what is morally allowable. Other issues have to enter into the discussion to settle those. You might still think what they're doing is wrong, even if it's rational on their part. Or you might think it's fine. But it does give a rational motivation to do what they do.
The Jesse Jackson example is a nice instance of what I'm talking about. It doesn't reveal him to be an anti-black bigot. It does reveal that he has a negative implicit attitude toward young black men, particularly awakened when he's walking alone at night and someone following him might well be dangerous. The idea is that he expects someone is less likely to be threatening if white and therefore will more likely be given the benefit of the doubt. That means white people are more likely to be given the benefit of the doubt than black people. This is so whether the stereotype is true or not. So there's an advantage that white people have over black people in being less likely to be seen as suspicious and being more likely to be trusted. What I'm saying does not depend at all on whether that claim is true, just on the fact that some people are affected by it in precisely the way Jackson said. It doesn't matter if the locking of the doors is rational. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. It does happen. And therefore a black person walking by a door that gets locked might notice it and be insulted, which does have a negative effect on that person that wouldn't happen with a white person walking by that very same car. That's some advantage that a white person has in a similar situation in having a better quality of life by being somewhat more likely to be trusted and seen as a citizen contributing to the life of the community rather than being assumed to be more likely to have criminal tendencies.
If you're talking about invited papers, then all those factors might play a role. But that's not what went on. People sent identical resumes to these jobs, with only the names changed. So those are all controlled for. People sent identical papers to these journals, with only the names changed. So there's no difference in perceived status of institutions.
As far as the church studies go, I'm pretty sure they didn't target predominantly black congregations as a group to be studied. They did look at mainline liberal denominations, Catholics, conservative non-charismatic and non-Pentecostal evangelicals, and Pentecostal/charismatics. There might have been one other group. The most progressive group, the mainline liberals, were the least warm in their letters toward minority-named letters (the letters were all the same, only the names changed). The evangelicals and Pentecostals were much more likely to be inviting to them. The point isn't that evangelicals are really more racially accepting in their outward actions on race than those who call themselves progressives (although I think that's true and that this study is evidence of it) but that even people with a very racially positive viewpoint, who see themselves as accepting, might treat racial groups differently in ways that they don't notice.
Delete(You chose Jewish-sounding names in your example, also. I don't think they included Jewish names or Jewish congregations. These were all to at least nominally Christian congregations, and the same Christian letter of inquiry was sent to each church.)
So are you agreeing with Steve that the phenomenon being studied is majority privilege, which in America still means white privilege, or something inherent to whites qua whites? The latter opinion is but the puling of a self-loathing crank or a professional ethnic with a buffalo chip on his underachieving shoulder. The former sounds like a local manifestation of a universal problem; given our current milieu of PC cum white Protestant heterosexual male as fair game, my antipathy towards anything which could further fan the flames of cultural meltdown is pretty strong. I reiterate my call for the stereotyped to ask themsleves what it is about their behavir which triggers negative reactions, and even (gasp!) accept that hey may be their own worse enemies too occupied with nursing their own bigotry to notice that the doors they are trying to kick in may be wide open. Given how Jews and Italians, who also faced a lot of discrimination and stereotyping, created their own niches in the face of such, I also tire of those who perceive no need to own their situations and achieve rather than demand. I tire even more of white guilt-mongers whose patronizing view of minorities is truly racist by infantilizing and condescending to them; there is no white man's burden, and I am thoroughly disinclined to search for one to take up. So, then, what exactly are you proposing?
DeletePer my church questions, Beth Messiah is my archetypical Messianic Jewish congregation, as Our Lady of Anglophilia would describe WASPish AC's. My question, then, is whether a black congregation would welcome a Messianic Jew, or would a Messianic congregation welcome a black; ie another example of majority privilege.
It's a fruitless endeavor, Kirk. Have you stopped beating your wife?
DeleteAs I said before, South Africa during apartheid had plenty of white privilege, but whites were a significant minority. So it's not just reducible to minority privilege. It's certainly not an essential property of being white. It's a social fact, not a biological fact, that whites end up with more advantages than other racial groups do in our society, even though the complex forces allow for various other groups to have advantages at times or with respect to certain phenomena. So it's none of the above (or at least not exclusively either; it's much more complex than either).
DeleteThe reality is that lots of stereotypes have their root in facts, but those facts in some cases reflect a general trend but in others don't. Empirical studies show that we form generalizations much more quickly (as in, from one or two examples) when it comes to negative traits, so we can end up with negative stereotypes whose factual basis consists of a small percentage of that population (even if it does occur at higher rates than in other groups). So it would still be wrong in such cases to think the stereotype is generally true or to assume it unconsciously even if one thinks explicitly that it's not true. Take, for example, the stereotype that evangelical Christians are anti-intellectual. There is some factual basis for that. I complain about it myself. But it's immoral to assume it of any evangelical without knowing it about them, and it's immoral to unconsciously treat evangelicals as if it's true even if one, in one's collected thoughts, refuses to believe it explicitly.
I think things are more complicated than what you're saying, although I think there's something to a lot of it. I'm not interested in spending much more time diverting to that subject, though. I simply wanted to make the point that white privilege is a useful concept that gets at something true about the world, and I think I've made a case for that.
I don't have a lot of connections with Messianic Jewish congregations, but I know several people involved in the one in town here, and I know of one member who is black, and she is welcomed there. I have more connections with majority-black congregations, and none of the ones I'm familiar with would bat an eye at a Messianic Jew attending. They tend to be welcoming of anyone, in my experience. They just do things in a worship style that many white evangelicals who aren't charismatic would find intolerable. But my own congregation isn't all that comfortable an environment for some people who grew up in a black church, even though there have been several black members in my time, all of whom felt perfectly welcomed. It's just a different expectation about how worship should be done.
ReplyDeletePossible erratum: I did not mean, when using the name Beth Messiah, that I was Messianic; it was poor wording on my part, and I'm certainly not Messianic. I've known a number of these folks, and have seen gentiles welcomed as long as they keep in their place; ie another ethnic church wallowing in the sin of phyletism.
DeleteAs for white privilege, I fail to see your point clearly; your apartheid example is no different to Alawi privilege under Assad; otherwise it's just like Han privilege in Red China; ie majority privilege a la Steve.
My point is that social practices can deliver advantages to a group for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it happens because of the mere fact that they are the majority. Sometimes it happens because they are in the positions of power and set the rules in their favor. Sometimes it happens because of unconscious effects from a history of having been either one or both of the above, given that it might have produced stereotypes that still operate and involve a stigma against a certain group. Sometimes it operates via the psychological effects on those who are subjects of that stigmatized stereotype. Sometimes it operates via the psychological effects on those who treat people based on those stigmatized stereotypes. Sometimes it happens because of pure market forces resulting from either of those two sets of behavior or some combination. Sometimes it happens because of deliberate discrimination against people because of an explicit view that the stereotypes are true (or even essential to the group). My point is that it isn't just like any other thing you're going to produce, so it's pointless to keep bringing up more and more other things that it's not just like. The exact social situation we have in this country today is not an exact duplication of any other exact social situation anywhere else at any time. It has its own idiosyncratic features.
Deletesince we agree that the whiteness aspect is incidental, I ask again what it is you are proposing. regarding this alleged problem.
DeleteSounds like radon gas. Colorless, odorless, virtually undetectable, but it's there and may cause cancer.
DeleteNot detectable by introspection of one's own attitudes. Detectable with empirical studies. Lots of stuff is like that.
DeleteBut "lots of stuff" is simply amoral. Your prodigious posts in this thread seem to waffle on this point. On the one hand you sometimes cast the subject in moral terms, "negative views" of the out group, "unfairness" in hiring and grading.
DeleteOn the other hand it's just a thing free floating in the air, hence my radon comment; you liken it to "home court advantage". There’s no moral or ethical quality to that.
So what's your point? And what's the cash value of freighting your empirical phenomenon with the loaded term "white privilege"? Unless I've missed it, I've yet to see your explanation for that.
It's unfair that someone is born with one arm, when most people are born with two, but that's no moral evaluation. So why are you taking it to be waffling when sometimes I accept that something is unfair but other times I'm treating it as morally neutral? Unfairness itself is morally neutral, at least without further argument to show that it's a morally problematic kind of unfairness.
DeleteBut the reality is that some of these things are things we should try to do things about and others of them might well not be.
There's a whole lot resting on this. One important thing is that I think conservatives have the better arguments when it comes to race but the absolute worst rhetoric. I'm trying to help conservatives understand the language of those who spend their time on race issues, and I'm trying to help conservatives be more aware of the empirical data that they usually dismiss as something other than what it is. I don't see how the better solutions to race issues are ever going to get a hearing when you have people who say things like what I'm seeing in this thread. I've managed to retain some very conservative views about race while speaking in a way that leftist race theorists think I'm on their side, because we share the same goal but disagree on how to get there. They don't think that of most Republicans, because they can't tell the difference between George W. Bush and Donald Trump, even though there's a world of difference there.
To be clear, the common goal I'm referring to here is nothing more than progress toward a better world in terms of how racial groups interact and in terms of their well-being. I don't mean to suggest that anyone thinks I'm favoring the socialist agenda or anything like that. I don't send any of those signals. But they do think I understand race issues in a way that they (wrongly) don't think Bush does.
DeleteSteve, you've posted your concern about police on many occasions Do you believe the police to be more corrupt than, say, in the days of the gangs of Five Points, Prohibition, or in more recent times esp during the civil rights era (eg, framing of Hurricane Carter)? What is a rational response should a police department have to drug gangs with M16's and automatic weapons but to increase its own firepower? What is the solution to this problem?
ReplyDeleteI doubt police in general are more corrupt than in the past. There have, however, been changes:
Deletei) The "war on drugs" has led to paramilitarization of the police force.
ii) Police have lots of surveillance equipment they didn't have in the past.
iii) Moreover, in my anecdotal experience, there simply are more police per capita than used to be the case.
iv) A philosophy of policing that emphasizes crime prevention rather than law enforcement results in very intrusive policing.
v) As liberals enact a raft of politically correct laws, that results in more oppressive or arbitrary policing. Ever more behavior is criminalized. Take cutting down a tree on your own property that blocks your view. Or smoking in a bar. Or needing permits for everything. The list continues to expand. It becomes suffocating.
vi) Conversely, you have sanctuary cities, where police decline protect the general public. Or take police who allow rioters to loot stores with impunity, or even burn it down.
If the storeowner shoots a looter or arsonist, they arrest the storeowner rather than the looter or arsonist. Self-defense is becoming illegal.
Is the problem then with the police, or rather with the government and those voters who demand security over liberty (and hence get neither)? Police don't make the laws - although they can creatively interpret them - but rather enforce what the government decrees. In Baltimore, were the police merely not responding to riots, or disinclined to evoke the wrath of a PC black mayor with a chip on her shoulder: in the former scenario, we have a police problem; in the latter, a failure of government and ultimately one of the electorate.
DeleteDrug enforcement presents a dilemma. What do you do when there's an insatiable demand for a socially destructive product? Because it's socially destructive, you need to deter it. But given the demand, there are limits to how far you can deter it.
DeleteI think we have to strike a balance. Try to keep it at manageable levels.
It's better to crack down on production and sales rather than possession. And I'd eliminate no-knock raids.
Obviously, we can't have police who are outgunned by criminals. However, when the DOD sells overstocked military equipment to the police, I think police feel the need to use it to justify the purchase. It fosters the mentality of an occupation force.
The police have powerful public sector unions that don't hesitate to run ads or go on TV news shows to protest a proposed bill they think is detrimental to law enforcement. Likewise, they endorse political candidates.
DeleteIn addition, although police chiefs a political appointees, sherifs are elected officials. Likewise, retired cops can run for political office.
So police have various ways to influence law and policy.