Which ideas do they want to censor?
Edit: I'm looking for specific examples. Otherwise we are just feigning outrage.
I had an ex co-worker who confided in me that he doesn't like gay people. I was very happy that he couldn't say that in public.
Edit: I'm looking for specific examples. Otherwise we are just feigning outrage.
I had an ex co-worker who confided in me that he doesn't like gay people. I was very happy that he couldn't say that in public.
* The USA is a moral country.
* The USA is morally superior to most/all other countries.
* A specific member of an in-power "preferred" group can experience unjustified prejudice, oppression, and bullying from members of an out-of-power group.
* Men and women have some neurological differences.
* Some cultures are morally superior to other cultures.
* Christianity's values are moral.
* Conforming gender identities exist for more reasons than culturally enforced gender roles.
* Abortion involves the killing of a baby.
* Poor whites are not a privileged class.
I just wanted to respond to this because (like a lot of these ideas) I think they represent a response to a strawman. The core point of the discussion of privilege acknowledges that all people have privileges. The question then is defining what they are and how useful they are.
When talking about white privilege, the point is that poor whites are better off than poor blacks, just by virtue of being white. The interesting thing here is that there are privileges only afforded to poor blacks. The problem is that the privileges afforded to poor whites are more useful than those afforded to poor blacks.
Its not clear to me that that that's true; there is complicated intersectionality at play. Poor whites are more likely to have social networks and other advantages that provide things useful to getting out of poverty, and may -- due to racism and the racially unequal distribution of wealth and power -- have better responses from people in power independent of their own social networks.
OTOH, they may also be more likely to have social networks that are less understanding of an accepting of poverty.
Whether this is a net advantage or net disadvantage varies, among poor whites, considerably from individual to individual.
Group privilege exists mostly in terms of average conditions across groups (and may not thus be particularly useful in discussing the positions of individuals.)
Taking White privilege as a given (which I think does accurately reflect reality, in terms of on-average advantage), I'm not sure that poor White privilege (compared to, poor non-White ) is valid; its certainly not a necessary corollary of White privilege.
Edit: this is technically incorrect, see dragonwriter below.
Yes, good to point that out.
My argument (implicitly) was that this is a really huge factor which gives poor whites a "net advantage."
(The first may help in the second, but just as committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to assure incarceration for it, avoiding committing a crime is neither necessary nor sufficient to avoid incarceration for it. It is frequently argued that it is both more necessary and less sufficient for blacks to avoid crime in order to avoid incarceration as compared to whites, for instance.)
No, its hard (but not impossible) to be incarcerated for murder without someone being dead. In a system in which law enforcement, the judiciary, and/or the population from which juries are drawn are biased against people like you -- whether for race or other reasons -- it can be quite easy to be incarcerated (or worse!) for murder without having killed the person who is dead, much less having murdered them (which is legally more specific than merely having killed them.)
> People are not being wrongly incarcerated (wholesale) for violent crimes that dont exist, not being violent is sufficient to avoid incarceration for such crimes.
No, even if the premise was true (that people are not wrongly incarcerated for violent crimes that do not exist), it doesn't justify the conclusion: not being violent would not be sufficient to avoid incarceration based on that premise, you'd have to stop everyone else from being violent, too, since only the existence of the crime, not you actually being the one who committed it, is posited as necessary for the punishment to occur.
That's absurd. You're completely ignoring the face that the FBI invented completely bogus disciplines of forensic science (hair analysis, bite marks) and self-certified experts in those disciplines who then went forth and helped convict scores of people for two decades.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/fbi-overstated-fo...
I'd suggest that the fraction of wrongly convicted people is much higher than the number of those who are/were known to be wrongly convicted.
In 2010, 62,593 blacks were victims of white violence, while 320,082 whites were victims of black violence. (Bureau of Justice Statistics). 2013 FBI homicide numbers show a similar ratio, with blacks being about 12 times more likely to kill a white person than whites were to kill a black person [2] (~10 blacks per 100k population kill a white, while ~1 white per 100k kill a black).
Some studies have shown that crime is correlated primarily with poverty, while other studies have found that being black correlates to criminality while controlling for other factors [4]:
"As a means to assess these possibilities, I estimate separate regression equations for the black and white block groups in Atlanta. [...] Consistent with previous research, percent black retains a strong, significant effect on violent crime net of the effects of other controls. [...]" "[...] Although this finding appears to provide partial support for the racial invariance assumption, the fact remains that for a large proportion of the black neighborhoods, the effect of disadvantage on violence is weaker than is the effect evident among all of the white neighborhoods in the analysis" (However this paper is largely inconclusive on the issue overall, and predominately suggests that previous research into the topic is inadequate to understand it)
Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society (by solve I mean bring violent crime down to zero generally, across all groups)
[1] FBI crime statistics by race for 2010: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/...
[2] FBI homicide statistics by race for 2013: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...
[3] http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-american... has additional details and citations.
[4] http://www.udel.edu/soc/faculty/parker/SOCI836_S08_files/McN...
Edit: missed this line in your comment before:
> Why this is the case is an interesting problem that I hope we can tackle, better understand, and attempt to solve as a society
This is what Black Lives Matter is about. They understand the problem (often by living through it) and are focused on tackling it. Because they don't focus too much on helping other people to understand the problem, this might not be clear to you.
Edit: I was about to respond to your reply, but it looks like you deleted it.
> too many topics seem taboo to reason about objectively
I think the disagreement is about where this reasoning can/should happen. From the perspective of the BLM movement, it is not their job to educate people about race. I think this reasoning has already happened at an academic level and has concluded that (to summarize very broadly) white people have a whole lot of privilege.
> Do we have that evidence?
Yes, I believe so.
[1] http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bobo/files/2010_racialized_...
[2] Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
[3] Alice Goffman, On the Run (this is an ethnography, so you may need to have an understanding of ethnographic methods to accept the evidence here as "data")
Prosecution figures are simply unreliable as a metric for judging how many crimes are committed by whites vs. blacks. There are many interesting cases that show this. The most interesting one is McCleskey v. Kemp. It's not my favorite in terms of the specifics of the case, but it is my favorite because in the intervening years it has become pretty clearly a bad ruling, to the point that the justice who wrote the majority opinion wishes he could reverse his own vote. The unfortunate thing being that he cannot, and his vote has made it effectively impossible to detect and address racial bias in prosecution.
"The UCR and NVCS show similar trends regarding the races of offenders. Generally, the number of minorities identified as offenders is disproportionately high compared to their overall numbers in the population. As Ronald J Berger et al. advise the NCVS, 'Data are consistent with the UCR. The offenders in these types of crimes are disproportionately young, nonwhite, and male.'" (NVCS page 312, can be found by Google search-inside-the-book)
I would be interested to research the topic further. Could you provide more information about the studies you mentioned? I have not previously seen convincing evidence that bias in the justice system is responsible for the racial disparity in these crime statistics. From what I understand, a lot of the murders are black-on-black violence, as well. In 2013, 90% of blacks were murdered by blacks. A majority of people are killed by one of their own race in general (though black-on-white violence is much higher than white-on-black). People are typically murdered by someone who knew them intimately.
[Updated per correction]
Blacks killed by blacks: 90% [1]
Blacks killed by whites: 8%
Whites killed by whites: 82%
Whites killed by blacks: 15%
I find it plausible that there are effects along the lines of what you're saying, but I find it hard to believe that it would result in a murder per capita discrepancy of 10:1. It seems more plausible that that kind of bias would result in a discrepancy of much smaller proportions, especially for murder. I would be glad to review whatever evidence is available.
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...
Blacks killed by blacks: 90%
Blacks killed by whites: 8%
Whites killed by whites: 82%
Whites killed by blacks: 15%
Ratio of whites killed by police to blacks killed by police: 1.857
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/...
"For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it." (Thomas Jefferson)
One particularly damning statistic: black people pulled over and searched for drugs are significantly less likely to have drugs than white people.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/racial-disparity-traffi...
This is a pretty good digest of the figures, but really read The New Jim Crow:
Yes poor whites are privileged compared to poor blacks, and poor blacks are privileged compared to poor indians living on a reservation. There is almost always someone worse off than you, arguing about who is the most worse off is the wrong fight.
The groups that we divide people into are fairly arbitrary anyway. Why stop at race? Surely you can subdivide any race into smaller groups where some are more privileged than others.
But to most people taking about privilege (especially college students) this issue is purely binary. If you are white you're privileged, if you're black you're not. To them it doesn't matter if you're comparing a middle class black guy and a dirt poor white dude.
If someone says something unpopular on hackernews, ie "Edward Snowden is a traitor" they will be downvoted into oblivion. You could say that hackernewws censored the person's ideas, but I think the reality is that what they said wasn't very popular with the people they said it to. I think this effect is just as relevant and predictable with online communities as it is with college campuses.
Nope. Totally different. In your example, the poster on HackerNews would only get down-voted and thus, censored. Okay. No big deal.
What's happening at the universities right now is different. It is not censership. At these, universities, a person who says, "Edward Snowden is a traitor" would get fired, because students would force the administrators to fired the person they disagree with, because it's "offensive" to call Edward Snowden a traitor.
So totally different. On HackerNews, it's just a down-vote, a simple censorship. At the universities, the person loses his job/education/livelihood, all because he has a different opinion about Edward Snowden. That's not censorship. That's "ruinning-people's-lives-for-having-a-different-opinion" but trying to pass it off as just a simple censorship.
1. works of Edward Said
2. works of Mark Twain
3. works of Upton Sinclar
4. works of Maureen Tkacik
5. Ovid's Metamorphoses
6. The movie Avengers
7. Debates about abortion
8. Some "Afrobeat" band that had too many white people in it
9. Some male professor who was "creepy" at a conference
10. Asking harassment victims for proof
And if I recall correctly from pop culture several months back:
11. The comedic act of Jerry Seinfeld
12. The comedic act of Chris Rock
He can still talk about it when he's around other like-minded people though. By not being able to say it in public, isn't he basically ensuring that he'll never have a conversation with someone with a dissenting opinion and never be forced to think through it? These things just reinforce his attitude probably.
Good call. As long as your opinions remain "acceptable" you have nothing to worry about.
Well done.
Note, this coworker in question didn't say "I don't think gay marriage should be an institution of the state" or some other impersonal statement that can actually be evaluated through logic. There is a distinct difference between those two types of statements. Do you think it's reasonable to defend people who say "I don't like gay people."?
As long as he don't act out on it, and go around killing gay people or something.
Just like you have the right to not like George Bush, or football jocks, or goths, or whatever. Nothing wrong with that. As long as you don't try to assassinate George Bush, you have the right to not like him.
I mean, sure, not liking gays make him a homophobic, but as long as he don't continuously go around calling all gays "Faggot" to their faces, harassing them, threatening them, etc.
Let's unpack this.
Are you happy that homophobia is now socially inappropriate? Or are you happy that it is verboten to reveal or express a homophobic opinion?
There is an important distinction to be drawn here. That homophobia is becoming socially backward and marginal is a wonderful thing. That nobody can say something homophobic is not. The way free speech works is, at its most basic: you're allowed to express yourself publicly. The public will then determine how it deals with you. If you say "I don't like gay people" to your co-workers, and your co-workers ostracize you, and/or you are fired for creating a hostile work environment, then you reaped the just results of your decision to speak up. But you should have the freedom to speak up, nevertheless. The choice should be yours.
We should also note that prior restraint and group-self-censorship aren't going to change your co-worker's opinions. Whether or not he's too scared to speak his mind, his mind is made up. Deprive him of the chance to engage in any sort of dialogue about his beliefs, and he'll never get the chance to have them challenged, and they'll remain deeply held.