Professor called racist for arguing race isn’t the sole explanation for poverty
thecollegefix.com
thecollegefix.com
The article says only that 'some students' called him racist. How do you infer that that means the large majority of those who criticize him are doing so for groupthink reasons?
If you want to view the video, it's at https://business.lehigh.edu/news/understanding-poverty?fbcli... along with a rebuttal, and links to various supporting documents and commentary.
My reading of the various criticisms show they mostly focus on the invalid arguments in the original video, and its framing. http://www.electrostani.com/2021/02/a-response-to-frank-gunt... summarizes it nicely as:
> I believe Professor Gunter’s YouTube video uses data misleadingly, though the real source of the visceral reaction many students have had to his arguments probably comes from his language and rhetoric.
> If his first slide had said “U.S. Census Data Suggests Poverty Rates are Declining for Black Americans,” instead of “Poverty is Not a Matter of Race,” frankly, I doubt we would even be talking about this. So the first takeaway is: how you frame arguments and the language you use matters.
> that “poverty is mostly a matter of race,” that it is “a generational curse,” and that “the poor have no agency.”
Later it quotes the professor as saying "I made the argument that racism cannot be the sole explanation of poverty in the United States."
It's definitely true that racism cannot be the sole explanation for poverty in the US. [1] However, reasoning this economic professor makes is:
> Gunter noted that it is “challenging to argue that white poverty is caused by racism” when it is a fact that “a majority of the poor identify as white.”
One obvious problem is that white poverty in the US is supported by racism. As Bill Moyers quotes LBJ as saying:
> “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.”
That is, just because someone is poor and white doesn't mean that racism wasn't a significant contributing factor to that poverty. Therefore, simply making that observation is not strong support for the underlying argument.
I therefore agree with the quoted assessment:
> “As a result, the viewpoint presented dismisses racial inequities as a component of poverty and ignores institutional forces keeping people in poverty. This has the consequence of propagating ideas rooted in structurally racist ways of thinking. We find it disappointing that the impacts of these deficiencies were not recognized, and that the video was instead promoted by our institution.”
[1] For example, gambling addition leading to bankruptcy and poverty. However, note that medical poverty wouldn't a thing if we had national equivalent to, say, the UK'S NHS. We don't have that because of the "socialism" boogieman, and some of the arguments against it are based in race and class prejudice.