Teaching Hopelessness to Kids of Color
freeblackthought.substack.com
freeblackthought.substack.com
When I go to the grocery store, I judge which bananas to purchase. No one asserts that bananas have free will.
But even in fictional narratives where names are not used, it's possible to identify distinct individuals based on their actions, personality, and carefully correlating together various stories. Same here.
Did you think there was only one?
I’m not quite sure what to make of it all. I read Sam Harris’s book on the subject, and can’t fault the logic. On the other hand I find the conclusion unsettling and prefer not to dwell on it. Usually I follow the logic fearlessly whatever it takes me, regardless of my feelings. But on this one, I do not.
I think free will aside, I’d rather the legal system focused on rehabilitation than on punishment where possible. It just screws up enough that the punishment might be applied to an innocent person. Also you want people that are able to rejoin society to do so from a position where they have hope and opportunity, and don’t fall back on old habits.
> I’d rather the legal system focused on rehabilitation than on punishment where possible.
Rehabilitation is science fiction. We're vaguely aware that we should be able to travel to other stars... and we might manage that too, someday. But at least the details are known with that one. We understand how much reaction mass it'd take. What payloads would be possible. We have an inkling of how to make some robotic probe navigate a new stellar system.
Rehabilitation? If we define it in a meaningful way, that is for a criminal that is likely to reoffend again in a significant way after being released... can we condition that incarcerated human to have a measurably lower risk of reoffense?
That's voodoo. There are lots of ways to cheat it (just pick the criminals who are unlikely to reoffend and put them in resort prison for a short stint far away from the bad apples). Lots of ways to be blind to the bad outcomes, and overemphasize the good outcomes no one should take credit for.
I've asked many times for someone to cite some credible theory of (criminal/non-criminal) human minds that makes it possible to lower the risk of recidivism... and everyone's sure that there must be. If you don't even have such a theory, how can you engineer a solution? The best that I ever hear is "but Europe!".
You’re essentially saying once a criminal, always a criminal. That’s objectively false, even if it might be a statistically sound bet (I don’t know if it is, but to address the strongest version of your argument.)
How best to go about that is an open question, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
For that matter, I assert that it is definitively provable that some people do change, and likely that the details of their personality and circumstances would demonstrate that this is generalizable to everyone. In short, everyone can change... not just some.
But that they can change is nothing like the idea that because people can change that we know how to rehabilitate.
You're so very confused. The idea that "people can change" is somehow equivalent to you with the idea that "rehabilitation is something science has figured out enough that we can skip straight to the applied science or even engineering phase".
What makes you confused like that? Are you prone to bouts of emotional irrationality? Are there many members of your family that are susceptible to magical thinking?
You say "I believe in lightning". I'm saying "but we don't know how to harness electricity". And we don't. You should stop using phrases like "objectively false" until you're able to think more clearly.
> but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth trying.
Yes, it actually does mean that. For one, the dangers of random experimentation on a criminal element that we have quite reasonably sequestered away from those they would harm can't even be easily measured.
For another, it is actually unethical to experiment on human beings in this way. Even on prisoners. The "it's worth trying by randomly doing shit and hopefully we'll stumble across something that seems like it will work when it takes decades to determine if someone has spontaneously rehabilitated" sentiment is lunacy.
Figure out how to do it first, and we'll talk.
PS Don't bother, I figured it out a few years ago. At least in principle. The trick is to have non-convicts outnumber the convicts, probably at minimum to a ratio of 12:1. Could be higher. Then we have to screen those correctional officers. And build every convict their own prison that looks too much like a home to make the voting public comfortable. So that we don't get any weird folie à deux issues, each room in that "prison" will need to be surveilled, and the correctional officers rotated out if things start to go off the rails. This would work, but it can't... that's 600,000+ guards in Ohio alone. Heck of a jobs program, until it works so thoroughly that there are no prisoners left and I tank the economy. And all those single-prisoner prisons that I spent a million bucks on each (50,000 of them in Ohio, for the bargain price of $50 billion) that are hidden in all the suburbs and whatnot... what is anyone going to do with those? I actually think about this stuff. It's never been more than a passing sentiment to you.
A lot of people in the west have not believed in capitol “F” Free Will for a loooong time. A huge swath of the intellectual world stopped around the time of Hume, so it’s been a central idea in the intellectual class since the American revolution. Not sure why now is different.
I think the American Revolution was vehemently predicated on free will, vis-à-vis liberty. Many other political agendas reject the notion of a "commoner" being able to think for themselves and seek a more restrictive society.
The loosely collected framework formed by those approaches was what used to be called critical race theory, before the right wing moral panic got their hands on it and made it mean something else.
In short, your bringing up her race, is completely irrelevant to the validity or invalidity of the arguments presented. (Which are pretty much boilerplate by the way. As conservatives, and liberals for that matter, we all really need new material if this is the best we can do.)
Would you say it absolutely doesn't matter how black people feel about it? Wouldn't that make the whole subject somewhat ridiculous?
And of course a black lawyer is a data point against the claims of systemic oppression.
I think "systemic" is just a way to sound somewhat deep without actually saying anything real, though. A magical explanation for everything.
I promise you, if you dedicate yourself to good-faith study, you will discover the essence of what people are talking about when they talk about "systemic" forces at play in the world.
Note that I am referring specifically to systemic forces because this encompasses the sum total of all causal influences on all elements of the system writ large. Systemic oppression is merely one half of a dichotomy, the other half being systemic privilege. Every sub-population within a general population can be evaluated along this 1D quantitative axis of "net-oppressed" vs "net-privileged". Some may be exactly balanced at the origin on this axis, but it would be simply absurd to assert that every sub-population is on average net-zero on that scale -- the probability of that happening is "almost surely zero". Ergo, some groups are more oppressed than others. Further, our constructed systems are not so complex that causation is unknowable. The civilization that humanity has built has relatively direct cause-effect relationships, largely due to its artificiality. So it stands to reason that we can determine that a) some groups are more oppressed than others, and b) the reasons for that net-oppression of a given group can be determined as functions of the components of the system they inhabit. Does this help clarify things?
Sorry I think it is all just scientism, fueled by socialist subversion theory.
The whole approach of blaming everything on oppression is a receipt for failure.
In a country that had a black president not long ago, too.
What with CRT being a university level course and all.
When I was a child, I had multiple field trips to a plantation in Louisiana. We didn't live very far away, so it was a convenient spot to go when our history teachers wanted to take us somewhere. And on the three separate trips I took, from the time I was a first grader to the time I was a junior in high school, not once did we ever visit the slave cabins, nor did the tour guides or teachers ever discuss the living conditions of the slaves or the fact that there were dozens of dead black heads on pikes outside of the entrance after the outcome of a slave rebellion. No, the tour guides talked about the artwork and the owners and the types of crops that grew.
It turns out we've been covering up the sins of our ancestors for generations, and it's part of the reason people like you are so stone-cold ignorant on the issue. Because if you're going to teach history, you should fucking TEACH HISTORY, not the whitewashed version that excludes all the naughty bits that make your ancestors look bad.
By what definition? AFAIK, critical studies can evaluate anything critically.
The issue I have with the US is that for all the talk of trying to rectify racism everyone seems more intent on "othering" than ever before. By that I mean it spends significant time trying to slot everyone into categories so they can then be treated in some prescribed manner. These categories are not based on the actual needs of individuals, but a persons RGB value. The policies in the US, at the governmental and private level say that people, based on color, are not equal, and some people need more help and others less. It's prejudicial at the core and the whole way of looking at things needs to be rectified.
We psychologically will never attribute what we've accomplished to external factors and will never see that those who don't accomplish what we've done may be disadvantaged -- even with the factors are pretty obvious.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/19/1156851675/in-2022-black-farm....
However one feels about “race”, it’s a current theme, not a relic, politically, economically or legally. And that shouldn’t be at odds with the individual choice to treat others equally.
Critical race theory is a fad among academicians, but it isn't academic in any way. It's a prescriptive worldview about how to interpret social dynamics; it is not a descriptive theory from which one can derive testable hypotheses.
Like any other prescriptive worldview, it has no place being taught as truth in a public school, which is what the opposition is all about.
Race struggles were a current event 50 years ago. The Civil Rights Act was signed in 1968 -- 55 years ago -- for example, and it hardly represented the end of racial injustice in the US. (Indeed, it's still an ongoing process in some regards.)
Teachers, not so much.
The quotation doesn't say that. The quotation is defining institutional racism and saying that one case of it is if institutions create outcomes that chronically favor white people... The fact that this author could jump to that interpretation of that sentence is ridiculous.