I've had this idea, that I think may make the situation better. They idea is that in black-on-black, as well as victimless crimes, the defendant is allowed to be judged by a jury of black people. Then the black community can decide for itself what punishments are best for the community, and could give more lenient punishments if the current ones are seen as harsh enough to be harmful.
Do you think it could work?
As a white man living in the South, we still have segregation in practice. I rarely had interaction with blacks because they did different things and took different classes at school. We all went to the same schools---just didn't have the same classes or have the same social circles. Not much shared in the way of culture. I have had some black friends over the years who get berated by other blacks for "acting white."
There is nothing white people can do to fix this. Blacks have always decided what kind of culture they want to have and they will continue to do so.
Therefore slavery still exists. It just got sneaky.
Well sort of sneaky - the English were calling their white slaves convicts. When people did crimes like steal bread, they could be sent all the way across the oceans on six month voyages to work. Yeah, they could eventually be free... but even if they managed that; then getting back was near impossible for most.
The full text of the amendment:
> Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
> Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
By word count, 30% of the amendment allows slavery under specific circumstances, but somehow that seems to get left out of the curriculum of most american civics classes (that I've seen / gone through anyway).
Well, except confronting our own biases, encouraging diverse hiring practices, confronting both overt and covert racism when we see it, educating ourselves on racial privilege, fighting racial profiling and sentencing in our justice system, and just in general fighting for racial equality.
I am white and I think I am in the very same group as blacks and all other races, namely the group called "individuals". All we need to do is fight for individual rights and teach people respect is earned on an individual basis. Nothing can be assumed from group membership in real life; every leftist would agree with this statement, yet you want to make laws based on group membership. Nothing can be assumed based on group membership. Whoever does is the true racist. Stop peddling your divisive ideologies. Stop drawing lines around people. We drew lines around places in maps and today we have wars over those lines. Your lines around people create the same kind of conflicts on a smaller scale. Please stop it. There's only one kind of person, the individual. Let's protect individual rights and everyone will be OK, and by that I mean everyone, not just the groups your crony leftists select to be privileged to the detriment of some other group's disadvantage.
You can try and create "race", "religion", "gender" labels all you want but to me there's only one sort of person, the individual, and nothing can be said about an individual a priori.
Stop propagating divisiveness.
Nothing should be, but unfortunately for many minority groups, it is. The fact that it doesn't affect you is the great benefit of being white (and, if such things don't affect you, probably male).
Yeah exactly, and there are tons of these people, and at the moment they tend to have a lot more money and power than the people they make assumptions about.
Promoting individual rights doesn't do enough, because we've had such a long history of not promoting them. You have to acknowledge race in order to fight the racists of the world.
Can you give a solid example? I can't see how labelling someone "race X" allows you to fight against unequal opportunities or other discrimination or prejudice.
Now imagine 90% of the unemployed are black, in a city where blacks are the minority. Clearly there is more than an economic problem here. Promoting individual rights is not going to help, because all races have identical rights in this scenario, and businesses should always have the right to not hire someone.
The solution would depend on the underlying problem, but it might very well involve giving some sort of temporary advantage based on race. The parent comment advocated forgetting all race, religion, gender labels, but we can't do that until everybody agrees to let those labels go. Until then, we need to acknowledge race and gender so that we can recognize when a problem exists, and address it.
From a colorblind perspective, race is already solved, right? All races have equal rights, discrimination based on race is illegal, legally we're all good.
Can you give me an example of how a town where 90% of the unemployed are black could possibly come into being in the free market where voluntary trade and contracts are enforced by the governments courts (and there are no group-membership based laws)?
I'll give you the beginning. Once upon a time there was a town where all sorts of races lived in (no one bothered to count because these people learned the lessons of Nazis using Dutch records to kill Jews and they didn't want that again). Then you fill in the blanks, then all of a sudden without government interference in the market, 90% of the unemployed are black.
I eagerly await your reply.
It's not all of a sudden because in the US, we had slavery and then Jim Crow. There was never a time where everyone lived equally, and then all of a sudden all the black people were unemployed. They've always been disproportionately poor, uneducated, unemployed, and that's a really tough cycle to get out of.
And it's not blatant racism. A black guy with a Harvard MBA doesn't have much of a problem getting a job in this town. But there's still plenty of subtle, unconscious racism. A black guy is more likely to be rejected for any given job than a white guy with a comparable resume. There's plenty of studies on this issue, here's the first one I found: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=422902
The employer here doesn't hate black people, they just decided to hire the white candidate for a reason they probably wouldn't be able to put their finger on.
These black people don't have any business connections, so it's a lot harder to get internships and jobs. Half the adults they know when they're in college are unemployed or in jail. This is more of a poverty problem than a race problem, but race still plays into it. You can't get a job in your dad's office like your white friends did, because your parents were constantly passed over for jobs like that.
These black people have a much harder time starting their own business. Their family doesn't have any money, and they seem to have more trouble getting a loan than white people do.
I want to reiterate that this is not all of a sudden. There has never been a time in the US where all races lived in equality and harmony. If 90% of the unemployed are black, it's probably always been that way, right up until none of them were unemployed because they were all slaves.
Why is it that when the number [getting the jobs] A < B by design it is wrong, but when A > B it's right.
Moreover what you appear to be arguing is not even that the candidates have equal standing with regard to ability to perform the roles but that you should select A > B even if on average candidates in group B are more able to fulfil the job requirements.
So now you reject candidates who are more able to do a job simply because they fit unrelated classification A. How is that discrimination good?
Why is it alright to antagonise people now because of their race when it wasn't in the past; don't you think that will just foment ill will and a greater focus on irrelevant biological classifiers?
We shouldn't discriminate against a poor person because they're poor and in group B, we should offer opportunities for all poor people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps regardless of unrelated biological classifications. By this means we will remove needless discrimination rather than shift it around. If, in order to make restitution you feel that there are excessively many poor people from one group, then make more opportunities available to all poor people. That way all those who wish to take advantage can do so regardless of whether their earlobes are attached or whatever hangup you have.
But it is absolutely fair to address the reasons black people are so disproportionately unemployed. Is it because employers are unconsciously discriminatory when evaluating candidates? Yes, according to a a few studies. What can we do about that? I don't really know, but helping poor people in general will not solve this problem.
Is it because particular communities have been caught in a cycle of poverty and lack of education for centuries, because of slavery and segregation? Yes, often it is. You are not racist, you had nothing to do with those crimes, but unfortunately the antagonism of the past is still very much affecting the people of today. It is not antagonistic to address these longstanding issues. Again, I don't know the solution, but it might involve offering college scholarships specific to black people. It might involve some kind of affirmative action.
These ideas are not antagonistic to non-black people, even if a white guy gets rejected from a college that accepts a less-qualified black guy. We cannot treat everyone equally when some people are starting so far behind.
Yes, we should offer opportunities for all poor people, but that won't do enough. Biological classification A is at a huge disadvantage, and all the people responsible for it are dead, so we can't punish them or make them fix it. We have to try to fix it.
Yes. But we won't fix it by layering on more irrelevant discrimination.
You have to start where you are, making things unfair now because they were unfair before just retains the acceptability of creating unfair systems.
Thanks for giving up your further insight. I suspect we won't both move beyond where we are unless you have a different angle to give that you think is more convincing?
Say an innocent person is accused of murder as a teenager, spends 30 years in jail, and then is released when the real killer is caught. As a society, we owe this guy something, right? We can't treat him like a normal unemployed person, because he's at a severe disadvantage through no fault of his own. For simplicity's sake we'll say all the police and prosecutors involved with his case are dead, so the responsibility lies entirely with the society/government they represented.
Ok, now imagine he never gets any kind of compensation, never gets a stable job, and dies leaving kids behind. Do you believe society owes his kids anything? They are at a severe disadvantage, still basically as a result of society's mistakes. You might say it was irresponsible of this guy to have kids with no means to support them, fine, but I would say the bulk of responsibility still lies with society as a whole.
And since our society has limited resources, if we were going to compensate these kids, we would necessarily be taking money away from something else. Money that might have been used to pave some roads, or fund some art, or pay some government employees. And even though the other potential recipients of this money had literally nothing to do with the original crime, it's not unfair to take it away.
Now imagine this whole story happened to a bunch of people, all of whom happened to be black. And that today, 95% of the black people in our fictional town are related to one of the original wrongly accused victims. Society owes something to almost all these black people, right? We don't owe them anything because of the color of their skin, it's just that all of the victims are black, and nearly all of the black people are victims. If there were an easy way to figure out exactly who was affected by the original crimes then we would, but there isn't.
So basically I'm only making two points:
1) Society's responsibility does not die with the victim.
2) Saying "all black people deserve compensation" is not racist when nearly all black people are affected by slavery and segregation and modern discrimination. If we could quantify exactly how much every person's life was affected by these things, that would be great, but obviously that's impossible. We really want to say "all victims of slavery and racism deserve compensation", but the only realistic way to identify that set is "black people".
My immediate response is that, right, the children of the wrongly imprisoned person (let's call them "CWIP") are disadvantaged. So one of them goes for a job and the other candidate's parent wasn't wrongly imprisoned so you give the job to the CWIP, rather than to the person who spent years studying to be sure to qualify fully, lived through extreme poverty, cared for their sick parents ... the CWIP get the job through accident of birth ... and this is supposed to be better than having people get a job through accident of birth [eg because of an unrelated biological characteristic].
So, then you want to expand this and say, "well, look, more of these people with this characteristic have been disadvantaged in the past". But, they're only a group because of that characteristic. There are people who've been similarly disadvantaged outside that characteristic-group and adding additional disadvantage to them because of something they didn't do, that none of their ancestors even did, based solely on irrelevant biological characteristics (let's call that "IBC"; yes, things like skin colour). Surely you can see how injust that is.
Are you going to then flip things around and say, well we acted injustly to this generation because they didn't have the right IBC and now these children were discriminated against unfairly, so now we'll have to be unfair again? Anything else would be morally inconsistent and partial. So you wind yourself in knots.
Lets take your hypothetical end position, you want to help the disadvantaged in that town, because 95% of those you feel are disadvantaged are because they're CWIPs. What's wrong with offering assistance to all those disadvantaged? Are you concerned that one of those 5% of disadvantaged people might be a descendant of a juror/judge/policeman who acted improperly? Surely equal grace to the disadvantaged is better that injust discrimination against the rest of that 5% who weren't involved?
Let's take a different tack: Logically, you're going to want to discriminate in favour of those with long-standing native North American ancestry too. So do you favour all tribes? What if one tribe was instrumental in wiping out another, do you favour them both, despite the ancestors of the one having the other's blood on their hands. If it doesn't matter if your inherited genetics are from ancestors who were Blackfoot or Assiniboine [two tribes who IIUC warred against one another], why does it matter if your ancestors were French, Portugese or British [or whatever]? If none of those matter, then why do other inherited IBC matter?
Suppose I'm rich, from a family of millionaires for multiple generations; do you still want to discriminate for me against the poor because of IBC?
Perhaps USA is different but in my country, UK, it's possible for a motivated individual to go from decrepitude to being part of the 1% within a generation. Certainly it's possible for nearly all those who wish to work hard to get education (non-academic trade qualifications for example) that will set you up with a reasonable standard of life if you're prepared to work hard. [Aside: this is becoming more difficult it seems.]
You've put the case for ongoing racial discrimination very well but the way you propose introduces further injustices by design; you lift up all those who're black (say). The way I propose may mean that injustice takes a generation or so to be fiscally corrected but doesn't introduce further injustices which will take further generations still to correct; I choose to offer help to all those who're most disadvantaged regardless of irrelevant biological characteristics.
PS: I just wanted to add, I like your analogy and it certainly gave me pause and I'll definitely think on it some more. Thanks.
It's odd that in the last 40 years of policy where these things where all mandated, promoted, and force, it only made things worse - for everyone (ex: dumbing down the education system to the lowest common denominator, hiring based on race rather than merit, breaking up the black family structure, seeing racism under every rock and corner to excuse bad behavior, promoting said bad behavior as either "authentic" or as the natural result of "white racism", etc).
Maybe, just maybe, your personal bias of viewing blacks as some type of helpless children that have to be taken care of - is the problem, and not the solution.
I took me years to really grok how I was part of the problem. Eventually, I figured out that I needed to do this:
s/white people/people/g;
s/black people/people/g
When I fail to overcome my upbringing, I fail to make new friends. I fail to be funny with strangers. I don't get smiles because, without thinking about it, I wasn't giving 'em.
This is subtle. It's not just hard to talk about, it's hard to think about.
You are right that white people being friendly is an issue. But that is the fly in the room. Black culture is the elephant.
Admittedly, though, white culture has been in decline since the late 18th century, so that's also a problem. Whites are doing all kinds of things to exacerbate the problem. Like accepting postmodern views that reject individualism and reason in favor of racism, classism, feminism, psychological determinism, and so on. Totally rejecting individual responsibility. In other words, yes, white culture is a huge problem---but not in the way people think.
This is so clearly untrue that I wonder if it's worth pointing out the obvious. In fact, black-skinned Americans rarely have had the option of self-determination, and mostly that is due to white-skinned contemporaries who enslaved them, forced them into ghettos, segregated them in public life, and denied them political rights, and social and economic opportunity.
More concretely, in the southeastern United States, blacks were slaves (something local whites fought a war to try to preserve; take a step back and think how bizarre that is) and after that oppressed: They couldn't eat in the same restaurants, go to the same schools work the same jobs, live in the same neighborhoods, sleep at the same hotels; talking to a white-skinned women could result in a black-skinned male being lynched. Even today, there is much discrimination; consider whether they can join certain college fraternities in Oklahoma, for example, or walk the streets without being harassed or worse.
To suggest social segregation is due to the choices of black-skinned Americans is absurd.
What can white people do to fix this specifically?
Assuming you never encounter this particular type of racism, it's still all connected. Addressing any type of discrimination and racism helps solve the general problem, which this "acting white" stereotype is just a symptom of. I think it's a little disingenuous to look at these individual symptoms and say "nothing I can do". "Nothing I can do about prison populations, those people made their own choices." "Nothing I can do about poverty, I already support them through taxes, they can improve themselves if they want to." "Nothing I can do about education inequalities, they can apply to college just like I did." etc.
Not saying you share these opinions, but you hear them a lot. And it's not like black people have no responsibility here, but there's plenty to be done by everyone.
Edit: By the way I upvoted even though I think your line of thinking is incorrect, and that it intentionally contributes to the racial problem we face here.
Edit2: I meant "un"intentionally. Sorry.
However, it doesn't really need to be fixed. All that needs to happen is for individuals to decide that they want to live rational, virtuous lives.
If you doubt that black culture preaches the opposite, listen to (modern) black music. (Or look at black incarcertaion rates.)
I say "modern" because much of the best American music was created by blacks. But that was a while ago.
Thanks for the clarification. Email me at 1000app@gmail.com so that I can email you my thoughts on this. From a black person's point of view. I suspect we will have to go a few back and forth. Maybe.
As a white man living in the South, we still have segregation
in practice. I rarely had interaction with blacks because they
did different things and took different classes at school. We
all went to the same schools---just didn't have the same classes
or have the same social circles.
I never saw them again, so I don't know if they went on to have the same social circles as white people.
Back in the mid 90s my wife's family wasn't allowed to stay in the nice part of a motel somewhere in the South. They had to stay in the slightly crappy "black" block of the motel. The irony is that all the cars parked in front of the shitty "black" block of the motel were expensive ones. Also they're not even black, they're Asian. Apparently every business in that part of the town had de-facto segregation like this.
I'm curious if it's still like that. I've seen on recent TV documentaries (e.g. Louis Theroux) that there is still a hell of a lot of racism down there, so I imagine things haven't changed very much for the better.
The North was not much better, where racial segregation in places like Chicago and Seattle was enforced through redlining, blockbusting, restrictive deed covenants, &c., and outright government policy.
Much of the country was ruled by an explicit white supremacist ideology for much of the 20th century, often enforced through open terroristic violence (lynching).