“So many prominent Americans, many of whom we celebrate for their progressive ideas and activism, many of whom had very good intentions, subscribed to assimilationist thinking that has also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority,” Kendi writes. They did so by promoting freedom but forgetting equality; by placing the burden of combating racism on black shoulders, not white ones; by implicitly accepting notions of inferiority, no matter how righteous their indignation; by conflating anti-racist claims and racist fears in an effort to claim a moralizing middle ground.
He is reviewing a book by Ibram X. Kendi, along with another book also focused on the history of racism by Nicholas Guyatt. It is too bad that Lozada did not include (and probably will never read) Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers. Lozada would have learned that racism became “scientific” in the latter part of the 19th century, and that American progressive economists too the lead in developing and implementing policies, including the minimum wage, that were intended to prevent “race suicide.”
The theory of race suicide was that members of inferior races could subsist on less than what superior races required. This meant that inferior races could drive wages below what the superior races needed to live on. Hence, the need for a minimum wage.
By the way, while I am not especially keen to read Kendi’s book, I would be curious to know what he means by “assimilationist thinking” and why it is a boo-phrase.
Haidt recently highlighted a good paper on ‘concept creep’ – the gradual shifting of the semantic goal posts for certain socially powerful accusations. Inevitably, the limits of the claims are so broad that they become unfalsifiable, which implies no possibility of defense from the charge.
Tort lawyers play this game all the time; trying to expand a cause of action to let the camel’s nose of their marginally excluded claim into the tent of complaints for which relief will be granted. Eventually the original category is unrecognizable and inevitably incoherent.
Quit cryin’ your white tears.
“Black inferiority” — what is this?
Is this that avg black IQ is lower than white, which is lower than Chinese, which is lower than Jewish?
Is this that 76% of black kids don’t live with married parents, while only 36% of white kids don’t?
In fact, the second example is an example of inferior behavior — having babies outside of marriage is inferior to having babies inside of marriage. This is also true between college whites and non-college whites, the latter having the behavior of having more babies outside of marriage.
In comparing any two groups, if there are more individuals who choose an inferior behavior, there is some sense that the group with more folk choosing inferior behavior is “an inferior group” — much like a basketball team where one team only focuses on offense while the superior team split focuses on both offense and defense.
The whole idea of “group equality” is a terrible dead end, and leads to increased racist acts, and increased feelings of exclusive tribalism, a superset of racism. All racism is tribalistic, but not all tribalism is racist. Jew hate is a form of tribalism. Hatred of Republicans is a growing form of tribalism in the US.
One ‘coming apart’ statistic I haven’t seen is what prevent of kids grow up from 0-18 with the same parents, married to each other the whole time.
My impression is that this is still modal for many attending prestigious colleges, but practically nonexistent in poorer communities these days. That’s a huge change in the last 70 years. Expressing the thought that this reflects an obviously huge and troubling loss of social and cultural capital remains taboo.
I would guess that “assimilationist thinking” involves what game theorists would call defection, “passing for white,” taking the side of the oppressor, going over to the other side, or embracing the dominant paradigm.
But it’s not a literature I’m all that familiar with.
Race relations and ethnic studies are a hodge-podge of good and bad scholarship, often interesting. Sometimes you get personalized, phenomenological approaches. and some of those are useful. Other times you get cold-blooded description and analysis. Generally I find the cold-blooded analysis more useful and more robust to criticism.
There is so much material out there that if you are not careful you can remain within a subset of the literature and rarely figure out what is thought by the people who disagree with you.
An example of this: I live in Rochester New York. It’s pretty highly segregated at the county level by race–perhaps comparable to smallish cities like Milwaukee or Hartford, CT. The county (Monroe) has some of the best and the worst performing school districts in the state.
Here in the Rochester, NY area there are occasionally conducted a series of “Community Conversations about Race” run by professional facilitators. You can hear interesting things said at those meetings by the people who turn up (obviously the attendants are self-selected).
One of my beefs with these meetings is that, as I perceive it, they are motivated by and run by well-meaning (if well trained) sectarians who often partake of a certain point of view.
These meetings last two hours–typically on a weekday evening and at a public library.
There were optional “suggestions for further reading” to take away afterward–the reading was heavily slanted toward identity politics and consciousness raising.
And yes, some of the facilitators appear to have bought into the “White Privilege Paradigm.” White privilege sometimes, from what I can tell, becomes adapted into a neo-Marxist approach–you could use word-search / replace and substitute race for class–it’s that general approach, at least at times.
It often seems to me that any micro-economic approach to race, class, and social dynamics just doesn’t come naturally. If you never think that way, it’s harder to generate hypotheses, think with counterfactuals, and ponder how your understanding might be incorrect. Or how you can falsify a nice, just-so theory.
One problem with micro-economic analysis is the static models aren’t enough–we need to incorporate dynamic effects (for example with peer networks, educational trajectories, labor markets, norms for child-bearing/rearing).
I’m not sure how to conclude, except to say that having opinions about race and racism in the USA is pretty easy, while understanding the issues is harder.
So, let’s say “ackin’ white” has externalities.
How does one account for this? If you don’t assimilate are you hurting the assimilators? Or if the assimilators don’t accommodate you are they hurting you? How do we decide?
This is like my criticism of Pigou taxes. There is no easy button. You are going to get a bunch of hacks claiming the correct tax is infinity.
“Here are some people you may not usually think of as racists: Abraham Lincoln. Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony. W.E.B. Du Bois. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Barack Obama.”
So basically, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” Given that its impossible not to be a racist, one should just up and be a racist.
Kendi, a historian at the University of Florida, proposes a standard. “My definition of a racist idea is a simple one: it is any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.”
An almost workable definition, but it seems the author has some difficulty parsing the difference between intentional and consequentialist racism.
The actual definition in practice today of “racism” is “undesirable political opponents expressing unacceptable opinions about (current an potential) political ally groups.” So, although it is flawed, the definition above is at least a start.
The minimum wage is racist! That’s brilliant. Libertarians are learning very well how to play the public policy debate g
Lingua franca, coin of the realm, etc.
Since the comments are still open on this blog entry, it’s a chance to note the concept of “Radical egalitarianism.”
The following is a good introduction. Weissberg may have coined the term himself–or perhaps not. The concept is an old one, and perhaps already has a label that eluded Weissberg.
His approach is polemical, but the point he makes is valid.
Methinks one alternative to radical egalitarianism could be what Napoleon called “a career open to all talents.” I believe I first encountered the phrase “a career open to all talents” reading Milton Friedman. Probably Friedman uses it in either _Capitalism and freedom_ or _Free to choose_.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/08/radical_egalitarianism_is_the_real_threat_.html