Jan 15, 2006 Teaching About Racism: My MLK Day Essay
My early college years really marked a shift in my thinking about race. After teaching college students for the past several years I realize that I am certainly not alone. For many young people this is the first time they are really forced to confront racism and actually engage in conversations across race. I had purposely chosen to attend a college that was racially mixed and was in a predominantly Black neighborhood, and I thought that I would be able to learn and put much of the racism behind me. Of course, I was 18, and I was wrong. However, most young adults are different from me. My experience is that they would prefer to go on living a largely segregated life just as long as there is no one else there to remind them of it. This is the difficulty teaching about racism in the colorblind era. Many students believe racism is over, or they believe that it is confined to Neo-Nazis, the KKK, or “Hicks.” I would say the vast majority of my White students and at least half of my students of color think racism is not a problem, and it is something they have no experience with. One of the reasons they think this way is because they do not have an understanding of institutionalized racism.
One of the problems is that prior to college, students learn almost nothing about racism. Many students learn about diversity and multiculturalism, but not racism. This distinction is significant because the terms diversity and multiculturalism, have become synonymous with the notion that “we are all a little different, but we should all like each other.” The problem with this way of teaching is that it ignores the fact that racism is not about how different we are or who we “love or hate.” The primary manifestation of racism is structural, which means that our social and economic opportunities are profoundly connected to race. If we all love each other and know that we are different, we will still have racism. People can love people and truly be racist towards them; moreover, racism isn’t just something located in individuals. Some times the rules themselves and their outcomes are racist. Take the education system as an example. Even the most nonracist teacher must contend with the fact that school districts are generally drawn based on town lines, and towns are often racially segregated. Certainly, racial attitudes shape neighborhood segregation, but these institutional arrangements take on a life of their own. Many of my students will say they don’t have many friends from different backgrounds because there were no people from different background in their neighborhoods. When I say that racism causes this, the immediate reaction is “I’m not racist. I just didn’t have the opportunity to meet people from other races.” Whether that individual person is racist or not doesn’t matter from my way of thinking. Racism has an impact because of the structure, and the individual person doesn’t much matter regardless of whether or not he or she is racist. I know this sounds defeatist, but it doesn’t have to be.
In my own experience the hardest thing to teach students about racism is that it exists in individuals, groups, and institutions. At the individual level, racism is about a particular persons attitudes and behaviors. At the group level racism is about collective attitudes and behaviors, and at the structural level racism is about the fundamental organization of society. One very good example of structural racism would be the electoral college. Superficially, the electoral college is a raceless policy, but in the end Whites’ votes for president count more because of it (not to mention the wholesale disenfranchisement of predominantly Black Washington, DC.). Bob Wing, former editor of Colorlines magazine details a few of the ways this works. He says:
The good news is that the influence of liberal and progressive voters of color is increasingly being felt in certain states. They have become decisive in the most populous states, all of which went to Gore except Ohio, Texas, and (maybe?) Florida. In California an optimist might even envision a rebirth of Democratic liberalism a couple of elections down the road, based largely on votes of people of color.
The bad news is that the two-party, winner-take-all, Electoral College system of this country ensures, even requires, that voters of color be marginalized or totally ignored.“The two-party, Electoral College system ensures that almost half of voters of color are marginalized or totally ignored.”
The Electoral College negates the votes of almost half of all people of color. For example, 53 percent of all blacks live in the Southern states, where this year, as usual, they voted over 90 percent Democratic. However, white Republicans out-voted them in every Southern state (and every border state except Maryland). As a result, every single Southern Electoral College vote was awarded to Bush. While nationally, whites voted 54-42 for Bush, Southern whites, as usual, gave over 70 percent of their votes to him. They thus completely erased the massive Southern black (and Latino and Native American) vote for Gore in that region.
Since Electoral College votes go entirely to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state, whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes, the result was the same as if blacks and other people of color in the South had not voted at all. Similarly negated were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, and Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails.
Wing goes on to detail how racism shaped the development of the electoral college,
The Constitution provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person (but given no citizenship rights) for purposes of determining how many members each state would be granted in the House of Representatives. This provision vastly increased the representation of the slave states in Congress.
At the demand of James Madison and other Virginia slaveholders, this pro-slavery allocation of Congresspersons also became the basis for allocation of votes in the Electoral College. It is a dirty little secret that the Electoral College was rigged up for the express purpose of translating the disproportionate Congressional power of the slaveholders into undue influence over the election of the presidency. Virginia slaveholders proceeded to hold the presidency for 32 of the Constitution’s first 36 years.Since slavery was abolished, the new justification for the Electoral College is that it allows smaller states to retain some impact on elections. And so it does–to the benefit of conservative white Republican states. As Harvard law professor Lani Guinier reports, in Wyoming, one Electoral College vote corresponds to 71,000 voters, while in large-population states (where the votes of people of color are more numerous) the ratio is one electoral vote to over 200,000 voters. So much for one person, one vote.
This year the Electoral College will apparently enable the winner of the conservative white states to prevail over the winner of the national popular vote–a tyranny of the minority.
This election system continues until today, in spite of how open minded modern politicians, political parties, or racial groups may or may not be.
To some extent when people learn about institutional racism, it can be very defeating because institutional racism is much more difficult to challenge. But there are also advantages. One major advantage is that it removes some of the guilt students (especially White students) have about racism. Once young people realize racism is less about blaming individuals (not that there isn’t some blame to go around) and more about strucutral organization; their defensiveness goes down a little. However, discussions of structural racism must also include examples of how strucutral racism can be challenged. The Civil Rights movement of the 1950-1960s provides such an example.
Because racism is pervasive and institutional, it needs to be attacked at the individual, group, and structural levels. I think this is highly relevant when we discuss the legacy of Martin Luther King because Dr. King always understood the institutional nature of racism, particularly at the end of his career. People often forget that when he was assassinated in Memphis, he was trying to help low income predominantly African American workers organize. Certainly, we can work on changes our individual attitudes, but in order to challenge racism today we cannot forget the important of social movements as a means of changing the social structure. A movement to end the electoral college, DC disenfranchisement, and the structure of the criminal justice system would be a few areas where we can begin a modern Civil Rights Movement.
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Re the Electoral College: the same phenomenon applies to whites, and in greater numbers. Any voter not part of the majority coalition in a particular state has a meaningless vote in the Presidential election. Which is as it should be, but that’s off-topic for your post.
Since Electoral College votes go entirely to whichever candidate wins the plurality in each state, whether that plurality be by one vote or one million votes, the result was the same as if blacks and other people of color in the South had not voted at all.
Don’t blame the Electoral College for that; that’s the States’ fault. The Constitution leaves to the individual states to decide how their votes are to be allocated. “Winner-take-all” is not specified in the Constitution.
A number of different schemes have been proposed on how to do this. The one that would seem to have the most support is to take the Electoral College vote for each Congressional District and allocate that vote to whoever won the majority/plurality in that District. The EC votes corresponding to that State’s senators would then get cast based on the statewide vote. So Illinois would have almost split it’s votes this last election, instead of casting them all for Kerry.
However, someone’s gone back and done the math, and found that this would not have changed the outcome of any but one or two elections in the nation’s history, nor would it have changed 2000 or 2004.
There’s also no Constitutional bar to having a 3rd party be created. What stops that is the election laws in the various states that give special privileges to existing political parties and put up various bars to those outside them. For example, here in Illinois members of existing parties only need 5,000 signatures for some offices, while independents or new parties need 25,000. The Constitution does not even recognize the existence of political parties, and I’d like to see the election laws of the various states that do struck down.
Similarly negated were the votes of the millions of Native Americans and Latino voters who live in overwhelmingly white Republican states like Arizona, Nevada, Oklahoma, Utah, the Dakotas, Montana, and Texas. The tyranny of the white majority prevails.
Similarly negated were the votes of Republicans in blue states like Illinois, where the urban voters (having a disproportionately high minority voter component compared to national averages) slightly outvote the rural voters and end up casting all the EC votes that the highly white rural/suburban voters would direct towards the Republicans. The racism cuts both ways. And as I say, the effects pretty much balance out as a whole across the nation.
Robert is right that cherry-picked examples aren’t good evidence of institutionalized racism. I can accept that institutionalize racism exists, but this seems to be a fairly bad example of it.
I am a white male in New Jersey. “We” white men voted for Kean for Senate 52%-45%, while our “White women” were evenly split 49/49.
The non-white men broke for Menendez 66/30, while the non-white women voted for him by an astronomical 85%-15%.
Am I a victim of institutionalized racism because my race’s choice has no representation in New Jersey’s Senate contingent, even though I am a member of the majority race in New Jersey? Does it matter to that answer that I, personally, voted for Menendez?
For every example where Republicans win despite blacks voting for Democrats, there are examples like New Jersey or Pennsylvania where white vote by a slight majority for Republicans, but the overwhelming black support gives Democrats the win.
In fact, if we voted by Congressional district (instead of winner take all), black votes would be diluted even more because of segregated housing patterns. Either blacks are “disenfranchised” in North Carolina, and are “over-represented” in Pennsylvania (because the small group can swing the whole state from Red to Blue), or they are equally represented in both.
I can accept that institutionalize racism exists, but this seems to be a fairly bad example of it.
Happily, that was not the only example Rachel provided.
It’s a fairly obvious case of a process that doesn’t particularly disadvantage anyone because of who or what they are – and it’s being presented as a “very good” example. If the premier/lead-off example is quite obviously not examplars of the phenomenon, it degrades the confidence we can have in the rest of the analysis, and demonstrates a seriously superficial reasoning process. As a social scientist, Rachel should be catching such things because she is approaching them from a skeptical and critical POV, not accepting them blindly because they’re common refrains in a particular community that she happens to sympathize with.
There’s nothing at all wrong with using analysis to inform activism, and there’s nothing at all wrong with using activism to motivate analysis. But that doesn’t make one a substitute for the other.
Actually, it does disadvantage blacks. The counterpoint is that it would also disadvantage any minority group in a state. Rachel can speak for herself, but my guess is that pointing to the Electoral College is useful in that people hate it for other reasons and therefore have a stake in it, as opposed to “gee, that sucks but I’m OK.”
Of course, it’s hard to ever mention racism without having a bunch of white conservatives rush in to explain that racism doesn’t really exist, or that white people are its true victims. As this thread demonstrates very well.
As Rachel’s post points out, the electoral college system is was intentionally designed to give an unfair advantage to white slaveholder states in national elections. It is still having that effect today, albeit to a lesser degree. Arguing that it’s just a big coincidence, which is essentially what folks here are doing, is historically ignorant, “and demonstrates a seriously superficial reasoning process.” It’s not a coincidence; it’s the lingering effects of a purposely racist design.
1) “Your race’s vote” was essentially split 50/50, or very close to 50/50. To claim that the effect of Mendendez winning was that nearly no white person’s vote counted would be extremely inaccurate; in fact, very close to 50% of white people in NJ saw the person they voted for win the election.
2) Both Kean and Mendendez were very aware that the election couldn’t be won without the help of nearly half the white voters; neither of them could rationally decide that they could ignore white voters in NJ and still have a chance of winning.
3) White voters in NJ could not rationally or correctly decided that their entire community’s vote has no chance of making a difference.
In contrast, in Rachel’s example – recent presidential elections in the South — iirc, 90% or more of black Americans in the entire Southern USA might as well have stayed home, because voting patterns & the electoral college system guarantee that their votes will make no difference to the outcome. And both parties candidates know this (how much money do you suppose the candidates target for advertising for southern blacks, apart from in Florida?). And if black southern voters (again, except for Florida) notice that their votes have no chance of making a difference, that would be a rational and correct observation on their part.
So no, the situations are not at all alike.
So in other words, when Democrats win it’s always with the support of very nearly half the whites, so the white community as a whole is not being shut out. In contrast, when the same system is cutting out blacks, it tends to cut out in the range of 90% of black votes; in Republican strongholds, this means that 90% or more of the black vote might be irrelevant for generations at a time. Do you really think this is not a significant difference in any way?
Ron, assuming that changing how the vote is counted wouldn’t have changed any outcomes is questionable in two ways. First of all, under some proposed fixes — such as the plan that all states devote all their electoral college votes to whoever wins the nationwide popular election — the outcome of the 2000 election would have changed.
Second of all, and more importantly, if the candidates weren’t reassured that certain states were “safe” and certain votes irrelevant, that would change not only how the votes are counted, but how the campaigns themselves are run from day one. So it’s impossible to say how election results might have changed if (for example) neither candidate could ever safely assume that black southern votes were meaningless.
I’ve long wondered how useful the term “institutional racism” is. For most English speakers, “racism” means a mental state and actions taken as a result of such a mental state. White people are very afraid of the term because an accusation of racial bias is about the worst thing you can say about a white person unless you’re accusing them of a serious crime.
As far as I can tell, the term “institutional racism” is completely unrelated to that meaning. It seems to mean what we law-types call” disparate impact” – a policy having more of an effect on one group than on another, whether or not that was the intention. For example, an academic admissions test on which black students on average do worse than white students has disparate impact on black students. It’s disparate impact even if the effect is entirely explained by class (that is, if black students and white students from similar economic circumstances do equally well). It doesn’t matter whether the test’s design was intended (consciously or unconsciously) to have anything to do with race. “Institutional racism” seems to mean exactly the same thing.
These kinds of conversations would be much easier to have if the highly intentionalist term”racism” were avoided. In fact they are much easier to have in the law for exactly that reason. The only reasons I can think of to use “institutional racism” rather than “disparate impact” are (a) there’s some subtle difference in meaning that I’m not understanding or (b) “institutional racism” is used to covertly smuggle in the assumption that disparate impact is just as wrongful as intentional racial discrimination. That’s a claim that ought to be argued for rather than smuggled in.
Is there indeed a subtle difference in meaning between “institutional racism” and “disparate impact”? If so, I’d appreciate it if one of our bloggers could explain it to me.
I think of institutional racism or sexism like traffic. It’s not any one person’s fault, but it’s, in a sense, everyone’s doing collectively.
I was teaching a class about affirmative action in employment, and related that my brother couldn’t get a full-time professor position at any university because the places advertising a spot, were all waiting for a female applicant. They were very upfront about why, if he took the position, it would just be a one-year contract job. My students were outraged that he was so discriminated against, until I asked them to consider why all these big universities didn’t have a single female professor in any of their English Departments. Of course, they said, it’s because women don’t want to be professors.
Sigh.
Can anyone think of any other group, half of whose votes are marginalized or totally ignored by the Electoral College? I can – “American voters”.
How can something be racism when the net effect is the same damn thing across all groups?
It’s not a coincidence; it’s the lingering effects of a purposely racist design.
Fooey. The purposely racist design was implemented at a time when we had 1/4 the number of states we have, and when the demographic distribution of black people was utterly different than it is today. And yet the system had the same effect then as it did today. It’s almost as if “because it’s a racist institution” is a pre-programmed answer, and it doesn’t make a difference what the initial conditions are.
Wing’s opinion about the formation of the Electoral College are off-base, but I don’t have time today to do the research to prove it. Maybe if this one stays live into my dead period later this week I’ll have time. But briefly, he’s wrong.
I don’t disagree that there’s quite a lot of structural/institutional racism. It’s easy to spot, in housing segregation, public schooling, government service. But this isn’t an example of it. It’s an example of someone going out into the rain and saying “God hates members of my group, because look at how wet I am.”
So you don’t have a “white conservative” saying “there’s no racism”. You have a white conservative saying “there’s plenty of racism, but this isn’t some of it”.
The purposely racist design was implemented at a time when we had 1/4 the number of states we have, and when the demographic distribution of black people was utterly different than it is today.
Which, nonethless, means it was a purposely racist design. You’re saying that things have changed so that it doesn’t primarily screw black people, and that may well be so, but it doesn’t change the origin.
In contrast, in Rachel’s example – recent presidential elections in the South — iirc, 90% or more of black Americans in the entire Southern USA might as well have stayed home, because voting patterns & the electoral college system guarantee that their votes will make no difference to the outcome.
How is that different from fundamentalist Christians in Manhattan, or Ultra-Orthodox Jews in Boston? They could have all stayed home too, instead of going out to cast a vote for Bush, and it would have made no difference.
For that matter, black voters in Massachusetts or New York could have also stayed home, and Kerry would have still won those states. You are looking at a narrow point and ignoring the broader picture.
The “Electoral College” system gives blacks in Alabama very little power (zero electoral votes to Kerry, instead of 1 or 2), but black in New Jersey lots of power (15 Electoral votes to Kerry, instead of 8 or 9 with proportional representation.) I completely agree with you that the Electoral College is not “fair”. It advantages some groups and disadvantages others. In decreases the chances that some people can sway the outcome, and magnifies the chances that some others will. (Oh! To be a swing voter in Ohio!)
And it doesn’t excuse the fact that it’s not fair to say that the result would have been the same by popular vote, or by Congressional district. Not fair is not fair. Not fair not fair not fair.
But the fact that it is not fair does not mean that it is institutionally racist. It harms some black voters, and helps others, just as it does for any group. It minimizes the voting power of a black Alabaman, and magnifies the voting power of a black New Jerseyan or Pennsylvanian.
So, if you put the Electoral College to a vote, and everyone voted based on whether it helped or harmed their personal voting power, it is not at all clear how the “black vote” would go.
Which, nonethless, means it was a purposely racist design.
Sorry, meant to put scare quotes around that. It wasn’t purposely racist; it was “racist”, in that it treated members of one race differently than another race, but it wasn’t intended to fuck over black people. Black people were already fucked over, and unfucking them wasn’t on the table.
It’s worth remembering, although it rarely is, that it wasn’t the slaveholding states who wanted to count blacks as 3/5 of a person. The slave states wanted blacks counted as full people for purposes of Congressional representation. The free states wanted to not count blacks at all. The question was never one of the political power of black slaves – that was fixed, immutably for the time, at zero. It was a question of how to weight the power of the various white people involved.
Elliot B. said, “It’s disparate impact even if the effect is entirely explained by class (that is, if black students and white students from similar economic circumstances do equally well). It doesn’t matter whether the test’s design was intended (consciously or unconsciously) to have anything to do with race. “Institutional racism” seems to mean exactly the same thing.”
That would be true only if race had no relationship to class, but we have overwhleming evidence that suggests that racism does affect the economic mobility of people of color.
I’d like to add some historical notes to the discussion of the House of Representatives system (which is how we get the 3/5 formula in the Electoral College). The Constitution specifies that both representation and direct taxes should be calculated by the same formula (free people are 1 person, slaves are 3/5 of a person). At the Constitutional Convention itself slave-state representatives wanted slaves to count as 1 person and representatives from other states wanted them to count as no people, and the 3/5 figure emerged as a compromise.
In the anti-Federalist papers (arguments written by opponents of the Constitution) you see anti-slavery advocates attacking the 3/5 figure from both sides. Some of them argue that slaves should count as no people (since they can’t vote) and others that they should count as 1 person (because it would increase the amount of direct taxes Southern states would have to pay). If I recall correctly the federal government didn’t impose much (or anything?) by way of direct taxation after ratification, so counting the slaves as 3/5 of a person became a pure benefit for the Southern states.
Robert, true, but I don’t get ‘racist’ as ‘needing to make the situation worse’.
But the fact that it is not fair does not mean that it is institutionally racist. It harms some black voters, and helps others
In which states are black voters a majority, such that they are benefitted unfairly by the Electoral College?
Rachel – I don’t disagree. That type of evidence is indeed overwhelming. I think y0u’ve read me as making a broader point than I intended. In the language you quote, I was merely trying to give an example of the use of “disparate impact” to make it clear what the term means. That is, X can count as race-based disparate impact even if the impact of race on X comes entirely from the fact that race impacts class and class impacts X.
My question remains the same: does “institutional racism” mean the same thing as “disparate impact”? If so, why use the term “racism,” which has very strong intentionalist connotations, for a concept that has nothing to do with intentions or other mental states?
This is the point that many of you as missing,
Nearly every small population state is overwhelmingly white
I’m making a chart for that.
Rachel – and that proves what, exactly?
In which states are black voters a majority, such that they are benefitted unfairly by the Electoral College?
They don’t to be a majority to be benefited by the EC. They just have to be voting for the candidate who ends up winning the state. The electoral college benefits voters who vote for the winning candidate – the same way every other one-winner system does. Big frickin whoop.
It proves that whites votes count for more….
Hint for Robert–every state has two Senators; those votes are part of the electoral college. Thus, small states get more pull.
Robert, if you’re in the minority and you hit the winning candidate, that’s coincidence, not a sign that your voting bloc is equal to the majority’s.
“White” votes don’t count for shit. VOTES count. Move to Wyoming, and you’ll get the Wyoming Premium, and much good may it do you, be you black, white, or Martian. For “whites vote count for more” not to be the most obtuse kind of bullshit requires just one basic fact to be true: that there be some actual voting premium attached to whiteness, versus some other factor – like, for example, “geographical location”.
WYOMING votes count for more. If Michael Jordan moves to Cody, his vote counts for more. If DC were to become a state, then its votes would have the same premium – but I suspect that anyone saying “black votes count for more” would be roundly disabused.
Small states get more pull, for complex historical reasons that have very little to do with racism. Is there some magical component to melanin, that it makes it impossible for someone possessing it to live in a small state? Is Wyoming shooting black people with U-Hauls when they cross the border? Small states with 0% blacks in residence get a premium on their pull. Small states with 90% blacks in residence get a premium on their pull. Notice that the constant between these cases is “small”, and not a particular percentage of a particular race?
(And waiting for the inevitable “but DC is 90% black!” – yeah, and it isn’t a state. It wasn’t a state when it was 90% white, either. DAMN those racist institutions, with their ability to predict where lots of black people would move a century after the institutional rules were laid down!)
Please pardon my fervent tone.
I was raised mostly in the American South. I saw racism most every day of my young life, and it made an impression on me. I understand that this is a real phenomenon; obviously, I’m not a black guy with first-hand knowledge of exactly what it’s like, but I’m not fooling myself that we’re a post-racist society. K?
Racism is important. Anti-racism education and activism are important. It’s important that people making the anti-racist case to new generations don’t fuck it up. If I was an 18-year old in your class, Rachel, and you presented something as poorly thought out as this to me, it wouldn’t convince me of the invidious omnipresence of institutional racism; it would convince me that you don’t know how to think logically about causation, and would degrade your credibility on the other things you say (which I hope to hell are more sensible than this). If the chain of thought presented as evidence contains basic errors at the level of identifying causal variables for things where causal variables are damn easy to identify, then there’s no possibility I’m going to give you good faith on questions where it isn’t easy to identify.
Your kids, as you’ve noted, are already coming in defensive and skeptical. Don’t give them good excuses for their skepticism by presenting stuff that can’t stand scrutiny. All that’s going to do is armor their defensiveness, and rightly so. Please, don’t fuck it up.
Your post is so accurate and I wish more people would speak to this issue. I didn’t learn much about racism until college, I knew it existed, but wasn’t really sure what it was. I knew racial slurs were wrong, racist… I knew the basics. It wasn’t until college that I truly learned how systematic and pervasive racism is, and how important it is for me to unpack my whiteness daily.
When I arrived to college and began to learn about racism through African Studies classes, Women’s Studies, Philosophy, ect, I was angry that I had been cheated of this knowledge all of my life. I was angry that others had allowed me to live in white priviledge without ever telling me the significant impact it has on others. I was very angry that my whiteness had been made invisible to me all of my life. It turned my whole world upside down, literally and truly, and took a lot of learning, discussion, active participation to work through those feelings.
Yet, even in college these discussions are so hard, and this learning so difficult to get through to people. I taught it for the first time in a first year class and my students had their back up in minutes, they felt attacked, many cried, most felt guilty… it’s hard to not allow that to become the entire class. White guilt can take up so much time, and takes away from the discussion of racism. I try to explain that although these feelings may be legitimate, they can’t be the discussion, because that is just white people making it about white people AGAIN.
It has changed my whole life to learn about racism. I’ve had to let go of many friends, constantly buck up against family members, it’s difficult, but I know it’s right. At least I have that now, at least now, I can live with myself.
Dylan said, “It has changed my whole life to learn about racism. I’ve had to let go of many friends, constantly buck up against family members, it’s difficult, but I know it’s right. At least I have that now, at least now, I can live with myself.”
I know the feeling. It’s like constantly walking up hill, but it is worth it. Many of us in the dominant group have the option to tune out, but those of us who take the risk to challenge things can make a difference.
Elliot said,
“I think y0u’ve read me as making a broader point than I intended. In the language you quote, I was merely trying to give an example of the use of “disparate impact” to make it clear what the term means. That is, X can count as race-based disparate impact even if the impact of race on X comes entirely from the fact that race impacts class and class impacts X.”
Oh, I get what you are saying. You weren’t really wedded to the example, but the question of whether or not there can be disparate impact without having it be racism. That’s a good question.
My own sense is that this would have to be analyzed on a case by case basis. I’m trying to think of an example of disparate impact that I could argue is not the product of racism. I can’t think of one off the top of my head, but I suppose there could be cases like this.
Personally, I think we would be much better to focus on racism as an outcome, rather than some sort of mind state, which is why institutional racism is so significant.
The United States is historically a majority White European nation, the stated goal of which has never been to represent every single race on earth equally in numbers. Why is that European Americans in the U.S. are always called “racists” when there are nations in Central and Eastern Europe whose immigration and social policies ensure that their composition will always be almost %100 white, yet they receive no stigma of being racist? It seems that the U.S. is at once the most multicultural nation on earth, and the most accused of being racist. People in China don’t argue too much about “institutional racism”, probably because everyone is Chinese. Show me ANY nation on earth where several races are represented in significant numbers and I’ll show you some racism. Stop beating up on the USA.
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Ron, assuming that changing how the vote is counted wouldn’t have changed any outcomes is questionable in two ways.
I never asserted that there were no plans that wouldn’t have changed the outcome; I asserted that the particular plan I named wouldn’t have changed the outcome.
Second of all, and more importantly, if the candidates weren’t reassured that certain states were “safe” and certain votes irrelevant, that would change not only how the votes are counted, but how the campaigns themselves are run from day one. So it’s impossible to say how election results might have changed if (for example) neither candidate could ever safely assume that black southern votes were meaningless.
True enough; there are limitations to this kind of analysis.
The concept of “safe” districts affects the composition of our government in far more ways than this. Consider that, what, only about 10% of the HoR seats changed hands? Gerrymandering of Congressional districts has long led to the practice of creating “safe” Congressional districts, whether it be based on presumed party affiliations, race, etc., etc. While this is often cloaked in the guise of “affirmative action”, what it really means is that the people in charge manipulate the configuration of Congressional and State districts to ensure that they remain the people in charge. This is not at all what the founders of this country envisaged when they developed our present governmental structure, although the politicians of the time sure picked up on it quick enough (Eldbridge Gerry was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, IIRC). If I had the power to make changes to our electoral system, I’d do the following:
1) All Congressional districts would have to be compact. By that I mean that there would have to be some kind of formula that would ensure that the sums of the length of the total border of the districts would be minimized by some formula. No gerrymandering for any reason, again whether it be based on income, race, political party voting patterns, etc.
2) All national primaries would be held on the same day in June, in every state.
3) The cost of a primary election would be borne by the entity it benefited. If the Republican or Democratic or Green or Libertarian or whoever parties want to use the State’s electoral machinery to help them decide who they want to run for President or Senator or Representative, let that party pay for it. Or let them use some private means to determine who they want to run in those elections.
4) And from an idea I got from this blog, runoff elections between the two highest vote getters should be held in any general election if no candidate gets a majority vote.
5) I would preserve the Electoral College. I would adopt the Congressional district system I presented above. #4 would apply to the Presidential election on the basis of Electoral College votes, which would require a Constitutional amendment, since presently such an occurence as named in #4 throws the election into Congress.
Hey Q1Checkride:
Don’t use inaccurate examples to illustrate your point. There are TONS of different peoples in China. And I can think of several reasons off the top of my head why people aren’t complaining about institutional racism in China (extreme poverty, government repression, limited access to media, etc.).
Actually Katie, all of the Chinese people I work and interact just look at our “racism” problem here in the states and laugh, China is a second world nation knocking on the door of the first world, and no, the racial differences in China are far more subtle than they are here, so don’t use inaccurate examples to counter my point. I asked a Filipino man about some of the differences between Chinese and Japanese culture and he said “they’re all the same to me”-if a white man said that it would be considered a racist remark.
Rachel,
You’ve written a good piece about the EFFECT of the EC, though I’m not sure whether I agree with you or not. But the motivation issue seems wrong.
This seems to me to be a classic illustration of “How Objectively Neutral Things Can Produce A Non-Neutral Effect On Various Folks” or perhaps, more colloquially, “When The Shit You Didn’t Consider Comes Back And Bites You In The Ass.”
there’s a big difference between saying “Hey, I know! Let’s screw those black folks by setting up the EC to favor small states!” as some seem to think….
and setting up the EC to obtain a good balance of power for the country between large and small states without, apparently, a whole lot of regard for race.
Hell, a lot of states had pretty different populations back then, ya know? So if you want to look at the racial motivations behind setting it up, you need to look at the motivations at the time of the EC setup not now.
And since you’re such a history buff, I’m a bit confused by the concern that the EC benefits small states. Well, yeah… that’s why it was set up that way. That’s why the Congress and House appointments are different. Otherwise, the worry was that the small states wouldn’t really be able to accomplish much.
Sailorman, structural racism doesn’t have to be intentional.
You want to see racism that puts the U.S. in the shade, visit Japan sometime.
I understand that re structural racism in theory. But the problem I also have with that approach is that it seems (and i may be misreading this) that this definition means
structural racism = “anything, no matter whether it was good-intentioned, neutrally-intentioned, or motivated by racism, which grants any type of disparate benefit to whites.”
The problem I run into is that this is, well, so broad that it seems entirely different from what I think of as “racism” and is also so broad as bo seem almost meaningless.
A deliberately tongue in cheek example–thought up on a whim–might note that
1) highways tend to have fast lanes;
2) fast lanes tend to require fast cars;
3) fast cars tend to be more expensive;
4) whites tend to be richer and more able to afford fast reliable cars;
5) so fast lanes and/or highways are an example of structural racism.
Yes, i realize this is a fairly ridiculous example. But sometimes i feel like the definitions are getting so wide as to encompass almost everything. And in my view, “racism” is a word which is most effective when used a bit more selectively.
If everything is essentially racist, then “Stop Racism!” = “Stop Everything!” And where does one go from there?
I think the sorry state of this thread; it highly indicative of the persistence of racism here in the US. Nobody wants to own it; everybody has a “better example.”
I’m really worried about the state of white America when I read threads like this.
For anyone interested, at CD I’ve now gone over the numbers and (using Rachel’s new preference as to methodology), pretty conclusively demonstrated that there’s no substantial disparate impact in the Electoral College.
I’m glad to own my own racism (well, not glad, you know what I mean), but I’m not going to accept bad analysis. Nobody should.
Rachael S., it’s quite true that there’s still racism in America. A lot less than there used to be, but it’s still there and any racism is too much racism.
Getting rid of legally-defined racism in this country is pretty much done as far as I can see. I’m talking about slavery, “separate-but-equal” schools, voting rights, etc., the kinds of things where laws specifically were designed to separate people on the basis of race and assign different levels of rights to different races. I don’t know of any examples of that any more.
But those were the easy targets. Not that it was easy to get rid of them, but it was easy to look at them and say “That’s racist.” Now what people are trying to deal with is situations where people of all races have an equal opportunity, but the outcomes are different. The assertion is “Opportunity is legally equal but is not effectively equal because of the effects of past racism.” That seems to me to be a central idea behind affirmative action. Quite frankly, this is a hard sell to the general public, as you can see at the ballot box. People generally favor viewing denial of equal opportunity as racist. They don’t view a lack of equal outcome as racist though, they view it as a lack of ambition or effort. It doesn’t help that most images of minorities in the media are based on figures in entertainment (that includes sports) who often promote ideas or values antithetical to those held by the majority. I’m talking the common perception of the materialistic and sexual values promoted by rap and hip-hop, the legal trouble that many entertainment figures get involved in, etc.
To me, racism is all individual. Institutions are the sum of the individuals that create and maintain them. Slavery was an institution, but when enough individuals understood how evil racism was and were willing to put their lives on the line to oppose it, slavery fell. When enough people understood how racist the denial of the vote was, “one man, one vote” became the law of the land. There don’t seem to be any institutions left that are racist in and of themselves; what’s left all seem to be examples of unintended disparate impact. You’re going to have a hard time gaining much success attacking any further institutions directly.
Fighting racism is going to have to concentrate on the individual from here on out to gain success, I think, and is going to have to focus on things that tie to opportunity. One glaring example of such is educational funding, especially in states like Illinois where it’s based on property values. Wealthy districts can afford to spend $12,000/yr a pupil on education, whereas a poor district might only be able to spend $3000 or so (I confess I’m not sure on my bottom number there), and have to worry about getting shot going to or coming from school, or mugged in school. People can understand that a kid in that kind of situation is being short-changed and will have problems succeeding. Not that you can’t tell the wealthy district it can’t spend what it can afford, but it’s reasonable to appeal to people and tell them, “Look at these 10-year old books that are falling apart. Look at the paint peeling. These kids have a right to a chance for a good education. They’re Americans too, and they are part of what America will be built on 10 and 20 years down the road. There’s a racial divide here, and we all need to help.”
Robert, trackbacks are cool, and a “hey look at my rebuttal” comment is cool, but one of each in the same thread seems like overdoing it. :p
Rachel S., I think that when it comes to explaining racism, showing is better than telling and threads like this one do a lot of that showing.
White men, and White women will often talk around the issue of racism to avoid addressing their racial privilege and since this is a White Supremacist society, they very often get to dictate the terms of any discussion of institutional racism and/or sexism in a discussion.
Although I have to say, when it comes to sterling examples of this unfortunate dynamic in action, this thread is definitely in the top ten.
Amp, I reposted the link because Rachel came over to CD and requested a different form of analysis (which was done, and which also completely demolishes her assertion), then indicated here that it was sad that we don’t believe her. Well, it’s becoming apparent that there are very good reasons not to believe her, and I wanted to make sure that any open-minded person reading this thread was aware that her position is being disputed.
But I apologize for the duplicate linking, and if you want to remove the hyperlink to the CD post or the comment itself, I have no objection. (Like I get a vote, anyway.)
Yeah, Radfem. Because it’s only important that what anti-racists activists say sounds good. It isn’t important that their truth claims be actually, you know, true. Because truth is just one of those structures of oppression that white men invented to keep the black man down.
Or something.
Radfem said, “Although I have to say, when it comes to sterling examples of this unfortunate dynamic in action, this thread is definitely in the top ten. ”
Yep.
Yes, sailorman, if you make up a stupid example of structural racism that isn’t even true, then it sounds stupid and it isn’t true. Your point?
How do you feel about the disparity in loan granting rates or the huge disparity in bonding rates between apparently equally qualified black and white loan applicants, to take an example of structural racism that is both real and not stupid? Do you think it is just individual actions of individual racists motivated by open personal animus, do you think it is structural, do you think it is a problem at all?
Bonding as in covered by a surety bond, as in “licensed bonded and insured,” as in the backbone of successful independent contracting businesses. I once heard the assistant attorney general for civil rights, Bill Lan Lee (back in the 90’s) state that the disparity in bonding rates for equally qualified black and white applicants was a factor of 50. I think you can probably guess in which direction.
There are also significant racial disparities in farm and ranch loans; black farmers have a hell of a time getting the same treatment as white farmers. (Apparently the DOA is pretty much an old boy’s club.) The Feds had to pay out $575 million to farmers who got screwed on their loans in a lawsuit in 1999; I doubt anything’s changed much since then.
(If you don’t know, it’s basically impossible to farm successfully without being either a big agribusiness, or having extensive credit available to smooth out the business cycle. No loan = no farm for ordinary people.)
Good example Robert.
Hey Charles, Do you know how to use regression analysis? If so, can you go over to CD and talk to Robert.
Rachel,
Call Andy and have him do the simple regression stuff. He can run that crap in his sleep and actually LIKES to do it, plus he’s written papers on population/voting stuff. AND he can explain the statistics better than anyone I know.
Seriously, call him. Robert is pissing me off.
Rachel, I just read through Robert’s post on CD and I actually agree with him. I don’t think that the electoral college is a good example on that basis (the disproportionate power of small overwhelmingly white states) as there are also small heavily black states, although the argument that a winner takes all system disadvantages minority groups is certainly the case (although it as true for white evangelicals in New York as it is for blacks in Georgia).
The electoral college is intentionally biased against large states, and it was intentionally set up to amplify the power of the slave states, and winner takes all elections are biased against minority groups of any sort, but I’m sure we can easily come up with way better examples of structural racism in American elections than the big state- little state bias of the electoral college system.
Permanent removal of voting rights from felons, for instance, was originally instituted to disenfranchise black voters and it still does exactly that to a huge degree, expanding the structural racism of the justice system into a structurally racist injustice in the electoral system.
The voting ID requirements pushed through by Republicans in congress a few years ago is another example, transforming racial inequality in wealth and documentation status (older black people are less likely to have birth certificates than old white people, due to the extreme racism of half a century ago) into structural racism in the electoral system.
When we get to institutional racist voter intimidation tactics, are we still talking about structural racism? Probably not, but we are still talking about a hugely important form of institutional racism that effects the electoral system.
But hey, I don’t know half as much as I ought to about stats, so maybe I’m missing something. If there is a way in which the EC is strongly biased against black votes, it is more subtle than what Robert was looking at, and would take some much more serious statistical techniques than any of us here can do.
I bet the EC is more strongly biased against Asian voters in particular, given the disproportionate portion of Asian-Americans in California.
That’s probably offset somewhat by Hawaii, a minority-majority state which is pretty substantially Asian. But I don’t know how much.
There is one area of the political arena where nonwhites are indisputably disadvantaged, relative to some group of randomly-selected other citizens. But it’s the result of immigration patterns, not structural factors (afaik). 50% of all non-whites live in just six states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Georgia), and 90% live in just 26 states (those six plus North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Tennessee, Hawaii, Washington, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma).
Oversimplifying, that makes nonwhite issues a major political concern for just 34% of the Federal seats, and of marginal interest in another 40% or so. The concentration in those areas probably increases the chances of representation in those areas and makes it more practical to try to overcome personal racism in the electorate, but means that there are huge chunks of the country where racial politics are simply a non-starter. We can obviously disagree about how and why that’s a good or bad thing, but it certainly means that nonwhite issues start at a disadvantage when being addressed on the national stage; anywhere from a quarter to half of the Congress has literally zero personal interest in pleasing minority constituencies. Again, that’s grossly oversimplified, but I’ve done enough Excel grinding for one day and so there it shall stand. ;)
Rachel S, actually I think it’s bucking for a top five position.
I love listening or in this case reading white male apologists defend their privilege and deny other people’s experiences, which in itself is a manifestation of their racial privilege that they are endowed with some entitlement that they get to do so. It’s not like I don’t encounter at least one a day or more. They are much more amusing online, lol.
I still think that the current political situation in most of the South — in which the black community’s vote is not only irrelevant, but is known to be irrelevant, and is likely to continue being that way for the foreseeable future — can reasonably be described as institutional racism. There’s no reason the southern black community’s vote has to be irrelevant; it’s just our political institutions that make them so.
There’s also an interesting history of explicitly racist attempts to utilize the electoral college in the South as a means of fighting civil rights for blacks, starting with Strom Thurmond and Charles Wallace Collins in the 1940s, continuing with the free-elector movement of 1960, and then George C. Wallace’s campaign in 1968. These movements didn’t just die out; they were absorbed into what’s called the “southern strategy,” which Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips described like this in 1970:
The cynical use of racism for electoral victory in the South has become a lot less explicit since then, but it’s still going on.
However, on the narrow grounds that Rachel and Robert have been arguing about, I think Robert has been (uncharacteristically :-p ) persuasive and factual. I agree with Robert and Charles: There are much clearer examples of institutional racism.
Damn, Rachel, you’re sounding like what my mother would call “snotty”.
Here, back atcha:
If i wanted an excellent example of how the social sciences have deteriorated, such that someone who holds an advanced degree, and who teaches others, can post an analysis which appears to be faulty or at least incomplete, refuse to defend it, get annoyed when others point out the flaws, and resort to random ad hominems (implying all the detractors are racists) to support her point… well, this would be in my most recent top ten.
Just because it’s about racism doesn’t mean you get to make it up.
I still think that the current political situation in most of the South — in which the black community’s vote is not only irrelevant, but is known to be irrelevant, and is likely to continue being that way for the foreseeable future — can reasonably be described as institutional racism.
Poof. I just waved my magic wand (well, Steph’s magic wand, but she won’t mind.) Every Southern black person just turned white.
Are their votes now more relevant?
If the answer is “no”, then how is this an example of racism, rather than an example of being a Democrat in Mississippi sucks?
My feelings are that, if you stop someone on the street and inform them about racial injustices that YOU perceive them to have when they are otherwise ignorant, then YOU are fomenting institutional racism. Is that not what the KKK, the Black Panthers and La Raza do? Educate people on how outraged they need to be on their racial plight in life? Also, don’t forget that our OP’er encouraged the blogosphere to “agitate the full force of the legal system” against a group of innocent white males (the Duke Lacrosse team). So much for being an objective observer in all of this….
Hey, that’s neat – let me try it.
I just took a time machine to a German concentration camp and waved my magic wand. Poof! Every Jewish person in the camp just turned gentile.
Yet this didn’t magically release them from the camp. Clearly, it would be wrong for me to think that antisemitism is part of the reason they were in the camp. The magic wand proves it.
There are reasons being a Democrat in Mississippi sucks, and those reasons have a lot to do with racism. Waving your wand around won’t make that fact go away.
Edited to add: There are also reasons that blacks in Mississippi are overwhelmingly Democrats, and those reasons also have a lot to do with racism.
It seems to me that any bigoted situation can be shown to be non-bigoted, with judicious application of the magic wand. This is because the magic wand is a device that acts by removing the results of racism (or whatever) from context, especially historic context. For instance, if I wave my wand over the racial wealth gap, I can change all white people to black, and they’d still own more wealth; the wand has proven that the racial wealth gap is unrelated to race.
There are very narrow, specific circumstances in which the wand — or something like it — can be useful for making current, direct and obvious racism visible. (For instance, the practice of sending in two testers, one black and one white, to apply for a job could be seen as an application of the magic wand approach.) But outside such narrow testing situations, I think it acts more to hide racism than to make racism visible.
Not to mention MLK himself, whose organization did a lot of educational work. To claim these groups are all alike — as if there’s no difference between being the beneficiary of racism and being part of a group harmed by racism — is too idiotic to be believed.
I’m banning you, not because you disagree with me, but because your opinions are too stupid to make a worthwhile contribution to conversation.
This is called an “ad hom” attack. Plus, I doubt that Rachel would claim that she’s an objective observer.
The existance of institutional racism in all its forms isn’t dependent on whether or not they appear more or less “clear” to White people. It’s easiest to say that when you’re not in the shoes of those who directly experience it. That’s why so many people of color that I have met or I know find these discussion so futile and so tiresome.
Most Whites can’t grasp institutional racism at all or don’t want to do so and most of them still can’t see racism as existing outside the presence of White men running around in White robes and hoods(and certainly do not understand that the Klan has largely been replaced by smaller, loosely organized cells of different White Supremacist gangs and organizations) burning things and Jim Crow. It’s much easier to paint yourselves as the heroes of ending inhumane practices if you can claim that it’s all over with.
Okay, I’ll take one of those “clear” examples.
I was reading today about an interracial family(he’s Black, she’s White) which has been subjected to vandalism and swastikas that some unidentified individuals have seen fit to decorate their home with for the past couple of months. The family including their kids are terrified. They look so, in the photographs.
Is this racism? What kind of racism is it? Is it individual or institutional? What do you base your answer on?
People of different races will answer this differently and indeed have and in this case, not surprisingly the answers fall among racial lines. And which one’s analysis of the situation is seen as correct? Who has always been given that right throughout history?
I agree. But as I understand it, the context of this discussion is an example used to teach Rachel’s students about racism. (I suspect that the majority of students in Rachel’s lower-level classes are white, but I could be wrong about that). The usefulness of an example intended to be used by a white person to teach (mostly white?) students about racism, does depend on how clear and defensible the example is.
I can understand that. But I don’t think it’s a bad idea for whites to have these “racism 101” discussions among ourselves; in fact, I think it’s necessary for whites to spend more time discussing race and racism.
I agree. And I think what Rachel is doing is extremely valuable, for exactly that reason. But I don’t think that the strength of the particular example & approach she (and Wing, via quotation) focuses on in this post, as a teaching tool, should be beyond discussion or criticism, or that the only reason one could criticize it would be denial of institutionalized racism’s existence.
I don’t have a copy of SPSS or SAS on this computer, but I know there is no way in hades that %white is not a statistically significant predictor of #number people per electoral vote. When I get my copy of it, I’ll run the numbers.
When I use this in class I use the entire article, which highlights several issues related to voting; however, the electoral college issue is the one most prominently featured.
Okay, I really need to be working, but as I’m working with Matlab anyway…
Regression of % voters white on number of people per EV:
rsquared = 0.0794
F-test = 4.1410
p = 0.0474
Rachel, you’re right. I’m wrong. It is a (barely) statistically significant predictor (using the standard arbitrary cutoff of p < 0.05 is statistically significant). I still think that the 1% increase in the average value of a white vote versus a non-white vote (that Robert demonstrated) is the more relevant result, as the statistically significant correlation does not equal causation (obviously), and doesn't say anything about why small states are more likely to be white (with the extreme outlier of Hawaii). And I still think that the 1% increase in voting power from the small state effect is tiny compared to the other ways in which black voting power is minimized.
Charles,
I love you!!! Thanks for running that. I could tell by eyeballing it that it was statistically significant.
Charles said, “I still think that the 1% increase in the average value of a white vote versus a non-white vote (that Robert demonstrated) is the more relevant result, as the statistically significant correlation does not equal causation (obviously), and doesn’t say anything about why small states are more likely to be white (with the extreme outlier of Hawaii). And I still think that the 1% increase in voting power from the small state effect is tiny compared to the other ways in which black voting power is minimized.”
That’s fair enough. It may account for a small percent, but it is statistically significant.
Thanks!
Oh, also, I reran with the data you linked to over at CD (and got results very different from Robert’s, so one of us is making a mistake in this – I make no claim that it is him, although I tried to check my work after I found that we were in disagreement) and also played with breaking out by races other than white. People per EV regressed on black % of population turns out to have an r-squared of ~0.2 and a p of 0.0005. Which is still a low r-squared from my science point of view, but that p is pretty solid from anyone’s point of view. I still don’t really know what meaning I should draw from the statistical significance of this correlation, but it certainly is there (and very strongly for black voters).
And I finally got around to resending you the email about mitochondrial lineages that I sent to the wrong address back in December.
thanks for posting that, charles. now the fun debate about statistical vs. clinical significance can start ;)
For the non-statistics folks reading this thread, i’ll quickly explain something to alleviate confusion:
“Significance” means two different things.
ONE meaning of significance” is that a given result is important. this is the “layperson’s definition”.
ANOTHER meaning of significance is that a given result is very unlikely to have occurred by chance. this definition is commonly used in statistics.
So something can be very, very statistically significant (e.g. we can be 99.995% sure that the difference between two groups is not random) but NOT necessarily be very, very, important in practice(whether or not a 1% difference is a huge practical effect may be an issue of debate).
Hey, that’s neat – let me try it.
I just took a time machine to a German concentration camp and waved my magic wand. Poof! Every Jewish person in the camp just turned gentile.
Yet this didn’t magically release them from the camp.
Why not?
In the 1970s Congress passed laws benefitting minorities in securing government contracts and licences. Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448 (1980); Metro Broadcasting v. FCC, 297 U.S. 547 (1990). Was this an example of a majority (predominantly white congressmen) willingly disadvantaging their side to promote the interests of a minority (non-white people)? Or, given that most non-white voters in the 1970s were Democrats, and that Congress was controlled by the Democrats, was this an example of a majority (Democrats) willingly advantaging their side at the expense of a minority (Republicans)?
Well, both. A commentor may focus on either dynamic, but the choice reveals more about the commentor than about the situation. Perhaps significantly, I often hear congressmen talking about party-line votes but rarely them talk about ethnic-line votes. That suggests to me that congressmen regard votes more heavily from a partisan basis than from a racial one.
When predicting the outcome of most elections, I regard partisan distinctions to be more predictive than racial ones. Amp and Rachel emphasize the demoralized status of black Democrats, but do not distinguish it from the demoralized status of white Democrats. The next time a black Republican faces a white Democrat for election to a statewide office in Mississippi, I’d bet on the black Republican; I surmise Amp and Rachel would bet on the white Democrat. Perhaps time will tell.
In contrast, what variables proved to be predictive of who would be incarcerated in Nazi Germany? I’m no expert, but I understood that ethnic affiliation seemed to be one, whereas party affiliation did not. I’d be surprised if the Nazis never released anyone from custody after the prisoner was able to demonstrate that he was not a Jew (or a gypsy or a member of whatever suspect category they were hunting at the time). In short, I suspect the magic wand would not work to change electoral outcomes in Mississippi, but it might work to change incarceration status in Nazi Germany.*
Yes, race matters. Yes, minority status matters. I nevertheless see a distinction between the role of race in contemporary Mississippi politics and the role of race in Nazi death camps.
[*Historically leaders have been tempted to seize the property of rich minority groups, just as Henry VIII seized properties belonging to the Catholic Church or Putin seized the property of the oligarchs. Thus, while I suspect the Nazis’ antisemitism was sincere, if a magic wand changed all the Jews into some other affluent minority group, there may be strategic reasons to suspect that the Nazis would have targeted them anyway.]
You surmise incorrectly, regarding my views (and regarding Rachel’s as well, I suspect).
I think you’re focusing too closely on the deliberately ridiculous Nazi example, while ignoring my larger argument, which is that the “magic wand” argument has the effect of ignoring historical context (such as the context I discussed in #58). In the short term — which is what I thought we were talking about — waving a wand and turning Rabbi Hirschberg into a gentile doesn’t unlock any locks. In the long term, could such a magic wand create changes? Maybe, but so could it in the South.
Suppose someone could wave a magic wand and wipe out all race from Americans. Would that change electoral outcomes in Mississippi? I think it obviously would – maybe not in time for 2008, but certainly over the next couple of decades. Right now only people who use magic wands to ignore history can pretend that the election patterns in the South have no relationship to race at all. If race was entirely wiped out, whites would have less reason to vote Republican, and more white votes would be up for grabs. Both parties would inevitably react by altering their policies to become more attractive for those newly grabbable votes.
Would this lead to the Democrats winning more often? I don’t know. But it would lead to whichever party wins having a different policy and rhetoric than they do today. To think otherwise is to think that race isn’t a factor at all in current policy and rhetoric, which isn’t a plausible view, imo.
(Meanwhile, the newly white people would still be systematically disadvantaged by class — and a significant amount of the reason they’d have less money would be the racism that went on before the wand-waving. Etc, etc. I just think that pretending that a magic wand example is meaningful shows a very limited understanding of how racism has impacted people in US history.)
So do I. Sorry if you read me as saying otherwise.
I forgot who said it and it’s kinda late and I don’t wanna mine for quotes at the moment.
But someone brought up that people won’t be interested in discussing outcomes because they will always assign outcomes to laziness, lack of ambitions, ‘values’, etc. etc.
Well, that’s the point. The above is more indicative of class prejudices than race prejudices, but the two are intertwined, especially in America where racial history has created a sort of class unconsciousness completely out of sync with the rest of the First World. Not merely because racial issues ‘divide the working class’ – in other words throw the blue collar racist in a trailer-shaking tizzy. I could count on one hand the nations that are as fixated on race as America is; I won’t even count the damn thumb as a finger. This fixation can be good, in contrast to societies where racism can be completely invisible, but it has also helped foster an eagerness to blame the victim within those who would otherwise stand to bear the shit end of that particular stick. That’s why ‘true blue progressives’ who proudly stick only to economic issues piss me off. Economic issues are economic ISSUES like hell in America because racism legitimized classism.
I understand the need for subtlety. A bad example could set things back against a primarily white student audience. I remember a discussion a while back that suggested the ‘First World’/’Third World’ labels to be racist. The term, strictly applied, refers to Cold War alignment, but in popular usage usually refers to standard of living. South Korea and Singapore are still thus ‘Third World’. As a Third Worlder myself, under this label, I must honestly say that I have no problem with this usage – and I assure you I am no appeasing twinkie – mainly because having to say ‘Western democracies’ all the time makes one sound like an affectatious buffoon. (It’s a safe bet that any essay that contains the words ‘Western society’ in its opening sentence, when the topic doesn’t directly pertain to such international issues, can be pissed on and actually be improved as a result.) Needless to say, my predominantly white classmates reacted with the strongest derision and incredulousness, before they went back to failing the course.
Then again, some don’t deserve subtlety. We should teach detailed, real world examples that show racism today. Many of them.
sylphhead, I agree with you on the idea of winning over the class. I use a couple techniques on controversial issues– 1) let the students debate with each other with me being a referee 2)use other authors texts to help make my point, while always adding the you don’t have to agree with the argument, but I want you to understand it.