Suspicious Persons, Fed Ex drivers and White Entitlement
photo by Thomas R Machnitzki (thomasmachnitzki.com), CC BY 3.0
Lest anyone think the murder of Ahmed Aubrey in Georgia was a one off, my own current home of Mississippi now has its own near miss on this subject.
Two White men are facing criminal charges after a Black FedEx Express driver alleged that he was chased and shot at while delivering packages in Brookhaven, Mississippi.
When he called police to report the shooting, he says he was told by the dispatcher that they had just received a call about a suspicious person at the same address.
Once again, white men decided independently of any legal authority that a black man in their neighborhood was not where he should be, and they took action to detain him with no authority to do so. Once again they decided that using violent force was appropriate as a response to the threat they perceived, and once again local law enforcement had to essentially be shamed into acting by public perception. Sadly Fed-Ex seems to also have been late to the table in supporting their own, very traumatized employee, and probably contributed to the situation by not even putting magnetic Fed-Ex signs on the truck.
Once again, white men decided a black man was wrong where he was. They decided he was wrong without actually assessing what he was doing. They decided they had the authority to do something about it. They decided they could and should use violence to impose their will. And prior convictions of other white men who did the same thing two states over was not a deterrent.
Yet I keep being told racism is no longer a concern in the US because its illegal. Were he alive, I wonder what Mr. Aubrey would say about that conclusion.
Adding to this, the reports of racial harassment at Elon Musk’s factory, and of course Spotify sticking by Joe Rogan despite his use of racial slurs.
Racism has never been absent from our culture, but was periodically beaten back into the shadows.
Now it is forcing itself out into the open.Report
From my understanding, Rogan was discussing the word, not actually using it.Report
Would Joe Rogan be allowed to comment at Ordinary Times?Report
I imagine so. Pretty much everybody is presumptively “allowed” to comment here.
We’ve only had a handful of commenters that have been banned.
If the argument is “but he said a bad thing somewhere else 10 years ago”, I’m not sure that that would be enough. Now, there are things that he wouldn’t be allowed to *REPEAT* saying… but we have a fairly generous commenting policy even when it comes to some pretty questionable positions.
We’ve had people defend the treatment of Eric Garner, for example, and they’re still around.Report
No, you keep being told that the level of racism in the US has diminished and other things are now greater factors in causing inequality.
Nut picking is a great way to claim racism is still alive. However if inequality is now mostly driven by marriage rates, education rates, and cultural choices, then I don’t see how this helps.
The police will deal with those people. I will continue to make the same cultural choices I have. So will everyone else.Report
What would you need to see to get you to say “Yes, racism is very prevalent in American society”?
Like what causes you to say “the level of racism in the US has diminished”? Is there some Racism-O-Meter which you see, and the rest of us don’t?Report
My guess is we’d have to demonstrate this is all false. And even then he’s likely still disagree.Report
1) Jim Crow is gone
2) Various laws have outlawed most forms of racial discrimination in business, real estate, etc.
3) We have vast levels of welfare and other various benefit programs which are largely aimed at the poor, which minorities disproportionally fill the ranks of. The war on poverty is largely an effort to uplift blacks.
4) Affirmative Action is another program which is an uplift effort.
5) Use of the N-word is basically poisonous today.
6) Various social justice warriors fill the ranks of the HR of the Fortune 500 trying to recruit minorities.
7) The level of outright racism is so low that an article of this nature has to cherry and nut pick because it can’t point to actual gov action.
8) Similarly, typically the arguments for racism still being a problem have to point to outcomes as “proof”. The inputs and the process can’t be used because they’re color blind.
Modern anti-racism efforts are focused on the concept that “color blind” is actually racist because it doesn’t have the desired outcomes.
9) The behaviors and policies of whites in the deep south now matches, or is “better” than, the behavior of the liberal whites in deep blue areas.
So whites (or rather, people with money) in both areas flee failing schools and attempt to shield their children from disruptive children (which normally means poor children).
10) African Americans migrants, i.e. blacks from Africa or really any who don’t have the culture of poverty and various disfunctions, do VERY well in American. Disproportionally high attendance at better schools thanks to AA. We should probably count Obama has being in this group considering who raised him.
11) Non-black minorities, Asians especially, who historically were also victims of racism back when racism was running things, are also doing disproportionally well to the point where AA needs to take their chairs and give them to other minorities.Report
1. Do you even know what Jim Crow was? It wasn’t just overt laws, it was a complex web of personal behaviors, similar to the acts which this post discusses. Acts whicha re very much still happening.
5. No, Joe Rogan is evidence that the N-word is NOT poisonous, and is growing steadily more acceptable.
7. Again, racism isn’t just overt government action. Schools are arguably more segregated today than in 1965.
9. Which behaviors, measured how?
Your comments about “cherry-picking” all have this air of “How come all these homosexuals keep giving me oral sex?” Like, how come all these examples just happen to keep popping up over and over and over again?
I would agree that we have made progress. But to assert that racism isn’t a problem is like I said before, similar to saying that sinfulness isn’t a problem anymore because Christianity is so widespread.
The evil of racism can never be conquered, just suppressed.Report
This phrase has an official definition in britannica.com and wiki and various other places.
Jim Crow redirects to “Jim Crow Laws”.
If I used it at work I would be fired.
Further Rogan has apologized, calling his language “regretful and shameful”. So even he views it as poisonous.
However that’s not driven by skin color nor is it legally enforced by skin color.
I just put my kid into a majority minority school because of test scores and social economic status. In the past I have refused to consider schools that were lily white. I’ve also refused to deal with white relatives because of their culture. Change the color of the school to black and you magically proclaim its “racism”… because treating blacks the same as whites is racist.
The solution isn’t for me to change my behavior, it’s for other cultures to change theirs. I’m not the one with a problem.
There are tens of thousands of murders per year in the us.
There are trillions of human interactions every year.
You can find anything you look for. That you keep finding these examples says where your head is.
It says nothing on what average looks like.
Straw man much? I didn’t say it doesn’t exist, or even that it’s not a problem.
I said that “other things are now greater factors in causing inequality.”
So, am I wrong? Does some media figure using the N-word really have more influence on a child’s success than the presence or absence of his father?
My parents had huge direct influence on me. My grand-parents very little. I never met my great-grands.
That same pattern has held true with my children. Air-brush me out of the picture, willingly or unwillingly, and life becomes VERY different and MUCH worse for all of my kids. Opportunities don’t appear. Illnesses don’t get treated. Problems don’t get solved. Very easy to picture them spiraling down and there’s lots of ways to become dysfunctional after that.
I don’t see why that’s supposed to be different if the color of your skin is different.Report
Like, how come all these examples just happen to keep popping up over and over and over again?
Would you say that white-on-black homicide is…”outta control?”
I recall that you’ve been quite critical of claims of things being “outta control” without accompanying statistics, so I trust that you have the stats to support the narrative that you’re insinuating. In the spirit of trusting but verifying, can I see them?Report
Brandon, Chip believes in truth, not proof.Report
On the topic of why these cases “keep popping up” (a couple of times per year?) you might benefit from reading Scott Alexander’s Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers.
In a nation of 1.4 billion, or even a quarter of that, you can find enough anecdotal data points to support pretty much any story you want to tell. You’re applying wildly different standards to anecdotal data points depending on how much you like the narratives they support.Report
Except it’s virtually impossible to find a black person who doesn’t have a personal experience of racism to tell.
What explains this?Report
Apparently culture.Report
There are apparently hundreds of millions of cherry picked anecdotes of political oppression in the Soviet Union.
Yet none of them can be corroborated with the hard data from the NKVD, nor are they found anywhere in the records of Pravda.Report
What impact does this have on income? Using what definition of racism?
In the bad old days the examples would have been murder or terrorism if they were too successful.
Now days Michelle Obama’s example was something about being not waited on in a store by the clerk.
I’m not saying racism doesn’t exist. And certainly if we’re going to lower the bar for it’s existence to the point where you feel comfortable accusing a black police chief then it’s everywhere.
The point I’m making is racism isn’t responsible for the lion’s share of inequality.Report
Pretend we’re talking about rural white socially conservative Christians being scorned by coastal elitists.Report
Pretty sure you didn’t think much of that line of thought and believed the scorn was well deserved.
And/or the problem was mostly in their heads and not in reality.
So for Michelle Obama, she seems to be saying that no white person has ever had a negative encounter with a minimum wage clerk.Report
No I’m serious.
I believe that there is and always has been discrimination of rural people, lower income people, and even religious people whose beliefs (like fundamentalist Christians) is outside the mainstream.
Andrew and Em have written about this pretty eloquently.
But using your metrics, there is no evidence of such. This is merely a bunch of cherry-picked anecdotes.Report
I don’t. Not to any significant degree.
Yes, agreed.
As long as the “evidence” consists of only cherry picked anecdotes, it’s only a reflection of what the author wants to believe.
If serious people look into this and can’t find anything in addition, then it’s exactly because it’s just what people want to believe.
Fundamentalist Christians love to see themselves as victims. I see nothing to support that view.Report
Similarly, typically the arguments for racism still being a problem have to point to outcomes as “proof”. The inputs and the process can’t be used because they’re color blind.
This is the fallacy at the heart of the systemic racism narrative: The idea that unequal outcomes are proof of a rigged system. We might call it the Rothschild Fallacy, since it’s the same logic that leads people to treat the high average SES of Ashkenazi Jews as proof that they’re rigging the system for their benefit.
Question for Phil et al: Which is it? Is society systematically rigged in favor of Jews, or are disparate outcomes not, in fact, reliable evidence of systemic oppression?Report
Did you really try to debate the existence of racism in the US by resorting to anti-Semitic tropes? Wow. That’s one of the most ballsy things I’ve seen around here.Report
A few posts ago you were claiming the (black) police chief was totally a racist because it took him 8 days to make an arrest.
That logic still would have been flawed even without the results being absurd.
Your outcome logic is similarly absurd. That logic can also be used as “proof” of a vast Jewish conspiracy. Once again that showcases just how bad the logic is.
You need to do more work than just point to outcomes.Report
No, I’m saying that the claims that you’re making imply anti-semitic tropes. I’ve made it very clear that I reject those claims. Let me break it down a bit more so that you can understand it.
You and your fellow travelers routinely point to disparate outcomes as evidence of systemic racism. Black Americans have lower incomes, shorter life expectancy, lower educational attainment, higher incarceration rates, etc. than white people. You claim that this is compelling evidence of systemic racism.
There are many problems with this logic, such as it is, but one of them is that it proves too much. There are also large gaps in socioeconomic outcomes favoring Ashenazi Jews relative to white gentiles. This isn’t some antisemitic myth (in fact, I think it’s quite admirable). It’s just fact. Take a look at this report from Pew. In particular, note page 10 (28% of Jews have a postgraduate degree, nearly twice any other group) and page 11 (23% have a household income of at least $200k, and the median is over $100k, well above the median for gentile white households). Furthermore, Jews are hugely overrepresented in most high-status occupations. And I’m extremely grateful for the wildly disproportionate contribution Jewish scientists have made to the advancement of human knowledge.
However, this presents a problem for your ideology. If disparate outcomes are proof of systemic racism, then that implies that anti-Semites are right about the system being rigged to favor Jews.
Of course, that’s ridiculous, so we can reasonably conclude that disparate outcomes are not, in fact, strong evidence in favor of systemic racism narratives. That doesn’t necessarily mean that systemic racism isn’t real, but it does mean that you can’t treat disparate outcomes as probative, or even particularly strong evidence.Report
I missed this earlier. He’s not resorting to anti-Semitic tropes; he’s comparing the structure of an anti-Semitic trope to the argument you’re making. He is thus accusing you of thinking that’s no better than an anti-Semitic trope.Report
To make my views falsifiable I should spell this out. If they’re not falsifiable then we’re in religion territory.
I would have to see evidence that inequality and racism is race based, i.e. is a skin color effect, as opposed to culture.
Do black immigrants from other countries come here and have the same problems advancing?
We have strong evidence the reverse is true.
Do we have official gov programs designed to blacks from advancing?
This seems a side effect of AA, send them to schools where they have to take the least profitable major. However given how strongly AA is liked by SJWs and the black communities it seems an unintended side effect.
Do other minorities with different cultures experience the same problems?
Asians are so successful that the SJWs who run AA need to discriminate against them.
Are blacks are excluded from public office because whites won’t vote for them?
The last three Democrat Presidencies have had a black in the main ticket. That’s how important not looking racist is to Team Blue and that’s how common SJWs are. Having a black on the ticket may be such a positive thing for election chances that this will be a thing for decades.
It would also help if the arguments in favor of racism didn’t depend on lowering the bar so much that absurdities abound. The Black cops who didn’t arrest the Fed Ex shooters right away are racist. People who want good schools are racist. Everyone who couldn’t vote for HRC is a racist. Events that happened to someone’s ancestors are more important than their parents.
The bar has to be lowered that far because the general concept doesn’t work.Report
why do you separate skin color and culture?Report
Believe it or not, the distinction between ADOS and African Immigrants exists in the wild.
Like, ADOS and African Immigrants have static.
Do you want me to find examples of this or would you like us to just go ahead with the assumption that skin color and culture can be assumed to overlap?Report
I’m saying that extricating racism (skin tones based bigotry and discrimination) from culture is a convenient way to avoid dealing with the former. I also find it fascinating that you and Dark seem to believe that white nationalists in the US are ok with African immigrants because their culture is alleged to be different, but not ok with Black Americans for the same reason. Last I check overt racists and white nationalists make no such distinction.Report
You are vacillating between racism as personal animus (as was most likely the case of these two men), and structural racism.
Structural racism is not at play here, since the men were arrested, and charged, and unless the DA softballs the grand jury, they will be indicted.Report
So we’re going with “skin color and culture can be assumed to overlap”?
That strikes me as agreeing with the white nationalists rather than disagreeing with them.
Do you believe that they’re *RIGHT*?Report
That’s right, they don’t. So if people like that have a significant impact on society then African immigrants would do about as well as our natives.
Instead we find the opposite. Blacks from different cultures do absurdly, massively better in the US than the locals.
Attendance at Harvard and the other top schools, pursuance of higher degrees, and so on. Almost like the skin color is a net positive if you only have to deal with discrimination and not dysfunction.Report
I think the problem that some see is that they view the dysfunction as a result of the racist policies of our past. Generations that did not have equal opportunity and subjected to policies that actively harmed them. Those policies are gone, but the effects remain.Report
This is truth, but it opens up the question of are the current (or proposed) policies actually addressing that harm and trying to undo it, or is it a highly gamable band-aid that policy makers and pundits keep trying to plaster over once the gaming becomes obvious?Report
“Skin color is a net positive if you only have to deal with discrimination and not dysfunction” ?!?!
Being discriminated against is a positive. WTF is the best comment i can come up with. Think that through a bit.Report
He’s making a reductio ad absurdum argument. You can’t refute it by saying the last line doesn’t make any sense.Report
Discrimination is a thing, it exists. It’s always a negative.
AA is a thing, it exists. Various other things the gov does to uplift people is also a thing. Various scholarships, etc.
So, from an inequality point of view, i.e. how much money you’re going to make in the future, where does all of this net?
If we just take skin color then the net is negative, but that’s including a dysfunctional culture that itself creates lots of problems.
Subtract that culture so you have discrimination but also still have the various advantages, and is the net still negative?
This brings us back to black immigrants, who are not only over represented in the higher level colleges compared to other blacks but they’re also over represented compared to Americans in general.
If memory serves their educational achievements were the highest (as a percentage) of any group but I can’t link to that. If true, highest educational achievements implies lots of really good things from an inequality point of view.
Of course in raw numbers they round to zero so there’s that.Report
The first obvious point is that recent immigrants success cannot be meaningfully compared to african americans because there are giant differences in background. Immigrants are often highly educated and/or middle or upper class in the countries they come from. Most AfAm’s do not start with the same level of education, connections or money. The comparison is faulty unless you want to show how useful it is to start with a PhD or a rich fam.
What is this dysfunctional culture? There is no one culture in the US and blacks are not a monolith. Middle and upper class blacks kids do just fine so it seems like its a poverty issue. Even then most poor black kids arent’ dysfunctional or even get in any more trouble then the avg white kid.
If there is a dysfunctional culture, which there is, it is a function of multi generational poverty and systematic racism that harms blacks in many ways.Report
There’s an excellent essay by Thomas Sowell called “Black Rednecks and White Liberals”. It’s available in audio on YouTube. You should give it a listen.Report
When discussing culture, I find that Ruby Payne’s Framework for Understanding Poverty illuminates more than it obscures.
Report
Wow. I totally fit that middle column. Stereotypical in every way.Report
if you were in the left column, would you have the resources to move to the center column?Report
Given that Maslow’s Hierarchy *WILL* be paid, I would like to point out that “resources” include “peers” and moving from this column to that one will likely involve changing peer groups.
And let me just say this: That’s a hell of a thing.Report
10 years ago I’d spent years with a negative income, had spent+lost my life savings, and was looking into welfare.
My attitude and habits were middle column at the time so it was just a matter of getting an income to match. I didn’t have any self destructive habits to lose.
Put differently, push me into the lower column and I move back to middle.
That’s ugly because it implies that the reverse might be true too. Someone who is purely left will likely end up there again even if they somehow go middle.Report
now, in that framing, imagine you are a young black man in an urban neighborhood. You are two generations removed form the end of legal redlining, but your neighborhood still has the ethnic make up that redlining created. Your mom supports your family working two jobs, both of which require extensive commutes out of the neighborhood because the plant that your grandfather worked at closed before you were born – sent to Mexico and then Vietnam by corporations that considered Black Americans too expensive as a labor force. Your Father moved away years ago to try and find work, and while he sent money for your first few years he had to stop because he lost his job in a small air conditioning plant in Indiana that moved to Mexico as well. Your school has been steadily declining because property tax values are going down, which mean tax receipts are going down. You have no car, and public transit still operates on 1960’s era routes that were established to reinforce the redlining that created your neighborhood.
Do you have any of the resources at your disposal to move from the left to the center column? If you don’t, is the lack of resources cultural, generational or racial in its base?Report
My best friend in high school had a worse background. His mom was borderline crazy and his dad refused to deal with her. He realized when he was in 2nd grade that he was going to have to make his life work himself. He was the one super-functional person in a sea of dysfunction. I think he’s right column now. Very smart and (more importantly) driven.
It would be easier now. My interview was on line. I studied for it for weeks using free, on-line resources. My job lets me work from home. Everything that I do could be done by your sample person.
If you view “learn to code on line” as a cop out; My wife took two classes at a community college and could have gotten a job as an apprentice carpenter.
Big picture moving to the middle column is mostly about not engaging in criminal activity, not getting addicted, not having children before you’re fiscally/emotionally ready, and getting skills for a job.
Your sample person has the resources to move to the middle column. It’s highly likely he won’t move to the middle column because he’s likely surrounded by bad examples and bad influences.
The big resources he’s missing are cultural.
And having defined that as “cultural”, what do we do about it? How do we get large numbers of people to make better decisions?
We proclaim the situation “racist” so they don’t have to take ownership over their choices? Their choices and culture are now our responsivity? How does that work or help?Report
I started in the left column. I made it to the middle column. It took military conditioning to make it happen (breaking the bad habits, and more importantly, the bad social/peer networks; along with job training, a job, financial support, financial education, social education*, etc.).
*Spent a week before my discharge just learning about how to dress professionally and color match fabrics to skin/hair/eye tone, and a variation on Vime’s Boots.Report
That’s hilarious. Every former military man I know wears Hawaiian shirts and khaki shorts, all the time.Report
These days, it’s tshirts and shorts all day, everyday, but when I was separating, knowing such things helped land jobs. In short, most vets know how to clean up nice.Report
you had an external input of time and talent – resources that only a small percentage of the folks in the left column receive. Had you not had those would you have been able – with the resources you had – to make the same move?Report
Honestly, I don’t think so, which is part of my point.
The other part of my point is very much about the breaking of old networks and formation of new. As much as the left column social networks (the actual kind, not the online kind) are necessary for survival, they are also very often key in perpetuating the cycle.
When I peek in on my peer group from my youth, I see very few of them having educations, and holding well paying middle class jobs.
When I have spoken with them about why they never tried to chase opportunity, the undercurrent I always see is fear. Fear of failing, fear of leaving that support network, fear of not fitting into a MC lifestyle. This is the reason I think most social welfare programs fail, or experience at best modest success, because none of them are/can addressing those fears. That was the biggest thing the military did for me, it helped to get over enough of my fears that I could chase opportunities.
But the fear, that is self-reinforcing with the social group. When I left for the Navy, I told NO ONE, because I knew some of them would try to talk me out of it, would give strength to my fears. Misery does love company, after all.Report
Cultures propagate themselves.
If they don’t, they die out and are replaced by other cultures that do.Report
Yep, and the thing to keep in mind is that it’s not a willful, conscious thing. It’s not like you try to leave and they community has a special phone tree that gets activated to apply pressure to make you stay.Report
That exactly. It gets in your head and everyone else’s.
All three of those columns have circular cultures.
I.e. the behaviors considered appropriate for the column not only let you thrive in that column but they also keep you there.
Money and other resources are secondary.
Hmm… the other side of this debate does have a point in that when the current culture of poverty was created there were a disproportionate number of minorities because of racism.
At the same time, it’s been generations and we don’t really know how to change culture, nor are we currently willing to point a finger at it.Report
The problem with that framework is that it doesn’t look at causes and effects. Ideally, anyone in the country should be able to end up in the column they choose. In reality, it might take a generation; that is, if you pass the thinking onto your kids, they’ll make it to the category of choice. At least, that’s true for any jump except lowest-to-highest.
Of course, a lot of the wealthiest people don’t exhibit the traits in the third column. That’s true with many of the new arrivals as well as the legacies. It’s interesting to note that Trump’s personality seems evenly distributed across all three.Report
Not “should”, “could have”.
Everyone is burdened (or blessed) with the choices they have already made.
And not “in the column they choose”. It’s harder to get into the Right column than the Middle. Middle requires you to just not do self destructive things. Right requires more.
Legacies is why we have the phrase “shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations”.
First generation makes money. 2nd generation was raised by the first and can copy their behavior if not their brilliance and maintain the money. 3rd generation is disconnected from all that and wants to spend the money.
For new arrivals you have people who basically lucked out (they won’t stay there long) and the truly brilliant one offs (their decendants will either change or they won’t stay there).
Most people don’t perfectly match their culture.
However I’m not sure where he’s even supposed to go.
Trump is demented, a grifter, a one man band, and an extreme outlier.Report
My take on Trump is he was born into the right column, and thanks to his father’s mental abuse always felt he was in the left column, while being taught to disdain both the left and middle columns. Perfect despot material.Report
A better description is he made a conscious decision to leave the culture he was in and join a different one. That’s exactly what my friend from HS did.Report
Somehow he encountered ideas and encouragement to make that move. It wasn’t de novo. And every other story you read about someone moving from the left column to the middle and even right columns is peppered with people – teachers, preachers, aunts, cops, judges – who gave direction, assistance, encouragement. I suspect your friend – and even you – are no different.Report
That seems profound.
As an idea it would predict concentrated poverty would be especially bad, which it is.
So what do we do?
The ideal would be to spread poverty out so it’s not concentrated. The flaw is people refuse.
Blue areas showcase this, thus your comment about “segregation being worse”.
Everyone wants to be with their own culture. The ideal number of disruptive children in my kids classroom is zero. That also holds true for various other social problems.
So we should be doing a lot more naming and shaming? A lot less “it’s not your fault”?
Intuitively I think we dismantle this culture of poverty by convincing people to leave it one at a time.Report
Yes, I made the decision, but once the decision was made, a whole support system engaged to help the decision stick.
Not everyone will need that support system, but you don’t really know if you’ll need it until you try to leave.
And not everyone will make it through (the military demands a lot of you), but having the system available is critical.
That said, you can’t just grab a kid in poverty and toss them into college and expect them to rise to middle class without the support system to help them break bad habits and break old networks while forming new ones. And for the most part, University is really bad at creating such support systems.Report
I’m not sure there’s a lot of recognition that this is a problem.Report
it is heavily recognized at the HBCU’s, or so my colleagues teaching and researching there tell me.Report
So the schools and the military recognize it.
Let me move the goal posts a bit.
I hear close to nothing about this at a talking head level.
There is a ton of focus on “racism”, implying these outcomes are something society inflicts on people in poverty.
There is almost nothing about “changing behavior that leads to poverty” much less “eliminating networks of people that encourage dysfunctional behavior”.
Shapiro was on a talk show where this subject came up and he pointed to culture (as opposed to racism) and the Leftists laughed at how absurd the concept was.Report
I think a lot of schools recognize it, but are institutionally incapable of dealing with it. The military, on the other hand, has a very consistent track record of dealing with it. It’s not perfect, because you really have to want to break away from poverty, but if you do, the military will happily help you do that.Report
there’s a lot of resources thrown at this issue (generally speaking) in the higher ed industry; it varies very heavily from institution to institution, however. and some good orgs (and a lot of middling ones) who also do work in this space.
a large component, but not the sole one, is sufficient aid packages that address cost of attendance as a whole rather than just tuition.
another key component is more difficult – building out some kind of cohort system in which students in similar situations can buddy up and have a peer group for support going into their first year.
bridge programs and the like are extremely common now, but the peer group model goes beyond the intensive introduction to academic and social life on campus that comes out of most bridge programs. it’s helpful when you have staffers running it who also were first in family/soc/pell/etc, and it helps when dealing with faculty and/or admins who maybe don’t quite “get” the challenges. i have personally heard some really wack garbage come out of faculty mouths when it comes to first gen or pell students – people who should really know better – though it has been satisfying to drop the “well, as someone who was first gen and a pell recipient myself…” in their laps when it has happened.
that said, all the supports in the world won’t help every single student, but now that first-gen is a recognized umbrella category there are more avenues to address the issue than there were even five years ago, much less 20+.Report
It’s good more resources are being applied towards first gen students.
The VA is/was pretty good at marshalling resources to students using the GI Bill/Voc Rehab like I was, but that was the VA kinda kicking the school in the a$$ to support vets 20 years ago. I hope it’s gotten better.
I like the cohort and buddy system, that sounds like a good idea that can provide critical Freshman year support.Report
Noblesse oblige? In this day and age? Would that it were true.Report
As a definition of how they act? I agree that the assertion deserves little more than a gigglesnort.
As a definition of how they view destiny? From here, I’ve gotta say it seems spot-on.
(Perhaps it would better communicate the concept if it were instead “fundamental attribution error”.)Report
It’s absolutely still true. What else would you call it when you buy a friend a beer at the bar?Report
The wannabe accountant in me sees much of this list, and much of Sowell’s article, in terms of discount rate. Obviously, if you’re in need of a meal, you have to prioritize today over tomorrow. But the willingness to prioritize tomorrow over today is both cause and effect for a lot of this.Report
Now wait, are we a seriously racist country where blacks can’t succeed or aren’t we?
If the only thing that matters is their behavior/culture and not ours, then that’s my point.
Marriage rates, willingness to interact with the police, whether or not children face social pressure to not “act white” by succeeding in school. We can measure these things and culture is hugely impactful.
Culture in this case presumably is both a cause and a result of poverty.
Yes. No better, no worse, and treated no differently by me and other parents who strongly value education.
Calling that “racism” doesn’t seem useful.
“Systematic racism” seems to be another way to say “culture” and especially marriage rates.Report
Would love to see the statistics that support the assertions you make in that first paragraph.Report
“For example, male immigrants from Africa arrived with 14.4 years of education, on average, which is the equivalent of a high school diploma plus nearly two and a half years of college. That exceeds the 13.8 years of schooling of the average non-Hispanic white man in the United States. (First-generation African females arrived with 13.6 years of education.)”
from
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2018-03-19/most-immigrants-outpace-americans-when-it-comes-to-education-with-a-big-exception
Just a quick bunch of stats for a busy day. That migrants from some countries often come with high ed is not news.Report
I’m pretty sure the US News article misinterpreted the data. The CPS data covers first-generation immigrants, who may have received some of their education in the US. Their educational level would be higher than at arrival.Report
Looking at the raw data from you link:
They come in doing very well and their 2nd gen children do even better.Report
This study doesn’t support your point. This is comparing the higher education level of non-hispanic immigrants with hispanic immigrants – who make up the vast majority of immigrants to the US. It also includes 2nd generations which make it even more irrelevant.
You could try and make the argument from this study that-Africans have a better probability of success in the US than African Americans do. And if true, is pretty messed up.Report
The gov pays my cousin to sell drugs, get high, and have children out of wedlock whose fathers that don’t get involved.
She’s white. She’s not the only relative I have in that culture.
Separating skin color from culture is easy when you have relatives that are members of a dysfunctional culture.
Change her skin color to black, and is it racist that her kids have less opportunity than mine?
Yes, there are more blacks that do this sort of thing than whites as a percentage of the population. Yes, everyone who is functional flees areas that have large numbers of people like that and the problem gets worse.
None of that changes that these are cultural problems with the predictable outcomes coming from dysfunction, not discrimination.
Subtract the dysfunction, and how much discrimination do we actually have? Little enough that you need to spin normal events or use large datasets and cherry pick to find any. Team Blue thinks it’s such a net positive to have a black on their ticket that they do it every time.Report
Two white men pursued and shot at black men who they considered to be a threat. What, beyond race, would have caused them to do that?Report
You’re using one murder and two murderers as a good representation of where all of America is at? Seriously?
Can I point to a black man winning the lottery as proof that all blacks are millionaires?Report
It’s where a vast swath of America is at. It’s where most of not all of the 74 million Americans who voted for trump the second time are at. The fact that it’s illegal in many ways doesn’t make it disappear.
These two white men believed they could, should and would, be ok shooting a black man who was “wrong.” They don’t care about the letter of the law because they believed the law wasn’t really for them.
And the local police didn’t really believe they needed to be arrested and charged until this made the news.
That’s about as deeply racist as it can be.Report
And the local police didn’t really believe they needed to be arrested and charged until this made the news.
According to the story you linked, the shooting was on January 24th, and the suspects were arrested eight days later, so around February 1st. A local news story at WJTV’s web site, dated February 1st, said that an arrest had already been made.
What media coverage preceded and led to this arrest? I can’t find any.
Also, as mentioned in the CNN story. the local police chief, Kenny Collins, is black. That’s allowed these days, you know. Even in Mississippi.Report
So yes, you’re trying to use one (attempted) murder as “proof” that “vast swath”s of America are like this.
The only other way you have to “prove” this is by dumbing down “racism” so it means “not a Democrat”. Pro-life means racism. Pro-gun means racism.
That this is your best “proof” goes a long way to showcase my point.
Incident happened Jan 24th.
Cops start with dueling reports because the other two got to the cop’s ears first.
Charges were filled Jan 31st (and Feb 1st).
That’s unusually fast for the police when they’re not actively there.
CNN’s reporting was on Feb 10th.Report
I think this is right. The Arbery situation was created by apparently criminal misconduct by the local prosecutor. No evidence of anything like that here, certainly not yet anyway.Report
One of the defendants was a local cop for 7 years and then worked for the DA’s office for 24 years until his retirement 9 months earlier.
The case screams of “blue privilege”.
Further he had some professional history with Arbery although it’s unclear if that played a part here.Report
I’ve very tired of the assumption that racism is always portrayed as a white on X scenario. It isn’t. Racism exists in all countries that are not monoethnic and within all races, AND tribes. Refer to the “cockroach” scene in Hotel Rwanda. I’ve personally been the victim of racism. Racism and stupidity, of course, is another whole kettle of fish, and that’s probably what we got in the above.Report
In the US – which is where I am concerned, racism is white vs. X because white Americans still hold most of the economic and political power. Of course its expressed differently in other countries with different ethnic makeup. That you actually expect all that to be spelled out for you is a sure sign of intellectual laziness.Report
Well, I AM in the US and as I said, I was a victim of racism by an African American guy with much more economic power than me, and he was a friend of my supervisor, so my job COULD have been at risk.
Now, to your point, this was Mississippi, not the intellectual capital of the South, much less the US. This was a pair of stupid rednecks. They’ve been arrested and charged.Report
Mississippi voted for president trump twice. They will vote for him again when he runs. Whites around here are lining up to find ways publicly to dismiss the victims and discredit their story.
These people vote. They are the true existence of much of the population around them. And they are quite prepared to tear it all down unless they get their way.Report
Same could be said for folks on the other political side in other states dude. I know that ’cause I live in one.Report
57.5% of Mississippi’s voters voted for Trump. That doe not mean the entirety of the state supports him.Report
You’re equating voting for Trump with being a racist white. Plenty of whites and non-whites, racists and non-racists voted in different ways.Report
When you vote for a politician who supports racist policies, you perpetuate a racist system even when you, as an individual, are not prone to acting in racist ways.Report
“supports racist policies”
Personally, I’d use a brush that wasn’t quite so broad.Report
What makes you say it’s a “racist system”?
Or more importantly, what would disprove it?Report
Equality of opportunity. Which doesn’t yet uniformly exist in this country.Report
Define “Equality of opportunity”, or what would be evidence for us having it or not having it?
Far as I can tell, “opportunity” mostly reflects your parents and their choices.
For example: My kids have less opportunity than Obama’s but more than my drug dealing cousin’s.
I’m not sure what that has to do with “racism” though.Report
I think the common liberal answer is that equality of opportunity is best measured by outcome.Report
Wiki’s definition: Equal opportunity is a state of fairness in which individuals are treated similarly, unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices, or preferences, except when particular distinctions can be explicitly justified.
The problem is seriously unrealistic expectations. “Unhampered by artificial barriers, prejudices” doesn’t mean that all cultures magically become equal and irrelevant.Report
I’m not saying that I agree with the common liberal answer. I was just presenting it without strawmanning it.
It’s an interesting question. Once equal opportunity is measured by outcome, then we’ve really switched goals from equal opportunity to equal outcome. There are differences in cultures as you note, and statistically we wouldn’t expect any randomized grouping to be proportional. Correlation doesn’t imply causation. On the other hand, there has to be room for a roll-your-eyes test. I always think of Law and Order. If a DA’s office only ever hired short brunette 10’s for assistants, there’d be a lawsuit sooner or later.Report
That’s just not a serious reply. I wouldn’t say that Trump supported racist policies, although I understand that you focus on outcome rather than opportunity. Even so, this is a two-party system, and I don’t expect many people to do what I did and only vote down-ticket. Anti-black Asians and ant-white Hispanics and anti-whatever nonwhatevers can vote based on priorities other than race.Report
You’d be wrong about that:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-wasnt-that-much-split-ticket-voting-in-2020/Report
That article doesn’t say that I’m wrong, and in fact makes a good case that I’m right. But ultimately it’s not even about voting only down-ticket. Why did you make me waste five minutes on it?Report
Its not the only one:
https://www.courthousenews.com/most-registered-voters-to-vote-straight-ticket-poll-shows/
https://www.austincc.edu/news/2019/02/acc-study-reveals-record-levels-straight-ticket-votingReport
I don’t expect many people to (do what I did and only vote down-ticket).Report
It would seem statistically you are wrong in that expectation. Care to explain why you continue to hold it?Report
One more try. I’m not saying “I don’t expect many people to do what I did; I expect them to only vote down-ticket”. That would be a scenario where I voted for a presidential candidate and voted for non-presidential candidates.
I am saying “I don’t expect many people to follow my lead and only vote down-ticket”. I am saying, in other words, that I didn’t vote for a presidential candidate but did vote for non-presidential candidates, but I don’t expect a lot of people to do the same. I expect people to vote for both presidential and non-presidential candidates.
I didn’t say anything about splitting tickets versus straight-party voting.Report
Is not the same thing as
Some of the words are the same, and one can lead to the other, but they are not in fact the same statement.Report
That’s why I patiently explained it to you repeatedly. Can we at least agree that no interpretation should have led to you posting articles about ticket-splitting, as no aspect of what I said related to which party’s candidates were getting votes?Report
So if a black guy beats up a latino because he is latino, is that not racism because the black guy lacks economic and political power? Because I saw a lot of that in high school, and I have no reason to think it no longer happens.Report
The whole “you can’t be racist against white people” thing requires a different definition of “racism” than most people use casually. Like, instead of using the casual definition, it’s using a fairly precise academic definition.
Which would all be well and good except the whole issue where you’re having a casual conversation and then, suddenly, you’re having an academic one. Which wouldn’t be a problem if there wasn’t usually an immediate pivot back to casual conversation afterwards.
And that’s without getting into the whole issue of “that’s not *RACISM*, it’s *BIGOTRY*” not addressing any substantive point being made by the original proposition that used the one word instead of the other.Report
“Racism is power plus prejudice” is an ideological tenet, not a proven (or even provable) fact. The word “racism” has extensive history of being used as Damon is using it, and the fact that you find a different definition rhetorically useful doesn’t invalidate that.
The fact that someone else doesn’t accept a tenet of your ideology as fact is not evidence of intellectual laziness.Report
If people want to say that racism is power plus prejudice, you’re right, we should push back against it, but we should also make it clear that prejudice is wrong. A hateful bigot is a hateful bigot.
I also think the left has a superficial understanding of power. Which is strange, considering how obsessed they are with power theories.Report
Seems Merriam Webster disagrees with you about what Racism is and isn’t.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racismReport
You omitted this:
That’s the sense in which Damon used it above. Note that Merriam-Webster definition was revised in 2020 in response to an outside request.
These are all valid definitions of “racism,” in the sense that they document distinct ways in which the word is used by many people. I’m just saying that the idea that “prejudice plus power” or some variation on that idea is the only valid definition of “racism” is an ideological assertion, not a fact, and it’s inconsistent with decades of actual usage.Report
Oh, my gosh. He copied and pasted the definition but deliberately left out part of definition 1?!?
Ooof. That’s a yikes.Report
not really, since beliefs that underpin a thing and that thing are not normally severable.Report
Oh, Phil. I’m just irritated that I have to click on everything you link on for the next while to compare it to what you’re saying it says instead of being able to take your word that that’s what it says.Report
I just went through that above where he twice “refuted” what I was saying with articles unrelated to what I was saying.Report
That’s because what you wrote and what you intended were not the same until the very end. I was refuting what you wrote.Report
Cause I’m the only person here who looks at a thing, and says 75% o fthe words are good enough to capture the flavor and if people are interested they can take in the other 25%? And because that’s a bad thing?
Wow – I LOVE being held to a standard others aren’t.Report
You mentioned that your father taught at the university level.
Throw what you did past him and ask “do you understand why they’re pretending to be upset or are they just bad people?”
See what he says.Report
I don’t think it was deliberate. If you click through and read it, the part he omitted is actually pretty easy to miss, because it’s sandwiched in between a bunch of example sentences and isn’t marked with a number or letter.
That aside, you definitely should not just accept at face value a claim that a link actually supports the argument it’s being used to make. People cite things that don’t actually support the claim they’re making all the time. It’s extremely common, including in academic literature. Trust but verify. Actually, just don’t trust.Report
I suppose that that’s a good explanation.
But I regret not checking the definition for myself.Report
There’s also a “good old boys” thing going on that transcends race. Recall last September when a 16-year-old in Texas struck and badly injured six bicyclists while trying to crowd them and “roll coal” to pump diesel smoke in their faces. The local police were basically going to let him off — he wasn’t arrested and indicted until six weeks after the incident, and only then when the county DA was pretty much forced to take action. From the Bike Law blog:
Report
Welp, you know, boys will be boys…Report