@jennifer I find nothing to disagree with you on there. Maybe it's wishful thinking but I do hope Sanders finds a way to incorporate those views from BLM. I shudder at the idea of another corporatist Democrat with hawkish foreign policy views, though it does look like that will be one of the two realistic options come the general election.
@kazzy First I don't see how the argument that the next law will also be racist addresses my point. I mean, if we concede that then why not just give up altogether? The biggest advances this country has been able to make on race have been through a mix of outreach and public policy via statute and legal challenge. What is the alternative path in our current form of government?
Also where have I advocated not rushing to judgment? I readily concede that racial inequality is a serious and challenging problem to deal with and that we should be doing things now to deal with it. I guess I'm not understanding what realistic options are out there that don't involve working through our political and legal process as they actually exist.
Lastly I don't see where I've been dismissive of @jennifer. I'm just discussing the issues she's raised. I'm not a Republican nor do I have republican sympathies so I don't know what the reference to the SSM debate has to do with this.
@jennifer Respectfully, I never said my proposed approach was easy, only that I think it's more feasible than laws explicitly targeting the issue of race. See my above comment to Kazzy about a natural coalition that can be built around the paritcular issue with Medicaid. Also, on that matter, in theory the only thing that would need to change would be the governors of the states that have declined the expansion funds. Not easy, but it could be done in a single election.
Bringing this all the way back to the OP I think the reason Sanders is even on the radar, is because he understands such a coalition could he built.
I understand how facially neutral laws can still operate to have a disparate impact on racial minorities, and that some laws are intended to do just that. I'm just stating my opinion on the best (but certainly not the only) means of combating those types of outcomes. The voter ID laws to me, for example, are the types of things that I think are ripe for constitutional challenges.
@kazzy You'll have to define whack-a-mole racism is in this context for me to be able to respond on the first question (not trying to be snarky just debating in good faith since apparently that doesn't seem to be clear to everyone).
On the second question I've never said that I think there is a single approach to adressing this issue, only where i think the priorities should be. In a perfect world fixing racial inequality would not require perfectly constructed laws but then in a perfect world we wouldn't have this problem to begin with. In the example we're talking about here, black people disadvantaged by the failure to expand Medicaid under the ACA in impacted states should in theory have a whole host of natural allies who are also being left out of the system or who sympathize with being too poor to have access to health care. That's where you start to form a political coalition to address the problem. Building that coalition is where I think discussions about racism on a more personal as opposed to structural level can be very useful and better seve progress.
@jennifer I disagree. I don't think that the problems with social security you mentioned are comparable post de jure segregation. Government programs will probably never be perfect but discrimination in the disbursement of government benefits is now illegal.
I think your Medicaid example actually supports my argument. The reason that has happened isnt clearly due to racism (though it probably plays some role) its due to a failure in the way the law was drafted and the political maneuvering in Congress that went into passing it. The bad result of that failure disproportionately effects black people but it could be corrected in any number of racially blind ways such as changing how medicaid is distributed or continuing to push for some type of public option or single payer system.
Now you may be right that we will never get to perfect through such mechanisms. I have no opinion on that. However even if you're right I don't see why that's a reason not to attack the issue on the front where you can get signifiant improvements.
@kazzy @nevermoor My issue is that reparations are a specific well defined concept. Laying out the problems of racism and how it manifests itself is, I absolutely agree, an unfortunate but necessary part of deciding what to do about it. I think that burden has already been met when it comes to most intellectually honest people. However, the existence of these problems does not in itself mean that the best solution is reparations or even that reparations is a workable part of many solutions.
I don't think it's an unfair burden when he is the one who chose that approach.
@kazzy I answered this question for Stillwater above. His article is called 'The Case for Reparations.' I think it's therefore reasonable to understand him to be proposing that the government give money to the descendants of African slaves as recompense for what was done to their ancestors. That is a policy proposal. I understand some people read TNC's thorough recounting of racial inequities as sufficient to make that case but I do not. Others seem to think he is making a different kind of argument and maybe he is but I'm not really seeing what that other argument is.
I think a really good piece would take that next step and address some of the basic issues and obstacles CK MacLeod mentions below (who gets them, when, how do you handle competing claims).
For example, if someone wrote an essay called 'The Case for a Hybrid Car Tax Credit' I would expect not only a history of the damage carbon emissions has done to the environment, but a little bit of number crunching about who is going to get what, when they will get it, and what the results would be. If it does not include anything of that nature beyond form a committee then it isn't a very good policy proposal.
As a footnote I'll just add that I am not making a comparison between entrenched racial inequality and carbon emissions beyond how i think proposals that the government release money to individuals to address a problem should be analyzed.
@kazzy I responded to your question below (and am about to respond to your follow up). On the matter of other writers I don't see how that is relevant to a point I made solely about TNC. I did not assert that a convincing argument could never be made for reparations just that I did not like the one made in TNC's The Case for Reparations.
I don't entirely disagree my point is about where I think priorities need to be. For me food in bellies and roofs over heads which aren't connected to correctional institutons are always going to be more pressing than the more abstract stuff. The fact that we can get there in a more or less race blind way is in my opinion a feature because it makes these changes more politically feasible.
I don't want to go onto a tangent specifically about a dollar amount (and in retrospect I can see why it may have appeared that was my only problem with the piece). However, the lack of details on that particular issue is illustrative of my larger problem with the piece.
My criticism is that he made a policy proposal that I don't think he adequately defended. Again, I don't expect draft legislation or hundreds of pages of details, just a basic idea of how we get to said policy from here, some basics about what said policy looks like in practice, and what we can expect the outcome of said policy to be.
@chris @stillwater So the response to a criticism about a particular piece that was being discussed on this thread is "your criticism is wrong because of some other unnamed writer who wrote some unnamed piece out there somewhere on the internet"?
I will take your point on my phrasing. What I should have said is that adding a dollar amount, among other specifics, would have made the argument more convincing.
His general cause, as I interpret it, is anti-racism. The purpose of the piece we're talking about, as I would interpret it, is to argue that the United States government should make payment to the descendants of African slaves as recompense. In my opinion, "resolved via dialogue" is a complete cop-out. It's what politicians say when they don't have the guts to say something substantive.
Now I wouldn't expect him to write a treatise addressing every possible issue and counter-argument. He doesn't have the venue for that, and even if he did, it isn't reasonable to expect one person to have all the answers. What's hard for me to take seriously is a piece that makes a controversial policy proposal but doesn't take a swing at any of those harder questions. Maybe the Atlantic doesn't want him to take those kinds of stances since it might alienate the white segments of his audience (I honestly have no idea) but I would not call the end result compelling writing.
Even if the answer is both. And blurring those two concepts doesn’t really serve any useful purpose except to obfuscate the role race actually plays in all this.
So it seems to me.
I disagree completely. It does serve a useful purpose if your goal is doing something measurable to improve the circumstances of the people most impacted. The problems of racism and inequality overlap and to the extent we can fight what might be called disparate impact racism by attacking inequality and the policies that entrench it we should.
I'm not saying that there's something wrong with arguing for more enlightened attitudes and/or sensitivity about race. I just don't think it's as valuable at our current point in time as improving material conditions and ending the policies that create mass incarceration.
This is why, despite all the praise Coates receives, I think he can be such a bad spokesman for his cause. He has a unique voice but his insistence on never really coming out and confronting the hard, nitty-gritty questions make him easy to dismiss. I can't tell if it's just his style or if beneath it all he is an intellectual lightweight posing as someone much more profound.
I agree with @kolohe and think that you could make precisely the opposite argument (which I assume many Sanders supporters would) just as plausibly. The mainstream progressive movement pays lip service to systemic racism but I think, at least in its online manifestation, often treats it more like an individual sin, where the solution is tongue clucking and shaming of individuals who with varying degrees of intent say something mean, stupid, or insensitive.
The other perspective is that racism at the personal or emotional level of individuals is hard to address from a policy perspective. From that point of view the best thing we can do is to try to improve the actual material conditions of racial minorities along with the poor generally and hope that over time racism at the individual/emotional level not only appears more absurd but causes less damage where it persists. That would mean basic wealth redistribution in the form of government programs. Better yet we can also set in place policies that force general accountability in law enforcement (BLM has some good ideas on that issue) so that individuals are less likely to be abused and if they are there is some recourse.
My personal perspective is that race and poverty are intertwined in America in such a manner as to make it ridiculous to argue either that racism is the sole cause of current entrenched inequality (its racist roots of course aren't debatable) or that the disproportionate poverty of (some) racial groups would go away if only we could solve racism. Is a black man more likely to be in prison in this country because he's black or because he's more likely to be poor. The answer can be both.
I didn't mean that they don't have their heroes (Obama had his own interesting cult of personality thing going in 2008) but I don't think they have something like Fox News producing contenders for the presidency.
My thesis is that the search for a hero (combined with a certain strain of know-nothingism) is the result of conservatism becoming more about culture and less about policy combined with the consolidation of a 'conservative' media. Fox News and Talk Radio create heroes designed to appeal to the demographic from which they profit. These figures end up overshadowing more normal politicians when it comes to election time until they're inevitably exposed as, at best untested for a national stage.
The Democratic coalition I think is far too fragmented to suffer from this particular pathology.
In theory I agree, A is better but its also a tall order. Reality tends to be what Jay bird said. Even if I disagree with the decision to select B in principle I find it hard to argue against it for any individual family.
The result in the county I grew up in was that virtually all white college bound students ended up in one of two magnet programs, going to private or parochial school, or moving (I went to a very blue collar parochial school then my family moved over the county line once they could afford it).
I will say that my experience was not the result of a policy decision to integrate poorer black students from dc into a predominantly middle class white county but was the result of development policies. Maybe it would go better if it was done more purposefully but I think a lot of similar dynamics would be in play.
What if the sacrifice is sending your children to a much more violent school and/or staying in a much more violent county? That was the experience my family and many others had in the late 80s through 90s just outside of DC.
My point isn't that de facto segregation is good or even that it's not racist (the roots of it absolutely are). My point is only that some of the concerns that make it hard to undo are legitimate (as opposed to those that aren't such as not wanting your kid going to school with people of a different race).
That's a good question and what makes th e issue hard. It's easy to argue for something when it isn't you and your family making the sacrifice (or at least facing uncertainty).
I find his conclusions a lot more compelling than proposals for school choice or merit pay or making the education model more corporate. Finland's education system is good because it doesn't face the same socio-economic problems (some) US school districts have. Here we expect teachers to solve problems our entire government struggles with.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Echoes of 68?”
@jennifer I find nothing to disagree with you on there. Maybe it's wishful thinking but I do hope Sanders finds a way to incorporate those views from BLM. I shudder at the idea of another corporatist Democrat with hawkish foreign policy views, though it does look like that will be one of the two realistic options come the general election.
"
@kazzy First I don't see how the argument that the next law will also be racist addresses my point. I mean, if we concede that then why not just give up altogether? The biggest advances this country has been able to make on race have been through a mix of outreach and public policy via statute and legal challenge. What is the alternative path in our current form of government?
Also where have I advocated not rushing to judgment? I readily concede that racial inequality is a serious and challenging problem to deal with and that we should be doing things now to deal with it. I guess I'm not understanding what realistic options are out there that don't involve working through our political and legal process as they actually exist.
Lastly I don't see where I've been dismissive of @jennifer. I'm just discussing the issues she's raised. I'm not a Republican nor do I have republican sympathies so I don't know what the reference to the SSM debate has to do with this.
"
@jennifer Respectfully, I never said my proposed approach was easy, only that I think it's more feasible than laws explicitly targeting the issue of race. See my above comment to Kazzy about a natural coalition that can be built around the paritcular issue with Medicaid. Also, on that matter, in theory the only thing that would need to change would be the governors of the states that have declined the expansion funds. Not easy, but it could be done in a single election.
Bringing this all the way back to the OP I think the reason Sanders is even on the radar, is because he understands such a coalition could he built.
I understand how facially neutral laws can still operate to have a disparate impact on racial minorities, and that some laws are intended to do just that. I'm just stating my opinion on the best (but certainly not the only) means of combating those types of outcomes. The voter ID laws to me, for example, are the types of things that I think are ripe for constitutional challenges.
"
@kazzy You'll have to define whack-a-mole racism is in this context for me to be able to respond on the first question (not trying to be snarky just debating in good faith since apparently that doesn't seem to be clear to everyone).
On the second question I've never said that I think there is a single approach to adressing this issue, only where i think the priorities should be. In a perfect world fixing racial inequality would not require perfectly constructed laws but then in a perfect world we wouldn't have this problem to begin with. In the example we're talking about here, black people disadvantaged by the failure to expand Medicaid under the ACA in impacted states should in theory have a whole host of natural allies who are also being left out of the system or who sympathize with being too poor to have access to health care. That's where you start to form a political coalition to address the problem. Building that coalition is where I think discussions about racism on a more personal as opposed to structural level can be very useful and better seve progress.
"
@jennifer I disagree. I don't think that the problems with social security you mentioned are comparable post de jure segregation. Government programs will probably never be perfect but discrimination in the disbursement of government benefits is now illegal.
I think your Medicaid example actually supports my argument. The reason that has happened isnt clearly due to racism (though it probably plays some role) its due to a failure in the way the law was drafted and the political maneuvering in Congress that went into passing it. The bad result of that failure disproportionately effects black people but it could be corrected in any number of racially blind ways such as changing how medicaid is distributed or continuing to push for some type of public option or single payer system.
Now you may be right that we will never get to perfect through such mechanisms. I have no opinion on that. However even if you're right I don't see why that's a reason not to attack the issue on the front where you can get signifiant improvements.
"
@kazzy @nevermoor My issue is that reparations are a specific well defined concept. Laying out the problems of racism and how it manifests itself is, I absolutely agree, an unfortunate but necessary part of deciding what to do about it. I think that burden has already been met when it comes to most intellectually honest people. However, the existence of these problems does not in itself mean that the best solution is reparations or even that reparations is a workable part of many solutions.
I don't think it's an unfair burden when he is the one who chose that approach.
"
@kazzy I answered this question for Stillwater above. His article is called 'The Case for Reparations.' I think it's therefore reasonable to understand him to be proposing that the government give money to the descendants of African slaves as recompense for what was done to their ancestors. That is a policy proposal. I understand some people read TNC's thorough recounting of racial inequities as sufficient to make that case but I do not. Others seem to think he is making a different kind of argument and maybe he is but I'm not really seeing what that other argument is.
I think a really good piece would take that next step and address some of the basic issues and obstacles CK MacLeod mentions below (who gets them, when, how do you handle competing claims).
For example, if someone wrote an essay called 'The Case for a Hybrid Car Tax Credit' I would expect not only a history of the damage carbon emissions has done to the environment, but a little bit of number crunching about who is going to get what, when they will get it, and what the results would be. If it does not include anything of that nature beyond form a committee then it isn't a very good policy proposal.
As a footnote I'll just add that I am not making a comparison between entrenched racial inequality and carbon emissions beyond how i think proposals that the government release money to individuals to address a problem should be analyzed.
"
@kazzy I responded to your question below (and am about to respond to your follow up). On the matter of other writers I don't see how that is relevant to a point I made solely about TNC. I did not assert that a convincing argument could never be made for reparations just that I did not like the one made in TNC's The Case for Reparations.
"
True but didn't de jure segregation have something to do with why that was the case? We don't have that now, we have something trickier.
"
I don't entirely disagree my point is about where I think priorities need to be. For me food in bellies and roofs over heads which aren't connected to correctional institutons are always going to be more pressing than the more abstract stuff. The fact that we can get there in a more or less race blind way is in my opinion a feature because it makes these changes more politically feasible.
"
What argument am I missing? I'm also not sure I comment here enough to have any habits.
"
I don't want to go onto a tangent specifically about a dollar amount (and in retrospect I can see why it may have appeared that was my only problem with the piece). However, the lack of details on that particular issue is illustrative of my larger problem with the piece.
My criticism is that he made a policy proposal that I don't think he adequately defended. Again, I don't expect draft legislation or hundreds of pages of details, just a basic idea of how we get to said policy from here, some basics about what said policy looks like in practice, and what we can expect the outcome of said policy to be.
"
@chris @stillwater So the response to a criticism about a particular piece that was being discussed on this thread is "your criticism is wrong because of some other unnamed writer who wrote some unnamed piece out there somewhere on the internet"?
"
I will take your point on my phrasing. What I should have said is that adding a dollar amount, among other specifics, would have made the argument more convincing.
"
His general cause, as I interpret it, is anti-racism. The purpose of the piece we're talking about, as I would interpret it, is to argue that the United States government should make payment to the descendants of African slaves as recompense. In my opinion, "resolved via dialogue" is a complete cop-out. It's what politicians say when they don't have the guts to say something substantive.
Now I wouldn't expect him to write a treatise addressing every possible issue and counter-argument. He doesn't have the venue for that, and even if he did, it isn't reasonable to expect one person to have all the answers. What's hard for me to take seriously is a piece that makes a controversial policy proposal but doesn't take a swing at any of those harder questions. Maybe the Atlantic doesn't want him to take those kinds of stances since it might alienate the white segments of his audience (I honestly have no idea) but I would not call the end result compelling writing.
"
I disagree completely. It does serve a useful purpose if your goal is doing something measurable to improve the circumstances of the people most impacted. The problems of racism and inequality overlap and to the extent we can fight what might be called disparate impact racism by attacking inequality and the policies that entrench it we should.
I'm not saying that there's something wrong with arguing for more enlightened attitudes and/or sensitivity about race. I just don't think it's as valuable at our current point in time as improving material conditions and ending the policies that create mass incarceration.
"
This is why, despite all the praise Coates receives, I think he can be such a bad spokesman for his cause. He has a unique voice but his insistence on never really coming out and confronting the hard, nitty-gritty questions make him easy to dismiss. I can't tell if it's just his style or if beneath it all he is an intellectual lightweight posing as someone much more profound.
"
I agree with @kolohe and think that you could make precisely the opposite argument (which I assume many Sanders supporters would) just as plausibly. The mainstream progressive movement pays lip service to systemic racism but I think, at least in its online manifestation, often treats it more like an individual sin, where the solution is tongue clucking and shaming of individuals who with varying degrees of intent say something mean, stupid, or insensitive.
The other perspective is that racism at the personal or emotional level of individuals is hard to address from a policy perspective. From that point of view the best thing we can do is to try to improve the actual material conditions of racial minorities along with the poor generally and hope that over time racism at the individual/emotional level not only appears more absurd but causes less damage where it persists. That would mean basic wealth redistribution in the form of government programs. Better yet we can also set in place policies that force general accountability in law enforcement (BLM has some good ideas on that issue) so that individuals are less likely to be abused and if they are there is some recourse.
My personal perspective is that race and poverty are intertwined in America in such a manner as to make it ridiculous to argue either that racism is the sole cause of current entrenched inequality (its racist roots of course aren't debatable) or that the disproportionate poverty of (some) racial groups would go away if only we could solve racism. Is a black man more likely to be in prison in this country because he's black or because he's more likely to be poor. The answer can be both.
On “The Rise (and the Inevitable Repeated Fall) of the Conservative Savior™”
I didn't mean that they don't have their heroes (Obama had his own interesting cult of personality thing going in 2008) but I don't think they have something like Fox News producing contenders for the presidency.
"
My thesis is that the search for a hero (combined with a certain strain of know-nothingism) is the result of conservatism becoming more about culture and less about policy combined with the consolidation of a 'conservative' media. Fox News and Talk Radio create heroes designed to appeal to the demographic from which they profit. These figures end up overshadowing more normal politicians when it comes to election time until they're inevitably exposed as, at best untested for a national stage.
The Democratic coalition I think is far too fragmented to suffer from this particular pathology.
On “Separate and Unequal Still: The Plight of American Schools”
In theory I agree, A is better but its also a tall order. Reality tends to be what Jay bird said. Even if I disagree with the decision to select B in principle I find it hard to argue against it for any individual family.
"
The result in the county I grew up in was that virtually all white college bound students ended up in one of two magnet programs, going to private or parochial school, or moving (I went to a very blue collar parochial school then my family moved over the county line once they could afford it).
I will say that my experience was not the result of a policy decision to integrate poorer black students from dc into a predominantly middle class white county but was the result of development policies. Maybe it would go better if it was done more purposefully but I think a lot of similar dynamics would be in play.
"
What if the sacrifice is sending your children to a much more violent school and/or staying in a much more violent county? That was the experience my family and many others had in the late 80s through 90s just outside of DC.
My point isn't that de facto segregation is good or even that it's not racist (the roots of it absolutely are). My point is only that some of the concerns that make it hard to undo are legitimate (as opposed to those that aren't such as not wanting your kid going to school with people of a different race).
"
That's a good question and what makes th e issue hard. It's easy to argue for something when it isn't you and your family making the sacrifice (or at least facing uncertainty).
On “Sweden’s Education Privatization Failure”
I think it's hard to talk about why Finland has had success without reading this article by Pasi Sahlberg:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/05/15/what-if-finlands-great-teachers-taught-in-u-s-schools-not-what-you-think/
I find his conclusions a lot more compelling than proposals for school choice or merit pay or making the education model more corporate. Finland's education system is good because it doesn't face the same socio-economic problems (some) US school districts have. Here we expect teachers to solve problems our entire government struggles with.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.