Comment by jawarner
5 years ago
The status quo is not explicitly racist, and a lot of people are comfortable with it. The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. Take the prevalence of indentured servitude after the Civil War as an example. I'd recommend "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness" for a lucid account of the racial issues in current America.
If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
> If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
This is assuming white privilege is the same as white supremacy, when the term white supremacy has been used for KKK and neo-nazis groups, not mainstream white society since after the civil rights era.
It also assumes that most whites and only whites benefit from white privilege, otherwise it's not so white, and may be more a combination of class, culture and/or historical consequences. Also the fact that white people are still a majority in countries like the US, where a majority in any country likely has similar privileges just by being the majority. One last assumption (in America) is that white culture is a certain way, when in reality the US is primarily an English dominated culture historically, whereas Europe has a lot of cultural variation.
A related issue is that white supremacy is sometimes extended to considering an entire economic system as racist, just because history went a certain way. But there's nothing about an economic system that says any one particular group need benefit more than another.
Fair point. White supremacy is an attitude, whereas white privilege a state of being. I would quibble that white supremacist ideas are quite widespread - see, e.g., references to "thugs" during the BLM protests.
I also agree that white privilege interacts with class, culture and historical consequences, this was well put.
If, hypothetically, an economic system admits little class mobility, and if classes are racially biased, then the effect of that economic system is to maintain a racial caste system. What are your thoughts on this? I'd also point that the justice system works similarly. There are few explicit racial biases, but what is the effect of this system? It actively maintains a racial hierarchy. Does that make it racist?
Sure, I’d say the West is less so over time as laws and attitudes shift towed being more inclusive. But as for capitalism in general, it’s just an economic system that any society can make use of. I’m of the opinion that it does a better job of growing the economy and producing more opportunities than other systems, raising the standard of living in general. It does also produce more wealth inequality. It also has a tendency to produce powerful corporations. So those two tendencies along with a few others need to be kept in check.
> there's nothing about an economic system that says anyone one particular group need benefit more than another.
Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
(1) And "small amount of inequality" isn't a fair assumption for the US, where one race started out owning people of the other race.
I should have said racial or ethnic group, since there's no reason other than historical happenstance why any racial/ethnic grouping can't benefit. As for friends of the rich, has there been any economic system where that wasn't true? If not rich, then at least the powerful and well connected have always benefitted in every society. The challenging part is how to mitigate that somewhat.
> I doesn't take a lot of analysis to see how that can re-enforce the dominance of one race in a society if there's any small amount of inequality to start(1) and people of a given race are mostly associating with others of the same race, since the positive feedback loops in capitalism are significant.
This isn't racial discrimination or racism or white supremacy, and yielding equal outcomes among racial groups isn't innately desirable. If we assume that all races would be equal today were it not for historical discrimination (quite an assumption given that significant disparities predated first contact between different racial groups and thus racism between them), and we want to correct for that historical discrimination then we can talk about it, but that's fundamentally different than "racism is rampant today" or "we've made little progress since abolition" or "we live in a white supremacist ethnostate" or any of the other left-wing claims.
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> Crony capitalism creates positive feedback loops where the friends of rich people benefit more than strangers to rich people.
That's about class, not race, ethnicity or whatever other grouping you prefer. White billionaires hang out with black billionaires, not with white hobos.
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> The push by the left is to suggest that just because a system does not have discriminatory laws, that doesn't mean it's not oppressive. ... If you can be convinced that the status quo is oppressive to racial minorities, then it serves to perpetuate white supremacy.
There are a couple of dynamics at play here:
* The distinction between de jure and de facto discrimination. No one disputes that a country can be racially oppressive via de facto discrimination as our country has been in the past.
* Whether any kind of discrimination is a necessary condition for a system to be called "oppressive". Of course a system is oppressive if it discriminates at all, even if the discrimination is only de facto. This is a completely uncontroversial opinion--virtually everyone believes this, so I don't think this is the position that the left is espousing (especially given that prominent left-wing voices like Kendi are pretty explicit that this isn't what they're talking about). Moreover, if leftists are taking the uncontroversial interpretation, then it doesn't make sense to call anyone else a "white supremacist" because at worst they are opposed to discrimination to the extent that they are aware that it exists (and no, pointing to disparities does not constitute compelling evidence of discrimination).
So presumably leftists believe we live under "white supremacy" because there are disparities at all, irrespective of whether those disparities are attributable to racial discrimination. More likely, it seems to me that leftists are conflating "there was a lot of historical discrimination that created different wealth, crime, marriage/family, etc distributions that the present system acts upon" with "the system today is racist and we've made little progress since the legalization of slavery".
If the latter were true then we would indeed be under a 'white supremacist' system, but thankfully it's obviously fallacious. There are certainly still some vestiges of racism that we should continue to work to remove, but we've progressed tremendously--our system is mostly colorblind, everyone of consequence everywhere is in favor of making the system more colorblind (save apparently progressives and a handful of thoroughly marginalized actual white supremacists); however, a perfectly egalitarian (i.e., non-racist) system isn't going to yield equal outcomes.
That said, if we want to address historical racism, then let's talk about it as such and not give the impression that we're solving for extant racism (or that extant racism is a primary driver in various disparities). This is unnecessarily dishonest and divisive. Let's talk about reparations instead of advocating for a racialized society and system (in contrast to a colorblind society and system). Let's dispense with viewpoints of racial primacy and essentialism. Let's dispense with DiAngelo's "whites are inherently racist" (not paraphrasing) and Kendi's "anti-racism requires eternal discrimination" (paraphrasing). All of this is nonsense and a distraction if our goal is to address historical discrimination or decrease injustice or even close racial gaps (defunding police or antagonizing whites are not likely to improve yields for minorities).
> I don't follow your first point, since it seems clear to me that people of color, jewish people, and homosexuals are able to hold white supremacist viewpoints.
My point didn't depend on the ability or inability of people with those identities to hold white supremacist viewpoints; it was literally parenthetical. I only brought it up because there's a lot of overlap between the people who make broad claims of white supremacy and the people who advocate that whites "shut up and listen" to people with these identities such that, you know, they might shut up and listen before writing these people off as white supremacists.
The justice system (1) does discriminate against people of color to some extent, and (2) it also discriminates against the poor. The arguments for these points are laid out in detail in the book I referred to, so I'm not going to waste your time repeating them. If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
You raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
I can't defend DiAngelo or Kendi because I'm ignorant of what they have to say.
> The justice system (1) does discriminate against people of color to some extent, and (2) it also discriminates against the poor
No doubt, and everyone agrees that this should be fixed to the extent that there is discrimination. It's unclear exactly how to fix this discrimination except to continue to promote a color-blind society (which has been the winning strategy thus far and while it hasn't completely resolved the problem, it's significantly curbed it in a relatively short amount of time).
> If you do agree with either of these points, then we would agree that the justice system is oppressive.
Yes. But no one is arguing that we shouldn't change the justice system; there's disagreement about the extent to which it's oppressive with the left arguing that it's "literally slavery" and moderates arguing that it's a problem that needs to be addressed but not a significant driver of the disparities that the left cites and the right arguing that it's an insignificant problem relative to black-on-black crime.
> ou raise the point that leftists don't differentiate between a system that discriminates based on race and a system that discriminates on factors correlated with race. I would argue that the effects of those two systems are quite similar. Would you agree that, regardless of the intention, both of these systems have the effect of racial oppression?
Yes, by definition, something that correlates with some underlying cause else has similar effects.
A good analogy would be the disparate outcomes of the criminal justice system with respect to men and women. As with blacks, the criminal justice system discriminates against men to some extent. However, it more significantly discriminates against violent behavior, which correlates with male gender to the effect that men are disproportionately likely to go to prison, their sentences are disproportionately harsh, etc.
A moderate would say that we should address the discrimination problem, but not try to discriminate against women in order to address the remainder of the gap which is attributable to the correlate: violent behavior.
An ideologically consistent leftist would argue that correlates should be treated as causes in the name of erasing disparities; however, (mysteriously) there are no nation-wide progressive efforts to close this gap. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine why progressives are comfortable discriminating against some groups but not others.
EDIT: Even though they have similar results, as with all correlations, the danger of treating correlations as a causation is that you end up treating the symptom and not the problem, and often this just exacerbates the symptom. Eliminating standardized testing in the college admissions process is very likely to result in more discrimination against blacks, but addressing our growing wealth inequality problem will benefit people of all races (and given that blacks are more likely to be poor than whites, it will benefit them disproportionately). Further, this allows us to dispense with the deliberately confusing, divisive "white supremacy", "white fragility", "racism" rhetoric that is in all likelihood only creating more racists.
EDIT2: While we may not disagree, I feel like this conversation is a lot more productive than most race conversations. Thanks for being a good faith participant, sincerely.