Wow. Other countries, and governments, and researchers, dropped 'race' a long, long time ago. Robust data is collected under the category 'ethinicity', which encompasses a great deal more than white and black. America is so retro in some things. I shake my head in wonder. (Critical race theory? Studied that 30 years ago, but that's not what it was branded in sociology circles back then.)
It seems like Greg is promoting a fake-it-til-you-make-it campaign. We all walk around with highly evolved stereotyping machines in our heads. We all see race. On average we clearly interact far more with racial in-groups than out-groups. I suppose we could all try to overcome these realities with a disciplined and very mindful change in the way we speak about race, but that seems extraordinarily unlikely to achieve success. Fighting thousands of years of human nature is quite a task. It seems the more likely path will be that we intermix so much that our brain becomes less and less reliant on racial stereotyping because its just no longer all that useful. That will take patience though. Not our strong suit.
As long as we are talking about overcoming human nature I would think openness and forgiveness would be the quickest solution. Let's all be totally honest about the stereotypes that we carry around. Air them out and discuss. I bet we could get rid of half of them with a kind of society wide cognitive behavioral therapy session. Have all of our unfounded stereotypes dissected and challenged. This is the approach Daryl Davis takes and it has lead to dozens of KKK members seeing the light. So imagine what it would do for good people who just don’t have a lot of exposure to other races. The current strategy for well-meaning people who carry around racial stereotypes is to smile and pretend they don’t have them. Racial awkwardness is a big impediment to more integration. Awkwardness is often the result of not knowing what you are supposed to say and worrying what you are thinking will offend.
This is a dream of course. This kind of honesty might lead to a lot of fist fights.
Disparate outcomes measured by race imply that their cause is the inability of the individual to achieve because of their race. Once within that paradigm we are left with whether the cause is internal or external to that individual. Is it their adoption of some societal induced reduced expectation or an undefined external systemic racist structure or some other internal or external racial factor. Regardless of the outcome of the discussion, we are stuck within the framework of race. We are unable to offer a solution that doesn’t involve race which brings with it all the baggage of the racial “victim”.
It seems (at least to me) that if we truly want to solve problems then we need to deracialize the way we think about the issues we are trying to address. If we ignore race and gather data differently then we can deracialize both the problem and the solution. What percentage of convicted felons come from homes living in poverty, what percentage of those felons were raised in urban environments, what percentage of those felons came from single mother households, what percentage of those felons didn’t graduate high school, etc., etc. If we are addressing a societal issue, why would we ever care if the racial percentages of the resulting population differ from their make-up in the overall population. It is our societal problem, not a racial problem, that we are attempting to address.
Perhaps my ignorance is showing and while we can attribute 95% of a particular issue (high school dropout rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, etc.) to cross racial factors, there remains a racial disparity that is solely a function of race that as Mr. Thomas argues comes from a racialized world view. For me, that should be the last factor we consider and not the framework within which we approach the problem.
1. When you spend time in the U.S., you learn racial categories and you learn to believe them. Glenn calls this "being raced." Greg calls it racialization and details the steps involved.
2. These racial categories are deeply entrenched in the culture, social practices, everyday conversation, social science data, etc.
3. They're both willing to acknowledge the reality of these categories
Where Glenn and Greg disagree:
1. Glenn is describing what is. Greg is envisioning what could be. As Glenn says, his argument is deliberately not normative; it's not evaluating how good or bad race-ing/racialization is. Greg is making an evaluation. He's saying: this isn't working, and here is what better looks like.
Question for Glenn: if you were to take a normative stance and ask what better looks like, setting aside the odds of bringing it to fruition, what do you think of Greg's vision?
2. In referencing these racial categories, Glenn is comfortable sticking with the conventions, e.g. black and white. Greg says: no, we need more accurate ways of talking about this. Hence his terminology "racialized as black."
Question for Glenn: using terms like "racialized as black" is obviously a bit more effort and even awkward when few other people say it, but you've never been one to shy away from standing apart from the crowd. If you set aside this verbal awkwardness, doesn't this terminology acknowledge the social convention of race-ing as well as, if not better than, the word "black?" I realize you don't see the upside gains of this shift, but can you name any downsides?
Mr. Roscoe, thank you for your thoughts. Two clarifying questions for you:
1. One way to deracialize people is to use different language. Let's say the U.S. Census started capturing data on how people are identified/racialized by others. Let's then say the charts on wealth you provide above reflected these shifts: they had all the same data but in the legend said "racialized black" instead of "black" and "racialized white" instead of "white." Ditto for the charts on 4th grade reading scores you provide in your piece on affirmative action, and so on. I contend that this change of terminology does not diminish a confrontation with brutal facts. Would you agree?
2. Let's say we paid attention to all of the important charts you provide AND, per Greg Thomas, also look at charts showing progress over time, e.g. the massive increase in the black-identified middle class in the past several decades. No need to stop looking at the bad news when we look at some good news. What objection would you make to this?
Having seen this movie before, how can anyone think that racializing every part of society once more will work out better? Race will never go away so long as it can be exploited for personal profit or political gain, and perhaps both. We enter Black History Month with theme of resistance. Resistance against what exactly? Civil rights have largely been achieved. That doesn't mean society is perfect but if perfection is the standard, then everyone will be perpetually disappointed.
What avenues of life are blacks excluded from these days? There is no field or industry that actively shuts them out. On the contrary, one company after another falls all over itself to hire or promote blacks, often irrespective of their ability or the results. Universities have watered down standards to increasing minority admissions, which should be seen as patently insulting and a case of setting people up for failure, but instead its hailed as a step forward. Everything from math to campus honor codes to punctuality has been characterized as evidence of white supremacy, again insulting the large numbers of black people who find none of those things especially vexing.
In reading Clifton's numbers, it reflects the "bias narrative" he cites. People have been conditioned to believe that every negative outcome that a black person experiences is solely due to race. How convenient. What excuse do people in other racial groups have when things do not go their way? This is 2023, not 1923. Police brutality? If anything, police have been castrated to the detriment of the law-abiding minority residents of those neighborhoods and cities. When you ask someone how many civilians of all races are killed by law enforcement annually, the gap between the response and the facts is enormous. THAT is a narrative in play, creating an illusion of reality. I daresay this is where the argument to de-emphasize race comes from - when it become a catch-all, then it sounds more like an excuse than an explanation.
In any society populated by heterogeneous groups, some disparities are likely. They exist in homogeneous societies, too, but no one there has the luxury of substituting an immutable characteristic for agency. As Glenn has repeatedly said, American blacks are the wealthiest, most powerful, and freest people of African descent anywhere on the planet. Far from saying good-bye to race, we have plunged headlong in the opposite direction, treating it as the only thing, which is not helping anyone. We have the DIE industry, which actively participates in racial and gender discrimination, but of the sort that is deemed acceptable. No; that's not how it works. Such discrimination is wrong on its face; it does not become okay because of who the targets are.
I am not a dog that chases my tail. Nor will I chase yours. With what blood quantum does a "white" person become black? Or at what quantum does a black person become white? Silly questions? Not when "serious" members of the government call Clearance Thomas, "white." Not when the five black police officers in Memphis are seriously accused of racism.
Many abhor "racism" in a very narrow technical sense and would not countenance the "typing" of people by skin spectrometer readings. Yet, that is exactly how "we" deal with Indians. Whether you do or do NOT receive tribal profits from gaming is, for many tribes and the members, a strictly blood quantum measurement.
So what does this have to do with other PoC? Obvious. Liberals can't affirm membership in some form of government (tribal, in this case) is UNRELATED to blood quantum, when in fact, that is how "rights" and tribal membership are determined. If race and racial history are meaningful constructs to define tribal government membership rights and casino profits rights, then we must acknowledge that rights of citizenship ARE directly related to skin color and blood heritage. And, actually, from my point of view as a non-native, it is really funny that folks with "Indian names" and who also might have an "Indian" profile, are in fact denied tribal membership because they cannot document their blood heritage. No matter that these individuals "look" like "Indians." Oh, YES, and that is defined by a federal government that does NOT practice racism. ( More Biden lies. )
Equal Protection under the 14th Amendment? What a joke. Clearly, we're still in the early stage of trying to deal with "skin color" and history as the basis for superior rights and inferior rights. What, not a relevant issue today? Au contraire. The Lac du Flambeau Tribe has blocked road access to my friends home. While they can drive their vehicles to their home, the title to which they "own" totally, they cannot return from the pharmacy by car. Last night, it was about -30 in real temp. To allow a friend to pickup insulin, my friend was allowed to pass the blockaded road, but he was NOT allowed to return to his home. [ https://lakelandtimes.com/ ] Had he been a "tribal" member, well then, sure he would not have been affected.
Seriously, was Obama "black," or white? Same for others. 10%, 20%, 49% -- at what point are we defined as "white" or "black? ?
This showed up in the Chronicle of Higher Education but I don't know if either participant has seen it. https://www.brookings.edu/2023/01/23/college-enrollment-gaps-how-academic-preparation-influences-opportunity/ In short these researchers found that 62% of Black students do go to college in some form and higher SES and academic preparation might make Black students more likely to attend college than equivalent white students. This suggests that differing school districts may spend exactly the same amount of money but have different expectations about how much of it is just to avoid the worst possible outcomes for the students. It feeds into Greg's point that even if the strengths in the Black community are not enough to save the community by themselves now, if they are not treated as something to build on then the worst-off members of the community may not thrive.
It is easier for a human, or a pollster, or a chart maker to identify and compare white and black. Suppose your sort groups are "uses an economic system well" and "uses an economic system poorly?" Hard to picture, poll for, or display. Thus we tend to default to the obvious weaker explanations, and thus weaker categories for group sorting.
Suppose you have White average income is $40,000 and Black average income at $25,000. Very easy to follow your cognitive bias and blame "racism" for the "obvious differences." But add more data:
Rich whites make $50,000 and poor whites make $0. Rich Blacks make $50,000 and poor blacks make $0. If whites are 80-20 and blacks are 50-50, you get the same statistic above. With extra data the problem is more easy to visualize as a "Poor Income Level" problem. Any racism that exists is in the ratio of Poor Blacks to Poor Whites. You have two ways to fight then, change the income of poor people, or figure out how to address the ratios of just the poor people. But then all people making money studying just "Race" are out of work.
The continuance of Race as a category persists until we learn how to view others as belonging to multiple categories. Personality? Culture? Activities? Enthusiasms? Skills? Race does tend to disappear as a category as you get deeper into a skill set. We could study any trade group with mixed races and probably learn a great deal about how people relate to other people when they have something to talk about. Maybe we start with Football Fans at the Super Bowl next week?
This seems like this is the quintessential question of the chicken and the egg: are people racialized by society or do they racialize themselves? At some point it seems like both sides need to call a truce if we want to move past this.
Clifton, you said “My overall point is that we can't deracialize America as long as large racial disparities persist and the bias narrative holds sway “. Doesn’t the bias narrative require a racial identity? Without racial identity doesn’t the bias narrative lose its teeth? I mean, everyone with a victim mentality will find something to blame for their failures/shortcomings. The problem, from my experience, comes when everyone affirms the legitimacy of their victimhood, instead of saying “Man, that sucks. What can you do different/better next time?” (This is a general observation, not specific to race).
Very often we hear people say "I do not see color". Some on the cultural left laugh at them. No data to prove this, but I have the intuition that what many are saying, or trying to say, is that of course they see color but do not see race, yet lack the language to describe this liminal space, searching for something beyond what our long-lived constructions will conceptually and linguistically allow. I was introduced to this "raceless-ness" (but fulsome appreciation of ethnicity) through Crouch, and Murray, on whom I wrote a thesis. Murray sought to puncture the myth of race. He used the phrase "so-called black and white," he used "afro-american," he used "negro", perhaps as chord changes, signposts through which we may improvise our way, living with and confronting both "the cold hard facts of life," - race as currently understood - all the while searching for and perhaps building an Omni-American conception with its attendant language, with which this conversation surely consonant.
A couple of ideas. This is a fruitful exchange, but the problem I have with the statistics provided is that they are a kind of normalized and racialized narrative of political complaint that, by using race, always has the hidden time bomb of allowing some racial theory of causation. This is why using race defies the scientific method. Consider describing any chemical reaction without reference to temperature and pressure. You cannot. Not even something as simple as determining the boiling point of water will be consistent if you do not account for the pressure of the environment of the reaction in question.
Now take the question of the increase of nominally black real wealth indicated by the chart provided. What does the inclusion of white and hispanic figures have to do with the trajectory of the black line? Nothing. It simply provides a comparison by race. So long as people carry around racial theories, you can only be assured that wealth (or lack of wealth) will be attributed to race.
Why not make this comparison by blood type? It's something done quite commonly in Japan. The reason is simple. We in America have no deep social meaning associated with blood type as we do with race. Nobody is asserting that we should positively or negatively discriminate, select or monitor by blood type for social purposes. Instead we feel compelled to include race.
I say the reason for this is owing to the power that accrues to those with the most compelling racial theory. It's not that the race itself changes, but our idea of what we can do with the political power to discriminate, select or monitor by race. The underlying common understanding of race doesn't change. The black racial stereotype of being highly sexualized is never exchanged for the stereotype associated with another race. Those myths are fixed and they are perpetuated.
So individuals who have been racialized and accept that racial identity will always be at pains to figure out which way the racial politics will go. They are compelled to pay attention to 'The Bell Curve' or try to map their understanding of race to people in other countries, in other time periods. It is therefore no surprise that people who are 'Afrocentric' in one decade are 'Woke' in another. Round and round the rugged rock of race they run until they are ragged rascals, wondering where their ancient glory went and where their future glory lies.
Of course it lies in the power of policy to come up with patches and circuses until a final solution is presented.
American race is a fiat identity created to 'justify' the civil deprivations of slavery. Practically every way to devalue that identity is a step in the direction towards equality and undermines all future temptations and moral hazards of racial theories.
Three men trying to reach the same admirable end using different terminology. It seems to me that a life well led cannot put aside God’s intended differences.
Do you think if in 1964 we had committed ourselves to a colorblind society -- by law with respect to government action, by declaration with respect to institutions, we would have it today?
Certainly the differences between the races are entirely superficial, but these superficialities ride shotgun with culture and heritage, which are not superficial at all. Consequently it's not just outsiders who categorize members of other races on these grounds, it's also the self-identified members of the races themselves. The desire to self-partition in this way is probably linked to the primitive part of the human brain that wants to be on a "team." As long as that is part of human nature, I wouldn't bet on the future of deracialization.
Wow. Other countries, and governments, and researchers, dropped 'race' a long, long time ago. Robust data is collected under the category 'ethinicity', which encompasses a great deal more than white and black. America is so retro in some things. I shake my head in wonder. (Critical race theory? Studied that 30 years ago, but that's not what it was branded in sociology circles back then.)
It seems like Greg is promoting a fake-it-til-you-make-it campaign. We all walk around with highly evolved stereotyping machines in our heads. We all see race. On average we clearly interact far more with racial in-groups than out-groups. I suppose we could all try to overcome these realities with a disciplined and very mindful change in the way we speak about race, but that seems extraordinarily unlikely to achieve success. Fighting thousands of years of human nature is quite a task. It seems the more likely path will be that we intermix so much that our brain becomes less and less reliant on racial stereotyping because its just no longer all that useful. That will take patience though. Not our strong suit.
As long as we are talking about overcoming human nature I would think openness and forgiveness would be the quickest solution. Let's all be totally honest about the stereotypes that we carry around. Air them out and discuss. I bet we could get rid of half of them with a kind of society wide cognitive behavioral therapy session. Have all of our unfounded stereotypes dissected and challenged. This is the approach Daryl Davis takes and it has lead to dozens of KKK members seeing the light. So imagine what it would do for good people who just don’t have a lot of exposure to other races. The current strategy for well-meaning people who carry around racial stereotypes is to smile and pretend they don’t have them. Racial awkwardness is a big impediment to more integration. Awkwardness is often the result of not knowing what you are supposed to say and worrying what you are thinking will offend.
This is a dream of course. This kind of honesty might lead to a lot of fist fights.
Disparate outcomes measured by race imply that their cause is the inability of the individual to achieve because of their race. Once within that paradigm we are left with whether the cause is internal or external to that individual. Is it their adoption of some societal induced reduced expectation or an undefined external systemic racist structure or some other internal or external racial factor. Regardless of the outcome of the discussion, we are stuck within the framework of race. We are unable to offer a solution that doesn’t involve race which brings with it all the baggage of the racial “victim”.
It seems (at least to me) that if we truly want to solve problems then we need to deracialize the way we think about the issues we are trying to address. If we ignore race and gather data differently then we can deracialize both the problem and the solution. What percentage of convicted felons come from homes living in poverty, what percentage of those felons were raised in urban environments, what percentage of those felons came from single mother households, what percentage of those felons didn’t graduate high school, etc., etc. If we are addressing a societal issue, why would we ever care if the racial percentages of the resulting population differ from their make-up in the overall population. It is our societal problem, not a racial problem, that we are attempting to address.
Perhaps my ignorance is showing and while we can attribute 95% of a particular issue (high school dropout rates, incarceration rates, unemployment rates, etc.) to cross racial factors, there remains a racial disparity that is solely a function of race that as Mr. Thomas argues comes from a racialized world view. For me, that should be the last factor we consider and not the framework within which we approach the problem.
Where Glenn and Greg appear to agree:
1. When you spend time in the U.S., you learn racial categories and you learn to believe them. Glenn calls this "being raced." Greg calls it racialization and details the steps involved.
2. These racial categories are deeply entrenched in the culture, social practices, everyday conversation, social science data, etc.
3. They're both willing to acknowledge the reality of these categories
Where Glenn and Greg disagree:
1. Glenn is describing what is. Greg is envisioning what could be. As Glenn says, his argument is deliberately not normative; it's not evaluating how good or bad race-ing/racialization is. Greg is making an evaluation. He's saying: this isn't working, and here is what better looks like.
Question for Glenn: if you were to take a normative stance and ask what better looks like, setting aside the odds of bringing it to fruition, what do you think of Greg's vision?
2. In referencing these racial categories, Glenn is comfortable sticking with the conventions, e.g. black and white. Greg says: no, we need more accurate ways of talking about this. Hence his terminology "racialized as black."
Question for Glenn: using terms like "racialized as black" is obviously a bit more effort and even awkward when few other people say it, but you've never been one to shy away from standing apart from the crowd. If you set aside this verbal awkwardness, doesn't this terminology acknowledge the social convention of race-ing as well as, if not better than, the word "black?" I realize you don't see the upside gains of this shift, but can you name any downsides?
Mr. Roscoe, thank you for your thoughts. Two clarifying questions for you:
1. One way to deracialize people is to use different language. Let's say the U.S. Census started capturing data on how people are identified/racialized by others. Let's then say the charts on wealth you provide above reflected these shifts: they had all the same data but in the legend said "racialized black" instead of "black" and "racialized white" instead of "white." Ditto for the charts on 4th grade reading scores you provide in your piece on affirmative action, and so on. I contend that this change of terminology does not diminish a confrontation with brutal facts. Would you agree?
2. Let's say we paid attention to all of the important charts you provide AND, per Greg Thomas, also look at charts showing progress over time, e.g. the massive increase in the black-identified middle class in the past several decades. No need to stop looking at the bad news when we look at some good news. What objection would you make to this?
Thanks for your thoughts.
Having seen this movie before, how can anyone think that racializing every part of society once more will work out better? Race will never go away so long as it can be exploited for personal profit or political gain, and perhaps both. We enter Black History Month with theme of resistance. Resistance against what exactly? Civil rights have largely been achieved. That doesn't mean society is perfect but if perfection is the standard, then everyone will be perpetually disappointed.
What avenues of life are blacks excluded from these days? There is no field or industry that actively shuts them out. On the contrary, one company after another falls all over itself to hire or promote blacks, often irrespective of their ability or the results. Universities have watered down standards to increasing minority admissions, which should be seen as patently insulting and a case of setting people up for failure, but instead its hailed as a step forward. Everything from math to campus honor codes to punctuality has been characterized as evidence of white supremacy, again insulting the large numbers of black people who find none of those things especially vexing.
In reading Clifton's numbers, it reflects the "bias narrative" he cites. People have been conditioned to believe that every negative outcome that a black person experiences is solely due to race. How convenient. What excuse do people in other racial groups have when things do not go their way? This is 2023, not 1923. Police brutality? If anything, police have been castrated to the detriment of the law-abiding minority residents of those neighborhoods and cities. When you ask someone how many civilians of all races are killed by law enforcement annually, the gap between the response and the facts is enormous. THAT is a narrative in play, creating an illusion of reality. I daresay this is where the argument to de-emphasize race comes from - when it become a catch-all, then it sounds more like an excuse than an explanation.
In any society populated by heterogeneous groups, some disparities are likely. They exist in homogeneous societies, too, but no one there has the luxury of substituting an immutable characteristic for agency. As Glenn has repeatedly said, American blacks are the wealthiest, most powerful, and freest people of African descent anywhere on the planet. Far from saying good-bye to race, we have plunged headlong in the opposite direction, treating it as the only thing, which is not helping anyone. We have the DIE industry, which actively participates in racial and gender discrimination, but of the sort that is deemed acceptable. No; that's not how it works. Such discrimination is wrong on its face; it does not become okay because of who the targets are.
I am not a dog that chases my tail. Nor will I chase yours. With what blood quantum does a "white" person become black? Or at what quantum does a black person become white? Silly questions? Not when "serious" members of the government call Clearance Thomas, "white." Not when the five black police officers in Memphis are seriously accused of racism.
Many abhor "racism" in a very narrow technical sense and would not countenance the "typing" of people by skin spectrometer readings. Yet, that is exactly how "we" deal with Indians. Whether you do or do NOT receive tribal profits from gaming is, for many tribes and the members, a strictly blood quantum measurement.
So what does this have to do with other PoC? Obvious. Liberals can't affirm membership in some form of government (tribal, in this case) is UNRELATED to blood quantum, when in fact, that is how "rights" and tribal membership are determined. If race and racial history are meaningful constructs to define tribal government membership rights and casino profits rights, then we must acknowledge that rights of citizenship ARE directly related to skin color and blood heritage. And, actually, from my point of view as a non-native, it is really funny that folks with "Indian names" and who also might have an "Indian" profile, are in fact denied tribal membership because they cannot document their blood heritage. No matter that these individuals "look" like "Indians." Oh, YES, and that is defined by a federal government that does NOT practice racism. ( More Biden lies. )
Equal Protection under the 14th Amendment? What a joke. Clearly, we're still in the early stage of trying to deal with "skin color" and history as the basis for superior rights and inferior rights. What, not a relevant issue today? Au contraire. The Lac du Flambeau Tribe has blocked road access to my friends home. While they can drive their vehicles to their home, the title to which they "own" totally, they cannot return from the pharmacy by car. Last night, it was about -30 in real temp. To allow a friend to pickup insulin, my friend was allowed to pass the blockaded road, but he was NOT allowed to return to his home. [ https://lakelandtimes.com/ ] Had he been a "tribal" member, well then, sure he would not have been affected.
Seriously, was Obama "black," or white? Same for others. 10%, 20%, 49% -- at what point are we defined as "white" or "black? ?
This showed up in the Chronicle of Higher Education but I don't know if either participant has seen it. https://www.brookings.edu/2023/01/23/college-enrollment-gaps-how-academic-preparation-influences-opportunity/ In short these researchers found that 62% of Black students do go to college in some form and higher SES and academic preparation might make Black students more likely to attend college than equivalent white students. This suggests that differing school districts may spend exactly the same amount of money but have different expectations about how much of it is just to avoid the worst possible outcomes for the students. It feeds into Greg's point that even if the strengths in the Black community are not enough to save the community by themselves now, if they are not treated as something to build on then the worst-off members of the community may not thrive.
It is easier for a human, or a pollster, or a chart maker to identify and compare white and black. Suppose your sort groups are "uses an economic system well" and "uses an economic system poorly?" Hard to picture, poll for, or display. Thus we tend to default to the obvious weaker explanations, and thus weaker categories for group sorting.
Suppose you have White average income is $40,000 and Black average income at $25,000. Very easy to follow your cognitive bias and blame "racism" for the "obvious differences." But add more data:
Rich whites make $50,000 and poor whites make $0. Rich Blacks make $50,000 and poor blacks make $0. If whites are 80-20 and blacks are 50-50, you get the same statistic above. With extra data the problem is more easy to visualize as a "Poor Income Level" problem. Any racism that exists is in the ratio of Poor Blacks to Poor Whites. You have two ways to fight then, change the income of poor people, or figure out how to address the ratios of just the poor people. But then all people making money studying just "Race" are out of work.
The continuance of Race as a category persists until we learn how to view others as belonging to multiple categories. Personality? Culture? Activities? Enthusiasms? Skills? Race does tend to disappear as a category as you get deeper into a skill set. We could study any trade group with mixed races and probably learn a great deal about how people relate to other people when they have something to talk about. Maybe we start with Football Fans at the Super Bowl next week?
“Hispanics?”
I though Mexicans identify as Mexican, Chileans as Chilean, and Spaniards as citizens of Spain.
This seems like this is the quintessential question of the chicken and the egg: are people racialized by society or do they racialize themselves? At some point it seems like both sides need to call a truce if we want to move past this.
Clifton, you said “My overall point is that we can't deracialize America as long as large racial disparities persist and the bias narrative holds sway “. Doesn’t the bias narrative require a racial identity? Without racial identity doesn’t the bias narrative lose its teeth? I mean, everyone with a victim mentality will find something to blame for their failures/shortcomings. The problem, from my experience, comes when everyone affirms the legitimacy of their victimhood, instead of saying “Man, that sucks. What can you do different/better next time?” (This is a general observation, not specific to race).
Very often we hear people say "I do not see color". Some on the cultural left laugh at them. No data to prove this, but I have the intuition that what many are saying, or trying to say, is that of course they see color but do not see race, yet lack the language to describe this liminal space, searching for something beyond what our long-lived constructions will conceptually and linguistically allow. I was introduced to this "raceless-ness" (but fulsome appreciation of ethnicity) through Crouch, and Murray, on whom I wrote a thesis. Murray sought to puncture the myth of race. He used the phrase "so-called black and white," he used "afro-american," he used "negro", perhaps as chord changes, signposts through which we may improvise our way, living with and confronting both "the cold hard facts of life," - race as currently understood - all the while searching for and perhaps building an Omni-American conception with its attendant language, with which this conversation surely consonant.
A couple of ideas. This is a fruitful exchange, but the problem I have with the statistics provided is that they are a kind of normalized and racialized narrative of political complaint that, by using race, always has the hidden time bomb of allowing some racial theory of causation. This is why using race defies the scientific method. Consider describing any chemical reaction without reference to temperature and pressure. You cannot. Not even something as simple as determining the boiling point of water will be consistent if you do not account for the pressure of the environment of the reaction in question.
Now take the question of the increase of nominally black real wealth indicated by the chart provided. What does the inclusion of white and hispanic figures have to do with the trajectory of the black line? Nothing. It simply provides a comparison by race. So long as people carry around racial theories, you can only be assured that wealth (or lack of wealth) will be attributed to race.
Why not make this comparison by blood type? It's something done quite commonly in Japan. The reason is simple. We in America have no deep social meaning associated with blood type as we do with race. Nobody is asserting that we should positively or negatively discriminate, select or monitor by blood type for social purposes. Instead we feel compelled to include race.
I say the reason for this is owing to the power that accrues to those with the most compelling racial theory. It's not that the race itself changes, but our idea of what we can do with the political power to discriminate, select or monitor by race. The underlying common understanding of race doesn't change. The black racial stereotype of being highly sexualized is never exchanged for the stereotype associated with another race. Those myths are fixed and they are perpetuated.
So individuals who have been racialized and accept that racial identity will always be at pains to figure out which way the racial politics will go. They are compelled to pay attention to 'The Bell Curve' or try to map their understanding of race to people in other countries, in other time periods. It is therefore no surprise that people who are 'Afrocentric' in one decade are 'Woke' in another. Round and round the rugged rock of race they run until they are ragged rascals, wondering where their ancient glory went and where their future glory lies.
Of course it lies in the power of policy to come up with patches and circuses until a final solution is presented.
American race is a fiat identity created to 'justify' the civil deprivations of slavery. Practically every way to devalue that identity is a step in the direction towards equality and undermines all future temptations and moral hazards of racial theories.
Three men trying to reach the same admirable end using different terminology. It seems to me that a life well led cannot put aside God’s intended differences.
Do you think if in 1964 we had committed ourselves to a colorblind society -- by law with respect to government action, by declaration with respect to institutions, we would have it today?
Certainly the differences between the races are entirely superficial, but these superficialities ride shotgun with culture and heritage, which are not superficial at all. Consequently it's not just outsiders who categorize members of other races on these grounds, it's also the self-identified members of the races themselves. The desire to self-partition in this way is probably linked to the primitive part of the human brain that wants to be on a "team." As long as that is part of human nature, I wouldn't bet on the future of deracialization.