The thing is, for the Elect, any disparity between races is racism. In 2016, London Airport was shut down by a BLM protest because global warming is racist. The context being that European countries contribute more to global warming than African countries, but that African countries suffer more from the effects. By the standard definition of racism, that is... not. But if you stretch the definition of racism to be something that creates any kind of disparate impact between people of different races AND something only attributable to white people (power + prejudice, reserving the less impactful term "prejudiced" for PoC), well then it's easy to take advantage of the power of the word "racist" without having to prove any kind of malice. As an aside, this is why I think this topic *absolutely* falls into Professor McWhorter's wheelhouse. The subversion of language and loading of words has been a key method of the social movement. It's a linguistic blitzkreig, at least at the common level. I can't comment on the academic level, I work in a strip club, we're about as far from ivory tower as it gets. But you introduce a phrase or a redefinition of a word, with the implication that it's an important academic clarification and if you don't get that, well, we won't call you "stupid" exactly, but surely you can see how necessary this is for the fight for equality. You do want equality, right? And then, before there's time for people to say "wait, this doesn't actually make sense..." you use that as the basis for the next phrase. Who, besides Professor McWhorter, is going back to examine the worth of the idea of being born with a paucity of melanin as culpability for all the ills of society? It's been accepted, we've moved on, and if you're questioning something that all of society has accepted, well, there must be something rather backwards about you.
So it matters not a whit whether what the motivation was or who was behind the disparity in sentencing. Motivation is not part of racism to the Elect, except that the term racist still implies intent to the rest of the country (and if you really press them on the issue, they'll just tell you that it's subconscious, a manifestation of every white person's inherent racism). And if it was supported by, or even largely driven by black people? Well they were the victims of a white power structure that caused them to internalize self-hatred. Blameless dupes of diabolical machinations by white America into sabotaging their own emergence on the national stage! Which brings me to the part of the subject that is Professor Loury's forte, the economic aspect. I am not an economist, so perhaps my views are hopelessly naive and simplistic, but I have thought for a while that the primary (not only, but certainly primary) issue is not systemic/structural racism in America, but the fact that economic mobility in general is awful in the US. If you're born poor, for a multitude of reasons, you're almost certain to die poor, or, at best, middle class. Couple that with the fact that 50 or 60 years ago there were massive roadblocks to black business ownership, and you're looking at perhaps 2 generations where economic growth was plausible. Black people aren't victims of some massive conspiracy (at least, not at this point) to keep them down and they're not incapable of being successful businesspeople, but the slow moving nature of generational wealth has kept black people from achieving success as a demographic. It becomes an issue of scope - as a whole black people in the US are worse off than white people, as a whole, but at any given level of economic success, the differences are far more minor. Certainly less salient than the problems accompanying poverty itself.
I think that belief is what makes me love Professor McWhorter's 3 points. When drugs stop being the best method to generate wealth for the poor, you eliminate much of the reason
(still have theft and prostitution, but it will shift a lot of people out of crime) for antagonistic interactions between police and the poor - of any skin tone. I think that relationship is a feedback loop. Poor black people are taught to expect police to be out to get them. "The Talk" sets up an expectation that is often self-fulfilling. In all honesty, you see much of the same antagonistic attitudes out of young urban white and hispanic people as well, with generally similar results in LEO interactions, but that doesn't represent as large a portion of those populations and certainly isn't pushed in the media. I have two major contentions with the "free college for all" idea. One is that it's unecessary - a PhD doesn't make a trucker more efficient at his job. Two is that the actual consequence would be exactly the opposite of what the proponents claim to want. It has no effect on the wealthy - they can go to any school they want at any time. For the middle class, it's a boon. But for the poor? For people working 3 part time jobs to keep a roof over their head and food in their bellies? Zero tuition, even no-cost books, doesn't remove the need for rent and sustenance. So what happens when the proportion of the workforce that has a degree goes up? Well, the requirement for degrees goes up! If you have 10 candidates and 8 have degrees, who is hiring one of the 2 without? Which means those people who are already behind the 8 ball in terms of potential for success just get buried deeper in the corner, and that means, like it or not, disproportionately black people. So the real effect of such legislation is just a widening of the wealth gap and a greater disparity between white and black demographics. Finally, effective communication is a basic that has to be met before effective teaching can happen. Slightly off-point but I think we need to invest more in teachers and K-12 education and (unpopular opinion) move money away from special needs and alt-school students and reallocate it to gifted programs. Rising tide lifts all ships and it takes more resources to turn these disadvantaged students into productive citizens than it does to turn bright students into the next Curie or Salk who can make improvements that benefit all of society, including those who are less capable.
If you're going to discuss solutions, maybe take a minute to separate out the different 'problems' you're addressing and how they interrelate - you tend to move between them fluidly.
First, you've identified a broken conversation, full of irrational groupthink and cowardice that demeans everyone involved. This conversation is a performative pandering bluff, does very little to solve any problems, does much to occlude their sources, and may lead to backlash white identitarian politics in the long run. This isn't the main problem, it just makes solving it very difficult.
Second, you've identified the human cost of persistent racial inequalities, the levels of violence, the enduring wealth/achievement gaps, the tragedy of mass incarceration, the loss to society of people not achieving their greatest human potential. This is what many of those concerned with structural racism are concerned with - the human cost persists, even if, as you say, things are better than ever with respect to racism in particular.
Third, you've identified the spiritual crime committed when individuals of color are told that any opportunities in their lives will come about only after white people's personal journeys to become less racist, putting white guilt, fragility, and ultimately redemption at the center of the narrative. White people become the villains and heroes of this breathtakingly narcissistic story, taking all the roles, leaving other groups robbed of personal agency, hope, and any sense their choices matter. This is a bleak, hopeless picture of inescapable caste with no room for the individual; you've rightly called it a spiritual dead end.
Separating these problems separately - intellectual, social, and spiritual - may delineate some concrete differences in your thinking with respect to first solutions. There could be different perspectives regarding the sequence in which these problems must be tackled. You could also imagine one of these being solved without the other two, perhaps even at the expense of the other two. Many of the people you're arguing against would accept solving the second problem at the expense of the first and third. Why John feels sad and Glenn feels angry with regard to 'Omar's' choices is worth investigating. It may be a question of experience, it may be a question of which of these problems you regard as primary to address, it may offer a clue into future departures of opinion with respect to remedy.
It's not necessary to be this fine tuned when discussing problems, but I think the discussion of solutions would benefit from a bit more structure.
That law was passed in 1986, I think. People forget what was going on in the world back then. For one thing, people were shocked by Len Bias's death. If it was a racist law, it only became that way retroactively and as an unintended consequence. It apparently passed by voice vote. I do not know if the Black Congressional Caucus opposed it or not. It would be interesting to know.
Wasn’t the sentence disparity a federal issue? Weren’t the overwhelming majority of drug distribution cases handled by state jurisdictions (without the same disparity)? Wasn’t Meth predominantly associated with white communities (at least in 90s) and didn't they have sentences on par with crack? I can tell you anecdotally that as a cop in the 90s, we didn’t care whether it was powder or crack…we were happy to arrest the dealer. Later, as a prosecutor, I was happy to make the same sentencing case regardless of race but prior convictions played a role as did the violence or guns associated with the offense. Finally, we weren’t excited about arresting or charging strictly users. We would push them to treatment. Crack dealers were dealing poison. Anyone who saw what a crack addiction did to a person, could not argue honestly that it as a victimless crime. Meth as well. Point being, it was worse than most audience members could know and it needed urgent attention. I do remember arguing however that, rather than long sentences, we needed certain and swift accountability with a mandatory term of years. Long enough to break their routine and criminal relationships but not so long they acclimated to prison and it lost its deterrent effect. I theorized 2 years based on conversations with inmates.
I would argue that for the small percentage of users that actually have an addiction problem, they should be treated medically, not criminally.
Side note, there's some decent research out there showing that addiction in large part depends on what else is going on in your life. If you've got nothing, the chance of bad addiction is WAY higher.
For example, many millions of people get a Vicodin prescription each year. But only a small, small percentage go on to be addicts. And there's a real strong correlation there between what happening in the rest of your life.
Is the drug (whichever drug) just a way to party on the weekends, or treat some pain, or is it to escape from life altogether?
I’ve only known a handful of recreational crack users. I’ve met hundreds who would (and did) sell their family car, pets, heirlooms, and even their own kids for a $50 piece of crack. They definitely need medical intervention, psyche intervention, and God. If the only offense was possession of crack…easy day. Drug court for them and services. But too often the possession charge was the least of their offenses as they were doing some heinous crimes to underwrite their next fix.
I think this is just a case of Congress and the federal bureaucracy making laws based on inadequate information and without considering unintended consequences.
In my view it's hard to make a reasonable case that this was driven by overt racism.
The thing is, for the Elect, any disparity between races is racism. In 2016, London Airport was shut down by a BLM protest because global warming is racist. The context being that European countries contribute more to global warming than African countries, but that African countries suffer more from the effects. By the standard definition of racism, that is... not. But if you stretch the definition of racism to be something that creates any kind of disparate impact between people of different races AND something only attributable to white people (power + prejudice, reserving the less impactful term "prejudiced" for PoC), well then it's easy to take advantage of the power of the word "racist" without having to prove any kind of malice. As an aside, this is why I think this topic *absolutely* falls into Professor McWhorter's wheelhouse. The subversion of language and loading of words has been a key method of the social movement. It's a linguistic blitzkreig, at least at the common level. I can't comment on the academic level, I work in a strip club, we're about as far from ivory tower as it gets. But you introduce a phrase or a redefinition of a word, with the implication that it's an important academic clarification and if you don't get that, well, we won't call you "stupid" exactly, but surely you can see how necessary this is for the fight for equality. You do want equality, right? And then, before there's time for people to say "wait, this doesn't actually make sense..." you use that as the basis for the next phrase. Who, besides Professor McWhorter, is going back to examine the worth of the idea of being born with a paucity of melanin as culpability for all the ills of society? It's been accepted, we've moved on, and if you're questioning something that all of society has accepted, well, there must be something rather backwards about you.
So it matters not a whit whether what the motivation was or who was behind the disparity in sentencing. Motivation is not part of racism to the Elect, except that the term racist still implies intent to the rest of the country (and if you really press them on the issue, they'll just tell you that it's subconscious, a manifestation of every white person's inherent racism). And if it was supported by, or even largely driven by black people? Well they were the victims of a white power structure that caused them to internalize self-hatred. Blameless dupes of diabolical machinations by white America into sabotaging their own emergence on the national stage! Which brings me to the part of the subject that is Professor Loury's forte, the economic aspect. I am not an economist, so perhaps my views are hopelessly naive and simplistic, but I have thought for a while that the primary (not only, but certainly primary) issue is not systemic/structural racism in America, but the fact that economic mobility in general is awful in the US. If you're born poor, for a multitude of reasons, you're almost certain to die poor, or, at best, middle class. Couple that with the fact that 50 or 60 years ago there were massive roadblocks to black business ownership, and you're looking at perhaps 2 generations where economic growth was plausible. Black people aren't victims of some massive conspiracy (at least, not at this point) to keep them down and they're not incapable of being successful businesspeople, but the slow moving nature of generational wealth has kept black people from achieving success as a demographic. It becomes an issue of scope - as a whole black people in the US are worse off than white people, as a whole, but at any given level of economic success, the differences are far more minor. Certainly less salient than the problems accompanying poverty itself.
I think that belief is what makes me love Professor McWhorter's 3 points. When drugs stop being the best method to generate wealth for the poor, you eliminate much of the reason
(still have theft and prostitution, but it will shift a lot of people out of crime) for antagonistic interactions between police and the poor - of any skin tone. I think that relationship is a feedback loop. Poor black people are taught to expect police to be out to get them. "The Talk" sets up an expectation that is often self-fulfilling. In all honesty, you see much of the same antagonistic attitudes out of young urban white and hispanic people as well, with generally similar results in LEO interactions, but that doesn't represent as large a portion of those populations and certainly isn't pushed in the media. I have two major contentions with the "free college for all" idea. One is that it's unecessary - a PhD doesn't make a trucker more efficient at his job. Two is that the actual consequence would be exactly the opposite of what the proponents claim to want. It has no effect on the wealthy - they can go to any school they want at any time. For the middle class, it's a boon. But for the poor? For people working 3 part time jobs to keep a roof over their head and food in their bellies? Zero tuition, even no-cost books, doesn't remove the need for rent and sustenance. So what happens when the proportion of the workforce that has a degree goes up? Well, the requirement for degrees goes up! If you have 10 candidates and 8 have degrees, who is hiring one of the 2 without? Which means those people who are already behind the 8 ball in terms of potential for success just get buried deeper in the corner, and that means, like it or not, disproportionately black people. So the real effect of such legislation is just a widening of the wealth gap and a greater disparity between white and black demographics. Finally, effective communication is a basic that has to be met before effective teaching can happen. Slightly off-point but I think we need to invest more in teachers and K-12 education and (unpopular opinion) move money away from special needs and alt-school students and reallocate it to gifted programs. Rising tide lifts all ships and it takes more resources to turn these disadvantaged students into productive citizens than it does to turn bright students into the next Curie or Salk who can make improvements that benefit all of society, including those who are less capable.
Great conversation guys, thank you both.
If you're going to discuss solutions, maybe take a minute to separate out the different 'problems' you're addressing and how they interrelate - you tend to move between them fluidly.
First, you've identified a broken conversation, full of irrational groupthink and cowardice that demeans everyone involved. This conversation is a performative pandering bluff, does very little to solve any problems, does much to occlude their sources, and may lead to backlash white identitarian politics in the long run. This isn't the main problem, it just makes solving it very difficult.
Second, you've identified the human cost of persistent racial inequalities, the levels of violence, the enduring wealth/achievement gaps, the tragedy of mass incarceration, the loss to society of people not achieving their greatest human potential. This is what many of those concerned with structural racism are concerned with - the human cost persists, even if, as you say, things are better than ever with respect to racism in particular.
Third, you've identified the spiritual crime committed when individuals of color are told that any opportunities in their lives will come about only after white people's personal journeys to become less racist, putting white guilt, fragility, and ultimately redemption at the center of the narrative. White people become the villains and heroes of this breathtakingly narcissistic story, taking all the roles, leaving other groups robbed of personal agency, hope, and any sense their choices matter. This is a bleak, hopeless picture of inescapable caste with no room for the individual; you've rightly called it a spiritual dead end.
Separating these problems separately - intellectual, social, and spiritual - may delineate some concrete differences in your thinking with respect to first solutions. There could be different perspectives regarding the sequence in which these problems must be tackled. You could also imagine one of these being solved without the other two, perhaps even at the expense of the other two. Many of the people you're arguing against would accept solving the second problem at the expense of the first and third. Why John feels sad and Glenn feels angry with regard to 'Omar's' choices is worth investigating. It may be a question of experience, it may be a question of which of these problems you regard as primary to address, it may offer a clue into future departures of opinion with respect to remedy.
It's not necessary to be this fine tuned when discussing problems, but I think the discussion of solutions would benefit from a bit more structure.
That law was passed in 1986, I think. People forget what was going on in the world back then. For one thing, people were shocked by Len Bias's death. If it was a racist law, it only became that way retroactively and as an unintended consequence. It apparently passed by voice vote. I do not know if the Black Congressional Caucus opposed it or not. It would be interesting to know.
Fortner on The Glenn Show in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbW8AmguUlA
It's my understanding that members of the Congressional Black Caucus supported passage along with other black leaders: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0674743997/?tag=slatmaga-20
Here's a photo of Charlie Rangel applauding at the signing ceremony for the 1986 bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986#/media/File:President_Ronald_Reagan_signing_the_Anti_Drug_Abuse_Act_of_1986.jpg
Wasn’t the sentence disparity a federal issue? Weren’t the overwhelming majority of drug distribution cases handled by state jurisdictions (without the same disparity)? Wasn’t Meth predominantly associated with white communities (at least in 90s) and didn't they have sentences on par with crack? I can tell you anecdotally that as a cop in the 90s, we didn’t care whether it was powder or crack…we were happy to arrest the dealer. Later, as a prosecutor, I was happy to make the same sentencing case regardless of race but prior convictions played a role as did the violence or guns associated with the offense. Finally, we weren’t excited about arresting or charging strictly users. We would push them to treatment. Crack dealers were dealing poison. Anyone who saw what a crack addiction did to a person, could not argue honestly that it as a victimless crime. Meth as well. Point being, it was worse than most audience members could know and it needed urgent attention. I do remember arguing however that, rather than long sentences, we needed certain and swift accountability with a mandatory term of years. Long enough to break their routine and criminal relationships but not so long they acclimated to prison and it lost its deterrent effect. I theorized 2 years based on conversations with inmates.
I would argue that for the small percentage of users that actually have an addiction problem, they should be treated medically, not criminally.
Side note, there's some decent research out there showing that addiction in large part depends on what else is going on in your life. If you've got nothing, the chance of bad addiction is WAY higher.
For example, many millions of people get a Vicodin prescription each year. But only a small, small percentage go on to be addicts. And there's a real strong correlation there between what happening in the rest of your life.
Is the drug (whichever drug) just a way to party on the weekends, or treat some pain, or is it to escape from life altogether?
I’ve only known a handful of recreational crack users. I’ve met hundreds who would (and did) sell their family car, pets, heirlooms, and even their own kids for a $50 piece of crack. They definitely need medical intervention, psyche intervention, and God. If the only offense was possession of crack…easy day. Drug court for them and services. But too often the possession charge was the least of their offenses as they were doing some heinous crimes to underwrite their next fix.
I think this is just a case of Congress and the federal bureaucracy making laws based on inadequate information and without considering unintended consequences.
In my view it's hard to make a reasonable case that this was driven by overt racism.
Yes, that’s nice, but what do you think of mandatory crack sentencing guidelines from the 80’s?