Great essay. Re: Structural Racism- I am not claiming that racism or implicit bias don't exist-because both do- although the IAT is prone to wild errors and only really useful for population level data. However, neither racism or implicit bias are particular strong causes of disparate outcomes by group, for the simple reason that we have…
Great essay. Re: Structural Racism- I am not claiming that racism or implicit bias don't exist-because both do- although the IAT is prone to wild errors and only really useful for population level data. However, neither racism or implicit bias are particular strong causes of disparate outcomes by group, for the simple reason that we have empirical evidence of factors which are far more powerful and proven.
First, there's Raj Chetty's research on social mobility. It shows that levels of fathers in the community are the most important thing for upward social mobility. This is also important in the sense that fathers working collectively have a moderating influence on pubescent male peer groups. This in turn directly involves the quality of schools in community. It demonstrates why generally poorer and more deprived Catholic communities in Northern Ireland were able to first draw equal with and then significantly outperform Northern Irish Protestants- because their families were disintegrating at a slower rate. Now, the positions are reversed, and liberals are blaming Catholics better educational outcomes on their more affluent backgrounds, when it was the fathers all along which powered their rise.
Second. HR really isn't the Black person's friend. There first duty is to protect their company from being sued. There are several good studies out their which show that Black applicants are more likely to have their CVs rejected on the basis of name only. Ingroup preference is cited as the cause. I'm not entirely discounting the possibility. However, there is a far more obvious cause. Most professional managers have to be more disagreeable than most. The ability to routinely say no to subordinates is in the basic job description. And some professional managers are a lot more disagreeable than others. If a vacancy entails working for a boss who has a track record of leaving behind disgruntled employees, which is actually a lot more common than most would think, what's the betting that HR is going to prevent minority employees from working for a manager who, through his management style, is likely to incur a charge of racially motivated constructive dismissal? In addition, many roles in companies are business critical, even though they may not be particularly well-paid. If an HR departments knows that over half of new entrants will need to be fired, just how likely are they to refer someone from a minority background for the job?
The other problem is that discrimination in hiring tends to be higher in customer facing roles. Believe it or not there is actually an HBR article out there arguing that the authors white progressive friends aren't really racist, but they are forced to discriminate against minorities because their customers are racist. Sure, this is a little bit true. There is old evidence of studies conducted back in the nineties and noughties which shows that customer facing businesses suffer when they hire minority employees, but this is almost exclusively a phenomenon when restaurants or businesses serving predominantly white neighbourhoods have staff compositions where the percentage of minority employees is over half. Yes, it's racism- but of a kind far milder than most have been led to believe. If anything this should engender empathy for people who are more often than not in the minority in whichever workplace they chose. In any event, White progressive (and mostly female) customer service managers need to be corrected in their assumptions, lest their active and illegally racist discrimination continue.
This brings me onto the third cause of structural racism, and it really is tragic, because it's free choice. There is an economic study from the Netherlands which studied the economic progress and prosperity of three successive waves of inward migration. it's finding are as profound as they are disturbing. The study looks at native networks vs. co-ethnic networks. Unsurprisingly, it shows that migrants prefer co-ethnic networks over forming native networks. It's looking at migrant populations, but really what is being studied is ingroup, stemming from social integration theory. The study shows that once someone with high ingroup had their basic needs fulfilled, they will opt for working with a co-ethnic network at lower pay, rather than work in an environment which is primarily non-co-ethnic in composition, but is better paid, with better opportunities. The study even shows that often migrants will chose to become temporarily unemployed in the hopes of finding a job with their fellow migrants rather than look for employment outside their community. Obviously ingroup is a spectrum, and tertiary education as a rule exposes up to 50% of a given community to a world of opportunities, and opportunities to form networks which are not co-ethnic, but what about the kids who were left behind?
The study recommends several positive actions, and is worth a read purely on this basis, but the question remains should be really be forcing people to become homo economicus, when it's their free choice as to the types of employment they will consider, and with whom?
I didn’t say that racism or implicit bias didn’t exist. Simply that they only accounted for a statistically small percentage of economic disparities by group. Obviously this wasn’t always the case, and there are significant differences in wealth accrued due to past injustices.
But where the Left goes wrong is in imagining that wealth makes a difference to future outcomes. It doesn’t. Children’s future life outcomes are predicted by their parental incomes levels, not their parental wealth levels. And it’s not that some individuals born to wealth don’t gain advantages. They do. But those who gain access to opportunities through wealth are cancelled out by those who are ruined by it. Besides most family wealth cancels out within three generations, as for the most part the profligate waste their family estates. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Look, I’m not against the goal. I’m for it. But empirical knowledge-based approaches work- unfalsifiable theories don’t. One example is cognitive load theory. Filling a mind with knowledge, committed to long-term memory over time, is akin to kindling lighting a mighty fire. In London there are now schools serving Black communities in the second poorest borough in London, rife with knife crime, yet those kids outperform the best that the overly privileged mostly White sons and daughters at Eton have to offer, under exam conditions.
Yes, investments were made, but mostly modest ones- particularly focusing on teacher training, especially in classroom practice. An inspirational African headteacher might also have had something to do with it.
It should be noted that this is part of a broader trend. Here in the UK we’ve almost completely eliminated differences in educational outcomes by race, under exam conditions. This was primarily due to educational improvements in London.
There are still areas where we fail, however. An example would be in labour participation. Labour participation is 7% lower for Black British men. Research shows that this tends to be because of a lack of participation in higher value blue collar trades, including amongst those who drop out of university. This also highlights why Dr Raj Chetty’s research on social mobility in the US showed that fathers at the community level was the best predictor of upward social mobility. It seems that fathers in the community can act as an unofficial social safety net, especially for the roughly 50% of kids in any groups who don’t do well in school.
The West has been focusing on university as a means of equalising racial outcomes for 30 years. It helps some people, but not enough. In order to truly raise the living standards and life outcomes of poorer communities, much more attentions needs to be paid to vocational training and the male mentoring it brings. Male unemployment disrupts a rough balance of gender parity favouring hypergamy, which causes lasting community damage through a lack of stable family formation.
Sure, the GI Bill was atrocious, but what caused far more lasting social damage was the mother of labour shocks caused by deindustrialisation/neoliberalism.
It’s why most Western countries should be focusing on starter homes like this. Good for people. Good for the planet.
There is a long used joke that the demand for racism far exceeds its supply. It may seem a bit crass but there is an underlying truth to it. I have concluded that concepts such as misogyny, racism and homophobia are "political mythologies" that have been created artificially (after their natural occurrence became harder to find) and sustained to keep justifying the political demands of the prog/left.
The primary objective is to keep the demanding demographics in a continuing state of apparent oppression because they would simply have no further reason to keep voting for socially left parties if they were to gain the long-promised equality. Hence the teaching of a persecution complex through the school system.
The more functional the developed democracies became, the more left-progressivism has been driven to the valorisation of dysfunction and so bs narratives of oppression.
I know I'm on a fool's errand. I've made it one of my missions to craft an alternative hypothesis to structural racism, because the majority of people in the Anglosphere actual believe in the concept of structural racism. I think I've gathered enough empirical evidence to prove it- only to find that most people aren't interested in any alternatives to their preferred narratives. I occasionally win over the odd heterodox thinker or open-minded independent, but despite the commonality of political independence, open-mindedness when it comes to biases is another matter entirely.
I had heard the racism demand/supply joke. Shelby Steele calls it poetic truth- a narrative truth which is more persuasive than the actual truth. Just because most people have always been somewhat influenced by instrumental rationality, it doesn't mean that we should abandon epistemic rationality entirely, Shelby Steele's documentary on What Killed Michael Brown? is excellent, by the way- particularly good at tracking the history of how institutional Leftism sabotaged African America communities, with purported 'help'.
Most people don't realise that Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School stole their ideas from Herder. However, instead of allowing that two realms of knowledge exist- the objective scientific realm and the subjective cultural realm, they set out to pretend that there was no such thing as objective truth. I only know about Herder because he was one of three of Isaiah Berlin's favourite Counter Enlightenment philosophers.
I agree with your diagnosis on motives. I think what the Left failed to understand was the more aggressively they pushed the dogma the less persuasive it would become. It might have played well with with gullible white kids in tertiary education guilty about their genuine socioeconomic privilege, but not everyone else.
Plus, the intersectional alliance is a net negative in terms of social self-interest, a far more powerful motivator than economic self-interest, for anyone already fulfilling their basic needs. A Black man may not necessarily be more disadvantaged by being a man, than he would be by being Black in the intersectional world, but when it comes to social threats and being told what to think the story is completely different. He can be told he is racist by a Latina or an Asian woman. He can be an Islamophobe, if he's a committed Christian and has questions or criticisms. He can forced like Kevin Hart to make a grovelling apology to an overly privileged gay White kid if he makes a joke. If he's Dave Chappelle or Charlemagne he can be called a transphobe.
There are other ways it doesn't work. It robs itself of the empirical power to genuinely enact trade-offs. Most powerful of al, it doesn't work politically. The power of the 'They/Them' vs. 'For You' ad was not on the 'They/Them' side, which committed partisans care about. The power of the ad was decidedly in terms of Trump declaring himself 'For You'. That's the problem of reducing people to their arbitrary characteristics, their labels, it robs the voters of the ability to imagine that you might be acting in their individual or citizen interest. Of course, this is a rationally implausible fiction, but at an emotive level such undercurrents of thought have a very real power to persuade.
The other problem is that a given person might encounter racism five times a day, but most people drastically underestimate how many people they interact with. The average person will encounter and interact with (including gestural interaction) 50 to 100 people in 30 minutes of travel.
Now let’s look at instances which are commonly perceived as racism, but at best are structural racism.
Let’s take a common scenario. The act of signing in at a security desk. Everybody not scheduled to work in a building has to sign-in. It’s important for many reasons, but let’s take the most straightforward. Fire lists. It’s important to have an accurate accounting of who is a building at any given time, otherwise people die or lose their jobs.
This is a particular problem at universities, where lecturers for example, keep irregular schedules. It may seem racist when a security guard has to ask a Black professor to sign it but it is nothing of the sort. It saves lives. If a security guard doesn’t ask everyone not scheduled to be in the building to sign he will quickly be fired for gross misconduct.
If Elon Musk was visiting a Tesla factory in which he doesn’t regularly work, then he should sign in. If the security guard didn’t ask him to sign in he would probably fine him. I know this because I’ve asked CEOs to sign-in. I apologised. The CEO was emphatic that I should not apologise. I was not a security guard, simply responsible for maintaining fire lists and other safety provisions at a major manufacturing facility.
The world is full of these sorts of scenarios, where what is not often racism is perceived as racism. The other issue is a human problem. People are great at spotting risks but not great at evaluating the extent of the risk. It’s a human problem which exists in all circumstances dealing with outgroups. It’s not particular to any one group, but clearly when majoritarian demographics prevail it can be a much bigger problem for some than others.
The problem is that it’s not a problem which can be easily solved. All the research on ingroups shows that the only thing which can defeat it is the formation of new ingroups. The military is particularly good at this, but milder positive results can be achieved in working environments through teambuilding. Diversity training and raising race consciousness do not work- all the evidence points to the conclusion that these approaches make the problem worse, because they emphasise difference. And no I don’t argue for colour blindness, a better approach would be fair-minded rapport building. Humans are hardwired for fairness, not equity-orientated equality.
The problem will become less over the long-term as children’s playgroups and educational environments become more diverse. It will lead to the formation of broader ingroups.
The oppression narratives are in equal parts appeals to fear and self interest. Since humans are very prone to blaming others for their own misfortunes, it is an easy sell.
Great essay. Re: Structural Racism- I am not claiming that racism or implicit bias don't exist-because both do- although the IAT is prone to wild errors and only really useful for population level data. However, neither racism or implicit bias are particular strong causes of disparate outcomes by group, for the simple reason that we have empirical evidence of factors which are far more powerful and proven.
First, there's Raj Chetty's research on social mobility. It shows that levels of fathers in the community are the most important thing for upward social mobility. This is also important in the sense that fathers working collectively have a moderating influence on pubescent male peer groups. This in turn directly involves the quality of schools in community. It demonstrates why generally poorer and more deprived Catholic communities in Northern Ireland were able to first draw equal with and then significantly outperform Northern Irish Protestants- because their families were disintegrating at a slower rate. Now, the positions are reversed, and liberals are blaming Catholics better educational outcomes on their more affluent backgrounds, when it was the fathers all along which powered their rise.
Second. HR really isn't the Black person's friend. There first duty is to protect their company from being sued. There are several good studies out their which show that Black applicants are more likely to have their CVs rejected on the basis of name only. Ingroup preference is cited as the cause. I'm not entirely discounting the possibility. However, there is a far more obvious cause. Most professional managers have to be more disagreeable than most. The ability to routinely say no to subordinates is in the basic job description. And some professional managers are a lot more disagreeable than others. If a vacancy entails working for a boss who has a track record of leaving behind disgruntled employees, which is actually a lot more common than most would think, what's the betting that HR is going to prevent minority employees from working for a manager who, through his management style, is likely to incur a charge of racially motivated constructive dismissal? In addition, many roles in companies are business critical, even though they may not be particularly well-paid. If an HR departments knows that over half of new entrants will need to be fired, just how likely are they to refer someone from a minority background for the job?
The other problem is that discrimination in hiring tends to be higher in customer facing roles. Believe it or not there is actually an HBR article out there arguing that the authors white progressive friends aren't really racist, but they are forced to discriminate against minorities because their customers are racist. Sure, this is a little bit true. There is old evidence of studies conducted back in the nineties and noughties which shows that customer facing businesses suffer when they hire minority employees, but this is almost exclusively a phenomenon when restaurants or businesses serving predominantly white neighbourhoods have staff compositions where the percentage of minority employees is over half. Yes, it's racism- but of a kind far milder than most have been led to believe. If anything this should engender empathy for people who are more often than not in the minority in whichever workplace they chose. In any event, White progressive (and mostly female) customer service managers need to be corrected in their assumptions, lest their active and illegally racist discrimination continue.
This brings me onto the third cause of structural racism, and it really is tragic, because it's free choice. There is an economic study from the Netherlands which studied the economic progress and prosperity of three successive waves of inward migration. it's finding are as profound as they are disturbing. The study looks at native networks vs. co-ethnic networks. Unsurprisingly, it shows that migrants prefer co-ethnic networks over forming native networks. It's looking at migrant populations, but really what is being studied is ingroup, stemming from social integration theory. The study shows that once someone with high ingroup had their basic needs fulfilled, they will opt for working with a co-ethnic network at lower pay, rather than work in an environment which is primarily non-co-ethnic in composition, but is better paid, with better opportunities. The study even shows that often migrants will chose to become temporarily unemployed in the hopes of finding a job with their fellow migrants rather than look for employment outside their community. Obviously ingroup is a spectrum, and tertiary education as a rule exposes up to 50% of a given community to a world of opportunities, and opportunities to form networks which are not co-ethnic, but what about the kids who were left behind?
The study recommends several positive actions, and is worth a read purely on this basis, but the question remains should be really be forcing people to become homo economicus, when it's their free choice as to the types of employment they will consider, and with whom?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00168-019-00953-8#Tab4
I didn’t say that racism or implicit bias didn’t exist. Simply that they only accounted for a statistically small percentage of economic disparities by group. Obviously this wasn’t always the case, and there are significant differences in wealth accrued due to past injustices.
But where the Left goes wrong is in imagining that wealth makes a difference to future outcomes. It doesn’t. Children’s future life outcomes are predicted by their parental incomes levels, not their parental wealth levels. And it’s not that some individuals born to wealth don’t gain advantages. They do. But those who gain access to opportunities through wealth are cancelled out by those who are ruined by it. Besides most family wealth cancels out within three generations, as for the most part the profligate waste their family estates. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions.
Look, I’m not against the goal. I’m for it. But empirical knowledge-based approaches work- unfalsifiable theories don’t. One example is cognitive load theory. Filling a mind with knowledge, committed to long-term memory over time, is akin to kindling lighting a mighty fire. In London there are now schools serving Black communities in the second poorest borough in London, rife with knife crime, yet those kids outperform the best that the overly privileged mostly White sons and daughters at Eton have to offer, under exam conditions.
Yes, investments were made, but mostly modest ones- particularly focusing on teacher training, especially in classroom practice. An inspirational African headteacher might also have had something to do with it.
It should be noted that this is part of a broader trend. Here in the UK we’ve almost completely eliminated differences in educational outcomes by race, under exam conditions. This was primarily due to educational improvements in London.
There are still areas where we fail, however. An example would be in labour participation. Labour participation is 7% lower for Black British men. Research shows that this tends to be because of a lack of participation in higher value blue collar trades, including amongst those who drop out of university. This also highlights why Dr Raj Chetty’s research on social mobility in the US showed that fathers at the community level was the best predictor of upward social mobility. It seems that fathers in the community can act as an unofficial social safety net, especially for the roughly 50% of kids in any groups who don’t do well in school.
The West has been focusing on university as a means of equalising racial outcomes for 30 years. It helps some people, but not enough. In order to truly raise the living standards and life outcomes of poorer communities, much more attentions needs to be paid to vocational training and the male mentoring it brings. Male unemployment disrupts a rough balance of gender parity favouring hypergamy, which causes lasting community damage through a lack of stable family formation.
Sure, the GI Bill was atrocious, but what caused far more lasting social damage was the mother of labour shocks caused by deindustrialisation/neoliberalism.
It’s why most Western countries should be focusing on starter homes like this. Good for people. Good for the planet.
https://builtoffsite.com.au/emag/issue-05/sweden-became-home-prefab/
Can you be more specific? I don't understand the criticism. What is the truth as you see it?
There is a long used joke that the demand for racism far exceeds its supply. It may seem a bit crass but there is an underlying truth to it. I have concluded that concepts such as misogyny, racism and homophobia are "political mythologies" that have been created artificially (after their natural occurrence became harder to find) and sustained to keep justifying the political demands of the prog/left.
The primary objective is to keep the demanding demographics in a continuing state of apparent oppression because they would simply have no further reason to keep voting for socially left parties if they were to gain the long-promised equality. Hence the teaching of a persecution complex through the school system.
The more functional the developed democracies became, the more left-progressivism has been driven to the valorisation of dysfunction and so bs narratives of oppression.
https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/tialpasj
I know I'm on a fool's errand. I've made it one of my missions to craft an alternative hypothesis to structural racism, because the majority of people in the Anglosphere actual believe in the concept of structural racism. I think I've gathered enough empirical evidence to prove it- only to find that most people aren't interested in any alternatives to their preferred narratives. I occasionally win over the odd heterodox thinker or open-minded independent, but despite the commonality of political independence, open-mindedness when it comes to biases is another matter entirely.
I had heard the racism demand/supply joke. Shelby Steele calls it poetic truth- a narrative truth which is more persuasive than the actual truth. Just because most people have always been somewhat influenced by instrumental rationality, it doesn't mean that we should abandon epistemic rationality entirely, Shelby Steele's documentary on What Killed Michael Brown? is excellent, by the way- particularly good at tracking the history of how institutional Leftism sabotaged African America communities, with purported 'help'.
Most people don't realise that Herbert Marcuse and the Frankfurt School stole their ideas from Herder. However, instead of allowing that two realms of knowledge exist- the objective scientific realm and the subjective cultural realm, they set out to pretend that there was no such thing as objective truth. I only know about Herder because he was one of three of Isaiah Berlin's favourite Counter Enlightenment philosophers.
I agree with your diagnosis on motives. I think what the Left failed to understand was the more aggressively they pushed the dogma the less persuasive it would become. It might have played well with with gullible white kids in tertiary education guilty about their genuine socioeconomic privilege, but not everyone else.
Plus, the intersectional alliance is a net negative in terms of social self-interest, a far more powerful motivator than economic self-interest, for anyone already fulfilling their basic needs. A Black man may not necessarily be more disadvantaged by being a man, than he would be by being Black in the intersectional world, but when it comes to social threats and being told what to think the story is completely different. He can be told he is racist by a Latina or an Asian woman. He can be an Islamophobe, if he's a committed Christian and has questions or criticisms. He can forced like Kevin Hart to make a grovelling apology to an overly privileged gay White kid if he makes a joke. If he's Dave Chappelle or Charlemagne he can be called a transphobe.
There are other ways it doesn't work. It robs itself of the empirical power to genuinely enact trade-offs. Most powerful of al, it doesn't work politically. The power of the 'They/Them' vs. 'For You' ad was not on the 'They/Them' side, which committed partisans care about. The power of the ad was decidedly in terms of Trump declaring himself 'For You'. That's the problem of reducing people to their arbitrary characteristics, their labels, it robs the voters of the ability to imagine that you might be acting in their individual or citizen interest. Of course, this is a rationally implausible fiction, but at an emotive level such undercurrents of thought have a very real power to persuade.
The other problem is that a given person might encounter racism five times a day, but most people drastically underestimate how many people they interact with. The average person will encounter and interact with (including gestural interaction) 50 to 100 people in 30 minutes of travel.
Now let’s look at instances which are commonly perceived as racism, but at best are structural racism.
Let’s take a common scenario. The act of signing in at a security desk. Everybody not scheduled to work in a building has to sign-in. It’s important for many reasons, but let’s take the most straightforward. Fire lists. It’s important to have an accurate accounting of who is a building at any given time, otherwise people die or lose their jobs.
This is a particular problem at universities, where lecturers for example, keep irregular schedules. It may seem racist when a security guard has to ask a Black professor to sign it but it is nothing of the sort. It saves lives. If a security guard doesn’t ask everyone not scheduled to be in the building to sign he will quickly be fired for gross misconduct.
If Elon Musk was visiting a Tesla factory in which he doesn’t regularly work, then he should sign in. If the security guard didn’t ask him to sign in he would probably fine him. I know this because I’ve asked CEOs to sign-in. I apologised. The CEO was emphatic that I should not apologise. I was not a security guard, simply responsible for maintaining fire lists and other safety provisions at a major manufacturing facility.
The world is full of these sorts of scenarios, where what is not often racism is perceived as racism. The other issue is a human problem. People are great at spotting risks but not great at evaluating the extent of the risk. It’s a human problem which exists in all circumstances dealing with outgroups. It’s not particular to any one group, but clearly when majoritarian demographics prevail it can be a much bigger problem for some than others.
The problem is that it’s not a problem which can be easily solved. All the research on ingroups shows that the only thing which can defeat it is the formation of new ingroups. The military is particularly good at this, but milder positive results can be achieved in working environments through teambuilding. Diversity training and raising race consciousness do not work- all the evidence points to the conclusion that these approaches make the problem worse, because they emphasise difference. And no I don’t argue for colour blindness, a better approach would be fair-minded rapport building. Humans are hardwired for fairness, not equity-orientated equality.
The problem will become less over the long-term as children’s playgroups and educational environments become more diverse. It will lead to the formation of broader ingroups.
The oppression narratives are in equal parts appeals to fear and self interest. Since humans are very prone to blaming others for their own misfortunes, it is an easy sell.