So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc.
But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the job you are hiring for are straight white men, because they are the only ones who had the opportunity to get the training, should we fix that at the hiring level?
The initial reaction is probably no, we should push that fix further down to make sure those people get the same chances as everyone else. But that will take decades. What do we do until then?
And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I mainly agree with the OP. While they don't come out and say it, most on the DEI frontlines execute on the idea that the fix to the fact that "those people have been discriminated against, well, forever" is not to do away with discrimination completely, but rather to discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way.
This strikes me as faulty thinking. Revenge-driven justice fails; two wrongs don't make a right. Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator.
Anyone who followed that "Activism as a Vocation" link here a few days ago can probably agree that the fix to the current cancel-culture chaos of academia isn't going to happen within academia. It's about mass media dollars. School administrators, like the rest of us, are just manipulated "useful idiots."
> Either you're against discrimination or you're only against discrimination against <protected class X>, which makes you a discriminator.
"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"
Moreover, I strongly suspect this kind of "reverse discrimination" (and general conditioning to identify racially) is driving a lot of right-wing radicalization. Even if you don't think "reverse racism" qualifies as "racism", surely you should be concerned if it is indeed driving more ole-fashioned, anti-minority racism, right?
Hold on, that's a misquote. "revenge driven justice" does quote me. "Against the rich" doesn't; you added it. That's a pretty big leap away from my point. Do you believe that <protected class X> is "anybody who isn't rich?"
It's an analogy: you said that DEI supporters want to "discriminate actively against races/genders/orientations that haven't been discriminated against in the same way." (Let's call this "reverse discrimination" just for brevity)
I figured if you can understand that "alms for the poor" isn't an example of "reverse discrimination", then you can also understand that there are also ways to support historically-discriminated-against groups without reverse discrimination.
If you can make that leap, there's a whole dialog on whether current methods are reverse-discrimination or something else. If you can't make that leap, then there's not really a conversation to be had - our perspectives diverge too much to be mutually comprehensible.
>I figured if you can understand that "alms for the poor" isn't an example of "reverse discrimination"
This is comparing apples to oranges. Alms for the poor is a personal choice: I decide to give some of my own money to someone who I think needs it more than I do.
"Reverse discrimination" in the sense you're using it refers (within this analogy) to somebody else taking your money away from you, because they believe that somebody needs it more than you do. I could write a book (others already have) about how many things can and always do go wrong with this approach.
> Refusing to give alms to the poor "because it would discriminate against the rich" seems obviously fallacious to me.
In what way is this obviously fallacious? Alms have to come from somewhere, and if you take them from the rich then it is clearly discrimination against the rich. You could very well make the argument that this is justified, but fallacious it is not.
That aside, it doesn't take a lot of scanning through those who purportedly wish to give alms to the poor before you find some outright revenge-driven rhetoric.
It’s also a broken analogy because “the rich” are always more privileged than “the poor”, but a given white person may be less privileged than a given nonwhite person.
> You could very well make the argument that this is justified
Discrimination isn't just "we treat people differently" - we put prisoners in jail, we don't trust liars, we try to keep abusers away from positions of power.
Discrimination is when it crosses the line into injustice - when you're acting solely off hatred and stereotypes.
Since you're conceding that it's justified, it seems that no actual injustice is occurring here.
Funnily enough, the poor having some more money often makes the rich wealthier in absolute terms just not in relative terms. The poor having money juices the economy a lot more than the rich having yet more money. Similarly with more diversity everyone is better off.
I agree with your train of thought, but I disagree with the specifics.
Though, that's in part due to my own definition of discrimination in this context to be "placing a label to tell 2+ groups apart and taking action using that label".
Taking money from the rich and giving to the poor is inherently discriminating between the rich and the poor with a follow-up action to remove resources from one group (the rich) and give to the other (the poor). The action is there regardless of the reason or ethics of the context (i.e. why someone is rich or poor).
If someone really doesn't want to discriminate, sure. But I think the argument of "labelling it discrimination is wrong" is wrong in the sense of my own definition of discrimination. For me, a more useful argument would be "well, let's figure out the metrics we're optimizing when we discriminate like this".
I think that definition is going to cause some very confusing conversations. We don't generally talk about it being "discrimination" to put criminals in jail, keep abusers away from positions of power, or distrust liars. Generally speaking, when people talk about discrimination, it's because there's an injustice - the difference in treatment is based on stereotypes and hatred rather than any truth about that individual.
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
Doesn't this seem like a weird thing to say? How do you know that? Isn't this the definition of stereotyping? Is every question going to be of the form "as a black woman, what do you think about X?" And why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?
> why is it okay to assume that white people don't have interesting things to say?
I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.
> How do you know that?
I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".
There's obviously some very low-hanging fruit in terms of having even one voice who will look at the situation and notice stuff like that.
All that said: Obviously a white person can notice that, and a black person can miss it. It's just statistics. And a white person can still be diverse along a dozen other axes! If you want to sell your product to conservatives, you probably want at least one conservative on your team for the same reason!
It's more possible than you think for people who share the same ethnic background to have had radically different experiences from each other, and people who look very different from each other to have gone through very similar life stories.
I'm not just saying this in theory (which is trivially true) -- I lived in a stereotypically liberal cosmopolitan city where most people I encountered, despite the visible diversity in their ethnic backgrounds, all had four-year degrees, worked in high-paying knowledge-based jobs, and had no experience in military service or single motherhood; then in a much smaller city in a stereotypically conservative rural state where most people were of the same ethnic background, but had more variety in what they went through in life. My own habits did not change between the two cities as to put me in touch with such a different group of people between them.
This is just anecdata, but I question the premise you appear to take for granted.
> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.
“All else being equal” doesn’t make sense. All else is never equal here and that’s the point yet we pretend everything swivels on skin color.
But all else is not equal. People are more than just their skin color. Ignoring all other diversity and focusing only on race (or a few other arbitrary factors like sexual orientation of all things) is exactly the problem here.
> I mean, basic statistics: in a group of 20 white men and 1 black woman, all else being equal, the black woman is likely to have radically different experiences.
The problem is the assumption th
at all else is equal.
> I think this because I routinely run into examples in the vein of "this cool facial recognition tech doesn't recognize black people".
Face recognition is one of the few areas where skin color matters. Most of the time it doesn’t.
Using basic statistics in order to determine behavior from people based on race is called racial profiling. It is why the police assume, all else being equal, that a black man is more likely to be involved in crime than a white man.
Alone, "It's just statistics." should never be the justification if the outcome has a strong negative for an individual.
Carl Sagan describe such profiling in his book The Demon-Haunted World. He calls it lazy thinking. People take in a complex person and reduces them down to single bits of information, man or woman, black or white.
> But that will take decades. What do we do until then?
We wait.
I don't understand why people want these issues to be resolved here and now. Society and culture take decades to change, that's natural, and shortcuts—however tempting they might be—often come at a cost of something else.
The conditions of these oppressed groups are not terribly bad, compared to what was going on with people in general throughout history. An average man who lived in Europe 100 years ago would gladly change places with an average black woman living in Europe nowadays. And even lots of white people from poorer countries nowadays have a lower standard of living than black people in developed countries. I speak from my own experience, as a person who grew up in a countryside where people don't have running water in their homes and toilet is just a hole in the ground; then I come to Northern Europe for work and hear how hard it is to be a black person here and that I'm apparently privileged because I'm white.
My point is, current conditions of people in developed countries are not so bad that it requires urgent measures to improve. If solving it takes 2-4 generations of people living in these conditions, it's not that much of a tragedy, and I don't think we must urgently start dumping resources to speed it up.
At least in the US, things don't tend to simply improve with time. It's a decades- or centuries-long fight, tooth and nail.
And things are much better now in terms of university diversity than they were even 30 years ago. But people have been fighting that fight this entire time.
This right here is the level of urgency that will reach its goal in 2-4 generations, if we're lucky.
I didn't mean we shouldn't be doing anything. I said that we need to accept that it's going to take those centuries and plan accordingly. The "here and now" people are the ones who need to realize this the most.
> This right here is the level of urgency that will reach its goal in 2-4 generations
"2-4 generations from now" is the exact level of urgency to reach the goal in 2-4 generations. Inflating the urgency of things spends the precious trust people have in you, and harms our decisions by making us miss some things that actually are more urgent. To list a few global things that are more urgent than this discrimination issue of rich Western countries: global warming, sustainability, poverty in other countries, war in Ukraine and other military conflicts, poor education (yes, I'm looking at you, US), autocratic dictatorships all over the world.
We already know this isn't going to work. Culture is the driving force that elevates people. If you didn't grow up in a broken home, were encouraged and supported in your education and pushed to make the rights choices in life, you grew up in a winning culture.
Agree; it IS decades later right now. Thank you Sesame Street, thank you counter-culture alum that went on to dominate our media and children's programming (pun intended).
The diversity initiatives are misguided attempts by those raised to care about it to fast-track the process. Now they are adults and impatient to see more change that really only occurs generationally.
Not everyone came along for the ride though and they absolutely know what Sesame Street and friends did. Hence the attacks on PBS, schools, and etc.
People act like these are the worst times but great progress had been made.
Piers was on Real Time a few weeks back with his sky is falling schtick about free speech in the US. He is not dumb, but is he really not aware of how burning a flag would have gone over 60 years ago? A white man would have gotten his ass beat and a black man hung(maybe by the police in either case!). What about Elvis and rock-and-roll "smut"? Anyone remember X-rated films? We are relatively unbounded in 2022 lol.
A bonified Indian immigrant runs Microsoft.
I get it though. Was hoodwinked myself. Raised on Sesame Street and Fern Gully. Shocked that so many people were not on board with the social progress I took for granted. Parents who seemed progressive aged and now parrot Moon hoax and anti-vax talking points..
I'm impatient too. What can we change what can I do?! How can we see this promise fulfilled in my lifetime?!
Maybe we can't though. Bad policy is bad policy. Bottom-up has been the real progress. Starts with the children. Gay marriage? The children. People coming out; don't talk about my child/nephew/niece/sister/brother/friends child like that!
It's a journey like security and performance. You don't just "solve" security at a company; "Whelp we finished those tickets and now we have achieved security; our work here is done!".
MAGA? We are greater now than ever before. Ask a 70 year old black man from the south how great America was..
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I'm trying to imagine how this would work in practice but products aren't usually designed by committee in giant brainstorming sessions where everyone gets to provide their opinion from their little expert/experience positions.
That usually happens through research and feedback loops. Being flexible and adapting. It doesn't require having to hire from every demographic and expert group, and putting them directly on your product/engineering teams.
If you're targeting a specific demographic or niche market is typically helps to be from that group or at a minimum be constantly talking to them (ala what Steve Blank talks about endlessly). It also helps with sales/marketing when communicating, etc.
But this stuff doesn't seem like a rule you can apply generally when composing a team or building a company like choosing the right Lego blocks by demographic profile.
It's not like building a team in an RPG video game where you're trying to find the right balance of race/gender/religion/culture.
> And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
From the post:
> If people of different races think differently, presumably that’s because of their different experiences (rather than, say, because different beliefs and attitudes are genetically programmed into different races). In that case, the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries. They’ve not just grown up in a different part of our society; they’ve grown up in a completely different society. So affirmative action proponents would greatly favor affirmative action for, say, African immigrants over affirmative action for blacks born in America.
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I mean, you give a very cliche example. Consider an alternative situation where you need to decide between the same black woman or a Latino man. Or the same black woman and an Asian woman. Should you be permitted to make the same racially motivated decision in this context?
And also: if you're provided race data in the hiring process, you're essentially put in a position to not only make decisions like the one you listed, but also ones regarding other races. You're in a position to establish which races are "above" one another in the hiring process. How can your employer guarantee that you don't do this, even if you say that you don't?
We know of the disgusting things white people have historically done. We also know that white people are over represented in hiring and admissions decisions. I ask: should white people, given their track record, be allowed to make this call?
> you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
No. But two white men could also have vastly different life experiences, possibly even more different than between one white man and a black woman, depending on who they are.
If your primary goal is to increase intellectual diversity than you need to look at more than just race, gender, and sexual identity. And I don't think that would be a bad thing. But that's not to say that there aren't other goals of DEI, such as trying to offset the disadvantages faced by certain groups of people.
I know for Taiwanese it is/was not uncommon for the rich to fly to the US for the birth to get dual cititizenship for their children. In general, US immigration has sufficient hurdles that any group that is actively migrating there will skew towards those already well off.
Of course that's not an argument for discrimination based on race - if anything, cements that race is a poor proxy for "priviledge".
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
I think this argument always fails to realize that even in a group of white dudes, probably all of them have had a vastly different life experience and can bring those perspectives too.
>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
Of all the people at my company, black and white, male and female, I am the only one from a poor background. My life experience is vastly different from all of them.
This is the issue with defining life experience or diversity purely in terms of race and sex.
I think the demand for a simple and easy answer to diversity (we have x% from group y!) Is well intentioned but very counterproductive.
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?
I'd posit that there is no good answer to this question, and that attempting to find or optimize one is a distraction. In very broad strokes, if you try to fix a problem too slowly, bad things keep happening; if you try to fix it too fast, you're liable to upset other things around you (e.g. the economy, delicate sensibilities, your short-term profitability, etc.). And the problem is too grossly high-dimensional to hope for any kind of consensus (or often, any analysis) at any level of detail beyond simply "yup, that's a problem".
With no hope of finding an ideal solution, the pragmatic response is to just address the problems you can see with the resources you can afford. Trust in being directionally correct.
> But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
The solution is not to systematically discriminate in another direction, forever.
In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy, and you have abandoned the high moral ground that racial discrimination is always a bad thing, and you end up in a worse situation than you started.
> In addition, you risk political blowback. People who are discriminated against get unhappy
Something related that tends to be forgotten, the temporal aspect: People just entering the workforce who have only ever been on the wrong end of affirmative action. For them, there is no "balance" or "correction" going on, they're just plain being discriminated against.
I think this is exactly what is happening with the rise of right-wing groups. We tried fighting racism with racism and now we’re surprised that there is more racism than when we started. Sadly the “fight racism
with racism” people interpret the increase in racism as a need to double down.
> So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc. But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
I think we get into trouble when we start treating individuals as mere tokens of their groups. To pick on your comment for example, "those people have been systematically discriminated against forever" is true at the collective level, but is very likely not true at the individual level. There's no justice in choosing a well-off black candidate on the basis that other black people disproportionately experienced slavery slavery, poverty, Jim Crow, etc, especially when it comes at the expense of a white person who had a very hard life.
Moreover, even if we insist on tokenizing people, we rarely treat people as the median of their group, and instead we treat whites, men, etc as though they have the privilege of board room executives, politicians, kings, etc (e.g., arguments that a given male has privilege based on the observation, "men have ruled for millennia").
> And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.
I emphatically deny this, especially the idea that a black woman is going to have interesting things to say, but a white man won't. There is far more diversity within a race than between them, including diversities of experience and how we process those experiences (for example, even if you have two people of the same race with similar adverse experiences, one could come out of those experiences with additional resilience and another with a trauma response). If you want interesting/different experiences, there are much better proxies (e.g., if your team is coastal and well-educated, a well-educated rural candidate is probably going to offer a lot more diversity than a black woman who came from the same pipeline as the rest of the company). What does a white man from rural Appalachia have in common with a white man from the Bay Area that you can conclude that neither will have interesting thoughts?
Moreover, if your company is super ideological about diversity, people who don't want to be regarded as tokens probably opt out, and you end up with a bunch of people with different skin color but similar viewpoints (and anyone with a unique viewpoint is probably afraid to speak it). Not exactly a way to optimize for "interesting thoughts".
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?
I think the only way to solve it would be - Randomized child dna assignment, ie, every child is adopted or the dna material is swapped.
I think people would like to solve historical unfairness problem - but I believe it would require abandoning the very foundation of our biologically influenced culture. Ie- nobody is willing to give up the possibility of having mini-me.
>you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man
So, where i get stuck, is that you can't actually make this statement about any individual black woman or white man.
The one common theme across all of social justice is that stereotyping is bad. Erasing individuality and forcing people to live in the shadow of their stereotypes is bad.
Yet its apparently allowed here? Because it mostly benefits minorities?
This is the unspoken line the separates identity politics and equality. A focus on minorities vs a focus on ending discrimination and stereotyping, which under equality would include AA.
When (most) people say they are against "woke" culture or "sjws" they generally mean they are against the identity politics flavor of ""equality"". Because identity politics is just a racist sexist dog whistle for discrimination against majorities.
I'd previously bought into the meritocracy argument, but was eventually convinced to update those beliefs when presented with a new perspective. If you only look at the end-result, then meritocracy makes sense. But the trajectory which each person takes in order to arrive at that destination can vary wildly depending on how priviledged of a lifestyle you were born into.
It's entirely possible to pick up and develop the required skills while on the job in many cases. Companies ultimately end up benefiting from this by spreading out the responsibility of training people, which results in a stronger more robust workforce.
If you want to account for privilege, that's fine. But there are much better proxies than "skin color". For example, if you want to reduce poverty, why write a check to people of a certain race (on the basis that people of that race are more likely to be poor) rather than just writing a check to poor people directly?
The problem is that people are obsessed with the median person of a given race (and how these "median people" compare with each other) that they project these median personas onto individuals. In other words, they treat individuals as fungible tokens of their race. It doesn't matter if a black candidate has had an easy suburban life and a white candidate grew up in poverty, the DEI lens just sees a black candidate and a white candidate, and the perennial social imperative to bring the median black person and the median white person closer to parity.
You're not wrong but really the whole problem is cyclical. It has to be broken down everywhere. Diversity and anti racism in education is getting raked over the coals right now. Housing discrimination is still pretty rampant. Racists are winning elections. There's an unfortunate tendency to force compliance on those who can best accommodate it rather than who is more in need of regulating.
I posit that "racists are winning elections" precisely because of the broken race ideology that was meant to combat racism in the first place (not just in admissions and hiring, but all over our discourse). The stuff we do in the name of fighting racism looks like exactly the sort of thing one would do if they wanted to create a thoroughly racist society--get everyone to hyper-identify with their race and create separate and mete out rewards and consequences on the basis of race. Imply that fault and victimhood are racial (rather than individual) attributes. Deal only in abstractions and ignore intra-racial variance. Police people to make sure they don't explore ("appropriate") cultures outside of their own. Use "nazi" and "white supremacy" as liberally as possible--make sure those words have no power to censure actual, bonafide racists. Stuff like this.
I think that's a completely specious perspective and one that is peddled by conservative politicians as propaganda. Being antiracist is not about assigning blame or curing racism with HR policy and certainly not about curing all societal ills. It's about taking small steps to counteract injustice instead of just saying "I'm not racist" and washing your hands. Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history. Out of control name-calling is happening in all quarters but all I'm saying that we are electing racists and we definitely are. The past president's response to the Charlottesville car attack was incredibly ambivalent and the perpetrator could be accurately described as a nazi.
> I think that's a completely specious perspective and one that is peddled by conservative politicians as propaganda.
Liberals have been talking about this long before the words “woke” or “CRT” fell upon conservative ears. “Conservatives say this” is merely the latest way to dismiss criticism.
> It's about taking small steps to counteract injustice instead of just saying "I'm not racist" and washing your hands.
The problem is that “counteracting injustice” is naively formulated. Specifically, it often means “reducing disparities between the median people of each race” which practically demands injustice: to make the average white person closer to the average black person, we have to push white people down. And which white people are going to get pushed down? The poorest (which is why we vilify poor, rural whites more so than wealthy coastal elites). Similarly, which black folks are going to get lifted up in order to raise the median? The poor or the rich (whose communities have experienced the largest post-BLM crime surges?)? Moreover, a whole shitton of violence was perpetrated (and rationalized, justified, and excused) in the name of “antiracism”, which is not what I expect from a movement about “counteracting injustice”.
Moreover, “colorblind antiracism” doesn’t imply shrugging—you can advocate for others to be more colorblind. There are approaches that don’t require tokenizing people, and I posit they’ve worked far, far better.
> Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history.
I’m not opposed to teaching accurate history (we covered lots of civil rights stuff when I was in school, but critically I wasn’t taught to feel guilty for having white skin), but (1) that’s not what is happening (lots of historians have significant issues with the 1619 series for example) and (2) the wrongdoers weren’t the ancestors of a lot of people (e.g., lots of white people’s ancestors didn’t immigrate until after the civil war and they didn’t have any major hand in Jim Crow, etc anyway) and (3) there shouldn’t be an implication of guilt based on something your ancestors did anyway and (4) the “antiracist” perspective also seems to take issue with any non-racialized historical lens (or even one in which the US isn’t the absolute worst).
> Out of control name-calling is happening in all quarters but all I'm saying that we are electing racists and we definitely are.
I agree, I just think that’s an effect of so-called antiracism. I don’t think doubling down is going to solve the problem.
> The past president's response to the Charlottesville car attack was incredibly ambivalent and the perpetrator could be accurately described as a nazi.
I won’t argue with you here. This all seems agreeable to me. Let’s make fewer Nazis.
I'm pretty sure that everyone now living has ancestors who have done deplorable things at some time in the past. Refraining from all sorts of deplorable things, by and large, is a very recent social innovation. (Steven Pinker is especially clear on this.)
Agreed. Not only that, but there’s also a debate among historians about “presentism”—judging the past by present standards rather than by the standards of the time. For example, most (so-called) antiracists are presentists, which is why they advocate for tearing down statues of Lincoln and the like—people who were very progressive for their day, but who fell short of the standards of today (as though the people who are antiracist today would be as strident as they are if they grew up in the culture of Lincoln’s time).
I don't follow. We live in the present so presentism seems pretty practical. Besides, this isn't ancient history. Civil Rights was only like 60 years ago. Strom Thurmond served in Congress this century. Is there any point in history that it would be acceptable to have a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on public land?
> We live in the present so presentism seems pretty practical.
Well, I live now. I’m very liberal, but am I more noble for doing fuck-all about civil rights (apart from voting) than the abolitionists who literally died to end slavery? Does the woke college student really deserve a statue more than MLK?
> Besides, this isn't ancient history.
Granted, but I don’t see the relevance. You should still judge people of the civil rights era according to the standards of their time.
> Is there any point in history that it would be acceptable to have a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest on public land?
I’m not very well-versed in Forrest, but he seems like he wasn’t progressive for his time, so the answer would be “no” irrespective of presentism.
I mean you are moving the goal posts into the parking lot right now. The initial question was whether or not there was value in taking incremental steps to combat racism and you're saying we shouldn't build statues to the keyboard warriors of Twitter. Nobody ever suggested that. And while we can absolutely evaluate historical figures on their cultural context that doesn't mean we should lionize them on public property. Forrest was the Confederate general who founded the KKK and was honored with a ridiculous statue on public property in Nashville.
I'm not moving goalposts, I think you've completely misunderstood the argument. Specifically, my point isn't that we shouldn't build statues for keyboard warriors, it's that the logic of presentism defies sensibility--presentists would say that woke college students are more moral because they adhere to the moral standards of the present than the imperfect-by-present-standards abolitionists of yesteryear.
> Nobody ever suggested that.
This is exactly what presentists believe.
> And while we can absolutely evaluate historical figures on their cultural context that doesn't mean we should lionize them on public property.
Well, if you believe that admirable people should be lionized on public property (about which presentism doesn't have an opinion), and if you believe that history has admirable figures (which presentism effectively denies), then it makes sense that you would lionize those figures on public property.
> Forrest was the Confederate general who founded the KKK and was honored with a ridiculous statue on public property in Nashville.
Right, but as he fails the moral standards of his own day as well as the present, he oughtn't be venerated either way.
"presentists would say that woke college students are more moral because they adhere to the moral standards of the present than the imperfect-by-present-standards abolitionists of yesteryear."
No they don't. Idk who even talks about this kind of thing. Certainly nobody in office that I've ever seen. I'm sure you could find a few people who think this, but it's nowhere near the state of the actual public debate.
"Right, but as he fails the moral standards of his own day as well as the present, he oughtn't be venerated either way."
Right, this is currently a position held by liberals and strongly opposed by a lot of conservatives who want to preserve monuments to things that were despicable even 150 years ago. Mind you, the infamous Forrest statue was erected in 1998, not 1870! It's not just a matter of reevaluating in present day, there are people evaluating the Confederacy in present day terms and still calling it great and getting support from elected officials. Those are the people in in power who are sending the signal that explicit racism is still very much prevalent in the halls of power and require explicit counteractions like DEI.
> No they don't. Idk who even talks about this kind of thing.
It's pretty commonly talked about whenever woke people want to tear down statues of historical progressives or when they want classrooms to stop teaching "dead white men" and so on. The whole claim is that these historical progressives fail to live up to today's rapidly-changing left-wing morals and thus they oughtn't be celebrated or taught (e.g., tearing down a Lincoln statue because Lincoln didn't accomplish more than abolition).
> Right, this is currently a position held by liberals and strongly opposed by a lot of conservatives who want to preserve monuments to things that were despicable even 150 years ago.
Yes (for some value of "a lot of conservatives"), but again I don't know why you keep bringing conservatives up when we're talking about woke progressives and liberals. Similarly, I don't know why you're bringing Forrest up when we're talking about presentism.
> Those are the people in in power who are sending the signal that explicit racism is still very much prevalent in the halls of power and require explicit counteractions like DEI.
DEI doesn't actually work though[0][1][2][3][4], and woke progressive politics are driving the resurgence in right-wing identity politics, as liberals predicted roughly a decade ago ("fixating incessantly on everyone's racial identity is going to strengthen right-wing white racial identity", "left wing illiberalism is going to legitimize right wing illiberalism", etc). In addition to increasing the amount and intensity of anti-minority racists, woke progressive politics on things like policing have driven crime rates (especially violent crime rates) through the roof disproportionately affecting minority communities.
If you want to minimize right-wing racism, you have to minimize all racism--in other words, you want liberalism, not left-wing illiberalism.
Completely irrelevant. The point is to improve the world we live in. To redress mistakes we're presently feeling the effects of. Not to punish every historical error.
Steven Pinker makes a way better argument in his latest two books than I could in a HN comment about why this stuff is nowhere near "completely irrelevant" if you genuinely care about bettering the world and resolving secular wrongs. By and large, squabbling about what this or that minority ethnicity might have suffered at some time in the past is very much part of the problem, not the solution.
The parent is responding to context that you set yourself:
> Trying to teach kids accurate history of deplorable things done by some people's ancestors is just teaching accurate history.
Specifically, the parent is noting that “the DEI folks” (or whatever descriptor you might prefer) are only interested in teaching about the dark history of “some people”, but there are atrocities committed among every sufficiently large people group.
That's not true and and it's not relevant. Teaching history is teaching history. The DEI camp want to improve the world in which we currently live. That it's due to historical injustice is beside the point. The two things are unrelated.
Feel free to support your claim. In the meanwhile, it's both true and relevant.
> Teaching history is teaching history
Yes, but 1619 != history.
> The DEI camp want to improve the world in which we currently live.
Perhaps their intent is noble, but they seem to have been counterproductive. First of all, DEI programs don't actually work, and this is pretty widely accepted[0][1][2][3][4]. Secondly, broader woke identity politics are not merely ineffective at reducing right-wing identity politics, they are driving them. Since left-wing identity politics became mainstream, right-wing identity politics moved from the fringe to a mainstream position. Right-wing identity politics moved from the margins in 2010 to a pretty popular position among Republicans. Right-wing hate groups have increased in number and brazenness. And by the way, liberals were sounding the alarm that this would be the consequence of going all-in on left-wing illiberalism--there was obviously no way that reducing everyone to their skin color was ever going to do anything other than increasing a right-wing white identity.
I said "conservative politicians" not "conservatives". The loudest crazies on both side don't generally represent the mainstream, but conservative politicians are actively appealing to the crazies. Absolutely nobody is being taught in schools to feel guilty for being white. That's an outright lie concocted by conservative politicians. Your perspectives of the liberal view is based on the worst caricature of liberal views you might find in the depths of Twitter while your perspective on the conservative view is based on the narrowest reading of stated policy. The 1619 Project was immaculately researched whole mainstream conservatives can't even figure out what happened in 2020.
> I said "conservative politicians" not "conservatives". The loudest crazies on both side don't generally represent the mainstream, but conservative politicians are actively appealing to the crazies.
Fair enough, but my point stands. Conservative politicians merely adopted criticizing CRT. Liberals were born in it. ;)
> Absolutely nobody is being taught in schools to feel guilty for being white. That's an outright lie concocted by conservative politicians
Again, this gets the timeline wrong because conservative politicians weren’t even aware of this stuff at the time. Moreover, I’ve heard from parents first-hand, including photos of children’s homework. One high school student was given an assignment to reflect on ways “white people can cultivate a positive racial identity” or some such.
> Your perspectives of the liberal view is based on the worst caricature of liberal views you might find in the depths of Twitter while your perspective on the conservative view is based on the narrowest reading of stated policy.
I am a liberal, “antiracists” are deeply (and often proudly) illiberal. I also engage regularly with these identity progressives precisely because I wanted to understand their point of view.
> The 1619 Project was immaculately researched whole mainstream conservatives can't even figure out what happened in 2020.
For fuck’s sake, even the socialists think it was shoddy. Are they actually conservatives too? https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/21/bynu-d22.html Moreover, I’ll never understand why identity progressives always clap back to liberals with some variation of “oh yeah? conservatives are dumb [mic drop]”.
"Fair enough, but my point stands. Conservative politicians merely adopted criticizing CRT. Liberals were born in it. ;)"
No, that point doesn't stand. I'm not sure where you even argued this. CRT is not taught in any public schools. It's grad school level. CRT mania is, again, conservative propaganda. If you want anecdote, I have two kids in big city public schools and they have read Stamped and done anti-racist lessons and Ibram Kendi did a talk for us. Believe it or not, they learned the right lessons. No one was insulted or made to feel bad about themselves at all. Conservatives are framing this kind of education not just as ineffective, but a grave and dire threat to America. Most liberals had never even heard of this kind of thing until conservatives started screaming about it.
WSWS is also just not credible. I doubt any policy makers of any stripe trust what they print.
First sentence of my earlier post: 'Liberals have been talking about this long before the words “woke” or “CRT” fell upon conservative ears.'
> CRT is not taught in any public schools. It's grad school level. CRT mania is, again, conservative propaganda.
CRT inspires a lot of public school education. There's clearly a lot of ideas that orbit CRT, and people use "CRT" as a shorthand to talk about them even though they aren't exactly part of the narrowest-definition of CRT. Conservatives often badly articulate and misunderstand these ideas and the ways they're problematic, and they pick problematic solutions for countering them (speech codes); however, criticizing CRT and related ideas isn't "conservative propaganda". For the third time now, liberals were criticizing this stuff long before conservatives knew what was happening.
> If you want anecdote, I have two kids in big city public schools and they have read Stamped and done anti-racist lessons and Ibram Kendi did a talk for us. Believe it or not, they learned the right lessons. No one was insulted or made to feel bad about themselves at all.
You claimed that no schools are teaching white guilt. You can't support that with an anecdote about a school that didn't teach white guilt. To be perfectly clear, I'm not arguing that every single school teaches white guilt all the time (not even the zaniest conservatives are making this argument).
> Conservatives are framing this kind of education not just as ineffective, but a grave and dire threat to America.
Why are you fixating on conservatives when neither of us are conservatives?
> Most liberals had never even heard of this kind of thing until conservatives started screaming about it.
Of course. Most liberals are normies who aren't paying close attention (same with most conservatives). But among the folks who were paying attention, loads of liberals were talking about this long before it entered the conservative mainstream. Folks like Jonathan Haidt have been examining this stuff since at least 2011.
> WSWS is also just not credible. I doubt any policy makers of any stripe trust what they print.
How can I take you seriously when you say that a professional historian, author, and emerita professor of history at Texas State University is "not credible" and when you refer to her as "a policy maker"? Come on. Moreover, I offered the WSWS version because your entire argument hinges on "only conservatives criticize 1619" and this is an example of socialists (pretty far removed from conservatives) objecting to 1619's pseudo-history.
> Absolutely nobody is being taught in schools to feel guilty for being white.
Now, that's a rather strong statement. I think quite a few moderate liberals would agree that there are real concerns with this kind of teaching, and that we should not turn history or social studies class into an occasion for grievance mongering and 'two minutes hate' of the supposedly dominating groups.
> So the question is, where should the fix be applied?
We could start by not forcing them into a school system that is highly correlated with outcomes of criminality[1]. Then we could stop subsidizing dependency and instead ease the paths work, education, and entrepreneurship, e.g. by reducing the cost of compliance by e.g. reducing scope and burdens of licensure requirements, instituting opportunity zones.
I leave as an exercise to the reader considering why the Democrat party does not support the above policies, while the Republican party does.
[1] "Overall, I find that winning the lottery to attend a first-choice school has a large impact on crime for high-risk youth. High-risk lottery winners experienced roughly a 50 percent reduction in the measures of criminal activity that weight crimes by their severity."
https://www.educationnext.org/does-school-choice-reduce-crim...
Genuinely inquiring here, on the study you linked: The study is that high-risk youth are less likely to engage in criminal activity if they attend a first-choice school. Why not inquire why those schools are first choice & if those factors can be deployed to every other school?
Similarly, what do you mean stop subsidizing dependency? What specific dependencies are being subsidized and what are the outcomes of no longer subsidizing them?
> Why not inquire why those schools are first choice & if those factors can be deployed to every other school?
That's not an easy question to answer, but have you asked it yourself? Why don't public schools adopt the successful practices of charter schools that have the prospect of saving their youth from a life of crime? My explanation is that teacher's unions fight against the practices proven successful in other context, such as merit-based hiring and compensation.
If we're going to ascribe success to a factor like school choice, we should also rule out other factors such as what those schools are being chosen for. [For example, if it turns out that there are no academic differences in chosen vs non-chosen schools, and its simply that the mere ability to choose a school causes benefits, that's really important to know!]
But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.
So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the job you are hiring for are straight white men, because they are the only ones who had the opportunity to get the training, should we fix that at the hiring level?
The initial reaction is probably no, we should push that fix further down to make sure those people get the same chances as everyone else. But that will take decades. What do we do until then?
And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.