When I first saw this Tweet (Xeet?), my eye was drawn to "Dems should pursue working-class voters of all races." It's a great example of something that is simultaneously (a) alt-center conventional wisdom and (b) utterly inane. What are the sorts of policies Dems should pursue to working-class voters of all races? Answer: the ones they're already supporting!
Price negotiations for prescription drugs is a great, obvious example of a policy that's geared to the interest of working-class voters of all races. Standing with the incipient wave of labor mobilization is another. The infrastructure bill was yet another. All of these are centerpiece items of the Democratic Party's economic agenda. But the alt-center punditry acts as if they don't exist. The "advice" on offer is "do what you're already doing, but make me pay attention to it." And one cannot help but think that the price the pundits have put on "make me pay attention to it" is "stop distracting me by also supporting policies that are distinctively to the benefit of specific historically marginalized communities."
At the same time, there is a separate vapidity in the "advice" that Biden shouldn't run for reelection. Again, as advice this is just terrible: Biden has a proven electoral track record and has already beaten Trump once. There's no universe where a chaotic primary free-for-all would actually be healthy for the Democratic Party or the broader prospect of ensuring that Trump or any of his lackeys stay out of the White House. The desire for "a real primary" is just thinly-disguised thirst for the good old days of "Dems in disarray" and the chaotic intraparty knife fights that aren't happening on the GOP side because virtually all of Trump's "challengers" can't help but cozy up to him (with a not-so-subtle wink to the various factions within the Democratic Party whose definition of a "real primary" excludes any primary where their preferred candidate doesn't march to victory).
Finally, "faculty lounge" politics is also a meaningless phrase. If it's meant to refer to the notion that Democratic party politics take their cues from whatever petition is currently being passed around the Wesleyan anthropology department email list, it's delusional. If it's meant to be a general referent to so-called "culture war" politics, then it's horribly outdated -- we are long past the days where the main "culture" wedge issues favored Republicans over Democrats. Republicans are getting absolutely blitzed on reproductive rights as their radical campaigns to imprison, maim, and murder women are predictably reviled. And their anti-LGBTQ agenda doesn't fare much better. Democrats have a lot of room to punish Republicans for their extremism here, and absolutely should.
Biden should run for reelection, and in the process will no doubt trounce token primary opposition. He should promote his policies which will improve the lives of working class voters of all races, and he should absolutely torch Republicans for their unabashed extremism in desiring to take American "culture" back to the 19th century.
[E]lite liberals need to recognize a fundamental truth: All of these people in middle America, even the actual liberals, have very different sensibilities than elite liberals who live on the coasts.
First of all, middle Americans go to church. Not temple. Church. God and Jesus Christ play important roles in their lives....
Second, politics simply doesn’t consume middle Americans the way it does elites on the coasts.... They talk kids, and local gossip, and pop culture, and sports....
Third, their daily lives are pretty different from the lives of elite liberals. Few of them buy fair trade coffee or organic almond milk. Some of them served in the armed forces. Some of them own guns, and like to shoot them and teach their kids how to shoot them. Some of them hold jobs in the service of global capital and feel proud of their work.
Fourth, they’re patriotic in the way that most Americans are patriotic. They don’t feel self-conscious saluting the flag. They don’t like it when people bad-mouth our country. They believe that America is mostly good, and that the rest of the world should look more like America.
I find these very frustrating, not because of what they say about middle Americans, but because of what they say about me -- born inside the beltway on the east coast, currently living in the ultimate liberal bubble of Berkeley on the west coast.
I don't drink almond milk (I've tried it, once, and think it's disgusting). I don't buy fair trade coffee or sip lattes of any variety. I've fired a gun, and while I don't have any real interest in doing it again, I don't begrudge others who do. I have friends from both high school and college who served in the armed forces. I can chat pop culture with the best of them (ask me about my breakdown of Gordon Ramsay shows). There is plenty that I find great about America, and am quite happy to kvell about.
Admittedly, I talk politics a lot (I am a political blogger), and I go to synagogue, not church. But I just got back from a funeral (my fiance's grandmother) which was held at a church in a town of less than 2,000 in rural Minnesota (Goodhue County went for Trump by 18, FYI). I survive such locales just fine. And while I always knew of how important her Christian faith was to her life, when I found out that she had specifically included me in her deathbed prayers, I was deeply moved.
Maybe this feels like protesting too much. But it's not just about me. It's also about the folks here at UC-Berkeley -- yes, hyper-lefty Berkeley -- that falsify that coastal bubble hypothesis.
When I started at Berkeley Law, my most liberal student was an alum of the University of South Carolina, and my most conservative was literally the scion of a wine dynasty. In between I taught decorated combat veterans and the daughter of an inland empire county sheriff. This is typical. UC-Berkeley is one of the world's great public universities, and our students accordingly come to us from all over the state and all over the world. They come from suburban Orange County, yes, but also inland ranch towns and impoverished LA neighborhoods. It is no surprise at all that Berkeley ranks ninth in the New York Times college access index measuring economic diversity amongst enrolled students, nor that UC schools comprise the entirety of the top 5.
So maybe we're asking the wrong questions. We know that students come from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic locations and pedigrees to attend to Berkeley. Indeed, I suspect that more Berkeley students and alumni know a sizeable chunk of folks who grew up in small towns than persons who grew up in small towns know a sizeable chunk of folks who attended schools like Berkeley. And we know that the resulting campus culture here at Berkeley is very liberal. And yes, self-selection plays a part in that, as does the relative ideological uniformity of the faculty. But maybe, just maybe, it's also evidence that when you expose people to a rich tapestry of human diversity encompassing people of a wide range of backgrounds, hometowns, and pedigrees -- the result is a tendency towards liberalism.
The fact is, our students aren't born on the Berkeley campus. Some of them come from those rural towns (in California or elsewhere). Or they don't, but their parents did. Or their best friend. Or their roommate. Or their future spouse. To act like Berkeley students have never met anyone who doesn't eat gluten-free is a grotesque parody of who actually comprises our "bubble".
So of course we should respect each and every part of America -- urban, suburban, and rural, north and south, coastal and middle. But the "coastal elites" who supposedly sniff down upon middle Americans from atop their soy lattes? They weren't born in a Starbucks. They might have been born in that small town in rural Minnesota that they supposedly cannot possibly understand.
A group of researchers decided to circulate a copy of Charles Murray's Middlebury College speech -- without saying who it was by -- in order to measure how readers gauged its political valence (did they think it was a liberal speech, a conservative speech, or a centrist speech?). They found that, without knowing who it was by, their sample of college professors viewed it as rather middle-of-the-road (5.05 on a 1-9 scale, where 1 is very conservative and 9 is very liberal). They also sent different portions of the speech to a random online sample group; averaging their responses together the speech got a 5.22 rating. Finally, they sent the speech to another group of college professors -- this time telling them Murray was the author. With that knowledge they rated the speech at 5.77 -- still basically "middle-of-the-road", albeit apparently more conservative by a statistically significant amount.
I'm actually not too surprised by this: my understanding is that Murray's recent work on American class divisions is not particularly conservative and certainly not as inflammatory as The Bell Curve's musings on race/IQ linkages. I would genuinely be curious about how readers would label the controversial portions of The Bell Curve under this methodology, mostly because I'm curious how most of us would "code" arguments of that sort given contemporary political dynamics.
I do think there was some obscurantism -- sometimes deliberate -- regarding what Murray was going to be talking about at Middlebury and in other lectures. His challenged lectures were not going to be about The Bell Curve, which is widely discredited in the academic literature, but about this new class-related research, which has not been the subject of such scholarly disdain and which seems on face to fall well within the normal range of academic discourse. My initial instinct is that there's something off-putting about protesting a speaker not for what they will say, but for what they had said years ago that they will not be talking about in this lecture.
That said, I suspect part of what's going on is the idea that for a certain type of white conservative intellectual, it is impossible to discredit yourself such that you're no longer deemed a worthy entrant into public conversation; whereas for many outgroups there's a "one strike and you're out" standard where they are forever haunted by bad speeches, books, or ideas they propagated years ago (witness the treatment of Keith Ellison). The protests are an expression of the frustration that -- as Matt Yglesias put it -- "Charles Murray ... manages to be a best-selling author, in-demand speaker, have a think tank gig and be a free speech martyr."
That Charles Murray's Bell Curve work is widely discredited and generally thought of as racist claptrap;
That Charles Murray's present work -- what he currently lectures on -- is not particularly politically polarizing (and -- perhaps this is the more controversial point -- that someone who produces racist claptrap can also produce interesting arguments which fall entirely into the accepted range of ongoing political controversies);
That many people are not like Charles Murray in that we have no interest in ever looking past their bad statements, and it is not shall we say random who gets to make comebacks and who is permanently haunted by their past; and
That, however we choose to manage the tensions elucidated by observations 1 through 3, certain types of remedies (like governmental censorship or censorial disruptions) are off the table as violations of free academic inquiry.
Everyone's talking about how coastal elites are in a bubble. But many rural Americans -- who've scarcely met a Muslim or a Jew, or an African-American or an Asian -- are in a huge bubble of their own. And nobody seems all that concerned with urging them to break out, or to take seriously the views of other people unlike them. Latino Trump voters explain their votes.
A meditation by Joan C. Williams (UC-Hastings Law) on what drives "White working class" (which actually generally means middle class) voters. Basically, they feel like their is a dignity-deficit in their lives, and they hate the professional/managerial (not the rich) class. An interesting read, though I have some reservations. The anti-Semitization of racism. That's my term, but Phoebe Maltz Bovy explains how racism is beginning to resemble anti-Semitism in that it targets achievement by racial minorities and snarls about their supposed excess of power and influence.
And finally, a truly excellent letter from Missouri U.S. Senate candidate Jason Kander, a Democrat who only narrowly lost his deep red state in a big GOP year. Well worth reading if you need a jolt.
Various permutations of this essay by Miya Tokumitsu, which attacks the concept of "Doing What You Love" (DWYL), has been making the blogospheric rounds to much applause. Allow me to dissent. Tokumitsu does not do nearly enough to demonstrate a causal link between the DWYL mentality and erasure of the lives of working class. Indeed, if anything DWYL is a valuable contributor to our understanding of "work", including for the "non-creative" working class.
Summarizing and simplifying, Tokumitsu observes that there only certain classes of jobs, typically held by certain classes of people, which are even candidates to be a job one might "love". The vast majority of jobs, including jobs necessary for the maintenance of "loved" jobs, are not going to be particularly fun or intellectually stimulating no matter what we do. Therefore, DWYL is inherently classist: "labor that is done out of motives or needs other than love--which is, in fact, most labor--is erased." Meanwhile, DWYL encourages exploitation -- it is basically a way to make workers content with getting less in the way of tangible proceeds in favor of nebulous emotional satisfaction.
As someone who has in the past few years done both a job that I loved (in the classic DWYL form), and a job that, we shall say, does not fit into that category, I feel well-positioned to discuss this issue. And given that the latter job paid triple the former (loved) one, I can even speak to the trade-off between tangible and intangible job benefits.
But let's not start with me; let's start instead with the claim that DWYL is class-divisive and "erases" workers whose jobs are not candidates to be loved. Put bluntly, I'm skeptical that the wealthy need the aid of a mantra to forget about the life and working conditions of the lower classes. That's really more of the default setting. The alternative to caring about how workers feel about their jobs emotionally is not necessarily caring about what workers get out of their jobs tangibly -- it can very easily be (and historically has been) caring about neither. A similar critique can be leveled at her claim that if someone does not obtain profit from pursuing their passion, DWYL implies that the fault must be in their enthusiasm. While I've never actually heard that assertion made, I admit I'm never surprised at the capacity of some people to attribute any deficiency in the lives of the working class to their own deficiencies. Suffice to say, this tendency predates DWYL, it is not caused by it.
What DWYL recognizes is that the tangible products of a job are not sufficient to provide for fulfilling lives. One can be tangibly provided for at market rates and still not have "enough". In other words, DWYL is in many respects a (admittedly inchoate) statement about a substantive entitlements -- that we are not owed just whatever dollar amount our employer puts in our pocket, but some level of happiness, dignity, and respect out of our job. Those values should be included in our calculus of what workers are provided.
Indeed, some of her treatment of improved intangible working conditions strikes me as almost incomprehensible. She quotes Marc Bousquet as saying that the "loved" academic job environment actually presents a model for corporations:
How to emulate the academic workplace and get people to work at a high level of intellectual and emotional intensity for fifty or sixty hours a week for bartenders’ wages or less? Is there any way we can get our employees to swoon over their desks, murmuring “I love what I do” in response to greater workloads and smaller paychecks? How can we get our workers to be like faculty and deny that they work at all? How can we adjust our corporate culture to resemble campus culture, so that our workforce will fall in love with their work too?
From this analysis, she concludes "Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love."
Reading the above, one would think that the way a corporation makes people love what they do is by casting an incantation or spiking the cafeteria with hallucinogenic drugs. In reality, to make workers happy by means other than a pay raise, one has to do things that make workers happier with their jobs. Those are real benefits, not chimeras -- I'd take my less-paying but more loved job over my less-loved, better paying counterpart in a heartbeat. The trade-off isn't infinite, of course, but all that demonstrates is that neither the tangible nor intangible proceeds of work are sufficient for self-fulfillment.
Which cycles us back to those workers whose jobs are not and cannot be made loveable. We should say here that almost any job can be made, if not loveable, than at least more likeable -- by being treated fairly and with respect, for instance, or by having some security such that one isn't not in constant dread of being tossed on the street. But even to the extent these jobs lie beyond true DWYL, the concept still matters because it provides a contrast to the prevailing counternarrative -- "the value of a honest day's work." That mantra, which by my lights is far more likely to represent the real competitor to DWYL (as compared to some sort of cross-class solidarity pressing for higher salaries for everyone), cares neither whether the worker is happy or whether they getting significant tangible returns -- value comes from working whatever job the market provides at whatever rate the market pays. I'm reminded of the archetypical 50s parent who, upon hearing that his son isn't happy at work, bellows that "You hate your job? I hated my job too! That's the point of a job!"
DWYL recognizes, at the very least, that the emotional side is important -- and anytime the American cultural zeitgeist recognizes any form of substantive entitlement as necessary for a fulfilled life, I'm inclined to jump on it. And to the extent we do view DWYL as a form of substantive entitlement and we simultaneously reckon with the fact that certain people are not (and likely cannot get it), that does provide a fulcrum from which those people can leverage a claim for greater tangible benefits as compensation. Of course, I'm not saying it's a guarantee that thinking about DWYL will cause wealthier Americans to recognize the deprivations faced by their working class peers -- as I said, wealthy Americans hardly need any excuse to ignore others outside their class. But attribute the lack of cross-class consciousness to DWYL is difficult to justify.
The bottom line is that the notion that we can view work solely through the lens of the monetary returns workers get doesn't cohere to how people of any class actually view their work. We don't just want "fulfillment" or "respect", but we don't just want a dollar figure either. It's obviously true that if one is being paid little, the marginal value of each additional dollar is going to be higher compared to additional "respect" or whatnot. But that doesn't change the fact that thinking about work in a way that's helpful to workers requires a holistic approach. DWYL matters because it is a recognition about what workers are owed, and any sort of public understanding of the proceeds of work that starts from what workers deserve, rather than what the market deigns to give them, is in my book a good thing
One of the major questions that has floated around the "Occupy Wall Street" movement is the simple "what do they want?" Obviously, we can answer this in abstract terms: economic justice, easing of burdens on the lower and working classes, and (slightly more concretely) accountability for the people who got us into this mess in the first place (namely, Wall Street). But there has been very little in the way of specific policy proposals. Indeed, even the overall ideology is fuzzy -- supporters range from Ron Paulites (they are everywhere, aren't they) to socialists and communists, to mainstream unions, to some Democratic politicians, to relatively apolitical Americans who are simply overcome with frustration. My friend Matt Cole makes a decent defense of this mode of operation -- not making "demands" of the system but rather expressing itself in a more "aesthetic" or expressivist sense.
But Rorty Bomb has done some interesting work parsing the "We are the 99%" tumblr to try and figure out what the movement wants. And the results are sobering. OWS is not about mid-twentieth century liberalism -- increasing unionization leading to the suburban house and the two-car garage. Nor is it about socialist revolution -- smashing the capitalist state and redistributing power and dignity to the workers. What the 99% want, RB argues, is decidedly pre-modern -- bearing most in common with historical peasant revolts. They want to be free from the burden of crushing debt, have access to enough resources so they're not consistently living hand-to-mouth. That's it.
To people who think OWS is the first step to the opening a new horizon, this is profoundly demoralizing. There is nothing bold about these desires. They are ancient and basic; if anything, they are the result of people too downtrodden to dream of anything more.
But at the same time, the very simplicity of what is being asked for here also gives it greater moral punch. Surely, in a country as rich as ours, with the bounty we possess, we can give them this much.
Mark Perry (via) of the American Enterprise Institute trumpets a Bureau of Labor Statistics report on continued gender disparities in higher education, less to forward any sensible solutions on sending more men to college than to attack "gender activists" who will presumably ignore the results.
1. This huge gender gap will receive almost no media attention, and will be largely ignored by the gender activists.
2. There will be no calls for government studies, or increased government funding to address the “problem,” and nobody will refer to this gender degree gap as a “national crisis,” the way former astronaut Sally Ride described the gender disparity for jobs in engineering, technology, and science (women hold only 25 percent of those jobs).
3. President Obama will not address the gender degree gap by signing an executive order creating the “White House Council on Men and Boys,” like he did last year for women and girls.
4. Neither Obama, Congress, nor the gender activists in academia will address the gender degree gap by invoking Title IX gender-equity law, like they have proposed using for the gender gap in some math and science programs (see here and here).
5. Nobody will blame the gender degree gap on structural barriers from grades K–12 that discourage men from attending or graduating from college, like they do for explaining the gender gap for women in math and science.
In other words, the standard “disparity-proves-discrimination” dogma, followed by calls for government intervention, will not be applied in this case of a huge gender imbalance in college completion by age 22, because the disparity favors women, not men.
Well, not quite. Because there is are two variables that Mr. Perry is, quite predictably, missing: Race, and class.
Let's be clear -- there is a gender gap in higher education among all races (except Asians -- they're essentially even). A study from the American Council on Education found that in 2007-08, 46% of all undergraduates under age 24 are men (an 8 point gap). For White men, that figure is 47% (so a 6 point gap). For Hispanic men, it's 42% -- a 16 point gap. And for African-American men, it's 41% -- a whopping 18 percentage point gap. (There's also evidence that a college degree is worth less for people of color due to post-graduation discrimination, but that's a separate matter).
As for class, the data shows that the gender gap is intricately connected to income. Again in 2007-08, for the highest income quartile there is no true gender gap at all: 51% of White undergraduates, 52% of Asian undergraduates, and 48% of Hispanic and Black undergraduates are men. For the bottom quartile, by contrast, only 45% of Asian, 44% of White, and 42% of Black and Hispanic undergraduates are men.
The problem, in other words, isn't really with "men" as a class. White men comprise 47% of White college attendees, which isn't bad, given that men are around 49% of the population. Where things get hairy is when we focus in on men of color, and poorer men of all races. I have no trouble asserting that these classes of people are badly failed by our educational system; and that we should be more aggressive in finding tailored solutions for helping them (and there are groups working toaddress the problem).
But to frame the problem in such a way so as to assert that the men who went to, say, my alma mater (Walt Whitman HS in Bethesda, Maryland) are in a serious way disadvantaged, much less a "second sex", vis-a-vis our female peers borders on delusional -- it obscures far more than it illuminates. The men who are facing discrimination are members of the usual suspects in American society: the poor, and racial minorities. And in general, it is the progressive movement of which those maligned gender-activists are a part that have taken the lead in trying to advocate for these classes.
Ta-Nahisi Coates labels this bit two posts in one. And, this being Ta-Nehisi Coates, both are fabulous, but I want to focus on the first. It talks about an NYT article about Black men in this economy explicitly deracinating their resumes in order to compete in the job market. The debate plays out implicitly as part of Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan's recent and already famous study, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination" (94 Am. Econ. Rev. 991 (2004)), finding that, holding qualifications constant, persons with White sounding names (Greg and Emily) got more callbacks for job inquiries than those with Black sounding names (Lakisha and Jamal). So you see Black people with MBA's from the University of Chicago doing things like removing their participation in the African-American business students association, so as to not tip off employers to their skin color before it is absolutely necessary ("If they're going to X me, I'd like to at least get in the door first.").
As Adam Serwer points out, all this goes to the big lie in American society that racism is not only gone, but so far gone that being Black is an advantage nowadays. It is so obviously not true -- the empirical evidence is so overwhelming -- that it can be explained only as White folks trying to impute an unjust social order onto its victims. A study by Devah Pager Pager (The Mark of a Criminal Record, 108 Am. J. Soc. 937 (2003)) found that Black job applicants fared roughly as well as Whites with a felony conviction (again, holding qualifications even). That this effect is holding for even relatively elite Black persons (folks with MBAs, looking for management positions) is yet more support that class isn't all there is.
I wrote earlier this week about my misgivings towards the proposal to replace race-based affirmative action with its class-based kin. That post specifically tried to refute the idea that such a move would defuse White resentment over the program. I noted that historically, the motivating force behind such anger was not that it was color conscious or seemed to give Blacks an "unfair" leg up. Rather, it was the simple fact that Blacks benefited that got Whites so riled. That anger remains perfectly consistent even in totally race-neutral programs that are perceived as assisting Black folks (such as welfare).
But in the comments to the TMV version of the post, folks said that the real issue here wasn't about White resentment, but "fairness". The usual suspect -- the wealthy or middle-class Black man getting AA -- was trotted here in support. As one commenter put it:
A CLASS based affirmative action plan would help anyone who starts out unfortunately low on the totem poll, even if they happen to be white, and exclude people with more than enough means of their own, even if they happen to be black.
The underlying assumption here is that race is not an independent source of disadvantage. Blacks might face disadvantage, but that's only because they're more likely to be poor. The argument here is that a wealthy Black man is surely not "disadvantaged" compared to a poor White.
That may be true, though I think it oversimplifies things greatly. Assuming that we could create an "oppression ledger" and add up all one's privileges and disadvantages to figure out who is better off, it may well be that wealthy Blacks are in a better overall situation than poor Whites. In fact, to the extent I think the question makes sense, I'd say it's likely. But all that it shows is that wealth can mask race-based disadvantage -- it doesn't mean it's not present. And there are racial disadvantages that cannot be "bought off", such as the risk of being racially profiled (which may well go up when you transition from shopping in Wal-Mart to Saks). Or perhaps not -- maybe wealthy or better educated Blacks don't feel like the experience significant racial discrimination.* In general, I think different axes of oppression are incommensurable -- it doesn't make sense to me to try and weigh how many dollars of extra income are "worth" being dismissed as "the angry Black man" anytime you get upset about something.
But in any event, it's a flawed comparison. The question -- at least for those of us who support both race and class based affirmative action (as I do) -- is not whether rich Blacks are better off than poor Whites. You got to hold other variables constant. So the real question is, are poor Blacks equal to poor Whites? That's the proposition that advocates of class-based AA superseding its racial cousin have to demonstrate -- and it's a tough claim indeed, because most of the research does not back it up.
A solely class-based affirmative action program would presumably treat equally poor Blacks and Whites the same. But if those two groups are not the same -- if poor Blacks face additional hurdles on account of their race in addition to what they face because they're poor -- then a solely class-based system would treat them unfairly. A system which looks at oppression holistically, by contrast, can accurately measure the relatively deprivations faced by people of all blends of race, class, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, religion, and other identity axes, and would thus seem to be superior to a counterpart that focuses only on race or only on class.
* The polling data we have, however, suggests that wealthy or better educated Blacks do in fact have roughly similar opinions as to the prevelance of racial discrimination compared to their poorer or less educated peers. See Russell K. Robinson, Perceptual Segregation, 108 Colum. L. Rev. 1093, 1112-13 (2008).
In an editorial for the Washington Post, Peter Beinart thinks that Barack Obama could put the issue of race away for good if he came out for replacing race-based affirmative action with class-based programs.
I have no problem with class-based affirmative action, though I think it should supplement, not replace, its racial peer, as both are independent sources of disadvantage and both are independent sources of diversity. But even the premise is wrong here. The reason affirmative action inspires disdain isn't because it leaves "deserving" Whites out. The reason is simply that it is a program whose primary beneficiaries are seen to be Black people.
It is well established that even class-based programs which are tagged as predominantly helping Blacks have significant struggles maintaining their popularity. Welfare is a great example of this -- it is, of course, the paradigmatic class-based assistance program, and yet it is just as controversial and (more importantly) just as racialized as affirmative action is (Welfare Queens, anyone?). Affirmative action is particularly vulnerable to this, because many of the arguments deployed against it now work just as well against the class-based variety (that we should "just judge everyone based on merit" applies as much to the poor as it does to Blacks).
Advocates for class-based AA say that it would still help many Blacks, because Blacks are disproportionately concentrated amongst the extreme poor. But if that's the case, then I doubt you'll see any serious dissipation in the antipathy many Whites feel for affirmative action. The causal force is White jealousy of Black attainment. At the end of the day, the procedures don't matter all that much.
See also, Ta-Nehisi Coates: "There's always a good reason to be a racist."
***
"Sometimes I have feared that, in some wild paroxysm of rage, the white race, forgetful of the claims of humanity and the precepts of the Christian religion, will proceed to slaughter the Negro in wholesale, as some of that race have attempted to slaughter Chinamen, and as it has been done in detail in some districts of the Southern States. The grounds of this fear, however, have in some measure decreased since the Negro has largely disappeared from the arena of Southern politics, and has betaken himself to industrial pursuits and the acquisition of wealth and education, though even here, if over-prosperous, he is likely to excite a dangerous antagonism; for the white people do not easily tolerate the presence among them of a race more prosperous than themselves. The Negro as a poor ignorant creature does not contradict the race pride of the white race. He is more a source of amusement to that race than an object of resentment. Malignant resistance is augmented as he approaches the plane occupied by the white race, and yet I think that the resistance will gradually yield to the pressure of wealth, education, and high character.
My strongest conviction as to the future of the Negro therefore is, that he will not be expatriated nor annihilated, nor will he forever remain a separate and distinct race from the people around him, but that he will be absorbed assimilated, and will only appear finally, as the Phoenicians now appear on the shores of the Shannon, in the features of a blended race.
Frederick Douglass, "The Future of the Colored Race", in Negro Social and Political Thought: 1850-1920, Howard Brotz, ed. (New York: Basic Books 1966), pp. 308-310 (originally published May 1886), 309.
Megan McArdle has a really great post up on the economics of hiring ex-convicts, and how we can restructure our system to make it easier. If we want ex-convicts to stay "ex-", we need to offer them some prospect of legitimate employment after their conviction. At the moment, that's basically impossible, making criminality the rational response. That's fine if you're okay with the status quo affecting many urban men: "catch-imprison-release-catch again", where the externalities fall nearly exclusively upon "certain" communities not-us. But if we want to actually do more than than watch from the sidelines as urban communities wither, rot, and die, then we need to start looking for ways to open up the current deadland of opportunity -- even for those who, like most of us, have made some mistakes in life.
The post was done at the request of Ta-Nehisi Coates, a liberal Black male blogger who is rapidly becoming one of my favorites. He wanted a differing perspective on the topic, so he enlisted McArdle, a libertarian-leaning conservative. McArdle's ideas are certainly tinged with that philosophy, but each one of her suggestions would be something I could endorse without hesitation. Most importantly, she is cognizant of the "the moral dimension" of the issue:
I don't know about you, but I've made a fair number of spectacular moral and economic mistakes in my life. Middle class kids, though, have margin for error. It's all very well to talk about how poor kids could pull themselves out of it if they did X, Y and Z, and I happen to believe that this is correct. The problem is that the first slip a poor kid makes is usually his last--as John Scalzi said, "Being poor is having to live with choices you didn't know you made when you were 14 years old."
McArdle's suggestions are what happens when you pursue integrated social discourse with an eye towards solving problems, not burying people who feel too problematic for us to handle. McArdle's views on the world are different from mine. But she pursues the issues in good faith, with an eye towards actually fixing the problem. That type of contribution is always welcome, regardless of political persuasion.
As someone who keeps a casual eye on the stock market (and who, of course, wants a functioning economy upon graduation), obviously I'm concerned with Bear Stearns sudden collapse. When a titan that big falls, the shock waves are going to be massive no matter how swiftly the government moves to stem the damage. One hopes that our public institutions are up to that task -- but the track record of this administration hardly inspires confidence in that respect.
But the other thought that persistently nagged on me was the very fact that Bear Stearns (through J.P. Morgan and the U.S. Federal Government) was getting bailed out in the first place. Obviously, I superficially see why this is so -- if they didn't, we'd be faced with a massive economic meltdown. But something rings uncomfortable to me that the powerful are insulated from the risks that they take by virtue of their power. If I kidnap folks and enslave them, I face life in prison at least. If a corporation does it, they're faced with a fine. A stiff fine, perhaps -- but shouldn't the executives and officials who concocted this deal also face criminal charges? Cigarette companies knowingly released a poison on the market without telling anyone of the risks. Yes, they get sued -- but the CEOs aren't being arraigned for manslaughter. Powerful actors consistently get to privatize the gains and publicize the busts. It's only the little people who have to worry about their own skin.
Like Darren Hutchinson, I'm not opposed to the Bear Stearns bail-out per se. But when I see it juxtaposed against strident opposition to public aid for other folks, who haven't behaved nearly as irresponsibly as Bear Stearns and whose mistakes have not wreaked nearly the havoc on American society, I grow white with anger. All this talk about "personal responsibility" and "welfare queens" and "no hand-outs", it's utter bogus. If you matter enough, the government will be there to back you up in the end. It's merely a question of who we think matters.
I think Bitch Ph.D's review of Promises I Can Keep really offers some illuminating points about unwed mothers in inner-city, Black areas. Here's the nuts:
What [the authors] found is that the moms have mainstream, even conservative ideas of what marriage should be, and they don't want to get married if they don't trust that the men will be faithful, help provide for their children, not be abusive, etc. And that these fears are quite reasonable, given the men they have to choose from.
But. The women also have mainstream, conservative ideas about the value and importance of children--so much so that they often think of abortion as irresponsible. Which is an interesting and profound realization, I think, and one that those of us who are pro-choice would do well to think very hard about. A lot of the time we argue for abortion rights as if we were doing so on behalf of poor women; we need to realize that many poor women are not themselves pro-choice, and that if we really want to advocate for them, we should start by listening to what they have to say.
The key thing the women in this book have to say is that having kids while young and poor has been good for them. According to their own account (and the author's observations), their children have given them a reason them to straighten up their lives, grow up, and become responsible adults. Their children provide a source of love for these young women, where boyfriends, peers, and parents have so often failed them. I think most of us in the middle class think it's a little fucked up to want a child for the love that child will give you (and Edin and Kefalis say this too). But at the same time, I think those of us who have had children will say that one of the most powerful and gratifying things about parenting is precisely that experience of love. It's possible that poor young women, who are often much closer to the experience of parenting than their middle-class peers by virtue of helping raise their siblings, or seeing friends have babies, are simply more realistic about the emotional benefits of parenting than the middle class is.
The one major argument we usually offer, though, for why young and/or poor women shouldn't have children, is that doing so is economically damaging: they won't get ahead if they have kids too early. It turns out that this argument isn't true. Poor women's economic prospects are demonstrably no better if they postpone childbirth than if they have children young. In fact, there's some evidence that their lives, economically and otherwise, would be worse, as kids provide them an incentive to stop using drugs, to end abusive relationships, to get jobs, and to further their educations. Setting an example for their children, or improving their situations for their children's sake, proves to be a much more powerful motivator than doing so for themselves.
Now, I understand that some folks really don't care what happens to women once they get married, so long as the ring gets on the finger. But for the rest of us, this offers an interesting twist to the tired cliches about unwed mothers in the inner cities. It seems that these Black women aren't opposed to marriage, per se, they just have high standards about who they're want to marry in the first place. Men who are responsible, hard-working, caring, not abusive. Things everybody deserves in a spouse. Lecturing them about the evils of not being married when they have a kid, when the immediate option to marry might not be to the most attractive candidate, is both patronizing and misguided.
Sometimes lawyer, sometimes law professor, all the time awesome. Assistant Professor, Lewis & Clark Law School.
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