Society

The Black Church as an American Symbol

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Historian Benjamin Park has an excellent post on the Charleston shooting and its connection to the history of white violence against black churches. After relaying a brief history of the suppressed slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, the convictions and executions that followed, and the building of the Citadel “as a way to protect whites from the type of racial threats the AME Church posed,” Park writes,

Black churches became a central recruitment point for soldiers and a prominent pedestal for emancipation messages during the Civil War, yet they were also frequently targeted by Confederate forces. They were primary locations for mobilization during the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement—Martin Luther King Jr. even used the Emanuel Church in Charleston for meetings of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—but also venues for violent backlash, as seen with the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Sadly, these attacks continue to appear in staggering numbers today. If one were to find a central crossing point for racial conflict in America, it would be hard not to choose a church.

It is an incredible essay. Check it out.

The Charleston Attack Was Terrorism

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879 - Church
The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Original photo by Cal Sr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/13147394@N05/2761893535. Used under Creative Commons Attribution license.)

Less than 48 hours ago, a mass shooting took place at the historic  Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. Since then I have read many articles, Tweets, and statuses about this tragic attack. And, while there is still a lot we do not know[ref]And, as a general rule, I deplore the insatiable need of media consumers for speculative guesswork before there are enough facts to justify reasoned analysis[/ref], we do know this much: this was a terrorist attack motivated by racism and white supremacist ideology. From the Wikipedia entry:

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) was named by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the suspected killer… One image on his Facebook page shows him in a jacket decorated with the flags of two former nations noted for their white supremacist policies, apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia… According to his roommate, Roof expressed his support of racial segregation in the United States and had intended to start a civil war…He also often claimed that “blacks were taking over the world”. Roof reportedly told neighbors of his plans to kill people, including a plot to attack the College of Charleston, but his claims were not taken seriously.

Before opening fire, Roof spent nearly an hour with the Bible study group. According to Gawker, “Roof told police he ‘almost didn’t’ kill nine people at Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night ‘because everyone was so nice’ to him,” but eventually he said “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” With that, he opened fire “while shouting racial epithets” on the 12 unarmed worshipers. He killed nine of them and intentionally left one survivor. Two others, one a five-year old child, survived by pretending to be dead. During the carnage, he reloaded five times.

Roof was caught yesterday morning after being tipped off by Debbie Dills, who is white. Dills spotted him on her way to work in North Carolina, called her boss (who called police), and then tailed Roof for another 35 miles until police arrived and arrested him. Roof waived his extradition rights and was brought back to South Carolina where conservative Republican governor Nikki Haley has called for prosecutors to pursue the death penalty. I mention the race of Dills and the politics of Haley for a simple reason: I am deeply saddened that many people, perhaps because they are accustomed to the terminology of Critical Race Theory[ref]”White supremacy” means very different things when we’re talking about unconscious microaggressions on the one hand, and bloodthirsty executions on the other. One is not merely a more pronounced version of the other, any more than accidentally running over someone’s foot is the same thing as intentionally hitting someone with your car in an effort to kill them[/ref], seem to believe that the kind of white supremacy behind Roof’s actions is endemic within American society, or at least among white conservatives. It is not. I do not say this to defend political allies, but in the interests of bridging wounds.

I believe we are all in this together. I will not pretend for a moment that we all suffer from racism or sexism or other forms of intolerance and bigotry equally. Clearly we do not, and the long history of violent racial terrorism in the South–which is my home–should not be whitewashed or ignored. I do not believe that we should assume Roof was a lone wolf without first conducting an aggressive investigation to determine what group–if any–lent him material support or advocated his heinous course of action. Calls to take down the Confederate flag are legitimate. So are calls for white people–even those horrified by this action–to engage in some soul-searching about how we view white killers vs. black killers in the mainstream media.

I want to make it clear that in my view there is nothing ambiguous about who Roof is or what he has done. He is a monster who committed an atrocity. I am concerned that there are those who–in understandable shock and outrage, perhaps–believe that Roof has far more allies or sympathizers than he actually does [ref]I’m not saying these sympathizers don’t exist.  They do, and it’s despicable.[/ref]. I am worried that an act like this–which, although the black community obviously bears the tragic cost directly–somehow will be seen as political when it is not. In addition to the personal tragedy faced by the victims and their families, this is a blow struck against the dream of equality and tolerance and understanding, and that is a dream that I believe can be shared (or sometimes neglected) by all Americans.

I pray for Roof to face justice, for his victims to be able to find some measure of peace, and also for us as a nation to find a way to draw closer together rather than farther apart.

“My liberal students terrify me.”

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883 - Vox Liberal Students Scare Me

The full quote from this anonymous professor is:

I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me.

Through the rest of this Vox article he does his best to maintain his left-wing creds while at the same time arguing vociferously that social justice warriors have taken over college campuses and implemented an Orwellian regime of a very, very, very emotionally sensitive Big Brother.

In 2015… a complaint would not be delivered in such a fashion [as in 2009]. Instead of focusing on the rightness or wrongness (or even acceptability) of the materials we reviewed in class, the complaint would center solely on how my teaching affected the student’s emotional state. As I cannot speak to the emotions of my students, I could not mount a defense about the acceptability of my instruction. And if I responded in any way other than apologizing and changing the materials we reviewed in class, professional consequences would likely follow.

This is the elevation of subjective perception–call it post-modernism, relativism or whatever you like–over objectivity and realism. And it’s dangerous. Here’s another example (which I alluded to yesterday) from the Vox piece:

This sort of misplaced extremism is not confined to Twitter and the comments sections of liberal blogs. It was born in the more extreme and nihilistic corners of academic theory, and its watered-down manifestations on social media have severe real-world implications. In another instance, two female professors of library science publically outed and shamed a male colleague they accused of being creepy at conferences, going so far as to openly celebrate the prospect of ruining his career. I don’t doubt that some men are creepy at conferences — they are. And for all I know, this guy might be an A-level creep. But part of the female professors’ shtick was the strong insistence that harassment victims should never be asked for proof, that an enunciation of an accusation is all it should ever take to secure a guilty verdict. The identity of the victims overrides the identity of the harasser, and that’s all the proof they need.

The anonymous professor goes on to say “This is terrifying. No one will ever accept that.” And yet, as he knows too well, in at least one part of our society they already have.

Don’t get me wrong, I highly doubt that this particular brand of ideological insanity is about to take over the entire country. On a broad scale, it probably will be rejected, and soon. There’s been a steady drumbeat of articles from the left side of the American political spectrum over the last six months attempting to dismantle and/or disarm this particular section of their coalition. And it will likely succeed. Eventually. The question becomes: how much damage will be done in the interim? And also: how extensive will the rollback be? Because anyone who thinks the victory of reason is inevitable in the short run hasn’t read a lot of history. Think about the most silly, stereotypical caricature of scholasticism (the medieval philosophy known for asking questions about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin). If, at least in the minds of anti-religious progressives, that absurd and irrational philosophy could dominate the elite universities of Europe for centuries, what is their guaranty that an equally absurd and irrational philosophy will not begin its own reign in our day?

 

Six Policies to Improve Social Mobility

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A recent event panel at the Brookings Institution looked at a number of possible policy solutions to improve social mobility for children across the nation. Take notice that most deal with on-the-ground local issues:

  1. Target housing vouchers more effectively.
  2. Build public housing in low-poverty areas, instead of high-poverty areas.
  3. Reform exclusionary zoning laws.
  4. Better enforcement of fair housing rules by HUD.
  5. Invest in infrastructure.
  6. Promote school choice.

Check out the link to see the discussion.

Transgender, Transable, Transracial

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Does transgenderism conflict with feminism?

What Makes a Woman? (New York Times)

Do women and men have different brains?

Back when Lawrence H. Summers was president of Harvard and suggested that they did, the reaction was swift and merciless. Pundits branded him sexist. Faculty members deemed him a troglodyte. Alumni withheld donations.

But when Bruce Jenner said much the same thing in an April interview with Diane Sawyer, he was lionized for his bravery, even for his progressivism.

After Being TKO’d by Fallon Fox, Tamikka Brents Says Transgender Fighters in MMA ‘Just Isn’t Fair’ (Cage Potato)

Transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox earned her second straight win on Saturday, when she TKO’d Tamikka Brents in the first round at a Capital City Cage Wars event in Springfield, Illinois. Brents reportedly suffered a concussion and a broken orbital bone during the two-minute beatdown, and required seven staples in her head.

Brens said:

I’ve fought a lot of women and have never felt the strength that I felt in a fight as I did that night. I can’t answer whether it’s because she was born a man or not because I’m not a doctor. I can only say, I’ve never felt so overpowered ever in my life and I am an abnormally strong female in my own right.

Does transableism conflict with disability rights?

Becoming disabled by choice, not chance: ‘Transabled’ people feel like impostors in their fully working bodies (National Post)

When he cut off his right arm with a “very sharp power tool,” a man who now calls himself One Hand Jason let everyone believe it was an accident.

But he had for months tried different means of cutting and crushing the limb that never quite felt like his own, training himself on first aid so he wouldn’t bleed to death, even practicing on animal parts sourced from a butcher.

“My goal was to get the job done with no hope of reconstruction or re-attachment, and I wanted some method that I could actually bring myself to do,” he told the body modification website ModBlog.

His goal was to become disabled.

Is transracialism bad for racial progress?

Why Comparing Rachel Dolezal To Caitlyn Jenner Is Detrimental To Both Trans And Racial Progress (Huffington Post)

Transracial identity is a concept that allows white people to indulge in blackness as a commodity, without having to actually engage with every facet of what being black entails — discrimination, marginalization, oppression, and so on. It plays into racial stereotypes…

 

Privilege is Complex and Contextual: A Case Study

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So the BBC has an article that is probably not going to generate a ton of sympathy with anyone: The surprising downsides of being drop dead gorgeous. It’s actually a pretty great article for a serious discussion about privilege, however, because it has attributes of identity privilege (your looks are largely intrinsic and immutable, like your race or gender) but with less (not none, but less) emotional volatility.

The obvious takeaway is that being pretty is basically a good thing:

In education, for instance, Walker and Frevert found a wealth of research showing that better looking students, at school and university, tend to be judged by teachers as being more competent and intelligent – and that was reflected in the grades they gave them.

But one of the interesting things is that this privilege isn’t always beneficial. There are times and places where being pretty isn’t going to work to your advantage. And these aren’t weird, idiosyncratic hypotheticals. These are real-world situations that we all face:

And as you might expect, good-looking people of both genders run into jealousy – one study found that if you are interviewed by someone of the same sex, they may be less likely to recruit you if they judge that you are more attractive than they are.

Here’s another one:

More worryingly, being beautiful or handsome could harm your medical care. We tend to link good looks to health, meaning that illnesses are often taken less seriously when they affect the good-looking. When treating people for pain, for instance, doctors tend to take less care over the more attractive people.

That one is particularly interesting, because the mechanism is identical to a lot of the benefits of beauty. People associate beauty with health, high-functioning, etc. Usually this is good. When you’re beautiful and in pain, however, this exact same mechanism turns against you.

And another one:

And the bubble of beauty can be a somewhat lonely place. One study in 1975, for instance, found that people tend to move further away from a beautiful woman on the pathway – perhaps as a mark of respect, but still making interaction more distant. “Attractiveness can convey more power over visible space – but that in turn can make others feel they can’t approach that person,” says Frevert. Interestingly, the online dating website OKCupid recently reported that people with the most flawlessly beautiful profile pictures are less likely to find dates than those with quirkier, less perfect pics – perhaps because the prospective dates are less intimidated.

This one is interesting, because it shows that the benefits of privilege can entail their own costs. Is it possible, for example, that there’s a connection between the privilege enjoyed by white males and the fact that they have the highest risk of suicide, and often at the peak of their socio-economic power?

888 - Suicide Rate by Gender

887 - Suicide Rate by Race

886 - Suicide Rates by Age

Obviously it’s not as simple as “loneliness of being privileged = high suicide rate.” That wouldn’t explain the very high rate of suicide among American Indians nor the fact that the age group almost as likely to commit suicide as the 45-64 (when white men are typically at the height of their social power) is 85+ (when white men are generally frail and socially vulnerable). But that’s kind of my point: privilege isn’t that simple It’s not just a matter of “this attribute makes your life easier,” whether the attribute is being white or being beautiful.

This also isn’t some kind of appeal to sympathy. As I said at the outset: I hardly doubt that anyone is going to suddenly feel bad for natural born beauties. So this can hardly be construed as an argument that really it’s the white male who has it hardest of all. That’s not my point. My point is simply that privilege–even when we’re talking about identity-based privilege–is more complex and more interesting than the dominant rhetoric allows.

Is There a Difference Between Red State/Blue State Families?

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The outcomes of “red states” and “blue states” are often used to demonstrate the superiority/inferiority of whichever political ideology. But the following report on state-by-state family structures in The New York Times demonstrates the importance of proper analysis:

In the blue-state model, Americans get more education and earn higher income — and more educated, higher-earning people tend to marry and stay married. In Minnesota, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, at least 51 percent of teenagers are being raised by both biological parents, among the highest rates in the nation. (That figure excludes families in which the two parents are together without being married; such arrangements are still rare — and less likely to last than marriages.)

The lowest rates of two-parent families tend to be in states that don’t fit either model: red states with the lowest levels of education or blue states with only average levels of education.

The entire article is worth reading and is full of useful information and links on family structure and child outcomes. Check it out.

A Great Comic About Privilege

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I’ve got serious misgivings with the way “privilege” is often used in political discourse these days, where the assumption is always that it’s racial, gender, or other forms of privilege that matter most. It’s not in any way that I deny that these forms of privilege exist, but the discussion is too simplistic and too myopic. Privilege is not absolute. It’s contextual. And race and gender and sexuality and other identity-based forms of privilege aren’t the only forms that exist. They aren’t even the most important. More important? The privilege of coming from a stable, two-parent, biological family, for one, and the privilege of a low ACE-score for another.

So, although most of the folks who share this comic (and possibly the author, too) would probably disagree vehemently with me over the topic, I share it because it’s actually a very, very good example of how privilege really works:

This is just the first few panels. Click the image to go to the site and read the entire thing. It's worth it.
This is just the first few panels. Click the image to go to the site and read the entire thing. It’s worth it.

What’s really good about the comic is that it actually illustrates specific examples of privilege and, in this case, the privilege of class. The two children both have strong families, are both white, and gender doesn’t focus prominently in the storyline. Instead, it’s all about who can afford to study while in college vs. who has to shoehorn studies and menial work into the same schedule.[ref]Been there, done that.[/ref] It’s also about who has family connections that can smooth the transition into a competitive job environment, and who has to figure things out on their own.

Class is a better framework for discussing privilege than race or gender (although race-based and gender-based privilege do exist) because it gets closer to the heart of the matter: power. The trouble is that Americans don’t really like class. We’re not sure what it means and we kind of like to pretend it doesn’t exist. No one is more keen to pretend that class is not an issue then the upper-class, of course. This is one reason for the fascinating relationship of brand prominence to price.

Today, anyone can own a purse, a watch, or a pair of shoes, but specific brands of purses, watches, and shoes are a distinguishing feature for certain classes of consumers. A woman who sports a Gucci “new britt” hobo bag ($695) signals something much different about her social standing than a woman carrying a Coach “ali signature” hobo ($268). The brand, displayed prominently on both, says it all. Coach, known for introducing “accessible luxury” to the masses, does not compare in most people’s minds in price and prestige with Italian fashion house Gucci. But what inferences are made regarding a woman seen carrying a Bottega Veneta hobo bag ($2,450)? Bottega Veneta’s explicit “no logo” strategy (bags have the brand badge on the inside) makes the purse unrecognizable to the casual observer and identifiable only to those “in the know.”

One function of this kind of invisible prestige (although not the only consideration) is that it allows the most privileged to avoid attracting attention from those who are less privileged. Only their fellow elites can recognize their subtle status cues. This is also the reason that identity-based privilege is so appealing to middle- and upper-class Americans: it obscures more privilege than it reveals by quietly taking class off the table. Identity-based privilege is loud and boisterous, but it poses a negligible threat to existing socio-economic power structures. It’s about as revolutionary as a Che Guevara t-shirt.

Global Inequality Is Falling: More Evidence

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The Economist reported on a new study that finds that the “Gini coefficient of global inequality fell from 69 in 2003 to 65 in 2013. And median income rose from about $1,000 to $2,000 in just ten years.” The economists and authors of the study estimate that it will continue to plummet to 61 by 2035. As for annual income, the abstract states, “The number of people earning between US$1,144 and US$3,252 per year in 2013 prices in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms will increase by around 500 million, with the largest gains in Sub-Saharan Africa and India; those earning between US$3,252 and US$8,874 per year in 2013 prices will increase by almost 1 billion, with the largest gains in India and Sub-Saharan Africa; and those earning more than US$8,874 per year will increase by 1.2 billion, with the largest gains in China and the advanced economies.”

I’ve written about global inequality here before. Nathaniel and I have even published on the subject. This is utterly fantastic news.

New Study: Inequality and Innovation Trade-Off

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Economist Stan Veuger has an article in U.S. News on the costs of redistribution. “Traditionally more common,” he writes, “but recently under sustained assault from the left, is the view that there are tough trade-offs to be made, and that while there may be a role for redistribution, it comes at a cost: It reduces innovation and growth. A new research paper…provides new theoretical and empirical support for this view.” He explains the theory:

The capitalists receive income from the firms they own that derives from their proprietary cutting-edge technology if they recently innovated or from generally available technology if it’s been a while since they or their parents did. The workers either receive wages or become capitalists themselves by innovating and replacing the incumbents. Mark-ups on products and services based on cutting-edge technology are higher than from generally available technology, so the more innovation there is, the more income goes to the capitalists. Of course, the more productive research and development there is, the more often new entrepreneurs join the capitalist class, and the higher social mobility is – unless barriers to entry keep entrepreneurs out. And if research and development is more productive, the economy grows faster, ultimately benefiting workers as well.

Now, what does the evidence show:

To measure innovation, they look at patents granted per capita, between 1975 and 2010, in all 50 states and D.C. When they relate that measure to year-by-year measures of the income share earned by the top 1 percent, they find what their model predicts: More innovative states are also more unequal. And that’s not just because the wealthy few file more patent applications. They exploit variation in innovation driven by whether states have members of Congress on Appropriations Committees and by innovation in other states that they interact with a lot to show that such quasi-experimental variation in innovativeness, not driven by the mere presence of wealth, also actually causes inequality. But only when we measure equality as the share of income that goes to the 1 percent – broader measures of inequality are not much affected; those appear to be the product solely of some of the other trends I mentioned before, like skill-biased technological change.

However, the trade-off is more social mobility:

Remember the social mobility stuff? Well that shows up in the data as well. Areas that innovate a lot show precisely the kind of Schumpeterian dynamics that make income inequality a lot more palatable to most observers who are not of the bitterly envious variety: There may be big gaps between rich and poor, but the poor today still have a reasonable shot at becoming rich tomorrow. And do you know what areas get a lot less of both innovation and mobility? Places with tons of lobbying activity, where the incumbents keep the innovators out. All in all this research suggests that some 20 percent of the increase in the share of income going to the top 1 percent since the mid-70s was caused by innovation alone. That may not sound like that much – but of course, we can’t just eliminate only the inequality we don’t like and keep the inequality that incentivized people to innovate.

This seems to fit with the Thomas Sowell quote above: there are no solutions, only trade-offs. This new study also fits with past research on cut-throat US capitalism vs. cuddly Nordic capitalism, top earners and skill-biased technological change, and Schumpeterian profits.