• This is a political forum that is non-biased/non-partisan and treats every person's position on topics equally. This debate forum is not aligned to any political party. In today's politics, many ideas are split between and even within all the political parties. Often we find ourselves agreeing on one platform but some topics break our mold. We are here to discuss them in a civil political debate. If this is your first visit to our political forums, be sure to check out the RULES. Registering for debate politics is necessary before posting. Register today to participate - it's free!

Slavery Reparations

Huey Freeman said:
1. Individualism in a pillar of white supremacy.
Click to expand...

You should really learn to separate things that are sometimes, or even often, used by white supremacists from thing that are exclusively representative white supremacists.

I should hope individualism is a pillar of freedom and liberty - the ability for one person to do what they want, when they want (within reason), as opposed to only being allowed to do what the government allows you to.

Like, this is the 2nd time where I agree with like 60-80% of what you're saying, but then you ****ing nuke the entire field instead of using a more strategic strike.
 
TurtleDude said:
She's also a hack academic.
Click to expand...

DiAngelo also highlights this in her research. She states that white people believe they know more about racism than someone who has spend their entire professional career studying it. White people have a disdain for experts. It's quite a pity, too. The same people who discovered the atom, eradicated polio, and went to the moon have regressed into simpletons who reject science and facts for conspiracy theories and innuendo. If you want to open up a thread to discuss individualism and white supremacy, have at it. But, out of respect for this thread, I won't be discussing this topic in this thread.
 
calamity said:
Many, perhaps most, solutions do tend to create more problems than they solve. The law of good intentions. But, we've also seen what happens when we do nothing. The perfect example is emancipation. The problems created by freeing every single slave in all the rebel states, in an instant, by decree, were legion. But, I doubt a single rational person on this forum would argue that we should not have freed all the slaves in an instant, by decree.
Click to expand...

When you end slavery by degree, you put an end to a series of crime. You don't need special knowledge about the consequences of the policy, nor about the treatment of slaves to justify it. The justification is embodied in the 14th amendment: it's a matter of core moral principle that all individuals be granted the same rights and be regarded as equal before the law. It is also a very obvious instance of a crime, once you adopt the principle. There is nothing implicit, subconscious or hard to measure about policies that allow you to own people: it's public information, backed by law enforcement and courts anyone can see.

The policies I criticize have far more expansive goals: they seek to redress every tort the limitations of humankind and the hardship of nature has thrown in the lives of some more so than in the lives of others. Back in the 1860s, it might have been possible to know exactly who benefited from slavery, who suffered and to find some way to compensate victims. Even if it would have been imperfect, it was at least doable. Over 150 years later, it is extremely dubious anyone has any idea how to find victims, beneficiaries and to pin down the right amount of transfers or even anything close to it.

My point is that if you want to help people in difficult situations, you might indirectly get closer to this goal of compensating for slavery and past discrimination by applying programs based on social and economic conditions than on focusing your attention on specific subsets of the population.
 
TheEconomist said:
When you end slavery by degree, you put an end to a series of crime. You don't need special knowledge about the consequences of the policy, nor about the treatment of slaves to justify it. The justification is embodied in the 14th amendment: it's a matter of core moral principle that all individuals be granted the same rights and be regarded as equal before the law. It is also a very obvious instance of a crime, once you adopt the principle. There is nothing implicit, subconscious or hard to measure about policies that allow you to own people: it's public information, backed by law enforcement and courts anyone can see.

The policies I criticize have far more expansive goals: they seek to redress every tort the limitations of humankind and the hardship of nature has thrown in the lives of some more so than in the lives of others. Back in the 1860s, it might have been possible to know exactly who benefited from slavery, who suffered and to find some way to compensate victims. Even if it would have been imperfect, it was at least doable. Over 150 years later, it is extremely dubious anyone has any idea how to find victims, beneficiaries and to pin down the right amount of transfers or even anything close to it.

My point is that if you want to help people in difficult situations, you might indirectly get closer to this goal of compensating for slavery and past discrimination by applying programs based on social and economic conditions than on focusing your attention on specific subsets of the population.
Click to expand...

Nah, it's pretty easy to see how anyone with brown skin suffers discrimination in this country. Remember, this is the country full of people so stupid that they mistook a Sikh for a Muslim and killed him.
 
TurtleDude said:
She's also a hack academic.
Click to expand...

Hardly.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism
content

Robin J. DiAngelo


But, I can see why some would think that. :roll:
 
Huey Freeman said:
1. Individualism is a pillar of white supremacy.
Click to expand...

It might not occur to you, but fascism and related political doctrines on the far right are fundamentally collectivist doctrines in the sense that they put whatever group to which they belong first. The individualist point of view takes it as axiomatic that the proper orientation of a society, the directing principle behind the structure of its institutions, laws, and the government is to benefit the individual. An ethnic group has absolutely no moral status in this world. In this world, black people, white people, and others have no interest of their own, short of the sum of potentially very heterogeneous interests of their respective members. It cannot place any legitimate claim on how to govern society.

In my world view, when someone talks about something like "protecting" "white people" from "others," this person might as well make a series of meaningless and incongruent noise. It doesn't make any sense because "white people" cannot present grievances that can be addressed. In this world, when a group of people who speak in a certain language and would want to protect it, they cannot explain that their language is threatened and must be protected. Again, groups aren't moral entities; individuals are moral entities. Racism is incongruent with my world view.

When Di Angelo talks about "whites" as if it was a coherent body of people, someone, coordinating themselves to put down black people, I am puzzled as to what kind of mechanism he has in mind that allows millions to coordinate themselves across all sorts of boundaries, physical as well as social, almost without fault. At every turn, efforts to coordinate groups of people into pursuing a shared goal can be derailed as shared goals may conflict with the vast array of goals individual members do not share. Even in a world where everyone is racist and would openly declare to desire moving forward with explicitly racist business strategies and policies, there are no guarantee intentions will turn into outcomes, especially when the said racist intentions imply large costs to the decision-makers. I would venture into saying this is a plausible explanation for why businesses in the Segregated South or under the Apartheid Regime in South Africa often violated racist policies in spite of threats of large fines and other penalties while government implemented racist policies: it's costly for many businesses in a competitive environment because race has nothing to do with competence, but it was cheap on political capital to vote in place racist laws in these conditions for politicians.

Individual intentions and social outcomes are not trivially related. As Engels put it in the 19th century, "what emerges is something no one wills." There is a very long line of theoretical developments in economics hammering this point home repeatedly under the name of the "problem of aggregation." Arrow's theorem shows moving from individual preferences to social preferences will either yield inconsistent preferences or will be identical to the preferences of one person. You can also find a proof in Mas-Collel, Whinston, and Green (the PhD microeconomics textbook almost everyone uses) of what it takes to model the entire demand side of a market as if it was the demand of just one household. It's related to the income effect -- basically, the distribution of income must not matter so that looking at the average is enough. A similar logic applies to the idea of approximate aggregation in Kursell and Smith (1998). The whole literature on agent-based modeling as well as the literature on heterogeneous versions of DSGE models are rooted in the idea you cannot reduce everything down to a set of intelligible intentions. And, of course, we have game theory where even things first-year undergrads can understand will show outcomes that look stupid and that no one likes can happen. In fact, in virtually every branch of economics, even you twist conventional methods to allow for greater realism, the presumption is that systemic forces matter.

Huey Freeman said:
2. You are correct that your taxes fund the federal government. And, lest you forget: so do mine and other people of color including the "illegals" you like to rail against.
Click to expand...

I never ranted about illegal, but alright.
 
calamity said:
Nah, it's pretty easy to see how anyone with brown skin suffers discrimination in this country. Remember, this is the country full of people so stupid that they mistook a Sikh for a Muslim and killed him.
Click to expand...

1. Identifying and measuring racism is not easy. We cannot just assume that absent racism, outcomes along any variable would show the same distributions for all ethnic groups. People do not all have the same skills nor the same idea of what constitutes a good life and most of what matters involve some degree of self-selection. To make a believable case, you need two things in my view: (1) statistical evidence suggesting that, after controlling for other factors, outcomes do seem to differ across groups and (2) enough contextual knowledge to know how discrimination can operate. It's not easy to do it right and, sometimes, it might be impossible to do it right because you don't have the information.

2. Even if people are stupid and racist, it's not obvious that the outcome will be discriminatory. One problem is that race doesn't determine competence, so adding that constraint to the mix of things a business tries to do will almost always cost something. It's not stupid to think there are conditions where racism will be weeded out by competition, even in markets that might not seem competitive at first glance. It actually happened in the past too, in way more racist conditions.

3. Your point does have some merit. This one is complicated to understand, but you can come up with models where seemingly stupid behavior doesn't die out even in the long run. Delong and others (1990) made a model of financial markets with investors that use information optimally and others who just extrapolate recent events. The complicated interplay between price dynamics and the strategies of smart and dumb investors make it possible for the dumb investor to make enough money to get people to adopt this strategy, even in the long run. In short, point (2) doesn't always work, though it seems to work in very many conditions.
 
Huey Freeman said:
DiAngelo also highlights this in her research. She states that white people believe they know more about racism than someone who has spent their entire professional career studying it.
Click to expand...

Of course, she would dismiss the critique out of hand as a further instance of racism. It's quite the curious statement to claim she knows what all or even most white people believe and why they believe it. However, you can excuse the suspicion of people by looking at certain facts. Many surveys of political opinions in the academia show most social departments, with the exception of economics, to be very heavily slanted to the left. Rampant racism is a very convenient narrative for those people and we know all humans are subject to confirmation biases. Moreover, many "hoax articles" were sent to prominent journals in social sciences covering topics such as feminism, sexuality, and postmodern philosophy and they were accepted, sometimes without revision...

I agree it's better to look at what Di Angelo actually wrote than to just assume she's clueless because she studies social sciences. However, I doubt it has anything to do with racism. It's plausible most people react badly to her work because it's social science and social science is not seen as credible. It certainly doesn't help if she tries to defend her work as you put it, pulling ranks and calling other people bigots and ignorants, requiring them to bow down before her "expertise."
 
TheEconomist said:
1. Identifying and measuring racism is not easy. We cannot just assume that absent racism, outcomes along any variable would show the same distributions for all ethnic groups. People do not all have the same skills nor the same idea of what constitutes a good life and most of what matters involve some degree of self-selection. To make a believable case, you need two things in my view: (1) statistical evidence suggesting that, after controlling for other factors, outcomes do seem to differ across groups and (2) enough contextual knowledge to know how discrimination can operate. It's not easy to do it right and, sometimes, it might be impossible to do it right because you don't have the information.

2. Even if people are stupid and racist, it's not obvious that the outcome will be discriminatory. One problem is that race doesn't determine competence, so adding that constraint to the mix of things a business tries to do will almost always cost something. It's not stupid to think there are conditions where racism will be weeded out by competition, even in markets that might not seem competitive at first glance. It actually happened in the past too, in way more racist conditions.

3. Your point does have some merit. This one is complicated to understand, but you can come up with models where seemingly stupid behavior doesn't die out even in the long run. Delong and others (1990) made a model of financial markets with investors that use information optimally and others who just extrapolate recent events. The complicated interplay between price dynamics and the strategies of smart and dumb investors make it possible for the dumb investor to make enough money to get people to adopt this strategy, even in the long run. In short, point (2) doesn't always work, though it seems to work in very many conditions.
Click to expand...

I grew up white and male. Not for one second do I ever believe the lies that this is not a huge advantage and was not the primary reason for my success, over those of similar background and other attributes not white or male. I see evidence of it every day...and, I have seen it for each of them for the past 50 years.
 
calamity said:
Hardly.

White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism
content

Robin J. DiAngelo


But, I can see why some would think that. :roll:
Click to expand...

She's a hack and other academics-people who have degrees in far more substantive fields, have taken her idiocy to task. She is a hack academic at a nowhere institution
 
Huey Freeman said:
A cop-out? As opposed to what? As opposed to saying "ROBIN IS WRONG!!!!!!!!" without explaining why or how she is wrong? Please. If you don't want a lazy "cop-out" response, don't give one yourself.
Click to expand...

He is afraid to answer that white people benefit from systemic racism in this country and that no black person can truly attain Individualism is a white supremacist institution.
 
TurtleDude said:
She's also a hack academic.
Click to expand...

Another non-answer answer... LOL Try providing some relevant counter-points or admit that you have nothing.
 
Bodhisattva said:
Jack just got OOOOWNED!!! :lol:
Click to expand...

Wow, you really are bored, a spelling error of someone's name is getting owned? That's really stupid even if you don't believe it
 
TurtleDude said:
Read this and get back to me. Guilty white sociologists rank rather low in the pecking order of serious academic disciplines. Near the bottom.

The Problem with 'White Fragility' Theory - Quillette
Click to expand...

White people are racist... that is not even debatable. It is Institutionalized. How many white people have you ever seen admit that they were racist? None, it is because they are unable to look at things objectively.

TurtleDude said:
Wow, you really are bored, a spelling error of someone's name is getting owned? That's really stupid even if you don't believe it
Click to expand...

Not just the spelling mistake, Mate... but his deflection attempt and inability to understand the premise of the argument.
 
TurtleDude said:
She's a hack and other academics-people who have degrees in far more substantive fields, have taken her idiocy to task. She is a hack academic at a nowhere institution
Click to expand...

As a STEM person myself, I also tend to look down on liberal arts like degrees. But, it doesn't take away from the fact that she has a published book which is held in high esteem, not to mention it hits the nail right on the head, as the gaslighting above makes clear.

On the Defensive: Navigating White Advantage and White Fragility - Los Angeles Review of Books!

White Fragility is a state in which even a minimum amount of racial stress becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves. These moves include the outward display of emotions such as anger, fear, and guilt, and behaviors such as argumentation, silence, and leaving the stress-inducing situation.

There rages among antiracists and those who imagine that we are past all that a pretty fierce debate over the merits of asking people to confront, in an organized way, the advantages accruing to them as whites. On the right, DiAngelo is already attacked, as is critical whiteness studies generally. Indeed, one perverse dimension of such venomous attack is an ability to perpetually gin up outrage and white fragility around academic studies of whiteness as if it were a new and intolerable thing, a quarter century after the first such attacks. Now that DiAngelo’s book has appeared on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list, she is almost certain to become the outrage du jour.
Click to expand...
 
TurtleDude said:
do you know the background of the person who praised her work?
Click to expand...

There are a lot of people praising her work. But, the guy writing the article has a PHD from Northwestern.
 
TurtleDude said:
mainly marxists and class/race warfare types
Click to expand...

sounds defensive to me...dare I say, White Fragility.

The guy who wrote the article has a PHD from Northwestern.


Interesting to me though is that pointing out White Privilege always leads to these "collectivist" type arguments. It's like a fear that the White free ride may end. I guess.
 
calamity said:
sounds defensive to me...dare I say, White Fragility.

The guy who wrote the article has a PHD from Northwestern.
Click to expand...

so what-he's a marxist who is part of the white guilt movement. It is a fringe movement in a field of study that isn't exactly seen as rigorous.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom