Note that when Kendi talks about “racism” he’s talking about anti-Black racism specifically. I think folks try to generalize his ideas in a way that goes beyond what he actually purports to address.
[1] My Bangladeshi mom had a tinge of skepticism upon first learning my girlfriend (now wife) was from Oregon, “because they eat snakes.”
Just from what I've read, I'd again recommend Loewen's Sundown Towns. He covers the post-Reconstruction past in the early chapters; latter chapters bring it to the present day. The combination of historical data with historical testimony was very convincing to me. The Atlantic has had a number of good articles on this over the last decade. E.g.: https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=atl...
There's a lot in the employment world. A study that was really eye-opening for me was this one: https://www.nber.org/papers/w9873
I also found some manager-focused classes on implicit bias very helpful in seeing how subtle the problem gets. An online course might help you as well. And the Project Implicit tests from Harvard helped me see some of my own implicit biases, which were notably different than my conscious beliefs.
And lastly, I strongly recommend breaking one's personal filter bubble: https://medium.com/@bjmay/how-26-tweets-broke-my-filter-bubb...
That was especially valuable for me in turning academic knowledge of the past into conviction about the present. When I listen to the daily lived experience of other people, it eventually became obvious to me that the same forces were at work. Racism has been diminished, and most racists know they can't speak openly [1]. But the problems have never gone away. As Faulkner said, "The past is never dead. It's not even past."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy#Evolution_(1...
The Implicit Association Test at Age 21: No Evidence for Construct Validity [0]
> The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is 21 years old. Greenwald et al. (1998) proposed that the IAT measures individual differences in implicit social cognition. This claim requires evidence of construct validity. I review the evidence and show that there is insufficient evidence for this claim. Most important, I show that few studies were able to test discriminant validity of the IAT as a measure of implicit personality characteristics and that a single-construct model fits multi-method data as well or better than a dual-construct models. Thus, the IAT appears to be a measure of the same personality characteristics that are measured with explicit measures. I also show that the validity of the IAT varies across personality characteristics. It has low validity as a measure of self-esteem, moderate validity as a measure of racial bias, and high validity as a measure of political orientation. The existing evidence also suggests that the IAT measures stable characteristics rather than states and has low predictive validity of single behaviors. Based on these findings, it is important that users of the IAT clearly distinguish between implicit measures and implicit constructs. The IAT is an implicit measure, but there is no evidence that it measures implicit constructs.
The Creators of the Implicit Association Test Should Get Their Story Straight [1]
> The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.
Psychology’s Favorite Tool for Measuring Racism Isn’t Up to the Job [2]
[0] https://replicationindex.com/2019/02/15/iat21
[1] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/iat-behavior-problem...
[2] https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-...
What I said is that it was helpful to me personally. Which it was, in that it helped me recognize my own implicit anti-black bias. Unless you'd like to prove that the whole concept of unexamined biases is 100% unreal, please move along and let people have a discussion untainted with irrelevant interruptions.
It is also true that people are skeptical of different foods period. But more than one thing can be be happening at once.
Skepticism of foreigners and the food they eat is universal to human societies. Enslavement of a distinct minority group, amounting to 1/8 of the population, for hundreds of years, and the social and economic consequences that remain when slavery ends and the groups must subsequently live alongside each other, is sui generis. It's not analytically useful to look at both things through the same lens. The causes, consequences, dynamics, and solutions are more or less completely different.
Skepticism of Chinese food ingredients is much better understood through the lens of the experience of prior generations of immigrants: Germans, Irish, Italians, etc. Anti-German antagonism in World War II accelerated uptake of English in German-speaking communities in the midwest and caused people to change their names; JFK's candidacy was met with charges of Popery; and people were actually quite skeptical of Italian food and unfamiliar ingredients like garlic.
That you keep building straw men out of what I say makes me think this is not a great use of my time.
That is not in fact my basic premise.
My basic premise, is, as I said: "it's worth asking both questions: Is racism really at play? And given America's lasting, endemic racism, is there reason to think something makes it absent in a given case?"
If America's history of racism were somehow only limited to Black people, then perhaps we could dismiss out of hand the notion that said racism could have something to do with a fact-free hysteria about "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome". But that's demonstrably not true.
Note that I've never said the two things are necessarily linked. I'm just saying that we can't presume a priori that racism isn't involved. We shouldn't assume that it is, but we mustn't assume that it isn't.
Yes, and this premise is flawed. You’re thinking of “racism” as one phenomenon weaving together the enslavement of Black people and skepticism about Chinese food. My point is that this is not a useful way to understand what’s happening.
Look at it this way. In Bangladesh, where I’m from, we also have many negative stereotypes of Chinese food. My impression is that such sentiments are common across the sub-continent. But obviously we don’t share what you’re calling “America’s lasting, endemic racism.” What you’re calling anti-Chinese racism is an expression of the xenophobia that exists in nearly every human society.
Anti-Black racism in America is completely different. It didn’t cause slavery. It was constructed to justify slavery and colonization: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/europe.... There is a superficial similarity, insofar both involves in-group versus out-group antagonism. But anti-Black racism isn’t just one expression of the ordinary out-group antagonism that exists all over the world. It’s something quite distinct.
Is that related to a broad human tendency to xenophobia? Sure. But that xenophobia is channeled through and reinforced by cultural elements. Many societies demonstrate racism, but none of them demonstrate it exactly equally to everybody else. Like it or not, there's a history and a structure here, and I think it's worth studying.
I understand that a lot of people have the hobby of pretending racism is a much smaller problem, or perhaps no problem at all. But since those people have been consistently wrong in the US for the last couple hundred years, I don't aim to devote a lot of energy to taking them seriously.
It is justified with following reasoning. If:
1. I trust that my body will enjoy the taste of well-prepared food from healthy fresh ingredients, and will inform me when I ate enough.
2. MSG makes anything taste better.
It follows that:
3. With MSG added, my body can be fooled into eating unhealthy food and it can be fooled into wanting more food than it needs.
4. All else equal, I will assume that a chef who does not use MSG is more skilful than a chef who does.
This logic may well be faulty, superstitious, misinformed, etc., but what it is not is racist.
(Addendum: “Chinese restaurant syndrome” is a different thing though, and unlike basic distaste for MSG it does give off an antagonistic vibe. It’s interesting that it happens in the US of all places—I bet many people around the world associate MSG first and foremost with snacks from American brands like Pringles.)
The majority of people have only leared on a superficial level of of the intertwined racism of America's past - often times mostly the light touches they learned in elementary school. And what's taught in elementary school is intentionally simplified to something deemed appropriate for children. Some summary of slavery is bad, MLK, Rosa Parks, sit-ins...
Most people don't actually learn anything about American's history and ties with racism at an adult level. So instead people think they know the history of it, and as a result think (based on what they've learned) it's overblown.
Anyone I know who has actually taken time as an adult to read about American history and its relationship with racism, comes away with a very different view point.
It's so intertwined it's incredible.
And it's no coincidence that I learned this in a suburban school with a student body that was 1% black. In a state that was 14% black. And that had a long history of racial exclusion and white flight.
I'm shocked now at how one-sided my initial education was on this. Shocked, but not surprised.
That is no reason at all to erase the deep endemic racism or the harm it causes daily to people. "You would be even more fucked in Japan" does not make anything better.
If not, then I think a focus on the US's particular brand of racism is warranted.
I do agree with you that it is fairly remarkable that the US is as stable as it is given the large mix of cultural views and values... but that doesn't let us off the hook for the problems we do have.
I would recommend looking into the treatment of the Indigenous in Canada [0].
https://samharris.org/can-pull-back-brink/
(I link Sam Harris because of his bigger point about people echoing talking points completely divorced from the data, as you have done. You can check his data sources.)
... and then he goes on for many paragraphs about several police shootings of black men, and how awful and unjustified they are, so... he seems to agree after all that this is a problem? Finally, he tries to muddy the waters by essentially claiming black people seem to "deserve it" more, because apparently black people are involved in more crime than white people? Which, again, doesn't seem to be very well supported by data.
So... I don't really get why you're using this link to try to refute what I said, because it does not do that, at least not in a logically consistent, evidence-based manner.
> But your claims aren’t back by data either.
I believe they are. Let's look at some actual data that we can easily read, rather than attempting to extract something useful from a meandering 15,000 word podcast transcript that rambles on forever.
This[0] shows that out of all US police shooting deaths from 2107 through now, 27% were of black people, and 49% were of white people. But black people only make up only 13% of the US population, while white people make up 60%, so that sounds pretty disproportionate against black people to me.
But this data is only for shooting deaths; likely someone like George Floyd, for example, wouldn't be counted in that data as he wasn't shot.
So let's take a look at this study[1] from last year (reported on here[2]) that suggests blacks are 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than whites.
I could go on, but I'll let you educate yourself further if you're so inclined; "police killings statistics by race" is the search I used.
> people echoing talking points completely divorced from the data, as you have done.
I don't believe that's what I've done; Harris' own views seem completely divorced even from what little data he presents, if one can be expected to actually find data in that nightmare of a transcript.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-de...
[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/116/34/16793
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-06/race-and-...
I don't think you're being fair to what he said. He said that black communities have higher crime rates, which should rightly deserve more police attention, hence their interaction with police on a per capita basis would increase.
You seem to be implying that cops are, subconsciously or not, more interested in using deadly force against black people than white people. The data you're using from statista seems to have many equally plausible explanations, but you've chosen to only accept the racism one.
"Interaction" is one thing; police killing people is another.
(An aside: if we dig deeper to figure out why black communities often have higher crime rates... welp, there we go again, it usually boils down to some form of systemic racism.)
> ... but you've chosen to only accept the racism one.
Why do you feel the need to steer people away from racism as a cause? Nowhere did I say that racism is the "only" thing; please don't put words in my mouth. But it is, by and large, the root of the majority of the problem.
I've already spent more time than I care to on this topic, so I'm not going to go digging again, but if you look at studies around general police behavior (who they are interested in, who they detain, how long they detain them, stats around escalation, arrest vs. warning rates for same offense, etc.), it's pretty clear that police target -- whether consciously or subconsciously -- non-white people, and black people in particular. You can call that "bias" or "prejudice" or whatever you want; I call it racism.
But regardless, bottom line: black people are killed by police at a disproportionately large rate when compared to people of other races. That is what the data shows, plain and simple. I'm not really interested in quibbling over vague claims that racism has little or nothing to do with it, as that's clearly false. If you want an acknowledgement that racism isn't 100% the entire picture, then sure, ok, fine. (Though you don't seem particularly interested in venturing forth any suggestions or data pointing to other causes, so I question your motives here.) But racism is a huge contributor to these disparities. If tomorrow we could magically eliminate racism from everyone's mind, I guarantee you ant disparities would be so small as to not really garner anyone's attention.
So here's my question for you: what are those other non-racism causes of this disparity? And if you can name some, do the causes of those causes not actually boil down to systemic racism in the end?
I understand why it feels that way, but all this data does is show correlation. As soon as you attempt to draw any meaningful conclusions about causation, the data is lacking.
I think the focus on racism is detrimental to the truth because it forces a feedback loop: we're tracking the race of victims of police shootings so that we can show more correlation that feeds back into the same narrative that racism is the problem. There's no data that shows poverty level, education level, etc. in these shooting statistics. If being poor increased your chances of being shot by the police, it would certainly explain the numbers, but since we're only interested in the race variable, we'll never know.
A couple of the books that turned me around here: Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", a history of racist ideas. And Loewen's "Sundown Towns", a look at the wave of ethnic cleansing during the Nadir that happened across America. I had known about the Tulsa Massacre, but what I didn't know was how common smaller-scale events were for decades.