Cancelling Dr. Seuss

[jimbogumbo]

The articles are about disagreements. That's called life.

Fortunately, we have these things called courts to sort out such disagreements.

[On two separate occasions my house was appraised, once by a white man and once by a black man. The latter came out with a noticeably lower value than the former. What should I have done? Begin a lawsuit for racial discrimination?]

There were tear downs in the area of the first article I sent with higher appraisals, so while it may have been life, probably not.

If you thought you were discriminated against then yes. Although, I'm guessing you felt the odds weren't good. One reason for that (shock) is that there is no long history of redlining whites out of black neighborhoods.

The beginning of redlining was under the New Deal: Government policy that in effect discriminated against blacks.

Stuck in a hotel room, so sadly too much time on this board. I'm well aware of when and how it started. I'm also well aware of how well received the practice (and similar discrimination related practices in Farm loan programs) were.

Yes. And nowadays personal problems masquerade as political problems.

Pretty well done study attached. Doesn't appear to be just a personal problem.

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/01/racial-discrimination-in-mortgage-market-persistent-over-last-four-decades/

[dismalist]

The articles are about disagreements. That's called life.

Fortunately, we have these things called courts to sort out such disagreements.

[On two separate occasions my house was appraised, once by a white man and once by a black man. The latter came out with a noticeably lower value than the former. What should I have done? Begin a lawsuit for racial discrimination?]

There were tear downs in the area of the first article I sent with higher appraisals, so while it may have been life, probably not.

If you thought you were discriminated against then yes. Although, I'm guessing you felt the odds weren't good. One reason for that (shock) is that there is no long history of redlining whites out of black neighborhoods.

The beginning of redlining was under the New Deal: Government policy that in effect discriminated against blacks.

Stuck in a hotel room, so sadly too much time on this board. I'm well aware of when and how it started. I'm also well aware of how well received the practice (and similar discrimination related practices in Farm loan programs) were.

Yes. And nowadays personal problems masquerade as political problems.

Pretty well done study attached. Doesn't appear to be just a personal problem.

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/01/racial-discrimination-in-mortgage-market-persistent-over-last-four-decades/

Sub-heading of article is: Discrimination in housing market sees decrease during same time period.

Suggests there are differences in financing terms. Nothing about causation.

It is perfectly legal to use all kinds of data about people to determine their creditworthiness, such as income, location of dwelling, and so on. Illegal to use race, gender, and so on.

Outcomes may well be different. That is neither evidence of racism nor discrimination.

It's a state of mind.

[jimbogumbo]

The articles are about disagreements. That's called life.

Fortunately, we have these things called courts to sort out such disagreements.

[On two separate occasions my house was appraised, once by a white man and once by a black man. The latter came out with a noticeably lower value than the former. What should I have done? Begin a lawsuit for racial discrimination?]

There were tear downs in the area of the first article I sent with higher appraisals, so while it may have been life, probably not.

If you thought you were discriminated against then yes. Although, I'm guessing you felt the odds weren't good. One reason for that (shock) is that there is no long history of redlining whites out of black neighborhoods.

The beginning of redlining was under the New Deal: Government policy that in effect discriminated against blacks.

Stuck in a hotel room, so sadly too much time on this board. I'm well aware of when and how it started. I'm also well aware of how well received the practice (and similar discrimination related practices in Farm loan programs) were.

Yes. And nowadays personal problems masquerade as political problems.

Pretty well done study attached. Doesn't appear to be just a personal problem.

https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2020/01/racial-discrimination-in-mortgage-market-persistent-over-last-four-decades/

Sub-heading of article is: Discrimination in housing market sees decrease during same time period.

Suggests there are differences in financing terms. Nothing about causation.

It is perfectly legal to use all kinds of data about people to determine their creditworthiness, such as income, location of dwelling, and so on. Illegal to use race, gender, and so on.

Outcomes may well be different. That is neither evidence of racism nor discrimination.

It's a state of mind.

That is why it was a pretty good article?

Also says essentially steady by race over the past 40 years.

[dismalist]

What's going on here is the assumption that differences in outcomes indicate racism or discrimination. They do not.

[jimbogumbo]

What's going on here is the assumption that differences in outcomes indicate racism or discrimination. They do not.

If you control for qualifications of applicants in your study what else would it be? Highly statically unlikely bad luck? Over a 40 year period?

[smallcleanrat]

Sorry, marshwiggle.

I misread your point about neo-Nazis.

It's my understanding the German immigrants during the period leading up to wwii were generally people trying to get away from Nazi Germany, not Nazis themselves. So, no. I wouldn't suspect the child or grandchild of a non-nazi to be any more likely than anyone else to be a neo-nazi.

That doesn't really negate what I was saying. I'm actually not sure what it's meant to negate.

[dismalist]

What's going on here is the assumption that differences in outcomes indicate racism or discrimination. They do not.

If you control for qualifications of applicants in your study what else would it be? Highly statically unlikely bad luck? Over a 40 year period?

What I said at the outset -- minimum wages locking black males youths out of the labor market and incarcerating black youth in prisons called schools.

The bad luck dished out to blacks is government policy. Not for the motive of racism, but to buy votes of others. That's discrimination.

But as I also said, that's pretty much all that's left of discrimination.

[jimbogumbo]

What's going on here is the assumption that differences in outcomes indicate racism or discrimination. They do not.

If you control for qualifications of applicants in your study what else would it be? Highly statically unlikely bad luck? Over a 40 year period?

What I said at the outset -- minimum wages locking black males youths out of the labor market and incarcerating black youth in prisons called schools.

The bad luck dished out to blacks is government policy. Not for the motive of racism, but to buy votes of others. That's discrimination.

But as I also said, that's pretty much all that's left of discrimination.

Thank you for your efforts at helping me understand your viewpoint. Where I guess we differ is that I think that's still quite a lot left.

[mahagonny]

rest

[marshwiggle]

It's my understanding the German immigrants during the period leading up to wwii were generally people trying to get away from Nazi Germany, not Nazis themselves. So, no. I wouldn't suspect the child or grandchild of a non-nazi to be any more likely than anyone else to be a neo-nazi.

Just to clarify:

Many Germans immigrated to North America after WWII. Is it reasonable for people to still worry about whether their descendants are neo-Nazis, anymore than other people?

I specifically referred to Germans who immigrated after WWII, not before. This includes people who actually fought in the German armed forces.

marshwiggle, I agree with you in principle, but I think you are drawing things a little too cleanly.

Mind you, I am talking about whether prejudice is understandable, not excusable.

To start with, the experiences of one generation influence the next. If you lost your farm or your home (which may represent years or even generations of hard work and savings) because of the internment and had to start from scratch after being released, that is going to affect your kids.

In Nanjing, there is a museum to commemorate the atrocities committed by the Japanese during WWII. Is a Chinese immigrant to North America, (or their child or grandchild), justified in being distrustful of people of Japanese descent in North America?

This is a hole with no bottom.

If your father's brother being murdered by a lynch mob is part of your family history, and you can see how the pain of that loss still affects him, that will have an impact.

It just seems a bit too glib to say, well those horrible things didn't happen to you specifically, so why do you care?

It's not about whether you "care", it's about the question of "What is the best way forward?"

I'm not always clear why people often point out that people are discriminated against for all kinds of things in discussions about racism. It sometimes comes across as someone saying "I think it's really important to support research that aims to reduce deaths from heart disease" and getting the response "Well, you know people die from all kinds of things, not just heart disease." As if the first person somehow implied that research into heart disease and only heart disease was important.

Oppression Olympics don't help matters, but neither does trying to deny or minimize other people's experiences so you can dismiss it as too trivial to be worth caring about.

Again, it's not about minimizing peoples' experiences; it's about treating people as human beings rather than as members of identity groups.

If a black police officer kneels on a suspect's neck until the person dies, is that not a big deal?
Is it less of a big deal than if a white person uses a racial slur against a black person?
Is it less of a big deal if a black person uses a racial slur against an Asian person than if a white person uses a racial slur against a black person?

OR

Are all of these things just simply bad, and everyone should be criticized for doing them?

For thousands of years, across lots of cultures, some variation of the Golden Rule has existed. "Treat others as you would want to be treated." That ideal has  been widely recognized, no matter how badly humans have been at trying to live up to it.

Laws should  created by looking at the ideal, rather than by trying to apportion blame according to perceptions of how many members of Group A were "oppressors" and how many of Group B were "victims", and what geographical and historical limits to consider, etc.

And I wasn't trying  to make a point like oh these groups had it so much worse than those groups.

My point was if you're going to say 'you never went through what they went through, so who are you to judge' then wagging your finger at other people whose experiences you yourself didn't go through seems like an inconsistency.

The "lived experience" idea is another hole with no bottom. Since no two people are identical, anyone can always claim their lived experience precludes anyone else judging their behaviour. (And it's entirely self-serving to claim one's own "lived experience" is somehow more valid, instructive, etc. than someone else's.)

The only way out is to appeal to common humanity, as the Golden Rule does, which is based on the idea that mistreatment of one person by another is easy to identify; if you wouldn't want it done to you, don't do it to someone else.

[smallcleanrat]

I think we are saying the same core thing.

I actually was going for 'all of these are simply bad and everyone should be criticized for doing them.'

My point about  the generational stuff  was that there are other explanations (not justifications) to explain why some people may have formed their own prejudices. It was meant to counter the idea that it entirely comes from things that happened too long ago to have affected them.

My point about the lived experiences thing was that 'no, you don't have to have shared exactly the same experiences to criticize someone.'  I was making the point that if someone has criticized other people plenty even without having experienced what those people have experienced they are being inconsistent if they tell other people 'you shouldn't judge because you haven't lived through what they did.' I don't think this should be applied to anyone, and it especially shouldn't be applied selectively.

I've met so many people who do this. They tell people to be more understanding and compassionate when a white person who has suffered or been raised a certain way is acting on their prejudice, but when its a non-white they are quick enough to criticize without any of the same considerations. If its wrong to make special exceptions for non-white people to criticize white people, its wrong in the other direction too.

[marshwiggle]

I think we are saying the same core thing.

I agree.

I've met so many people who do this. They tell people to be more understanding and compassionate when a white person who has suffered or been raised a certain way is acting on their prejudice, but when its a non-white they are quick enough to criticize without any of the same considerations. If its wrong to make special exceptions for non-white people to criticize white people, its wrong in the other direction too.

The point I would make here is that it isn't OK to publicly say anything prejudicial about almost any group. However, politicians, journalists, and academics can publicly say horrible things about "privileged" groups, including the universal source-of-all-evil group, straight white males, and be applauded, rather than censured.

The people who most disparage potential offense to other groups routinely and gleefully engage in it in the other direction. (And of course, the most galling is the virtue-signallers like "male feminists" who self-righteously disparage their own group, implying that somehow they themselves are thereby less evil, even though just belonging to that group makes anyone else evil.)

[smallcleanrat]

I think we are saying the same core thing.

I agree.

I've met so many people who do this. They tell people to be more understanding and compassionate when a white person who has suffered or been raised a certain way is acting on their prejudice, but when its a non-white they are quick enough to criticize without any of the same considerations. If its wrong to make special exceptions for non-white people to criticize white people, its wrong in the other direction too.

The point I would make here is that it isn't OK to publicly say anything prejudicial about almost any group. However, politicians, journalists, and academics can publicly say horrible things about "privileged" groups, including the universal source-of-all-evil group, straight white males, and be applauded, rather than censured.

The people who most disparage potential offense to other groups routinely and gleefully engage in it in the other direction. (And of course, the most galling is the virtue-signallers like "male feminists" who self-righteously disparage their own group, implying that somehow they themselves are thereby less evil, even though just belonging to that group makes anyone else evil.)

I agree there is an imbalance and that it well deserves criticism. I think the best argument against it is of the sort you describe: criticizing the whole principle of judging and condemning an entire demographic of people based on race or sex or sexuality whether the target is a 'privileged' class or not.

Though I don't think this argument is well-served by many of the common talking points. This argument does not depend on the premise that there is no more injustice and everyone who says there is must be 'manufacturing' it. This argument stands even if we can acknowledge that things can still be better.

This is where dismissing or minimizing other people's experiences can be relevant. If you are arguing that it is unfair to condemn all white people as evil based on things that happened before they were born, that's one thing. If you are arguing that people are too hung up on the slavery thing because a lot of slaves were well-treated and hey, some of them got to work inside the house, that's something else entirely.

When it comes to contemporary anger against historical injustices, I agree with the goal of acknowledging the past but focusing on moving forward. I disagree that the blame for failure to do this rests entirely on minorities. A specific act may lie in the past, but if the attitudes and prejudices which motivated those acts are still present, there's a reason to keep talking about it.

The US government didn't officially acknowledge the Japanese-American internment as unjust until 1988, and that required years of prodding from campaign groups for the government to investigate the matter. Decades after that, I still met people who would grumble about it, saying the internment was entirely justified. There were politicians post-9/11 talking about a registry or even internment for Muslim Americans as a matter of national security. They referred to the internment camps of wwii as a precedent in favor of the plan.

If instead of saying "Those past events were wrong. They shouldn't have happened and we should not let them happen again." someone (or many someones) are saying "Those past events were completely justified. I wish things could be the way they were back then." then they are contributing to keeping the relevance of historical grievances alive.

[Wahoo Redux]

Someone on Reddit just posted this:

70 bills in 27 states and that is not counting the ones that are already laws.

Many of these have a private right of action , with bounties (this means there is an end run around constitutionality with the legislature encouraging financial lynch mobs)

The penalty can be per student.

Your school can lose funding and accreditation in attempt to regulate private schools and higher ed.

Listen to this https://www.npr.org/2022/02/03/1077878538/legislation-restricts-what-teachers-can-discuss

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/states-weigh-raft-proposed-laws-limit-race-sexuality-lessons-schools-n1288108

This not not someone getting fired after posting a video .

This is some straight up fascist ****

"Across the U.S., educators are being censored for broaching controversial topics. Since January 2021, researcher Jeffrey Sachs says, 35 states have introduced 137 bills limiting what schools can teach with regard to race, American history, politics, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Sachs has been tracking this legislation for PEN America, a writers organization dedicated to free speech. He says the recent flurry of legislation has created a "minefield" for educators trying to figure out how to teach topics such as slavery, Jim Crow laws or the Holocaust. One proposed law in South Carolina, for instance, prohibits teachers from discussing any topic that creates "discomfort, guilt or anguish" on the basis of political belief.
"

[Wahoo Redux]

Book Ban in Texas

Harry Potter Book Burning in Tennessee and CRT military