But someone brought up that people won’t be interested in discussing outcomes because they will always assign outcomes to laziness, lack of ambitions, ‘values’, etc. etc.

Well, that’s the point. The above is more indicative of class prejudices than race prejudices, but the two are intertwined, especially in America where racial history has created a sort of class unconsciousness completely out of sync with the rest of the First World. Not merely because racial issues ‘divide the working class’ - in other words throw the blue collar racist in a trailer-shaking tizzy. I could count on one hand the nations that are as fixated on race as America is; I won’t even count the damn thumb as a finger. This fixation can be good, in contrast to societies where racism can be completely invisible, but it has also helped foster an eagerness to blame the victim within those who would otherwise stand to bear the shit end of that particular stick. That’s why ‘true blue progressives’ who proudly stick only to economic issues piss me off. Economic issues are economic ISSUES like hell in America because racism legitimized classism.

I understand the need for subtlety. A bad example could set things back against a primarily white student audience. I remember a discussion a while back that suggested the ‘First World’/'Third World’ labels to be racist. The term, strictly applied, refers to Cold War alignment, but in popular usage usually refers to standard of living. South Korea and Singapore are still thus ‘Third World’. As a Third Worlder myself, under this label, I must honestly say that I have no problem with this usage - and I assure you I am no appeasing twinkie - mainly because having to say ‘Western democracies’ all the time makes one sound like an affectatious buffoon. (It’s a safe bet that any essay that contains the words ‘Western society’ in its opening sentence, when the topic doesn’t directly pertain to such international issues, can be pissed on and actually be improved as a result.) Needless to say, my predominantly white classmates reacted with the strongest derision and incredulousness, before they went back to failing the course.

Then again, some don’t deserve subtlety. We should teach detailed, real world examples that show racism today. Many of them.

When predicting the outcome of most elections, I regard partisan distinctions to be more predictive than racial ones. Amp and Rachel emphasize the demoralized status of black Democrats, but do not distinguish it from the demoralized status of white Democrats. The next time a black Republican faces a white Democrat for election to a statewide office in Mississippi, I’d bet on the black Republican; I surmise Amp and Rachel would bet on the white Democrat.

You surmise incorrectly, regarding my views (and regarding Rachel’s as well, I suspect).

In short, I suspect the magic wand would not work to change electoral outcomes in Mississippi, but it might work to change incarceration status in Nazi Germany.*

I think you’re focusing too closely on the deliberately ridiculous Nazi example, while ignoring my larger argument, which is that the “magic wand” argument has the effect of ignoring historical context (such as the context I discussed in #58). In the short term — which is what I thought we were talking about — waving a wand and turning Rabbi Hirschberg into a gentile doesn’t unlock any locks. In the long term, could such a magic wand create changes? Maybe, but so could it in the South.

Suppose someone could wave a magic wand and wipe out all race from Americans. Would that change electoral outcomes in Mississippi? I think it obviously would - maybe not in time for 2008, but certainly over the next couple of decades. Right now only people who use magic wands to ignore history can pretend that the election patterns in the South have no relationship to race at all. If race was entirely wiped out, whites would have less reason to vote Republican, and more white votes would be up for grabs. Both parties would inevitably react by altering their policies to become more attractive for those newly grabbable votes.

Would this lead to the Democrats winning more often? I don’t know. But it would lead to whichever party wins having a different policy and rhetoric than they do today. To think otherwise is to think that race isn’t a factor at all in current policy and rhetoric, which isn’t a plausible view, imo.

(Meanwhile, the newly white people would still be systematically disadvantaged by class — and a significant amount of the reason they’d have less money would be the racism that went on before the wand-waving. Etc, etc. I just think that pretending that a magic wand example is meaningful shows a very limited understanding of how racism has impacted people in US history.)

Yes, race matters. Yes, minority status matters. I nevertheless see a distinction between the role of race in contemporary Mississippi politics and the role of race in Nazi death camps.

So do I. Sorry if you read me as saying otherwise.

I still think that the current political situation in most of the South — in which the black community’s vote is not only irrelevant, but is known to be irrelevant, and is likely to continue being that way for the foreseeable future — can reasonably be described as institutional racism.

Poof. I just waved my magic wand (well, Steph’s magic wand, but she won’t mind.) Every Southern black person just turned white.

Are their votes now more relevant?

If the answer is “no”, then how is this an example of racism, rather than an example of being a Democrat in Mississippi sucks?

Hey, that’s neat - let me try it.

Yet this didn’t magically release them from the camp.

Why not?

In the 1970s Congress passed laws benefitting minorities in securing government contracts and licences. Fullilove v. Klutznick, 448 U.S. 448 (1980); Metro Broadcasting v. FCC, 297 U.S. 547 (1990). Was this an example of a majority (predominantly white congressmen) willingly disadvantaging their side to promote the interests of a minority (non-white people)? Or, given that most non-white voters in the 1970s were Democrats, and that Congress was controlled by the Democrats, was this an example of a majority (Democrats) willingly advantaging their side at the expense of a minority (Republicans)?

Well, both. A commentor may focus on either dynamic, but the choice reveals more about the commentor than about the situation. Perhaps significantly, I often hear congressmen talking about party-line votes but rarely them talk about ethnic-line votes. That suggests to me that congressmen regard votes more heavily from a partisan basis than from a racial one.

When predicting the outcome of most elections, I regard partisan distinctions to be more predictive than racial ones. Amp and Rachel emphasize the demoralized status of black Democrats, but do not distinguish it from the demoralized status of white Democrats. The next time a black Republican faces a white Democrat for election to a statewide office in Mississippi, I’d bet on the black Republican; I surmise Amp and Rachel would bet on the white Democrat. Perhaps time will tell.

In contrast, what variables proved to be predictive of who would be incarcerated in Nazi Germany? I’m no expert, but I understood that ethnic affiliation seemed to be one, whereas party affiliation did not. I’d be surprised if the Nazis never released anyone from custody after the prisoner was able to demonstrate that he was not a Jew (or a gypsy or a member of whatever suspect category they were hunting at the time). In short, I suspect the magic wand would not work to change electoral outcomes in Mississippi, but it might work to change incarceration status in Nazi Germany.*

Yes, race matters. Yes, minority status matters. I nevertheless see a distinction between the role of race in contemporary Mississippi politics and the role of race in Nazi death camps.

[*Historically leaders have been tempted to seize the property of rich minority groups, just as Henry VIII seized properties belonging to the Catholic Church or Putin seized the property of the oligarchs. Thus, while I suspect the Nazis’ antisemitism was sincere, if a magic wand changed all the Jews into some other affluent minority group, there may be strategic reasons to suspect that the Nazis would have targeted them anyway.]

For the non-statistics folks reading this thread, i’ll quickly explain something to alleviate confusion:

“Significance” means two different things.

ONE meaning of significance” is that a given result is important. this is the “layperson’s definition”.

ANOTHER meaning of significance is that a given result is very unlikely to have occurred by chance. this definition is commonly used in statistics.

So something can be very, very statistically significant (e.g. we can be 99.995% sure that the difference between two groups is not random) but NOT necessarily be very, very, important in practice(whether or not a 1% difference is a huge practical effect may be an issue of debate).

Oh, also, I reran with the data you linked to over at CD (and got results very different from Robert’s, so one of us is making a mistake in this - I make no claim that it is him, although I tried to check my work after I found that we were in disagreement) and also played with breaking out by races other than white. People per EV regressed on black % of population turns out to have an r-squared of ~0.2 and a p of 0.0005. Which is still a low r-squared from my science point of view, but that p is pretty solid from anyone’s point of view. I still don’t really know what meaning I should draw from the statistical significance of this correlation, but it certainly is there (and very strongly for black voters).

And I finally got around to resending you the email about mitochondrial lineages that I sent to the wrong address back in December.

Charles said, “I still think that the 1% increase in the average value of a white vote versus a non-white vote (that Robert demonstrated) is the more relevant result, as the statistically significant correlation does not equal causation (obviously), and doesn’t say anything about why small states are more likely to be white (with the extreme outlier of Hawaii). And I still think that the 1% increase in voting power from the small state effect is tiny compared to the other ways in which black voting power is minimized.”

That’s fair enough. It may account for a small percent, but it is statistically significant.

rsquared = 0.0794
F-test = 4.1410
p = 0.0474

Rachel, you’re right. I’m wrong. It is a (barely) statistically significant predictor (using the standard arbitrary cutoff of p < 0.05 is statistically significant).

I still think that the 1% increase in the average value of a white vote versus a non-white vote (that Robert demonstrated) is the more relevant result, as the statistically significant correlation does not equal causation (obviously), and doesn’t say anything about why small states are more likely to be white (with the extreme outlier of Hawaii). And I still think that the 1% increase in voting power from the small state effect is tiny compared to the other ways in which black voting power is minimized.

When I use this in class I use the entire article, which highlights several issues related to voting; however, the electoral college issue is the one most prominently featured.

The existance of institutional racism in all its forms isn’t dependent on whether or not they appear more or less “clear” to White people.

I agree. But as I understand it, the context of this discussion is an example used to teach Rachel’s students about racism. (I suspect that the majority of students in Rachel’s lower-level classes are white, but I could be wrong about that). The usefulness of an example intended to be used by a white person to teach (mostly white?) students about racism, does depend on how clear and defensible the example is.

That’s why so many people of color that I have met or I know find these discussion so futile and so tiresome.

I can understand that. But I don’t think it’s a bad idea for whites to have these “racism 101″ discussions among ourselves; in fact, I think it’s necessary for whites to spend more time discussing race and racism.

Most Whites can’t grasp institutional racism at all or don’t want to do so and most of them still can’t see racism as existing outside the presence of White men running around in White robes and hoods…

I agree. And I think what Rachel is doing is extremely valuable, for exactly that reason. But I don’t think that the strength of the particular example & approach she (and Wing, via quotation) focuses on in this post, as a teaching tool, should be beyond discussion or criticism, or that the only reason one could criticize it would be denial of institutionalized racism’s existence.

Most Whites can’t grasp institutional racism at all or don’t want to do so and most of them still can’t see racism as existing outside the presence of White men running around in White robes and hoods(and certainly do not understand that the Klan has largely been replaced by smaller, loosely organized cells of different White Supremacist gangs and organizations) burning things and Jim Crow. It’s much easier to paint yourselves as the heroes of ending inhumane practices if you can claim that it’s all over with.

Okay, I’ll take one of those “clear” examples.

I was reading today about an interracial family(he’s Black, she’s White) which has been subjected to vandalism and swastikas that some unidentified individuals have seen fit to decorate their home with for the past couple of months. The family including their kids are terrified. They look so, in the photographs.

Is this racism? What kind of racism is it? Is it individual or institutional? What do you base your answer on?

People of different races will answer this differently and indeed have and in this case, not surprisingly the answers fall among racial lines. And which one’s analysis of the situation is seen as correct? Who has always been given that right throughout history?

My feelings are that, if you stop someone on the street and inform them about racial injustices that YOU perceive them to have when they are otherwise ignorant, then YOU are fomenting institutional racism. Is that not what the KKK, the Black Panthers and La Raza do? Educate people on how outraged they need to be on their racial plight in life?

Not to mention MLK himself, whose organization did a lot of educational work. To claim these groups are all alike — as if there’s no difference between being the beneficiary of racism and being part of a group harmed by racism — is too idiotic to be believed.

I’m banning you, not because you disagree with me, but because your opinions are too stupid to make a worthwhile contribution to conversation.

Also, don’t forget that our OP’er encouraged the blogosphere to “agitate the full force of the legal system” against a group of innocent white males (the Duke Lacrosse team). So much for being an objective observer in all of this….

This is called an “ad hom” attack. Plus, I doubt that Rachel would claim that she’s an objective observer.

Poof. I just waved my magic wand (well, Steph’s magic wand, but she won’t mind.) Every Southern black person just turned white.

Are their votes now more relevant?

Hey, that’s neat - let me try it.

I just took a time machine to a German concentration camp and waved my magic wand. Poof! Every Jewish person in the camp just turned gentile.

Yet this didn’t magically release them from the camp. Clearly, it would be wrong for me to think that antisemitism is part of the reason they were in the camp. The magic wand proves it.

There are reasons being a Democrat in Mississippi sucks, and those reasons have a lot to do with racism. Waving your wand around won’t make that fact go away.

Edited to add: There are also reasons that blacks in Mississippi are overwhelmingly Democrats, and those reasons also have a lot to do with racism.

It seems to me that any bigoted situation can be shown to be non-bigoted, with judicious application of the magic wand. This is because the magic wand is a device that acts by removing the results of racism (or whatever) from context, especially historic context. For instance, if I wave my wand over the racial wealth gap, I can change all white people to black, and they’d still own more wealth; the wand has proven that the racial wealth gap is unrelated to race.

There are very narrow, specific circumstances in which the wand — or something like it — can be useful for making current, direct and obvious racism visible. (For instance, the practice of sending in two testers, one black and one white, to apply for a job could be seen as an application of the magic wand approach.) But outside such narrow testing situations, I think it acts more to hide racism than to make racism visible.

Poof. I just waved my magic wand (well, Steph’s magic wand, but she won’t mind.) Every Southern black person just turned white.

Are their votes now more relevant?

If the answer is “no”, then how is this an example of racism, rather than an example of being a Democrat in Mississippi sucks?

Here, back atcha:

If i wanted an excellent example of how the social sciences have deteriorated, such that someone who holds an advanced degree, and who teaches others, can post an analysis which appears to be faulty or at least incomplete, refuse to defend it, get annoyed when others point out the flaws, and resort to random ad hominems (implying all the detractors are racists) to support her point… well, this would be in my most recent top ten.

Just because it’s about racism doesn’t mean you get to make it up.

There’s also an interesting history of explicitly racist attempts to utilize the electoral college in the South as a means of fighting civil rights for blacks, starting with Strom Thurmond and Charles Wallace Collins in the 1940s, continuing with the free-elector movement of 1960, and then George C. Wallace’s campaign in 1968. These movements didn’t just die out; they were absorbed into what’s called the “southern strategy,” which Nixon adviser Kevin Phillips described like this in 1970:

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.

The cynical use of racism for electoral victory in the South has become a lot less explicit since then, but it’s still going on.

However, on the narrow grounds that Rachel and Robert have been arguing about, I think Robert has been (uncharacteristically :-p ) persuasive and factual. I agree with Robert and Charles: There are much clearer examples of institutional racism.

I love listening or in this case reading white male apologists defend their privilege and deny other people’s experiences, which in itself is a manifestation of their racial privilege that they are endowed with some entitlement that they get to do so. It’s not like I don’t encounter at least one a day or more. They are much more amusing online, lol.

There is one area of the political arena where nonwhites are indisputably disadvantaged, relative to some group of randomly-selected other citizens. But it’s the result of immigration patterns, not structural factors (afaik). 50% of all non-whites live in just six states (California, Texas, New York, Florida, Illinois, Georgia), and 90% live in just 26 states (those six plus North Carolina, New Jersey, Virginia, Michigan, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Mississippi, Tennessee, Hawaii, Washington, Missouri, Massachusetts, and Oklahoma).

Oversimplifying, that makes nonwhite issues a major political concern for just 34% of the Federal seats, and of marginal interest in another 40% or so. The concentration in those areas probably increases the chances of representation in those areas and makes it more practical to try to overcome personal racism in the electorate, but means that there are huge chunks of the country where racial politics are simply a non-starter. We can obviously disagree about how and why that’s a good or bad thing, but it certainly means that nonwhite issues start at a disadvantage when being addressed on the national stage; anywhere from a quarter to half of the Congress has literally zero personal interest in pleasing minority constituencies. Again, that’s grossly oversimplified, but I’ve done enough Excel grinding for one day and so there it shall stand. ;)

I bet the EC is more strongly biased against Asian voters in particular, given the disproportionate portion of Asian-Americans in California.