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[Racism & Poverty] : A Love Story?
The Ender
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Once upon a time, a group of people - mostly white people - found a group of other people (well, maybe a few different groups of other people) who were not like them in mostly superficial ways. They had different facial features, different flesh tones and different cultures.
Naturally, the mostly-white-people decided that they were the superior group, and as such had the right to disenfranchise the other group(s) through violence, unreasonable legislation, captivity and paranoia.
Fortunately, one of people from the disenfranchised others was elected President of the mostly-white-people, and then the disenfranchisement ended and everyone lived happily ever after.
The End
...Well, okay, maybe that third part isn't quite accurate. Sue me (no don't really do that plz I'm scared of lawyers).
So, we were having a discussion about racism in a different, unrelated thread that I thought might be valuable. The discussion orbits these questions:
To what extent, if any, do you feel that racism is tied to poverty (or otherwise tied to one's socioeconomic status)? Does one tug the other? Which one tugs which? Is there a sort of mutual system involved between the two? Is addressing socioeconomic issues sufficient by itself to also address racism? Can addressing racism by itself combat socioeconomic issues? When will that lazy Obama finally fix racism?
These questions and more, D&D, all for you (And don't get them wrong. Your scores in this thread will effect your final grade!)
Naturally, the mostly-white-people decided that they were the superior group, and as such had the right to disenfranchise the other group(s) through violence, unreasonable legislation, captivity and paranoia.
Fortunately, one of people from the disenfranchised others was elected President of the mostly-white-people, and then the disenfranchisement ended and everyone lived happily ever after.
The End
...Well, okay, maybe that third part isn't quite accurate. Sue me (no don't really do that plz I'm scared of lawyers).
So, we were having a discussion about racism in a different, unrelated thread that I thought might be valuable. The discussion orbits these questions:
To what extent, if any, do you feel that racism is tied to poverty (or otherwise tied to one's socioeconomic status)? Does one tug the other? Which one tugs which? Is there a sort of mutual system involved between the two? Is addressing socioeconomic issues sufficient by itself to also address racism? Can addressing racism by itself combat socioeconomic issues? When will that lazy Obama finally fix racism?
These questions and more, D&D, all for you (And don't get them wrong. Your scores in this thread will effect your final grade!)
With Love and Courage
The Ender on
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Addressing socioeconomic issues is insufficient to address racism. Oppressed minorities are so far behind on the whole economically that there's no way short of forceful redistribution that would truly solve the economic imbalances. Pursuing fixes to socioeconomic issues is still a worthwhile goal in itself, but to fix the ways in which racism has held folks down requires additional, specific effort. For example, implementing fair hiring practices and living wages for working class folk does nothing to address and solve the overwhelmingly skewed incarceration rates and discrepancies in severity of sentencing that black people face.
Would you mind making the point here? "Go read a book" doesn't really make for a compelling thread.
Unless the thread is literally about the book, then you know its reasonable. "What this Nonsense about the notebook?"
I mean you could post in that thread but the rest of us can't Jeffe...
pleasepaypreacher.net
I'd recommend reading the excerpt he put up at The Atlantic:
It's a relatively short read, but a depressing one.
It would be helpful to give more explanation of what the book is about though. And a title, just to make sure we're looking at the right book when we look it up on Amazon.
For example, the incident I referenced was how about a friend of his was killed who was a good, middle class kid, (to condense and paraphrase a lot) by a cop who tailed the friend for fifteen miles, having mistaken him for someone a foot shorter of totally different appearance, until he realized he was being followed and started ramming the cops car, forcing him to put four bullets into the guy. Yes, there are a lot of things wrong with that sequence of events, but there was no poverty involved in that particular set of racism and murder.
I think that's a very narrow view of how poverty and racism interact.
It's kinda self-enforcing from what I've seen.
Racist policies -> creates a race based under class -> leads to said race being involved in a disproportionate amount of crime -> gives the impression that being of said race means that you're more likely to be a criminal -> Racist policies
Except the arrows go both ways, and sometimes skip a step and actually the whole thing is a complex mess.
It’s not a very important country most of the time
http://steamcommunity.com/id/mortious
There's nothing constructive or interesting to be explored in that. It's just a ridiculous statement that dares you to disagree with it so you can be charged as being on the wrong side. Coates himself explains at length that he's basically given up on any future - which, okay, fine; then why are we talking, again? Just go grab your gasoline can and box of matches already.
His story provides one anecdote among many. It's a powerful anecdote, but it's still just that: it alone doesn't answer any questions about how much racism is or isn't related to poverty.
This is a ridiculous worldview and heavily plays into the idea that there is "The Man" who keeps black people down. Our society, for whatever reason, stereotypes the poor as lazy criminals. A good third of black people, a higher percentage than any other ethnicity, are poor and so they get the shaft. The solution? As little poverty as we can get- I'd argue that tariffs to promote manufacturing and regional growth restrictions (ala Portland) to promote re-investment in the inner core of cities along with regionally-planned mass transit would go a lot farther towards helping the black man than cutting him a check every month. Or whatever "forced redistribution" is.
It's not that there is "The Man", it's that our society is fundamentally built on the extraction of wealth from minorities (and blacks in particular).
By the way, it's interesting that you chose Portland there, considering the racial history of both that city and the state that it's in.
Or it's hyperbole for effect. Since we have something like 20% of the world's prison population in this country.
Expecting people to disagree with you is one thing, going into a discussion intending to antagonize the audience for the sake of doing so is another, and in my opinion undermines Coates's credibility. If he's not interested in a good faith argument, how do I know he even actually believes the messages he espouses?
Let's look at housing for a moment. Just housing. Nothing else.
In the last few years, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, and Bank of America have all been fined by regulatory agencies for discriminating against black home loan borrowers and pushing them towards higher interest rates and riskier loans - even when compared to white people of equivalent credit scores buying comparable homes. They were literally charging black people more money, until they got caught.
Moreover, this specific example isn't new. Banks have been sued, fined, and have settled over discriminatory lending practices for decades.
Before that, there was redlining and both openly and covertly racist housing appraisals. There's a known appraisals gap - as soon as a neighborhood is more than 10% black, homes in that neighborhood will appraise for less than homes in less-black neighborhoods, even after controlling for socioeconomic status and crime. This is one of the major reasons that black families, on average, have lower accumulated wealth than white families - even when their income is higher.
In the first half of the 20th century, that this appraisal gap was explicit, where appraisers were explicitly instructed to categorize home appraisals based on race. Meanwhile, redlining and sundown towns kept black people out of desirable neighborhoods.
Meanwhile, the racial dimension of eminent domain is pretty well known (PDF). If you're a town looking to build, say, a bus station, you're more likely to uproot the poor black homes than the rich white homes with eminent domain.
The most famous example of this is probably New York City's own Central Park. Until 1857, the land that Central Park is now on was a neighborhood called Seneca Village which boasted the largest concentration of black homeowners in the city. It was that land and those homes that were eminent domained to make room for the park.
Imagine how much those homes would be worth today to those homeowners' descendants.
In short, banks and local governments collude to:
1) Charge black people more for borrowing a mortgage than they do white people
2) Pay black people less when their homes are sold than they do white people
3) Take their homes for public projects more often than they do white people
This is literally extracting value from black populations.
And that's just housing. This says nothing about other forms of economic exploitation: wage discrimination, misuse of civil fines and forfeitures to fund local governments, racism in the criminal justice system, and, of course, slavery.
We never stopped harvesting economic value from black people. We just got kinder, gentler, and more devious about it.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Surely there's more to that story. If some guy showed up with a gun claiming he was a cop without a police car or uniform or badge I would probably be trying to get the hell out of there myself no matter what he looked like.
It also makes a lot more sense when you read about the goose on the other side of the argument. And unlike Coates, Otis is dead serious, and he has the ear of Senator Chuck Grassley - the sitting chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
...So, I don't have the figures off hand, but does anyone care to guess whether or not NYC paid the black home owners fair market rates for those homes? :P
A quick googling says that the city offered $2335 to each homeowner, and attempts to negotiate higher prices were rebuffed. I have no idea if $2335 was truly fair market value at the time, but I do know that $2335 is only about $60k in 2015 dollars.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
It makes the poor poorer, of course, but there's a good chance that that's not actually the intent. They're just much easier targets to go after.
Saying that anything that disproportionately harms the poor is racist because minorities inherently tend to be poor seems kind of, well, racist. I'd prefer actual evidence of racial bias in cases like that. I wouldn't be surprised to find that there was/is a bias even after correcting for income and location, but just comparing rich whites with poor minorities doesn't really say anything.
The intent has explicitly been racist until around 1980. There's a certain quote that comes to mind for the state of things since then.
Wow, what an utterly twisted way to kick off the thread. What society is this you're talking about? India?
Are you familiar with US history? Y'know, slavery into jim crow into redlining into mass incarceration?
So trickle-down racism from past generations is keeping minorities buried in poverty today? Is this what you're trying to say?
I'm saying it never ended.
You should maybe scroll up and read the rest of the thread.
Institutional racism is what it's common known as.
I would suggest you read Feral's post above, and the associated links, because right now you look supremely ignorant.
Yes, this is obviously what we are trying to say, and there is a post with six different supporting links to back up the argument.
What would "actual evidence of racial bias" look like?
To me, the evidence Feral provided meets that standard. If I was looking for "actual evidence of bias", I'm pretty well convinced by what he posted. Clearly you aren't, so then my question becomes: What would this evidence look like, if what has been provided is not satisfactory?
As a side note, don't try and sneak a "the people claiming something are racist are the real racists!" argument in here. I saw you, and that is a terrible argument. It serves nothing but to devalue the definition and make the word, and thus the discussion, meaningless.
Something like evidence of poor white neighborhoods being better treated than equally poor black neighborhoods. I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it, but I do want to see it.
Portland is actually a really great example of showing how complex the issue of race and racism can be. For those who don't know, unlike California and Washington at the time, Oregon was largely settled by farming families who weren't trying to get rich quick, but just to build homes and settle permanently. A large portion of their immigrants were poor whites from slaves states, who had either not owned land or only owned a little land, and who in most aspects of politics were quite conservative democrats. However, Oregon initially voted to enter the union as a free state... Not really because they had any particular opposition to slavery qua slavery, but because Oregon was widely considered to be perfectly suited for plantations. If mega-wealthy plantation owners began bringing their slaves into Oregon the economic prosperity for these small-scale farmers would be over quite quickly.
So when the Dred Scott case turned every state into a slave state, the first thing Oregon did was ban blacks from entering the territory (like literally, it was one of the first laws Oregon passed as a state). Actual enforcement of the law wasn't really funded, and there actually were black people who continued living in Oregon, but the primary purpose of the law wasn't truly to keep blacks out, it was to keep slave owners out. Now, that's not to say Oregon wasn't also WAY RACIST, but the root feelings feeding that racism were far more complex than "plundering economic value from the oppressed." The white Oregon farmers' primary goal was to avoid themselves being the oppressed, as they had been back in the south (if not as oppressed as the slaves). And throughout the west it was hardly a case of "The Whites" vs. "The Blacks / The Non-Whites". During the settling of the west 1/3 to 1/2 of white American settlers in the west were born outside of the US, with their own national and racial identities and prejudices. And throughout the west there were varieties of inter-racial marriages between traders and trappers and the local populations, whose racial status were very irregularly defined, both in law and in practice, and changed greatly over the decades.
Indeed, there's plenty of examples just in American history of complex interplays between race relations. The first Tokugawa embassy mission to the United States recorded no racial sympathy towards the disenfranchised minorities, as the Japanese considered themselves to be also of a master race and equal to the whites. Irish and Jews were not white except for when they were, asians in some parts of the US were considered "honorary" whites while in others there were race riots waged against them (and of course meanwhile back home some of those asians home countries were waging racist colonial wars against other asians). And oh lord just try defining "hispanic" as some sort of racial identity that makes any sort of sense at all.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm not intending this as some sort of distraction against the core issues of disenfranchisement. But I want to point out that the history of this shit is in no way simple, and just because we're all familiar with mid-20th century conceptions about "how things have always been" does not, in fact, mean they've always been that way.
I read some of the posts, I think you guys are reaching a bit. Correlation does not imply causation.
Hey, this gives me the chance to repost an infographic illustrating this very point!
See: Ferguson, City Of
In this case though, I'd have to concede that the poverty created and exacerbated is a side effect while the primary purpose is straightforwardly to ruin black people's lives directly, instead of "merely" economically.
Which is why I originally used it as a point to demonstrate how racism and poverty are different, and how solving the latter can not truly fix the former.
Can you explain this a bit more? I'd really like to understand where you're coming from on that point.
The federal government disagrees.