Nov 29, 2021 12:56 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 29, 2021 01:19 AM by C C.)
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/...tractable/
EXCERPTS (Jospeh Heath): . . . After 1965, however, America became the destination for many immigrants from both Africa and the Caribbean, who are classified racially as black, and yet are not part of the historical community of African Americans. This has produced an unhelpful ambiguity, especially because the formulation of various legal remedies in terms of race, rather than ethnicity, has had the effect of expanding eligibility to include a large number of people who have no obvious claim to them. The problem is obvious in the case of slavery reparations, where it seems clear that the proposed beneficiaries would be limited to the descendants of American slaves. [...] because of the formulation in terms of race, a disturbingly large percentage of the beneficiaries of affirmative action (for example, in highly selective American universities) are in fact recent immigrants or foreigners. The same is true of minority “set asides” in government contracting, where preference is given to minority business enterprises, many of which are owned by immigrants...
[...] In order to avoid confusion, in the discussion that follows I will use the term African American to refer to members of the specific ethnic group -- descendants of American slavery --and use the term black primarily to refer to the (much larger) racial group. I will, in this respect, be breaking with the American practice of using the two terms interchangeably. My central focus will be on the claims of African Americans, not the larger group of black Americans. I refer to them as an ethnic group because, just as Italian Americans are an ethnic subcategory of the white racial category, African Americans are a subcategory of the black racial category.
Conflicting Policy Imperatives. When dealing with any persistent social problem, especially one that is widely acknowledged and yet remains unresolved, there is a natural tendency to attribute lack of progress to widespread indifference or malevolence on the part of various social actors. [...]The first step in serious policy analysis involves the recognition that some problems persist not because of a lack of will to solve them, but because there is no agreement about what constitutes a solution, or because the problem is multidimensional, and so an improvement in one dimension generates a worsening of the problem in another.
A classic example of this style of analysis can be found in the work of James Q. Wilson on bureaucracy. As Wilson notes, there is widespread acknowledgment, across the political spectrum, that there is a problem with bureaucracy in the U.S. government. The surprising thing is that, even though “everybody seems to agree that we ought to do something about the problem of bureaucracy,” nothing ever gets fixed.
The reason for this paralysis, Wilson claims, is that “there is not one bureaucracy problem, there are several, and the solution to each is in some degree incompatible with the solution to every other.” The most celebrated example involves the desire to eliminate “red tape,” and yet also improve accountability. Because one person’s red tape is just someone else’s accountability, fixing one problem necessarily worsens the other. And so the bureaucracy problem persists, not through malevolence or indifference, but because reasonable actors are pursuing incompatible objectives.
The relevance of this analysis to the problem of race in America should be obvious. To speak of a “problem” invites one to ask what a “solution” would look like. Here one is immediately struck by the lack of agreement [...] there remains a stubborn insistence that the persistence of racial inequality and conflict must be explained by the influence of bad actors. In other words, racism and racial discrimination are posited as key factors that explain all problems related to race in America. There is, of course, a surfeit of anecdotal evidence, along with high-profile instances of racial animosity to support this view, but the large-scale empirical evidence is weak...
First, there is the simple fact that the level of attitudinal racism among Americans is not that high compared to people in other countries. Americans think that other Americans are quite racist, but that is primarily because they take the persistence of the race problem, or lack of support for preferred policy responses, as evidence of racism. They generally fail to realize just how racist people are in other countries.
By contrast, the United States is an outlier from other Western countries in a number of social, economic, and political respects that clearly contribute to the persistence of racial inequality. These include the lack of class mobility, inadequacy of the social safety net, poor quality of diet, extreme inequalities in primary education funding, artificial scarcity in elite postsecondary education, high levels of crime, especially violent crime, astronomical incarceration levels, high levels of police violence, widespread gun ownership and gun crime, and governance failure in the democratic system. Set against these problems, traditional racial discrimination does not seem like the most pressing issue facing disadvantaged minorities.
The other reason for suspicion of the bad actor theory is that racism -- at least of the overt, attitudinal variety—has declined quite precipitously in the United States since the 1960s, and yet many problems have persisted. [...] Yet many Americans remain resistant to the suggestion that the persistence of racial inequality could be due to anything other than racism.
They suggest that racism is still present, but that it has become hidden. According to this view, since social norms changed in such a way as to stigmatize the expression of racist attitudes, many Americans simply ceased to report their true beliefs to pollsters. As a result, the racism was still there, it had merely become invisible to social scientists. [But this claim has merely invited the development of more sophisticated social-scientific techniques, which tended to confirm the decline-of-racism story. As a result, the explanation shifted to the notion of “implicit bias.” According to this view, racism is hidden not just from pollsters; it is hidden from the racists themselves, because it is subconscious. Again, empirical support for this hypothesis is less than overwhelming.
It is not difficult to discover evidence of subconscious bias; the problem lies in showing that it has a significant effect on behavior. The primary evidence that it does, in most cases, is just the persistence of the race problem, combined with the assumption that it must be caused by racism. As a result, implicit bias winds up functioning in these theories in much the same way that dark matter does in our understanding of the physical universe. We are not able to actually detect or measure it, but know it must be there, because it is the only way that we can account for the behavior of the matter that we can see. The question, of course, in the case of racial inequality, is whether attitudinal racism is really the only way, or even the best way, of accounting for observed patterns of racial inequality.
Increased recognition of the limitations of these bad actor explanations has spurred a growing movement away from an analysis based on attitudinal racism toward one based on systemic racism, which is produced as an effect of social institutions or systems of interaction, in some cases completely independent of the racial attitudes of individuals.
This type of institutional analysis raises a number of complex issues, but for now it may suffice to observe that the shift to the vocabulary of systemic racism usually involves a shift to agnosticism on the question of causation. Systemic racism cannot serve as an explanation of racial disparities in outcome, because it is typically just another way of describing those disparities.
For example, if the overincarceration of African Americans serves as the primary evidence of systemic racism in the criminal justice system, then these disparities obviously cannot be explained by systemic racism, on pain of circularity. Thus the overrepresentation of African Americans must be explained by something else, such as attitudinal racism, along with some complex combination of social determinants.
Of course, the diagnosis of systemic racism is often made in a way that is intended to suggest that attitudinal discrimination is widespread in a particular domain. Strictly speaking, however, it is neutral on the question of causation, and in this respect, winds up serving as a diplomatic way of abandoning the assumption that the persistence of racial disparities must be due to traditional attitudinal racism.
Because of this, my analysis of racial inequality in America as a wicked problem could be described as a way of specifying the notion of “systemic racism.” My inclination, however, is to avoid that term, because once the pretense at causal explanation has been abandoned, use of the term “racism” -- a term that in my mind always implies moral condemnation -- winds up being tendentious, since one cannot condemn a racially disparate outcome without knowing what caused it.
As long as there are cultural differences between white and black Americans, there will be differences in modes of behavior, which will generate disparities with respect to certain outcomes, many of which will be perfectly innocent, the aggregate effect of choices that no one has any desire to interfere with.
Thus if one wants to affirm the moral proposition that racism is always wrong, it is best to use the term only in its traditional sense, to denote attitudinal racism. And when one focuses on racism in this sense of the term, it seems very doubtful that America’s race problems are caused, first and foremost, by racists (as opposed to being merely exacerbated by racists).
The primary reason for this suspicion is that, across the American population as a whole, there are simply not enough genuine racists, their social status and economic power are too low, and they are too geographically isolated to be able to block the efforts of those Americans who act with goodwill.
So while racists are no doubt capable of serving as some impediment to progressive change, I would like to suggest that America’s race problems also persist because of reasonable disagreement among good actors about how those problems should be resolved. It is not merely that progressive Americans, both white and black, have not agreed upon any clear conception of what would constitute success in achieving racial reconciliation; the problem is that they have been pursuing incompatible models of ethnic accommodation... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS (Jospeh Heath): . . . After 1965, however, America became the destination for many immigrants from both Africa and the Caribbean, who are classified racially as black, and yet are not part of the historical community of African Americans. This has produced an unhelpful ambiguity, especially because the formulation of various legal remedies in terms of race, rather than ethnicity, has had the effect of expanding eligibility to include a large number of people who have no obvious claim to them. The problem is obvious in the case of slavery reparations, where it seems clear that the proposed beneficiaries would be limited to the descendants of American slaves. [...] because of the formulation in terms of race, a disturbingly large percentage of the beneficiaries of affirmative action (for example, in highly selective American universities) are in fact recent immigrants or foreigners. The same is true of minority “set asides” in government contracting, where preference is given to minority business enterprises, many of which are owned by immigrants...
[...] In order to avoid confusion, in the discussion that follows I will use the term African American to refer to members of the specific ethnic group -- descendants of American slavery --and use the term black primarily to refer to the (much larger) racial group. I will, in this respect, be breaking with the American practice of using the two terms interchangeably. My central focus will be on the claims of African Americans, not the larger group of black Americans. I refer to them as an ethnic group because, just as Italian Americans are an ethnic subcategory of the white racial category, African Americans are a subcategory of the black racial category.
Conflicting Policy Imperatives. When dealing with any persistent social problem, especially one that is widely acknowledged and yet remains unresolved, there is a natural tendency to attribute lack of progress to widespread indifference or malevolence on the part of various social actors. [...]The first step in serious policy analysis involves the recognition that some problems persist not because of a lack of will to solve them, but because there is no agreement about what constitutes a solution, or because the problem is multidimensional, and so an improvement in one dimension generates a worsening of the problem in another.
A classic example of this style of analysis can be found in the work of James Q. Wilson on bureaucracy. As Wilson notes, there is widespread acknowledgment, across the political spectrum, that there is a problem with bureaucracy in the U.S. government. The surprising thing is that, even though “everybody seems to agree that we ought to do something about the problem of bureaucracy,” nothing ever gets fixed.
The reason for this paralysis, Wilson claims, is that “there is not one bureaucracy problem, there are several, and the solution to each is in some degree incompatible with the solution to every other.” The most celebrated example involves the desire to eliminate “red tape,” and yet also improve accountability. Because one person’s red tape is just someone else’s accountability, fixing one problem necessarily worsens the other. And so the bureaucracy problem persists, not through malevolence or indifference, but because reasonable actors are pursuing incompatible objectives.
The relevance of this analysis to the problem of race in America should be obvious. To speak of a “problem” invites one to ask what a “solution” would look like. Here one is immediately struck by the lack of agreement [...] there remains a stubborn insistence that the persistence of racial inequality and conflict must be explained by the influence of bad actors. In other words, racism and racial discrimination are posited as key factors that explain all problems related to race in America. There is, of course, a surfeit of anecdotal evidence, along with high-profile instances of racial animosity to support this view, but the large-scale empirical evidence is weak...
First, there is the simple fact that the level of attitudinal racism among Americans is not that high compared to people in other countries. Americans think that other Americans are quite racist, but that is primarily because they take the persistence of the race problem, or lack of support for preferred policy responses, as evidence of racism. They generally fail to realize just how racist people are in other countries.
By contrast, the United States is an outlier from other Western countries in a number of social, economic, and political respects that clearly contribute to the persistence of racial inequality. These include the lack of class mobility, inadequacy of the social safety net, poor quality of diet, extreme inequalities in primary education funding, artificial scarcity in elite postsecondary education, high levels of crime, especially violent crime, astronomical incarceration levels, high levels of police violence, widespread gun ownership and gun crime, and governance failure in the democratic system. Set against these problems, traditional racial discrimination does not seem like the most pressing issue facing disadvantaged minorities.
The other reason for suspicion of the bad actor theory is that racism -- at least of the overt, attitudinal variety—has declined quite precipitously in the United States since the 1960s, and yet many problems have persisted. [...] Yet many Americans remain resistant to the suggestion that the persistence of racial inequality could be due to anything other than racism.
They suggest that racism is still present, but that it has become hidden. According to this view, since social norms changed in such a way as to stigmatize the expression of racist attitudes, many Americans simply ceased to report their true beliefs to pollsters. As a result, the racism was still there, it had merely become invisible to social scientists. [But this claim has merely invited the development of more sophisticated social-scientific techniques, which tended to confirm the decline-of-racism story. As a result, the explanation shifted to the notion of “implicit bias.” According to this view, racism is hidden not just from pollsters; it is hidden from the racists themselves, because it is subconscious. Again, empirical support for this hypothesis is less than overwhelming.
It is not difficult to discover evidence of subconscious bias; the problem lies in showing that it has a significant effect on behavior. The primary evidence that it does, in most cases, is just the persistence of the race problem, combined with the assumption that it must be caused by racism. As a result, implicit bias winds up functioning in these theories in much the same way that dark matter does in our understanding of the physical universe. We are not able to actually detect or measure it, but know it must be there, because it is the only way that we can account for the behavior of the matter that we can see. The question, of course, in the case of racial inequality, is whether attitudinal racism is really the only way, or even the best way, of accounting for observed patterns of racial inequality.
Increased recognition of the limitations of these bad actor explanations has spurred a growing movement away from an analysis based on attitudinal racism toward one based on systemic racism, which is produced as an effect of social institutions or systems of interaction, in some cases completely independent of the racial attitudes of individuals.
This type of institutional analysis raises a number of complex issues, but for now it may suffice to observe that the shift to the vocabulary of systemic racism usually involves a shift to agnosticism on the question of causation. Systemic racism cannot serve as an explanation of racial disparities in outcome, because it is typically just another way of describing those disparities.
For example, if the overincarceration of African Americans serves as the primary evidence of systemic racism in the criminal justice system, then these disparities obviously cannot be explained by systemic racism, on pain of circularity. Thus the overrepresentation of African Americans must be explained by something else, such as attitudinal racism, along with some complex combination of social determinants.
Of course, the diagnosis of systemic racism is often made in a way that is intended to suggest that attitudinal discrimination is widespread in a particular domain. Strictly speaking, however, it is neutral on the question of causation, and in this respect, winds up serving as a diplomatic way of abandoning the assumption that the persistence of racial disparities must be due to traditional attitudinal racism.
Because of this, my analysis of racial inequality in America as a wicked problem could be described as a way of specifying the notion of “systemic racism.” My inclination, however, is to avoid that term, because once the pretense at causal explanation has been abandoned, use of the term “racism” -- a term that in my mind always implies moral condemnation -- winds up being tendentious, since one cannot condemn a racially disparate outcome without knowing what caused it.
As long as there are cultural differences between white and black Americans, there will be differences in modes of behavior, which will generate disparities with respect to certain outcomes, many of which will be perfectly innocent, the aggregate effect of choices that no one has any desire to interfere with.
Thus if one wants to affirm the moral proposition that racism is always wrong, it is best to use the term only in its traditional sense, to denote attitudinal racism. And when one focuses on racism in this sense of the term, it seems very doubtful that America’s race problems are caused, first and foremost, by racists (as opposed to being merely exacerbated by racists).
The primary reason for this suspicion is that, across the American population as a whole, there are simply not enough genuine racists, their social status and economic power are too low, and they are too geographically isolated to be able to block the efforts of those Americans who act with goodwill.
So while racists are no doubt capable of serving as some impediment to progressive change, I would like to suggest that America’s race problems also persist because of reasonable disagreement among good actors about how those problems should be resolved. It is not merely that progressive Americans, both white and black, have not agreed upon any clear conception of what would constitute success in achieving racial reconciliation; the problem is that they have been pursuing incompatible models of ethnic accommodation... (MORE - missing details)