Friday, February 12, 2021

Race: No need to panic.

Joe Biden says he wanted an administration that looks like America.


That means some Black people, Latinix, Asians, women, LGBT.  It also means positions filled by them will not be filled by White, heterosexual males.


No need to panic. They are Americans, too.



Watermark: Hammermill Bond
This blog attempts to look closely at intentional and unintentional messages sent and received in the political world. We interpret messages through the filter of our own imprinting. We think by creating mental shortcuts and ascribing meaning to categories. Humans jump to conclusions. We stereotype. We profile.

We are a collection of impressions and assumptions, taught to us by culture and experience. They remain like watermarks on bond paper, simultaneously visible and invisible, there but not-there, deep in the fiber.

Joe Biden pleased some people when he announced at an early debate that his vice-presidential choice would be a woman. That immediately got opposition. Biden did not say "I want the best, most highly qualified person, the person who will be a heartbeat away from the presidency." He said "a woman." It was a declaration that identity mattered. A politician does not simply "happen to be female."  She is female. He wanted that perspective as his Vice President. He got a highly qualified one.

Herb Rothschild
I don't intend to condone prejudice or minimize how contrary it is to our own principles of fairness and equality. I acknowledge internalized assumptions are present with everyone, always. Prejudices--shortcuts--are not some unique character fault of "deplorables." I assume all finger-pointers condemning racism or misogyny or other prejudices are in some sense hypocrites themselves, blind to their own imprinting. The meaning of mental categories is taught from earliest infancy, and it continues throughout our lives. We were imprinted by parents in ways we cannot imagine. How could we avoid having unfathomable feelings about women, about figures of authority, about the familiar? 

Change is what we intentionally write atop the watermark.

Herb Rothschild shares thoughts on intentional diversity. He retired in Southern Oregon. He grew up in Louisiana and is old enough to have seen and welcomed the Civil Rights revolution as a young adult. He had a long career as an English professor and remains active on behalf of peace and justice.

 

Guest Post by Herb Rothschild

                     The resistance to intentional diversity never dies

In the thread of comments on your February 8th blog, the issue arose in reference to President Biden’s appointments. Very intentionally he has chosen women and people of color—Black, Latinix, Asian, Indigenous and an openly gay man—to occupy prominent positions in his administration. There are far too many to charge “tokenism,” as one commentator did, because tokenism means just one for display at the front counter. This is a genuinely inclusive group of well-qualified public servants reflective of our nation’s make-up.

Does Biden’s intentionality itself vitiate the genuineness of the diversity? To argue that would be another way of decrying affirmative action, which met severe resistance from its inception. But consider this: we white men have always represented significantly fewer than half our nation’s population, but until intentional diversity began we occupied almost all the positions of economic and political power. Why? Because we white men had control of the selection process, and we simply preferred our own, intentionally excluding women and people of color. We were the administrators and beneficiaries of an affirmative action program established from the start. 

None of that would have changed without intention. And the change has meant that we are on our way to mobilizing the talents and skills of our entire population. I witnessed that result first-hand during my years in academia, especially with the flourishing of women of all races and ethnicities as students, faculty and administrators.  

The Democrats’ one failure of diversity was their turning away from blue collar and lower wage working people. Starting with Carter and very pronouncedly with Clinton and Obama, the party was largely captured by the same economic elites that continue to control the Republican Party. Thanks to the Sanders candidacy in 2016 and continuing through the 2020 campaign, the Democrats under Biden seem committed to including once again working-class whites in their base. We’ll see if they deliver.

And then we’ll see if white men can finally value justice over race.



13 comments:

John said...

Think about it - Biden said I want a woman as Vice President. He didn’t say I think the Vice Presidency is woman’s work. He made a personal choice intentionally to get a different perspective, after all more than half the country’s population is female. Smart. Now let’s look at the Republican Party. The GOP leadership is, for the most part, white and male. As I watched the House Mangers deliver their reason to convict Trump on the charge of insurrection I marveled and the diversity on display in the Democratic Party. Not tokens, highly qualified and talented individuals that happened to be men, women, white, Asian, Latino, Black, Jewish, Catholic, Christian and it mattered not that they were as they functioned as a team seamlessly making their case. Looking at the GOP I see throwbacks to an old mythical time of white male superiority represented by, for the most part, old white aged men harking to a time of “father knows best”..

Anonymous said...

The truth is that there were many women qualified to be vice president and even president long before Harris. Sometimes leadership is about breaking old molds so that the culture can see a new way forward. Teddy Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House for dinner. Too soon? I think not.

Anonymous said...

Although I can’t agree that Democrats are reaching out to the working class. How did the $2000 stimulus checks promised in the Georgia Senate race become $1400 means tested checks? Biden may end up delivering fewer dollars in stimulus checks then Trump did.

John said...

Reply to the second anonymous comment...
The $2,000 checks are still on the table but you have to remember you already got $600 (if not you got a $600 tax credit) in January and now to equal a payment of $2,000 you should receive another check for $1,200. Hopefully you'll realize the $600 plus $1,200 equals $2,000.

Rick Millward said...

President Biden won because he chose a woman for VP. He had no choice.

As far as "Democrats left the working class"...that's nonsense. It's the opposite. As the Democratic party has increasingly advanced social justice it's triggered the racist paranoia that Republicans opportunistically have embraced.

Michael Trigoboff said...

… decrying affirmative action, which met severe resistance from its inception.

I am one of those who has resisted affirmative action from its inception, because "affirmative action" has almost always been implemented as a covert way of imposing racial quotas.
If you are imposing racial quotas, then by definition you are not picking the best people. You are choosing "diversity" over competence and excellence.

Maybe this doesn't matter that much in fields like the humanities or even in politics. But it matters a lot in STEM fields.

I spent my career as a software engineer. Now I teach computer science and raise baby software engineers.

Code either works or it doesn't. Code can be small, elegant, and crystalline, or a bloated and chaotic mess. The standards for determining this are totally objective. Were I hiring a team to build a software project, I would look at the code of my prospective employees and hire them based on that, regardless of race or sex. If that policy of mine resulted in a racial or sexual "disparity," so be it. If someone accused me of racism or sexism because of that, I would hand them their head.

Interestingly enough, prejudice against female symphony musicians was successfully overcome by having "blind auditions," where the musician played from behind a screen and were therefore judged solely on the basis of how well they played. This was a great innovation, in my opinion.

There is now an attack on the practice of blind auditions coming from woke activists because blind auditions have not produced "enough diversity." They want intentional racial discrimination, instead of an objective standard based on competence and excellence.

Excellent STEM-related high schools in New York City like Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, and Brooklyn Tech, admit students via a competitive exam. These exams are under attack now by woke activists because "not enough" black students are admitted to these schools. If the activists succeed, competence and excellence will be sacrificed, and the standard of instruction in those schools will drop precipitously.

Sometime in the late 1960s or early 1970s, an organization of black police sergeants sued New York City because "not enough" blacks had passed the (presumably racist) competitive exam for sergeant. The city settled the suit by allowing the organization to come up with their own test for sergeant. So the organization consulted with experts and created their own test. The city administered that test. "Not enough" blacks passed this new (presumably non-racist) test, and the black sergeants sued the city again. The emphasis was on a racial quota, not competence and excellence.

Affirmative action quotas have a destructive effect on students who are admitted to institutions that are above their level of academic competence. Black students admitted to top-level universities that lower their admission standards to do so, drop out at higher rates than other students because their academic skill levels are not up to what those universities require. They end up as college dropouts, when they would most likely have done just fine had they been admitted to a lower-level college whose academic standards they could actually meet.

I recently had very serious surgery. My surgeon was a Christian man of Asian descent. This was completely fine with me, and he did a great job. But if the surgeon had been black, that would have given me pause, because I have seen the pressure to lower standards that affirmative action and demands for "diversity" have led to.

We can have competence and excellence, or we can have affirmative action quotas and "diversity." We can't have both. I vote for competence and excellence.

John C said...

Question for Michael - re: "Black students admitted to top-level universities that lower their admission standards to do so, drop out at higher rates than other students because their academic skill levels are not up to what those universities require" - Is there data to support this? I find it interesting.

Michael Trigoboff said...

John C:

You could start with this article.

You would find plenty of data in this book.

Anonymous said...

Thanks, John! Guess I didn’t go to neoliberal math school like you did.

Ed Cooper said...

Replying to John; $600, (tax credit or cash) plus $1200 equals $1800, not $2,000, unless I missed something in my basic Arithmetic classes some 60+ years ago.

John C said...

thanks Michael, the Prop 209 and UCLA issue discussed in the Atlantic article was especially insightful.

Ed Cooper said...

An addendum: I find myself agreeing with Mr. Trigoboff, near 100 %. I've seen the drop out figures, and they make sense.
This whole topic is a sticky web, very easy to get so involved with "but what about" type analogies that the the thread becomes so tangled as to become impenetrable.

Ralph Bowman said...

Un fucking believable. Blacks do poorly because they are black. Like native Americans do poorly because they are from the Res. Mexicans do poorly because they like to pick fruit. Whites do poorly because they are stupid. Women are too hysterical and so cannot hold a wrench.
Chinese are good at copying. South Koreans make inferior cars. The Swiss like watches. The Germans are fascists. The Canadians say eh?
Italians drink wine and like fast cars. Irish are drunks. Americans are ugly.