I'm certainly not. What I'm also not doing is conflating the easy at which a message can be delivered with how effective that message is at affecting change.
If it won't be accepted, it won't effect change. Part of the reason that it won't be accepted is that it's not correct. The rest of the reason is that it fights fundamentally against human nature. On the bright side, an accurate message that can effect change (that racism exists and is harmful) is widely accepted.
I've worked in education (adult and within the motor industry, but its still education) for a long time, and my wife was a teacher for a long while as well, the easy to accept message and the message that actually affords change and maximizes retention are not always the same, quite often they are the opposite. Walking a delegate through a process and guiding them every step of the way is easy for the student and the educator, but it poor in terms of both retention and flexibility of approach. Guided self-exploration which includes learning by failure is far, far harder for both the student and the educator but increases retention of skills and actively teaches a flexibility of approach.
https://www.waterford.org/education/why-failure-is-better-than-success-for-learning/#:~:text=As it turns out, mistakes,learning potential of their mistakes.
I have no idea how "white people benefit" lines up with a self-exploration approach and "racism is bad" lines up with a handholding approach.
As such, no your claim that it's self-evident that the easy to accept approach is the best approach doesn't hold up, in fact when it comes to affecting long term change and flexibility it's quite the opposite.
It is selective rigor. You don't like my message, and so you're trying hard not to see it, when it's quite simple. For example, you seem to have applied exactly zero rigor to the notion that somehow the harder message (white people benefit) will be more beneficial in the longrun despite it being much harder to convey.
From my post above, adopted slightly for clarity..
In any interaction with the US legal system, which would you pick to be?
0% is the base line for the normative correct number of arrests, stops, likelihood of being found guilty, length of sentence, etc. While the values are indicative, they hold true in terms of incresaeing or decresing likelyhood.
- Rich White (-10%)
- White (+ 10%)
- Black (+ 50%)
You're going to pick rich white, but if that option was removed you are still going to go for white. Under no rational circumstances are you going to pick black in these circumstances. As such a benefit to being white, rich or not, still clearly exists.
I read that. I thought that it would be evident from my response that it did not address the problem I posed. I'll adopt a more "guided" approach then. The fact that you might pick one group or another group does not mean that one group benefits. It's essentially a non-sequitur for what I asked for, which is how it benefits a white person for a black person to be wrongly arrested and incarcerated. The kind of argument you'd be looking for would be something along the lines of that there is some kind of fixed unalterable pie of police abuse, and so since black people are taking more than their fair share of that pie, white people are left with a smaller share of police abuse than they would otherwise have. That, somewhat nonsensical (but quite similar to the economics arguments made by CRT proponents) would actually explain how white people benefit. Aside from some kind of reasoning like that, you've got nothing.
It does not help me (a white person) for a black person to be wrongly arrested or harassed by the police. Your example does not even attempt to illustrate how it would. If a black person was falsely arrested last night in my area, I'm not only not helped in any way or fashion by that injustice, I am tangentially harmed by the propagation of injustice in my area.
Again, no benefit to me (a white person) for any injustice against black people in my area. The police don't give me a cut of the contents of the wallet of the arrested black person. They don't let me rob banks because the prisons are full of black people. I'm not afforded any criminal opportunities, or given anything in exchange for harming black people.
I do not benefit (as a white person), and you have not even attempted to show how I would.
You seem to be under the belief that unless something can benefit the whole of society then it can't be a benefit to a part of society or an individual,
I literally posted the opposite and gave you an example... twice.
You also seem to be arguing that unless a maximum can be extracted from a benefit, then it's not actually a benefit.
Not really. The question here is which is better racism or not racism. Racism is worse for "white people", therefore they do not benefit. Individual white people can, and indeed this is part of the reason that racism perpetuates. The same was true for plantation owners, and it is for Donald Trump. But that does not mean that white people, as a group, are better off for racism. "White people" do not "benefit".
Now with the agreement that racism harms the whole of society, that doesn't change the following.
I'll come back to this one in response to
@FuriousDemon. It's your best argument since we've been in this discussion.
Can you demonstrate that this is the result of racism against black people? To make your job harder, I posted a CRT proponent arguing that white people benefit from
lower house values because of the smaller pool of buyers. What do those house valuations do in the absence of racism? Go down? Is that... bad?
Is this somehow the result of racism against black people? If we stopped picking on black people, would these numbers change? How?
In all of the above it is beneficial to the individual to be white
That is fundamentally not the question, and it's not the issue. Nobody chooses their (initial) skin color. The question is whether white people benefit from racism, not whether you'd prefer to be one race or another. If this were the question, then simply saying "black people are harmed" would be sufficient. Because you'd obviously choose not to be a member of the harmed group. What is at issue is whether white people are the beneficiaries of that harm, which this statement does not address.
To try and hand-wave that away because it's not beneficial to the whole of society simply makes no sense, and allows it to be both normalized and continue.
First, I'm not doing that. I'm specifically arguing (and I made this point clear so I don't know why you're shying away from it) that "white people" do not benefit from racism. And no, that does not normalize anything or allow it to continue. Racism is still harmful, not just to black people, but to white people, and to society as a whole. I gave you a whole host of reasons why the incorrect message that white people benefit from racism is harmful, toxic, and leads to the unintended consequences of fallacious positions in everything from immigration to international cooperation, and you ignored that and responded with something that is fundamentally not true. Saying that racism is harmful (to all, including white people) does not in any way permit it to continue or normalize it.
Also, selective rigor. You appear to have not attempted to bolster this point, because it is one you like.
Taking the house valuation example, as you also touched upon house prices. Yes lower valuations of black owned houses stops the entire housing market from reaching it maximum potential, but it's not enough to stop housing increasing in value overall, and as such the vast majority of people will not see it or for that matter care about it. As long as overall house prices go up, they are find, their personal investment is growing.
So white people aren't benefiting, and they don't notice. This isn't lining up. Are you saying that they incorrectly think that they are benefiting and so we should just say they are even though they're not so that we convince them to... stop discriminating? No that doesn't make sense either.
It also needs to be considered as part of the fact that housing and living in the US is still
heavily segregated, and as such the undervaluation of black-owned homes affects predominantly black neighborhoods, and the impact is not seen directly at all in predominantly white-owned neighborhoods.
I posted an example of a CRT proponent arguing that low housing valuations is something
white people enjoy because of a lack of black buyers. I'd like to get this one straight, which one is better, so we can get to the bottom of how racism in housing helps white people.
This has been seen historically (and I strongly suspect continues to be seen) when a black person/family buys a house in a predominantly white neighborhood as lowering the value of all the other properties, reducing the benefit white homeowners have over black homeowners gets peoples attention in a very quick and direct manner (and predominantly negative manner).
Citation required. I could see that happening in a heavily racist region. You'd need widespread racism to make it work. There's a pocket of racists, a black person is allowed to buy a house there, and then the racists can't attract the predominately racist
buyers to the area because there is a black person. Think about what it would take to make this work on a "white people" scale, not just a neighborhood in Alabama that has high klan membership rates.
This is still an example where white people as a whole are not benefiting. Segregation in the housing market is still bad for the housing market, it's only a benefit in that racist people are enjoying their racist outcome. So to say that this benefits white people as a whole requires saying that white people prefer this racist outcome
as a whole. Financially, this is straight up not advantageous. The solution here would not be to say that white people are somehow house rich because of their racism (which would be wrong), it would be to say that white people and black people alike would benefit
together from a reduction in racism.
To use a crude analogy, would it have benefited George Floyd to have been white?
How did it benefit
me (or white people as a whole) for George Floyd to be killed?
They do and you are right it's toxic.
That's not what I was calling toxic. I think this was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but if it wasn't, it misrepresents my statement.
Just want give a personal example to explain why being white is a benefit.
Some years back my wife and her friend were both registered on a jobs website looking for online jobs. My wife is black, her friend white.
Wife also had a foreign sounding name, which she's changed since then.
On the website, in addition to uploading your resume, filling out profile info, etc. you also need to upload your picture in order to apply for anything.
At the time, wife was looking for a job in remote teaching. She has a degree and experience in teaching.
Her friend has a degree, but in unrelated field and no experience.
Basically long story short is - my wife would apply, but would not hear back from most listings she applied for.
Her friend would get interviews for the same openings on a short notice and on top of that people offering her interviews for things she didn't apply for.
When she would forward over wife's profile, the recruiter would suddenly lose interest or say position was filled.
As you can imagine, this is just one specific example. There are many others of course.
So yeah, you can say racism hurts the society overall. Sure.
It is also undeniable that white people enjoy a number of benefits (large or small) on a number of things.
Those benefits, over the course of a lifetime, can snowball into a much larger gap in quality of life, mental health, prosperity, etc.
It's not the same thing as before, where black people were slaves and the benefit was easily and undeniably quantifiable, but still...
So the thesis here is that there is a fixed pool of jobs available, and that by not considering black people for them, white people enjoy a better chance of getting one of those jobs. This "fixed pool" concept, while being wrong, seems to be a recurring theme in a lot of these discussions.
I will agree that an individual white person can benefit in this example. If an employer posts 1 job opening, and there is only one employer and one job opening, and two people apply (white and slightly better qualified black), and the white person is chosen preferentially solely because they were white, then the white individual has benefited from racism. The economy as a whole does not benefit from the worse qualified individual being lined up with the available job, and neither does the employer or the employer's customers.
If the black person is denied because of skin color, in this case, the black person may
never be able to fully use his or her skills because of the perceived inability to overcome a fairly stagnant feature - skin color. On the otherhand, if the white person is denied because of
qualification, the same market incentive is not there to waste those skills and potential. Additional training or credentials can pad the resume and get the next job - because the loss of the job was not tied to something immutable. In the meantime, the better applicant is presumably creating more wealth overall. It's easy to see how this is overall beneficial to all people, including the presumably white (because they're the racist here) employer and potentially mostly white (because again, racist employer) customers. But I can also see how an individual can unfairly benefit. I'm sure there are other examples where individuals can benefit from racism besides Donald Trump, plantation owners, and hypothetical fixed number of job opening economies.
I'm very sceptical that it's wrong to say that a system seemingly designed to disadvantage non white people should not put white people at a relative disadvantage. Whether this is true in practice I don't think I can blame critical race theorists from using this as one of their starting assumptions.
Terms like benefit and privilege seem to be just semantics as "less disadvantaged" and "more advantaged" seem to be synonymous to me.
It's not. If a black person is falsely imprisoned because of racism, white people not only do not benefit, but actually live in a worse society - where injustice hampers everything from safety to prosperity. One group is disadvantaged, and not only is the other group not advantaged, the other group is also disadvantaged. It's not semantics.
Edit: There is no fixed pie, we can all lose together.
www.nbcnews.com
