I think I’d understood your argument and had responded to most of it, but I’ll try again.
I find the two principal analogies on which you’re hinging your argument — AIDS and the handling of gender discrimination in Norway — to be both off the mark.
Your argument with AIDS is, in essence, if certain people are getting AIDS, we should give medicine to those people and specifically those people, not to some larger group that will tend to overlap with those people, such as poor people. The analogy here, of course, is that if black people are victims of discrimination, then THEY and not the larger, somewhat overlapping group of poor people should be the ones to receive the help.
The first problem with this is that people with AIDS have a disease. Once they have AIDS, they have AIDS. Black people, meanwhile, are discriminated against as a result of a mix of what they are and of choices they make. To use my example from my last response to you, for instance, if you’re going around the street, walking with a strut/saunter, with gold teeth and obstreperous jewelry, your pants down past your underwear, etc., should you have a reasonable expectation of not being discriminated against? I’d say no. If you’re living a criminal lifestyle, not trying to get an education, behaving in a loud, boorish, aggressive fashion towards others, etc., should you have a reasonable expectation of not being discriminated against? I’d say no. Why does society owe you anything?
The second and more important problem with the AIDS analogy is that if you have AIDS, you have AIDS, but if you’re black, you’re not necessarily a victim of any discrimination in 2018. We have some empirical and a lot of unreliable anecdotal evidence that discrimination may exist, but, for instance, the implicit/unconscious bias tests that have claimed to find that all white people are biased against blacks have been repeatedly discredited as unscientific, with people’s results being completely uncorrelated from one test-taking to the next and with absolutely no correlation between such alleged “implicit bias” and any real-world behaviors. Other high-profile claims of systemic discrimination, such as an epidemic of police shootings of blacks, are, again, repeatedly discredited myths, with the reality being that whites are actually slightly more likely to be victims of police shootings when the respective data about actual police interactions is introduced into the picture, as it must be to create an apples-to-apples comparison. The same is true of the myth of mass incarceration of blacks for low-level drug possession crimes, with the reality being that the overwhelming majority of inmates in prisons are there for violent crimes or property crimes, such as robbery, and those who are in prison for drug offenses are almost always there for dealing, not possession.
You can delve into that evidence or not, and I’m not asking you to take my word for it on faith. All I’m asking you to understand is that the question of whether this society in 2018 exhibits very much discrimination against blacks is a complex and open one. I would argue that there’s currently so much political and social pressure to make overt and flashy displays of anti-racism that the result is that blacks, far from “marginalized” or “under-represented,” are being artificially thrust front-and-center and are “over-represented” with respect to their actual qualifications in virtually every aspect of media, employment, etc. And, again, even if you don’t believe that 100%, I would ask you to admit simply that the reality is more complicated than “blacks are victims of discrimination.”
Finally, on this same point — and this is really the nail in the coffin of your analogy and your argument here, I think — even if it were the case that blacks may more often be victims of discrimination, it is not the case that most or all blacks are necessarily victims of discrimination who have been harmed by it in any obvious way. A wealthy, successful black person may never have faced much discrimination at all. From my time at Yale, I know such black people who would tell you themselves that they do not feel as though they have been discriminated against in their lives. So, in contrast to your analogy of giving medicine to people who are sick with AIDS, not all black people are “sick” with discrimination. So it’s simply not true that affirmative action for blacks is like medicine for sick people. What I’m saying is that targeting people of all races who are poor not only wouldn’t have the blowback that race-based affirmative action has but would also actually be the more targeted approach to take. It would track those who are “sick” much better because, in contrast to the case of race, for the case of income/assets, we know with near-100% certainty that those who are economically disadvantaged are more in need of a leg up in society than those who are already economically advantaged.
Let me turn, next, to your gender example. You are telling me that “affirmative action” for women in Norway has not only not resulted in blowback but has been a welcome advance that has succeeded wonderfully. If that’s true, that’s great. The problem is that (i) gender is not race; (ii) the U.S. isn’t Norway; and (iii) we already know perfectly well that race-based affirmative action in the U.S. has generated significant blowback. Let me take each of these in turn.
First, gender is not race. Women and men already live within the same environments, move in the same social circles, are part of each others’ families, care about each other, etc. Men might not historically have respected women and their abilities, but they loved and cherished women in other ways. They treated them somewhat like children, let us say. Moving gradually from that to an acceptance of a certain degree of equality is a far easier step than bridging a large racial gap. The problem there is that, historically speaking, white people not only had a low opinion of blacks’ capacities (just as in the case of men vis-a-vis women), but also lived and functioned in separate spheres from blacks. They did not love and cherish blacks. They were not part of the same families, churches, workplaces, social circles, etc. And it continues to be the case that blacks in the U.S. today are largely segregated in low-income neighborhoods, work in low-wage, low-skill jobs, intermarry with other races at a lower rate than everyone else, etc. So if you force affirmative action on the basis of race, there’s much greater reason for whites to say, “What the heck is going on here?” Notice that while racial affirmative action in university admissions has generated tons of controversy here, gender affirmative action in university admissions has quietly and quickly revolutionized our society, with much less fanfare or blowback. It’s just a different variable.
Second, the U.S. isn’t Norway. Norway is a relatively homogeneous society. According to this, for instance, it is 83.2% composed of ethnic Norwegians, 8.3% other Europeans and only 8.5% other. The U.S. by contrast, is a far more heterogeneous society, both historically and today. According to this, it is about 62% white, 17% Hispanic, 12–13% black, 5% Asian and 5% other. White people will cease to be a majority in the U.S. very soon, according to most demographic prognosticators. This means that various “diversity” initiatives here are going to be a lot more contentious and questionable because the group currently (more) in power justifiably feels far more threatened. With the recent uptick in focus on race and racial issues here, mutual distrust is at a high point. You can’t expect something like affirmative action to work smoothly.
Third, and most importantly, your example of Norway is simply irrelevant because we already know perfectly well that race-based affirmative action in the U.S. has generated significant blowback. There is no reason to guess or speculate. It’s a hotly contested issue that, as I’ve already discussed in my earlier response to you, has resulted in repeated high-profile lawsuits, constant contentious discussions in the media and the source of a lot of racial friction. In the America of 2018, meanwhile, there’s a lot less reason to have affirmative action than there was in earlier ages, when actual victims of systemic Jim Crow-style discrimination were all around us, and the result has been that more and more white people and Asians are getting fed up with this unjust system.
And all of this really underlines my point that the main problem with affirmative action is that it makes racial discrimination worse, not better. I discuss in this article empirical evidence about how the current obsession with race and focus on race has actually led to a predictable increase in racial animosity:
My point in the article is that if you want to fight discrimination on the basis of race, you have to do the thing the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and many others were saying during the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement: you need to transition to a society where we treat people as individuals, not as races. As long as you keep focusing on race, whether positively or negatively, you engineer more and more epidemics of race-based thinking. It doesn’t matter whether the racial categorization is positive or negative. If you tell people that black dogs are great and deserve special treatment, you’re going to get them to focus on the color of those dogs more than they otherwise would. And all other colors of dogs are going to start feeling neglected and will start making a nuisance of themselves. The same thing will happen and has happened with people.
Two more quick points. One is that blacks are not the only group that may claim to be discriminated against here. What about Hispanics? What about Native Americans? What about Asians? What about Muslims? What about conservatives? What about the handicapped? What about people with deformities? What about people who are short? What about people who are ugly? What about people who are dumb? Each of these groups seems, to me, to have some legitimate claim to being in the position of your sick AIDS patient who needs medicine. In other words, once you start this process, it’s a Pandora’s Box. “Black” is just one artificial sociological category and sub-categorization of people, but there are many others, and some, like dumbness, ugliness or poverty, are probably correlated much better with actual discrimination. What I’m advocating is choosing affirmative action on the basis of poverty because it’s such a real, measurable and socially agreed-upon metric of disadvantage.
The second quick point is that group after group in this country has come here as disproportionately poor, uneducated, crime-ridden immigrants. This is true of Irish Americans, Italian Americans, Greek Americans, Slavic Americans, Chinese Americans, South Asian Americans and many others. Each of these groups faced enormous formal and informal discrimination from the white Anglo-Saxon majority and didn’t benefit from any affirmative action. Eventually they succeeded in large numbers by working themselves into the middle class and beyond, and then intermarried and mixed with the majority in every context. Discrimination against them dissipated as a result. The same is in the process of happening with Hispanics today. There is no earthly reason it cannot happen with blacks. My view is that it would’ve happened a long time ago (and was in the process of happening) if blacks hadn’t been held back by regressive social welfare policies that treated them like special children in need of handouts. If you’re treated like a child, you start acting like one and developing the expectations of one. We just keep digging that hole deeper, making that problem worse. Affirmative action on the basis of race is just another big part of this same problem.
