You wrote: “All I know is I have seen the subtle assumptions that are the preface for discrimination which white people make…. I do agree that anti-discrimination laws exist making discrimination illegal. But that’s only part of the picture. A more insidious and subtle discrimination still exists in our society. As I have said before, this “societal discrimination will only disappear only when discrimination becomes unacceptable behavior in our society. The problem is that President Trump is doing nothing to accomplish that goal.”
So what I’d say is that I almost entirely agree about the “subtle assumptions”/”insidious and subtle discrimination” that “still exists in our society.” What I disagree on is the causes of or solution to this problem. I’ve described the reasons for continued prejudice against blacks in some detail as I see them here:
To summarize some of my points, given the way most of us encounter black people in society today — as disproportionately poor, disproportionately “thuggish,” uncouth and ill-mannered, disproportionately uneducated, disproportionately loud, bumptious and aggressive — I’d be shocked if we WEREN’T racist. The key point that some conservatives miss is that this isn’t about blame. The reasons blacks display these tendencies in disproportionate numbers has nothing to do with biology or genetics or anything immutable of that sort and, instead, has to do with complex historical and socio-cultural issues, some being continued remnants of the harm done by slavery while others — the great majority — reflect the devastation wreaked on black communities throughout America the unintentionally harmful programs created by Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and which resulted (again, unintentionally) in the complete collapse of stable, two-parent black families that, before the 60s, were a fixture of black communities, and even as of 1965 still represented 75% of black families, whereas now, a whopping 77% of blacks are born in single-parent families. Single-parent families are correlated with every sort of societal pathology. To give you one example, 92% of blacks in prison were born into single-parent families.
So the next logical question is, okay, how do we fix the problem? You write, “societal discrimination will only disappear only when discrimination becomes unacceptable behavior in our society.” This is where I strongly disagree. That’s what this article of mine that I’d previously linked to was about:
The point there — illustrated with evidence — was that we can scream at, call out, shame and browbeat those we call “racists” all we want, but all it’ll succeed in doing is driving their prejudice under the surface, while simultaneously creating resentment and driving an upsurge in white nationalism. This is exactly what has been happening, in fact.
The reason attacking prejudiced ideas and the people who hold them doesn’t work is that if you get forced, kicking and screaming, into some diversity workshop that you resent and get told about your alleged racism and implicit bias and all the rest, even if you somehow manage to come out a better person (rather than an angrier person, which is more likely, in my view), you then will go back out on the street or turn on the news and see the same thing you’ve always seen: the black criminal, the black homeless guy, the black boor, the black thug sauntering by with his gold chain and pants pulled down below his underwear. And what are you going to think then? Oh, that black guy is just an outlier? But he’s not an outlier! He’s a disproportionate reality in America. You can’t fight prejudices based on reality by attacking the thoughts in people’s minds. The only way to fight prejudices based on reality is to work to change that reality.
This is why the solution to lingering anti-black prejudice is not to make discrimination “not acceptable in our society,” but rather, to fight black poverty and black single-parent families, which are the causes of all the other problems we associate with blacks. We don’t need more idiots screaming about racism. We need some constructive bipartisan measures to engineer more racial integration, to get rid of segregated, underfunded black schools that set black kids up for a life of underachievement and poverty, to create and enforce mandatory, free, universal pre-K starting at age two, which has been shown to go a long way to eliminating the knowledge gap that cripples kids from poor families by the time they get to kindergarten and has them playing catch-up and falling further and further behind from that point onward. We need to eliminate the kinds of stupid standardized tests that have very little connection to what kids actually learn in school and that are little more than an opportunity for rich families to use their wealth to pay for tutoring or test-prep to get their kids into elite schools and universities. We need to eliminate legacy admissions in universities. These are just some of the steps that we could take to erase black poverty and all the prejudices that are directed against blacks because of the many pathologies that stem from black poverty.
Trump isn’t talking about doing this stuff, but neither is any mainstream Democrat. Bernie Sanders comes closest, I’d say, which is why I like him, though lately he’s also started espousing other positions that I don’t agree with at all.
In any event, hopefully that gives you a broader sense of where I stand on some of these issues.
