As a child in the 1970s I was told that racial quotas and other affirmative action policies would reduce prejudice in the U.S. One people from Minority Group X were in positions of authority and power, members of other groups would have warmer feelings about Minority Group X.
Today we have a president who identifies as “black.” Yet we are told by newspapers that prejudice against blacks is at a level not previously seen in modern times.
I’m wondering if the purported increase in prejudice is because of rather than in spite of having a black president. Consider that only about half of voters support any person who becomes president of the U.S. Thus it seems safe to assume that whatever actions the president takes will be the opposite of what roughly half of Americans want. If the president were a white male protestant a person might say, in response to these actions, “I hate Democrats” or “I hate Republicans” but never “I hate members of Minority Group X.”
The phenomenon seems to occur at lower levels of government as well. A reader contacted me because he had been sued by his wife in Middlesex County, Massachusetts and had read our statistics in the Massachusetts chapter and this analysis of divorce lawsuits filed in May 2011. Via temporary orders (decisions made within a few months of a lawsuit being filed, typically after a 15-minute hearing with no witnesses testifying) he had lost the house, the kids, and most of his income going forward. According to U.S. Census data from March 2014, this is the expected outcome for roughly 97 percent of fathers in Massachusetts, regardless of the sex, race, etc. of the judge. He was in front of Judge Maureen Monks, whom he believed to be a lesbian (she is identified in this article as “a long-time radical lesbian activist”; this article identifies her as “a founding member of the Massachusetts Lesbian and Gay Bar Association”), and said “I used to have a positive opinion of lesbians, but now I hate them.” If it had been a white male judge he might have said “I hate this judge,” “I hate the Legislature,” or “I wish that I had moved to Arizona or Pennsylvania ten years ago.”
[You might ask what advice I gave to this reader… I told him that temporary orders were de facto permanent in Massachusetts, that there was no way to get around paying his plaintiff every week despite the fact that she earned more than he did, and that he should stop paying his lawyer if the hope was that somehow any aspect of this could be turned around at a trial.]
I’ve also seen this in the private sector. I have heard anti-Mormon grumbling from employees of companies whose CEO is a member of the Latter Day Saints church and who brings in other LDS members for executive and managerial jobs. “I never gave any thought to Mormons before I joined this company,” said one worker bee, “but watching people get jobs and promotions because they are Mormons makes me angry.”
What do readers think? It seem safe to assume that the reign of the white male Christian will not be reestablished in the U.S. Thus an ever larger percentage of powerful positions will be occupied by people who are members of groups that have minority status. People will never be unanimous regarding what decisions should be made. Can we thus expect ever more inter-group acrimony, contrary to the Age of Aquarius that affirmative action advocates of the 1970s predicted?
I’m your age and I don’t recall ever hearing that affirmative action would reduce racism in America. I do remember being taught at a very young age that racism and other forms of bigotry are wrong and irrational. The idea was to treat people as individuals and not assume that lesbian judges or Mormon CEOs are all unfair or incompetent based on an unpleasant experience with one person.
On the other hand, the solution to this problem that you describe, if it’s a real phenomenon, could be more quotas. If all of the next ten presidents were black, it would be much less likely that an unpopular action by a black president would cause and increase in anti-black sentiment.
This is another philg post I find interesting, but hesitate to touch without a fireproof suit.
Making broad sweeping generalizations, I suspect it’s better for many fathers to have a female judge (can spot a woman’s bullshit) than a male one (white knight), but I can understand how it would be much worse if that female judge were proudly a radical feminist activist (hates men, loves gaia).
To answer your question directly, I, an awake US-observer from afar, don’t harbor much hope for your melting pot solidifying into something edible any time soon. Too many cooks and kooks at once. Thus, alas, expect “more inter-ethnic group acrimony.”
Regarding your statement “it seems safe to assume that whatever actions the president takes will be the opposite of what roughly half of Americans want,” factual though it may be, is simply an instance of a false correlation: that half the voters chose not to partake in an election does not mean that the enthroned official’s decisions go against these non-voters’ wishes. As the Esquire Magazine once put it: “If Silent Majority Had A Voice, What Would It Say?”
Lastly, this sad business of a fellow reader losing the house, the kids, and most of his income going forward, thus in effect becoming 20+ year live chattel to the state, now forced to support also an adult.
This may sound morbid but, given the frequency with which your fellow Americans solve everyday conflicts with guns in hand, I wonder why we don’t hear more of suddenly & massively disenfranchised fathers (let’s quit beating about the bush that potentially it also applies to mothers) expressing their anger the American Way: by familial gun murder-suicide. I am sure that such happens a lot, only isn’t being reported. Perhaps you should add that item to your state-by-state survey of divorce law aftermath… that would be a hell of a correlation!
[Incidentally, I hear that the state of North Carolina reached an agreement with the relatives of (shot by policeman in the back “deadbeat dad”) Walter Scott, to the tune of US$6.5MM Given size of the payoff, shouldn’t the taxpayers request that it be covered from the appropriate police budgets ?]
The post describes an interesting and plausible phenomena. However, it also seems likely that Obama’s election as president inflamed pre-existing prejudice. That is, people who didn’t like blacks before Obama became upset when a black person was elected president. Perhaps some of the tension in the black community reflects frustration due to unmet expectations generated by the election of a black president. US race relations also wax and wane over time for reasons quite independent the president (black or otherwise). Given the back drop, I’m not yet convinced that the phenomena described in the post is a significant contributor to the current situation.
philg: “Yet we are told by newspapers that prejudice against blacks is at a level not previously seen in modern times.”
What newspapers have said this?
Do you mean “prejudice against blacks” or do you mean “level of trust between whites and blacks is much much lower than before”?
One result of affirmative action is that less competent members of favored groups end up in important positions.
There is also a subtle statistical point. If the favored groups are on average less competent by some metric than the average then a higher proportion of the members who qualify for a given position will be in the lower ranges of the group who qualify. This is basic statistics.
Discrimination reduces the effect of the second factor. Affirmative action makes it worse. After a while you start to assume that a person from the favored group is probably less competent than average. And you are likely to be right if the more favored group is on average less competent.
So affirmative action makes prejudice more rational.
davep: See http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/the-persistence-of-racial-resentment/?_r=0 for example (“Pasek and his collaborators found a statistically significant increase from 2008 to 2012 in ‘explicit anti-black attitudes'”)
A 3% increase in “anti-black attitudes”. Illustrating that “statistically significant” includes changes that are small.
Obama had a larger percentage of white voter than 8 Democratic nominee and fewer than 4.
It’s weak support for the claim made.
ianf, I initially considered your proposition that ex-husbands murdering their estranged wives and kids was an under-reported phenomenon to be preposterous. As Americans, we hear about how mothers sometimes go crazy, and murder their children, but not fathers. However, I’ve just done a little googling, and it would seem that this is, in fact, happening. There have been several prominent cases over the past couple of years, but all seem to have been locally reported. I would have expected these to be national news, but they’ve not bubbled up into my (admittedly quite limited) exposure to prime-time news programming. One happened last year, not far away from where I live, and it didn’t even come up till the 3rd page of results! This is very surprising to me. I don’t know how this could even be possible, and I don’t know what it means or implies.
David K: The murder of a wife or girlfriend happens over 2.5 times per day on average, although the FBI does not say how many of those were estranged from the killer: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2014/crime-in-the-u.s.-2014/tables/expanded-homicide-data/expanded_homicide_data_table_10_murder_circumstances_by_relationship_2014.xls. I don’t think something this common will generally make national news.
David K., it was meant as preposterous, but not a proposal! ;-)) Then I, too, realized, that I know of two such cases, both essentially briefly reported only as instances of police/ social/ CPS’s negligence in not preventing them from happening, something that could be avoided (not stated how, but presumably based on some theory of Godlike Omnipotence of City Authorities). The general topic that this is filed under is “Violence against women.” The financial disenfranchisement angle (which by and large thankfully is not on the books in Europe, or not enforced) is not reported; the danger of emotional distancing of kids sometimes is alluded to, but generally blamed on the “absentee” parent’s malbehavior. Googling Europe familicide brings up 13 cases since 1971 that are known to the Wikipedians, though neither of those “mine” is there. The USA is “credited with” 37 familicides in the same period… given saturation of guns, and (Hilary Clinton’s recent quip of) “90 people per day falling victim to gun violence,” it seems a pretty low figure to me (DuckDuckGo-ing it brings up a slightly different mix of the same).
[ ADMINISTRIVIA • Assuming this is not some error in the posting robot, but Phil holding up, then filtering out a comment of mine (+ the WordPress subscription to follow-up comments) in another thread where I dared to make a joke, this will be my last contribution to this blog. There’s no point in writing where there are unwritten rules. Thank you for reading. ]
[Added by Moderator: Philip is not a regular moderator. Your posting was flagged for review by the WordPress software, presumably due to the large number of hyperlinks (commercial spam often has a high ratio of links to text). Regarding the previous posting, http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/comment-moderation-policy/ explains the moderation goals.]
ADMINISTRIVIA @ moderator-of-the-moment
Fair enough, have not previously been aware of that by and large reasonable “moderation goals” & S#P#A#M weeding-out policy… perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to periodically post a reminder of it?
Still, it doesn’t mention any link-technical restrictions. I often post with plenty of links[*], don’t recall any of such comments being held up, while obviously newer ones appear (as with that my response in the “Marcy” thread).
My note above carries 4 links (google, 2 wikipedia, duckduckgo) – it appeared instantly. The still-suppressed one of this morning [Boston night] also contained 4 (shmoop, strangescience, newyorker, and realworlddivorce). Your WordPress needs to wake up, or begs to be spanked?
[^*] what distinguishes this hypertextual virtual medium from analog substrate-based ones.
ADMINISTRIVIA cont.
On top (or rather bottom) of that, when the above comment appeared (and previous one, too), the WordPress robot inserts this instructive item in the otherwise empty URI field of the header:
http://deleted
(presumably also now that I post this, too)
ianf: I haven’t looked at the WordPress code to see how it decides what should be flagged or not. Remember that I don’t maintain this server. To the best of my knowledge it is constantly downloading spam patterns from a central location. I guess they are looking for link spam. I think the filtering can be pretty aggressive and sometimes legitimate comments are pushed aside into a spam folder. That’s consistent with http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2015/10/06/swiss-pour-cold-water-on-our-internet-dreams/
I’m in Europe (north-western part) with an obviously different situation. I remember walking through the Jewish museum in Berlin, middle-ages section, and coming away with the impression that back when both the (white) Christian and (white) Jewish groups had a nasty habit of getting into each other’s hair periodically. Of course, there was a bit of a power imbalance, but that didn’t really change the nature of the thing.
Now, we’re flooded with Muslims, whose underbelly-dwellers are bad enough that I’d be instantly suspicious of anyone from that stock of any higher stature. The occasional obviously incompetent and/or corrupt headscarf-wearing politician managing to make several tens of millions of municipal euros vanish into thin air, having to bugger off for incompetence, and after half a year (of essentially very well paid vacation) getting pushed back into position with her own party saying she’s a good administrator, really, doesn’t make me lighten up my dim view. This despite numerous non-Muslim politicians doing much of the same kind, if not always to the same affront.
Personally I think that affirmative action easily creates an environment where the wrong people get elevated just because they’re extra special pathetic somehow, which means it creates an elevated elite of incompetents as ambassadors of their minority. For many reasons, that’s no good.
By contrast, I forget where in Africa reserved some (small-ish) percentage of its parliament seats to women, and at least one of the women who obtained her seat through that construct next period quite deliberately ran for office the non-reserved way (and succeeded). If that sort of thing doesn’t happen, then the affirmative action thing can be said to have failed.
I’d go further and say that if the system doesn’t encourage that sort of thing or has no inkling of a sunset to the mechanism, it has failure and future misery built right into it.
In a related sense, (first wave) feminism has more or less succeeded reasonably well, to the point that the current wave is floundering and groping for meaning. They really should just conclude that this war has been won, and get on with normal life. Which is of course boring and annoying because it lacks the thrill if “improving the world” (nothing more dull than having achieved that vaunted improved world) but instead means hard work and taking responsibility for your own actions, like the rest of us have had to do for ages.
But that isn’t really what’s going on in above piece. There, it’s about convenient prejudices kicking in. “Oh I got shafted because the judge is a lesbian.” Well, it’s not impossible, but the numbers cited paint a different picture. (I say that justice system is broken and somebody conveniently abused it. This appears to be endemic in many USoA-states as well as on the federal level.) Even so, it happens quite a bit, and not just with minorities. How often have you blamed something –rightly or wrongly– on the other gender if you had words with just one member of that gender?