In an earlier post I mentioned that the school superintendent here in a rich suburb of Boston had emailed about a meeting with a child psychologist regarding “How to talk with your children about the election and its aftermath”.
I went to the meeting!
First, what had kids actually learned at school?
- a first-grader heard that Trump would be rounding up women and then shooting them
- a second-grader thought that four of her classmates (children of legal immigrants, I believe, and one of them Muslim) would be deported by Trump
- a father overhead third-grade girls say “My mom said the President is a racist.” (children in Happy Valley cannot be dumped off at the curb; parents who are serious about parenting walk them into school and assist them with locker operations)
- a fifth-grade boy saw a plane overhead (probably a Gulfstream off KBED heading 250 bound for Teterboro with one rich bastard in the back) after school and wanted to go straight home out of fear that the plane would be dropping bombs
There was a broad spectrum of political opinion represented at the meeting: Trump’s victory ranged from being characterized as a “crisis” to a “catastrophe”. The therapist herself admitted to going on a long angry rant (to a friend) about Trump in front of her 7-year-old: “We’re scared and they know it.”
One challenge at the meeting was keeping the focus on children. Adults kept wanting to talk about their own grief and how could they be healed. When the discussion would circle back to the kids, the therapist recommended telling children “I’m really upset” or “I’m worried about this because it is not the way I want the country to go.” A father who is a member of the town School Committee said “My mood is down, but I don’t hide it from the kids [11 and 13]. I don’t believe in putting on a false face.” He then compared us to Germany in the 1930s (but without the high quality carpentry?).
A woman who had sued her husband talked about the challenge presented by the middle school boy learning (during occasional visits with the father) that the defendant had supported Trump. She presented her passionate support for Hillary and his vote for Trump as a vast moral gulf that the child was having trouble navigating. This prompted the therapist to remind the group that not all Trump voters were racists and sexists. Some people voted for Trump for “reasons that came out of their own pain” (i.e., the difference in voting behavior could not be explained by the fact that the person who is not subject to income tax (child support is tax-free) voted for a Democrat while the person who pays taxes voted for a Republican in hopes of facing lower tax rates).
I dumbfounded the group by asking “Would it make sense to try to point out some things that might be better for them under a Trump Administration compared to what they experienced in the last few years?” Jaws literally dropped.
The most practical-sounding advice from the therapist was to throw questions back at children. If a child says “X told me that Trump is a racist” then ask “What do you understand a racist to be?” This way the adult response is calibrated to what the child actually cares about.
The therapist noted that, although the walls of every school may be plastered with posters about tolerance, love, acceptance, etc., there remains aggression, a lot of which was let loose during the campaign. It is this aggression that is upsetting to children. She recommended reminding them repeatedly that they are safe (but see above for how she doesn’t truly believe it), kind of like the message to MIT undergraduates. “Model calm and confidence. Show them where is the strong place, the safe place.”
Bonus image of a non-deplorable’s car (taken the weekend following the election):
Assuming the photo of the car was taken in the rich Boston suburb, note the revealed preference of the owner to pay FL tax rates rather than MA tax rates. I’m sure they have told the IRS they live in FL for 183 days of the year. I wonder where the car spends the majority of its time?
It’s not just coastal Democrats who are worried about Trump, a demagogue who is woefully unprepared to actually govern. Joseph Britt, a Republican in Wisconsin, pours scorn on affluent Republicans who voted for Trump:
“…but without the high quality carpentry… ” Heh heh. Liked that one.
At this rate, PhilG may need to change the subhead of this site… seems like the interesting posts are more than once a month.
As far as science goes, psychology is right up there with astrology and phrenology. My kid’s elementary school used to trot in a child psychologist once a month or something to have talks with the parents on all kinds of nonsense. Can’t say I ever attended one of those sessions.
Just wait until they become teenagers.
“What do you understand a racist to be?”
“It means someone who may utter racial slurs, have racial prejudice, or commit atrocities against other groups. However, crucially, the racist must also be white. As Andile Mngxitama so wisely put it in his 2009 New Frank Talk, the definition of “racism” must include the ability of one group to subjugate another, and since black people have never had the social, economic or political power to subjugate white people, they cannot be racist, by definition.
The concept of white privilege confuses and frustrates many white people, especially people who don’t perceive themselves as being in a position of power (e.g., “I grew up in a trailer park”). This is an important point because white privilege is leveraged against ignorant white people to do the bidding of more powerful white people who have an economic agenda—the Koch brothers or Donald Trump, for example.
Or, put more briefly: racism is about prejudice and power. It includes the ability to access resources, being able to control it and decide who is restricted from it. It is whiteness (not blackness), which has formed a globalised power structure (this doesn’t have to be material resources.) It therefore becomes redundant to say a black person is racist because while they can be bigoted and ignorant, they lack power.”
The gates to Harvard silently swing open.
See also
http://www.diversityinc.com/ask-the-white-guy/ask-the-white-guy-is-the-oxford-dictionary-definition-of-racism-too-white-for-you/
http://www.voice-online.co.uk/article/can-black-people-be-racist
http://thoughtleader.co.za/mandelarhodesscholars/2010/03/23/one-simple-reason-why-blacks-cant-be-racist/
Tom,
assuming you are not an amusing troll, I was under the impression that gravity is a fact (try if do not believe me!) and it as a factual definition, while the definition of human social constructs is somewhat less precise and factual. That is, unless you are able to understand the difference between my opinion, your opinion, opinions you agree with and stone cold facts and definitions you are basically unable to hold any discourse or debate. Your power to define what racism might be is no greater than that the next human being.
Jack wrote “My kid’s elementary school used to trot in a child psychologist once a month or something to have talks with the parents on all kinds of nonsense. Can’t say I ever attended one of those sessions.”
If you didn’t attend the sessions, how do you know they were nonsense?
the definition of “racism” must include the ability of one group to subjugate another, and since black people have never had the social, economic or political power to subjugate white people, they cannot be racist, by definition
I’m not sure what the point of posting this is. That definition is not the standard definition. You shouldn’t assume that someone using the word in some non-standard way unless there is evidence. Also, white privilege is another matter altogether.
There appears to be a large portion of the population who derive satisfaction out of asserting that racism has been completely eliminated from American life and that the big problem in the 21st century is false accusations of racism. This raises some questions. How did such people come to the conclusion that there is no longer any racism in America? Did they spent a lot of time studying the issue? Or is it just something that they want to believe? Another possibility is that they’re like Holocaust deniers. We assume that people who deny the Holocaust do so because they hate Jews, though you might think that such people would celebrate the Holocaust instead. Maybe white Americans who hate black Americans categorically deny the existence of racism for the same twisted reasons.
People don’t listen to me, but I always enjoy recounting the story of being a terrorized first grader in Republican Orange County (CA) after Kennedy defeated Nixon. We knew ABSOLUTELY that Kennedy was going to make us go to school during the summer.
It appears that some commenters here are not quite au courant with discrimination and racism in America, but I feel confident that in a few years you too will accept these definitions as if it was always thus.
After you have delved into the sources, also consider e.g., ‘reverse racism’, and, of course, ‘white privilege’ for similarities in reasoning. For example, here is the wikipedia section ‘Criticism’ of reverse racism.
While we all consider the use of “i.e.” above to be jarring, I hope this will enlighten and enliven your community meetings and future discussions with your children.
Tom, stating opinions (so and so believes X human construct should be defined as ‘description’) as facts is the kind of entertaining childish behaviour that will automatically justifies the alt-right claim ‘we have a a different opinion, and as such the facts have just mutated in our favour’. They are playing this game much better than you do, last time I checked.
Federico – In this, I’m afraid I’m but a proxy of academia, though as you can see the science, if you will, is sufficiently settled that it is disseminated to school children such as Amma Germanotta Riaz above. But in case you think I’m pulling your leg, why not go and test the waters yourself? The best thing is, of course, to enquire and listen with an open mind with a minimum of mansplaining.
Regarding Britt, he apparently didn’t notice that there’s one other little difference between the 2008 war hero/2012 governor and Trump – those guys lost and Trump won. The GOP could have nominated yet another “qualified” candidate such as Jeb and that candidate would have lost too. Britt would apparently prefer that Republican candidates be highly qualified losers instead of unqualified winners. To quote another Wisconsonian, winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
Scott Alexander http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/ points out that Democrats are using up their ammunition by calling Trump “openly racist” (calling the Republican Presidential candidate merely racist wasn’t sufficient this time because six of the last four Republican candidates were racists too). If (in the unlikely event that) a future Republican candidate is ACTUALLY an open racist, what term will they be able to use to describe him? Of course, in the heat of battle, no one cares if they are saving any ammunition for the next fight – you hurl whatever you can at the other side.
But people who are vulnerable (who are supposed to be those who Democrats want to protect) – the mentally ill, small children, etc. are collateral damage in this battle. The day after the election, Hillary, Obama and many other Democratic pols came out and said, “all that stuff we said about Trump – just kidding, he’ll make a fine President. We just said that stuff in order to try to win the election and never actually meant it, nothing personal. We never said that Trump was a homicidal maniac before he ran for office and we won’t say it again now that the election is over and he’s the President elect” . But their followers don’t seem to understand that the character assassination was “just business” and that they never really mean a word of it.
Tom – academics live in a sort of (overwhelmingly left-liberal) bubble. Life inside that bubble is a sort of Alice in Wonderland place where words like “racist”, “rape”, etc. mean exactly what they say they mean. According to some academics, for example, “rape” refers to all acts of heterosexual intercourse because the unequal power relationship between men and women in our society means that true consent is impossible.
Now sometimes academics are successful in spreading their view of reality to the larger society. One of the techniques for doing so is the “appeal to authority”. “We are experts in this field and we say X is true, so X is “settled science” and you ignorant folks should just accept what we say. ” This generally works better when the “settled science” matches your own life observations. So if your science teacher tells you that it is “settled science” that gravity exists, you are likely to accept this because every time you have lost hold of any object it falls right to the ground. But if she tells you that blacks are incapable of racism, you might notice that you have had life experiences that seem to indicate otherwise and you might question that theory.
The results of the most recent election seem to indicate that the views of academia on racial and political have not yet fully taken hold everywhere in the US.
“white privilege is leveraged against ignorant white people to do the bidding of more powerful white people who have an economic agenda—the Koch brothers or Donald Trump, for example.”
But when ignorant non-white people are leveraged to do the bidding of more powerful white people who have an economic agenda – Goldman Sachs or Carlos Slim, for example, we call this what?
(notice BTW that white people are the only remaining group you are allowed to openly slur – you toss off “ignorant white people” nonchalantly but if someone says “ignorant black people” everyone immediately gasps and starts looking for his KKK hat).
Vince say, ” How did such people come to the conclusion that there is no longer any racism in America? Did they spent a lot of time studying the issue? Or is it just something that they want to believe?”
Perhaps they looked at things like the Gallup poll:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wolf/
http://ropercenter.cornell.edu/public-opinion-on-civil-rights-reflections-on-the-civil-rights-act-of-1964/
or the Wikipedia article on the KKK, or the SPLC which puts their total membership at somewhere under 8,000 people today in a country of 300 million:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ku_Klux_Klan#cite_note-Ku_Klux_Klan-2
but there are 17 million google hits on Trump KKK or over 2,000 google hits for each member of the Klan.
The day after the election, Hillary, Obama and many other Democratic pols came out and said, “all that stuff we said about Trump – just kidding, he’ll make a fine President.
This sort of thing is typical. Trump also said some nice things about Hillary after she conceded.
Regarding Scott Alexander’s article, it was so long that I just scanned it, but it appears that he didn’t address any of the stories about how Trump treated black employees of his businesses or prevented blacks from renting apartments in his company’s buildings and was sued for that and so forth. He also disagrees with Paul Ryan’s statement that Trump’s remark about the Mexican-American represents the definition of a racist statement. So I guess Paul Ryan, devotee of Ayn Rand, must be a squishy, lefty SJW now.
Mr. Alexander summarizes his judgment about Trump in a few paragraphs:
Trump will apparently believe anything for any reason, especially about his political opponents. If Clinton had been black but Obama white, we’d be hearing that the Vince Foster conspiracy theory proves Trump’s bigotry, and the birtherism was just harmless wackiness.
Likewise, how could Trump insult a Mexican judge just for being Mexican? I don’t know. How could Trump insult a disabled reporter just for being disabled? How could Trump insult John McCain just for being a beloved war hero? Every single person who’s opposed him, Trump has insulted in various offensive ways, including 140 separate incidents of him calling someone “dopey” or “dummy” on Twitter, and you expect him to hold his mouth just because the guy is a Mexican?
I don’t think people appreciate how weird this guy is. His weird way of speaking. His catchphrases like “haters and losers!” or “Sad!”. His tendency to avoid perfectly reasonable questions in favor of meandering tangents about Mar-a-Lago. The ability to bait him into saying basically anything just by telling him people who don’t like him think he shouldn’t.
If you insist that Trump would have to be racist to say or do whatever awful thing he just said or did, you are giving him too much credit. Trump is just randomly and bizarrely terrible. Sometimes his random and bizarre terribleness is about white people, and then we laugh it off. Sometimes it’s about minorities, and then we interpret it as racism.
If you agree with this, Trump is extremely weird, possibly to the point of being deranged. Or maybe he’s just an a–hole.
>you toss off “ignorant white people” nonchalantly
>but if someone says “ignorant black people”
>everyone immediately gasps and starts
>looking for his KKK hat
An observation on the ambiguity of English: To me, “ignorant black people” evokes “ignorant” as a modifier of “black people” whereas “ignorant white people” evokes “the subset of white people who are ignorant”. They are both slurs (we are all, after all, ignorant of many things), but perhaps not mirrors.
>It appears that some commenters here
>are not quite au courant with discrimination
>and racism in America, but I feel confident
>that in a few years you too will accept
>these definitions as if it was always thus.
To put it in the starkest possible terms, the hatred of the lynching victim for the lynch mob is not the same as the hatred of the lynch mob for their victim. If both groups transmit (some of) that hatred to their grandchildren, it is STILL not the same hatred.
Jackie (in reference to comment #16): Please explain how the data in the Roper Center study indicates there is no racism in America. Also, please reference the recent studies of uber, lyft and airbnb and explain how they show there is no racism in the US. Also, please reference the DOJ studies on the Ferguson and Baltimore police departments and explain how those studies show there is no racism in America. How about asking some black people what they think? It is a measure of our progress that some black people I know say they have not experienced significant racism in their lives, but there are others (among those I have met) that say they have.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-finds-racial-discrimination-by-uber-and-lyft-drivers
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/09/technology/airbnb-anti-discrimination-rules.html?_r=0
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-findings-two-civil-rights-investigations-ferguson-missouri
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/08/09/us/document-Baltimore-P-D-Findings-Report-FINAL.html
Jackie, none of those links has much regarding the amount of racism in the country. The page at ropercenter.cornell.edu states that most black Americans think that blacks don’t have the same job opportunities as whites, but most non-black Americans disagree.
Here is something more recent that shows that many whites, including a majority of Trump voters, consider blacks to “less evolved” than white people.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/11/the_majority_of_trump_supporters_surveyed_described_black_people_as_less.html
In any case, Jackie, I still think that there’s confirmation bias in your links. A lot of people decide that they hate the government at a young age, often when they’re teenagers. Many such young people decide at the same time that racism has been eliminated from American life. Then they go and search out survey and articles and books that confirm those views. (It’s worth noting that this is not a way to learn anything. To spend a vast amount of time reading material that merely confirms what one already believes amounts to a big waster of time.)
One interesting question is why these two things go together. Why do people who hate the government want to believe that there is no racism in America?
“If you agree with this, Trump is extremely weird, possibly to the point of being deranged. Or maybe he’s just an a–hole.”
Tony Schwartz , Trump’s co-author (or to hear him tell it, the author) of The Art of the Deal says that Trump is very narcissistic and that he has binary opinions about people (and things) – either you are terrific or you are a loser, depending on whether you are helping him or standing in his way at that moment. This sounds fairly accurate and not very flattering to Trump, but it has nothing to do with racism, in fact indicates the opposite – if you are on Trump’s good side he really doesn’t care whether your are black or white or green.
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all
Trump also values loyalty and felt (rightly I think) betrayed by Schwartz – Schwartz made a ton of money because Trump trusted him to be his co-author and to listen in to his most confidential business dealings and Schwartz repaid him by declaring him unfit for office. In his account, Schwartz makes it seem as if Trump just impulsively selected Schwartz but I get the feeling that there was more to the selection process than that and Schwartz constructs a narrative that lets himself off the hook.
The Art of the Deal BTW is currently the #1 best seller biography on Amazon.
Vince, the flip side of this is why do so many Democrats insist on believing that America (especially flyover country) is infested with vicious racists when reputable polls such as the Gallup Poll show that nowadays only 1 or 2% of the American population would object to having black neighbors and a similar percentage object to the Civil Rights Act of 1964? They have chased own all but the last few thousand hard core racists but they still see them under every bed. This is the flip side of 1950’s America where the # of Communists in the popular imagination far exceeded the real actual influence of Communism in America.
Demagogues love having imaginary bogey men – it’s very useful to unite your followers around hating a common enemy. If you remember, in Orwell’s 1984 it wasn’t really clear if Emmanuel Goldstein even really existed – if he didn’t exist, they would have to invent him. The KKK is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the modern left. Probably at most KKK meetings nowadays, most of the people there are FBI agents provocateur trying to egg on the other agents provocateur .
>Probably at most KKK meetings nowadays,
>most of the people there are FBI agents
>provocateur trying to egg on the other agents
>provocateur.
Nobody on this thread has argued that the KKK represents a major threat so this statement nicely refutes a straw man.