Category: Social Justice

To understand the American black experience, talk to a white school administrator

by philg

Confused by the Black Lives Matter protests? If my inbox is anything to go by, our millionaire white school administrators are here to help!

From Rafael Reif, the president of MIT:

The death of George Floyd and the events unfolding in Minneapolis are deeply disturbing in themselves. And of course, they come on the heels of highly charged incidents, from Georgia to New York, that highlight yet again the tragic persistence of racism and systemic injustice in the United States.

I know that the pain of these events is especially intense for certain members of our community, beginning with those who are African American and of African descent, though certainly not ending there. And I know that, in this time of tension around the pandemic and rising strains in US-China relations, others in our community are also suffering distinctive forms of harassment and discrimination.

In the days and months to come, I would like us to find meaningful ways to come together to work on these challenges, for ourselves and for our society. I have asked John Dozier, our Institute Community and Equity Officer, to guide us in this effort.

(MIT has already hinted that undergraduates won’t be welcomed back to campus any time soon, so comfort will be provided via Zoom (perhaps with the help of the Chinese referenced in the email?)

From Larry Bacow, president of Harvard:

In the midst of this incomprehensible loss, our nation has once again been shocked by the senseless killing of yet another black person—George Floyd—at the hands of those charged with protecting us. Cities are erupting. Our nation is deeply divided. Leaders who should be bringing us together seem incapable of doing so. [i.e., Trump is bad]

As I think about the challenges that we face today, I return again and again to what I believe:

I believe in the goodness of the people of this country—and in their resilience.

I believe that all of us, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican, whatever our race or ethnicity, want a better life for our children. [if he hasn’t talked to a Republican since starting his career in Academia, how does he know what a Republican might want?]

I believe that America should be a beacon of light to the rest of the world.

I believe that our strength as a nation is due in no small measure to our tradition of welcoming those who come to our shores in search of freedom and opportunity, individuals who repay us multiple times over through their hard work, creativity, and devotion to their new home. [remember that immigrants are good]

I believe in the Constitution, the separation of powers, the First Amendment—especially the right to a free and independent press that holds those in power accountable, and to a free and independent judiciary.

The last one is interesting. The First Amendment is apparently not real, since it is something that one either “believes in” or does not. Dr. Bacow is also picking and choosing here. He doesn’t mention the First Amendment right to assemble, which healthy young people have been denied now for months by state governors’ lockdowns.

The promotion of low-skill immigration is interesting because it is black Americans who pay the heaviest price when low-skill immigrants are welcomed by coastal elites such as Dr. Bacow (see “Yes, Immigration Hurts American Workers” for a Harvard professor’s explanation of how low-skill immigration results in a $500 billion/year transfer of wealth from low-skill Americans, like George Floyd, to rich Americans, like Dr. Bacow).

In our nearly all-white suburb, the school superintendent sends us an email with a subject line of “Opportunities to Stand Against Racism”:

Mayor Walsh has asked Boston residents to hold a moment of silence for 8 minutes 46 seconds at 3:45pm in honor of George Floyd. I invite each of us to take part in this symbolic act as a stand against racism and demonstration of support to our community members impacted by acts of violence and racism.

As school has now been shut down for three months, we’ll be standing against racism on the two-acre zoning minimum lots that serve to exclude black Americans from our “community”…

Despite there being only one school in the town (K-8 for about 440 town-resident students), in addition to the above-referenced superintendent and her assistants, we also have two school principals. They sent out a joint email “K-8: We Stand Together Against Racism”:

Students, staff, families and community members have joined in conversations this week to talk about racism. We are committed to speaking out and creating change, and to educating ourselves and our school community so that we can cause true change. This video is the collective voice of the Lincoln School educators: We Stand Together Against Racism.

One change that they’ve created recently is committing to building the most expensive school, per student, ever constructed in the United States. This will raise property taxes to the highest levels in Massachusetts, thus creating an additional barrier to lower-income people of color who might want to live here (can they afford $20,000/year in property tax on a median house?).

One irony regarding the new school is that they couldn’t figure out a way to build the new building somewhere on the 70-acre campus other than where the current school is. So half the students (K-4) will be crammed into temporary trailers for three years while the site of the existing building is worked on and the 5-8 students are shuffled from one part of the building to the other.

The existing school, either built or renovated in 1994, has an exterior door in every classroom and massive banks of windows that can be opened for fresh plague-free air. The trailers appear to offer less than half the square footage per student and minimal doors and windows. Given that Americans refuse to believe the Europeans that the science is settled regarding young children not being a significant source of coronaplague, it is unclear how the trailers can ever be occupied.

Here’s a recent photo from an East Coast Aero Club helicopter. The existing school building is in the foreground, an L-shaped building. The trailers are in the middle of the L.

A close-up of the trailers, showing the lack of windows and doors and the generally more compact ideal virus-breeding environment.

So… not only did they contract for the construction at the very peak of the Boston real estate market ($110 million total cost; roughly $250,000 per town-resident student), but they will be trying to cram students into a reduced square footage less-ventilated space just in time for Wave #2 of a global coronavirus pandemic.

Related:

  • AerialBoston, Tony Cammarata’s site (he took the pictures)
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Are the BLM protesters protesting against their own actions?

by philg

Friends on Facebook are posting support for the Black Lives Matter protests going on around the U.S. A few brave souls post selfies from the (daytime) protests themselves (the vast majority prefer to show their support by updating their Facebook status!).

My stupid question for today is why city-dwellers need to protest to obtain the changes that they seek. The typical American city in which protests have occurred is ruled by a single political party voted for by a population that overwhelmingly identifies with that one party. If the people who live in a city want a different mayor, want the police department to be disbanded and started over from scratch, etc., why didn’t they already just vote for that? What obstacle was in their path?

Consider a few of the cities that have been in the news lately. My friends on Facebook are saying that the protests are necessary #BecauseRepublicans.

If the single-party voters and politicians in the above cities want to change something, why does anyone have to protest? Why can’t they just change whatever they want to change? Nobody from a different party is opposing them.

I tried asking the Facebook righteous this question. Here are some responses;

Jack is suggesting only Republicans will make the argument that black people need to be more aggressively policed. The prediction is true (regardless of your view on the merits of the argument, because some arguments are only made by one party or the other.)

(What difference does it make what arguments Republicans put forward? Why would the Mayor or the City Council of any of the above cities listen to an argument from a Republican?)

Republicans are the Core of Trump’s supporters, White Supremacists, and folks who never questioned the most bizarre acts of Trump.

(But if those Republicans live and vote in the suburbs, how can they stop the people of Minneapolis, for example, from voting to disband the police department, fire the city employees involved with management of police, replace the mayor, hire a new police force with different objectives, etc.?)

What’s it like for folks who are just trying to live in these towns? A friend in Venice, California (on the border with Santa Monica):

LA looks like a zombie movie. Every business boarded up and spray painted. Mobs with picket signs constantly. Everyone wearing masks. Never seen more thieves in a city in my life. People attempted to rob my house on a Friday at 930p while we were home.

In the chat group, a San Francisco resident responded to the above with security camera footage of a dark-sunglasses-wearing thief sifting through the day’s Amazon and UPS deliveries on his doorstep and taking a package.

A more rural Californian responded: Your stories make me feel better about my decision to live with the plane fueled up and the guns loaded. Lucky for us we are in a highly armed gated community. My father just bought a gun for the first time since when we were in Russia in the 1990s. [She speaks with an accent, so I assume she is an immigrant.]

To all of them, a member responded “Wyoming awaits.”

Separately, from a physician friend: “I bet Canada feels like they live in the apartment above a meth lab.”

Readers: The mayors of the big cities where protests are occurring have come out to support the goals of Black Lives Matter (example from San Francisco). If almost everyone in a city agrees that particular changes need to be made, why can’t they simply make those changes?

Related:

  • “Critics denounce Black Lives Matter platform accusing Israel of ‘genocide'” (Guardian, August 2016): The policy platform titled A Vision for Black Lives, is a wide-spanning document that was drafted by more than 50 organizations known as the Movement for Black Lives. … In the Invest/Divest section of the platform, the group criticizes the US government for providing military aid to Israel. “The US justifies and advances the global war on terror via its alliance with Israel and is complicit in the genocide taking place against the Palestinian people,” the platform says. “Israel is an apartheid state with over 50 laws on the books that sanction discrimination against the Palestinian people.” (If the U.S. police kill only the occasional citizen while Israel is committing “genocide” against millions of Palestinians, why is BLM bothering to protest anything being done in the U.S.?)
  • L.A. Protest Draws 50,000
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Why does Uber charge a commission on rides given by black drivers?

by philg

“Uber Eats stops charging delivery fees to black-owned restaurants” (New York Post):

In an email to customers late Thursday, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said Uber Eats will promote black-owned restaurants on its app, and that the service will not charge delivery fees to those restaurants “for the remainder of the year.”

“I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short,” the 51-year-old CEO wrote. “I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths.”

Let’s ignore for a moment how it is just for a “black-owned restaurant” (would Dolezal’s Pub count?) to be spared Uber’s rapacious fees on December 31, 2020 and also just for a “black-owned restaurant” to be hit with those fees on January 1, 2021. (Maybe the problem of racial injustice will be completely solved by January 1?)

If it is unjust to collect fees from “black” (in Uber’s judgment) restaurant owners, how can it be just for Uber drivers who identify as “black” to give up a massive slice of the revenue collected from customers as a fee to Uber? If Uber is measuring restaurant-owner skin color and not charging those it deems to be sufficiently “black,” why isn’t Uber doing the same with drivers? Presumably a typical Uber driver has less wealth than a typical restaurant owner.

Related:

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Uber stands with the Black community

by philg

Judging by the contents of my inbox, America is truly the land of goodwill and brotherhood. A typical recent example has a subject line of “Uber stands with the Black community”:

I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short. I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths. I wish that all members of our Black community felt safe enough to move around their cities without fear. I wish that I didn’t have to try to find the words to explain all of this to my two young sons.

But I’ve been given hope this week by hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors demanding change. I am committed to being part of that change.

We know this isn’t enough. It won’t be enough until we see true racial justice. But we plan to work day in and day out to improve, learn, and grow as a company.

Dara Khosrowshahi
CEO

(From the fact that riots and looting give him hope, I think it is safe to infer that he’s explaining everything to his two young sons while safely enroute in the family Gulfstream from fenced airport to fenced airport.)

The Uber Diversity and Inclusion Report for 2019 shows that standing with the Black community can be done by “tech leaders” who are 51 percent white and 47.5 percent Asian (“Black of African American” people hold 0.8 percent of these jobs; “Hispanic or Latinx” are also at 0.8 percent).

Readers: What would Travis Kalanick have written about recent events?

Related:

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Urban riots predictable after lockdown?

by philg

Loyal readers of this blog (i.e., both of you!) will recall that I have regularly asked whether the lockdown cure is worse than the coronavirus disease. I anticipated deaths in the U.S. due to the shutdown of health care for non-Covid issues, due to poverty and unemployment, due to the shutdown of clinical trials for new/improved medicines, and due to the shutdown of clinical training for medical doctors (post). I anticipated a vast number of deaths in poor countries that were our trading partners.

I did not anticipate civil unrest and the destruction of American cities, but of course in hindsight it seems obvious that locking the poorest Americans into their crummy tiny urban apartments for months, while taking away jobs from most of those who formerly worked, would lead to them eventually emerging and entertaining themselves in ways that wouldn’t be entertaining for the mansion-dwelling governors who ordered the lockdowns. (see “Your lockdown may vary”)

Police departments in the U.S. murder citizens on a regular basis (and why not, since they are generally immune from being fired). The typical police murder does not bother too many Americans or even make the news. This one was unusually disturbing and unusually thoroughly documented on video, of course, but I still don’t think it would have been enough to trigger nationwide riots back in, say, 2019.

In addition to the lockdown itself having put non-mansion-dwelling Americans into a bad mood, I wonder if the lockdown created a general environment of lawlessness. Unlike in Sweden, for example, Americans were told that everything had changed due to the killer virus and therefore their Constitutional rights were inoperative. Since the old laws didn’t apply to the government, maybe the old laws against looting didn’t apply to the subjects?

Is it fair to say that a lot of Americans actually did anticipate this kind of breakdown of society? There was a huge run on guns and ammo back in March, right? I discovered that several of my friends had become new gun owners. These included female physicians in their 40s, for example, living alone in cities. I scoffed at them, saying that the militarized U.S. police state would keep the ghetto-dwellers quietly imprisoned, watching TV while consuming alcohol and opioids purchased via Medicaid.

Readers: Were these riots easy to foresee?

Bonus: Some pictures from a recent helicopter trip over Dover, Massachusetts. #WeAreAllinThisTogether #StayHomeSaveLives

(The house is at 36 Farm Street. Trulia says that the annual property tax is $141,000 per year, i.e., not enough to pay the pension for one retired senior police officer or school administrator. It may belong to Kevin Rollins, former CEO of Dell.)

Related:

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Will the post-plague world be a better place for rich people?

by philg

A year ago I went to Disney World with a rich friend (post). He paid up $8,000 for two days of a VIP guide who enabled us to cut the lines. It still wasn’t that nice, however, due to the Times Square-ish crowds everywhere when we weren’t on a ride. I proposed the idea of a “crowd hater day” at each park each week where the ticket price would be 2X so that there would be some breathing room.

Every aspect of our Disney experience was ideal for spreading coronavirus. Even with the VIP guide we were jammed into crowds periodically. Dining was a mob scene. Shopping was mobbed.

I wonder if the parks will reopen with a capacity set by the tyrannical government at some level that seems unlikely to set off the next epidemic. If so, the most logical method for rationing the remaining tickets will be price. And Disney will have to raise the prices to get a similar level of revenue (since their overall expenses will be similar). So the parks will actually become a lot nicer for anyone who can afford $300/person for a ticket.

How about restaurants? If they have to cut capacity to 25 or 50 percent, as some of the reopened ones in various states are being ordered to do, again it seems as though though they’ll have to raise prices. So rich people will experience a negligible (to them) price penalty and a huge bonus in terms of peace and quiet for conversation, reduced waiting times for a table, etc. (Coincidentally, just as this post went live, a former student posted to Facebook a picture of herself eating wagyu steak in a Taipei restaurant’s private room. Their party of 4 was nicely spread out at a table that, in former times, would have easily held 8-12. As with most MIT students, she was born with an off-the-charts intellectual ability and then she has worked hard for 20 years. (She’s not “white” nor does she identify as “male” so you can’t say this is due to “white male privilege”!))

Getting to Disney? I am dreaming that airlines won’t ever be able to sell the middle seats anymore! As long as they bump prices by 50 percent, though, they can still have the same revenue with somewhat richer customers. Spirit prices are essentially $0 from the perspective of a rich American. It shouldn’t be a problem to pay 1.5 * $0.

Readers: What do you think? If everything has to be de-crowded and prices consequently raised, isn’t that actually a good thing from the perspective of the richest 5-10 percent of Americans?

Related:

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If All Lives Have Equal Value, why does Bill Gates support shutting down the U.S. economy?

by philg

The Gates Foundation‘s main message is “All Lives Have Equal Value” (secondary message: send $billions in Microsoft profits over to Africa without it ever being taxed!).

Bill Gates is a righteous opponent of Donald Trump’s hopes to reopen the U.S. economy. From The Hill:

Asked about suggestions being floated in the U.S. about relaxing social distancing measures to avoid severe economic damage, Gates said there is “no middle ground” between the virus and the cost to businesses.

Gates, who did not mention Trump in the interview, said that “it’s very irresponsible for somebody to suggest that we can have the best of both worlds.”

Are these positions consistent? If some of the most pessimistic epidemiologists are correct, shutting down the U.S. economy might save a few hundred thousand American lives. For this to be true, the virus has to thrive in hot/humid weather, the Army Corps of Engineers has to be incompetent at setting up field hospitals, all drug therapy attempts have to fail, etc. But maybe all of those worst-case assumptions will be correct.

For every saved American, though, aren’t we guaranteed to cause more than one death in a poor country? The U.S. is 15 percent of the world economy. Our shutdown is going to make us poorer so we’ll buy less from the world’s poorest countries. People in those poorest of countries who were at a subsistence standard of living in 2019 are going to be without sufficient funds for food, shelter, and medicine in 2020. Even citizens of medium-income countries, e.g., those who work in industries that are tied to trade with the U.S., might be unable to afford previously affordable life-saving medical interventions.

So if Bill Gates actually believes that All Lives Have Equal Value, shouldn’t he be saying “keep the the U.S. economy open, sweep up any dead bodies, and keep buying stuff from countries where they desperately need the cash”?

[Update, 4/9: I have supplied this post to friends on Facebook who are most zealous regarding “saving lives” via a U.S. economic shutdown. Although in pre-plague times these same people were generally huge advocates for “thinking globally” and advocating for the vulnerable anywhere on Earth, they are hostile and confused when told that their shutdown might be an inconvenience or worse for someone in another country. It has proven to be an interesting window into the logic of the American Righteous. Planet Earth is exquisitely interconnected such that bringing a reusable shopping bag to the Columbus Circle Whole Foods will stop global warming and thus keep the seas from inundating Jakarta. On the other hand, we can stop trading with a country where people are living on $2/day and there will be no adverse consequences for those people.]

Related:

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Book on the evils of settler colonialism…

by philg

… offered for sale on land once owned by Native Americans who were dispossessed by settler colonialism. From the window of the Harvard Book Store, Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Where has the author, Rashid Khalidi, settled? Wikipedia says he’s a professor at Columbia, so presumably he is living on what was, until recently, Native American land (in case you want to argue that Manhattan was purchased, that’s also true of much land in present-day Israel).

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