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Blank slatism does not mean that all disparities have to be explained by racism. Now, I actually think that black underperformance in very large part is explained by the legacy of slavery and subsequent structural racism, but, for instance, in the case of Asian-Americans, the selection effects of the American immigration system appear to account for their above-average performance in education etc.
Furthermore, 'tear society apart' seems just a little hysterical. Where and how has this happened?
This is a silly way of flattening all difference between the history of various countries. Of course, almost every country in the world has experienced strife and warfare, but that doesn't mean that for every country concatenation of various circumstances has led to different outcomes in each country.
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How much is a very large part? Can you list off a few specific metrics in which you believe that black Americans underperform, give the relative numbers for some other races, and then estimate where you'd expect the needles to be absent the legacy entirely? Can you also provide what you'd expect the numbers to look like for other races in a hypothetical no-discrimination-at-all environment?
I mean, you do have some kind of "X specific discrimination which happened in these specific ways at these times caused these gaps, which I expect to persist for this many generations.", right? It would be very silly to claim that you had any idea what the expected but-for-slavery-and-Jim-Crow outcomes of black Americans relative to all other colors of American would be absent that kind of comparison, after all.
Let's get some actual numbers around this, both in terms of how you see things now, and how you'd expect to see things differently with a few specific point interventions.
This is a silly hypothetical given that, absent the legacy of slavery, most African Americans would not be here at all. Nonetheless, we can observe immigrant groups from Africa whose circumstances of arrival more closely mirror that of Asian immigrants, and they tend to do pretty well. Recent Nigerian immigrants and their children out-earn the national average.
I don't really grasp the thrust of the rest of your comment. Obviously it's going to be very, very difficult to parse out the effect of every specific aspect of historic and structural racism, but so what?
Hmm. I don't think that the circumstances of recent Nigerian immigrants actually do mirror, e.g., those of turn-of-the-century Chinese immigrants particularly well, but I'd be interested to hear you break down what you think the salient features of Asian immigrant waves were, and how they compare to the circumstances of the given Nigerian wave.
We've got a lot of immigrants to a lot of nations being done by a lot of ethnic groups across a lot of history for a lot of reasons under a lot of circumstances; we should be able to tell pretty quickly which of those factors (if any of them) most saliently predict outcomes.
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Yes it does. You even call the other source you postulate racism. Those things can be controlled for in statistics and the gap persists.
BLM? Embedding every institution public and private of a certain size with DEI initiatives? States like California trying to repeal laws against racial discrimination so that they can institute corrective racism? The increasingly hysterical insistence that racism is baked into the very core of our society and thus our society must be deconstructed brick by brick is not some unheard of sentiment. Where have you been?
Source?
This is a relatively fringe position. Other things like quota-based affirmative action hardly 'tearing society apart'; America had quota-based affirmative action in universities for a good while before Bakke, and society remained notably intact.
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Suggesting that BLM is caused by affirmative action rather than by animosity between cops and black folks is a huge stretch.
Who said it was caused by affirmative action? Blank slatism is not just expressed in policy like affirmative action, it is the root of this uprising of race essentialism and fixation on race that has gripped the nation and set the stage for things like a BLM riots.
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I may have misread the original comment, but I don’t believe he suggested affirmative action caused BLM, but rather that blank slatism did. And that blank slatism also causes affirmative action
I believe the argument would be like this. Blank slatist observes more black men are shot/killed/imprisoned by police and the justice system. Because of blank slatism the only conclusion can be that this is a result of systemic racism, as opposed to any difference in criminality or violence in the affected populations. This same reasoning is leveraged for affirmative action and BLM: that any different average outcomes can only be the product of racism because of blank slatism.
In my view this is an accurate diagnosis of the faulty reasoning underlying both movements
It's a little silly to suggest that people woud look at the data and say 'ahh well, it's fine that a.man was choked to death because statistically he had 15 lower IQ points and was thus slightly more predisposed to criminality. I guess we'll just accept our lot.' The blank slate argument is just giving voice to an already held belief.
The premise of BLM is not that what happened to George Floyd was a personal tragedy for him but a rare, highly-unrepresentative stroke of bad luck, requiring a calm local investigation into what went wrong. The premise of BLM is that cops are routinely targetting black men for death, requiring nationwide [protesting/rioting and arson] to persuade the authorities to rein in the police violence ... and, implicitly, that the racial disparity in rates of deaths-by-cop cannot be accounted for by a comparable disparity in the rates of the kind of behavior that tends to draw the potentially-lethal attention of the cops.
You're missing a key component though: getting away with it. What really outrages people is when they think someone is getting away with murder. No amount of 'well, it's very rare' will mollify a person angry about that.
True, I suppose, but if cops get away with murdering black people less often than black people get away with murdering black people, it at least allows you to point out the skewed priorities (where 'get away with' includes the perpetrators never being identified because the witnesses all refuse to cooperate with the police).
No I really don't think it's a skewed priority, because of course police are held to a higher standard because they're on the public payroll and protected by additional legal tools. There's a difference in how people react to a betrayal of trust vs an hostile act by someone they already regard as a lowlife.
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