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It absolutely is. It was called white guilt in the 60's and a moral blot in the 18th century and so forth. White privilege is just a fancy academic term for already existing feelings. It's not a chicken and an egg here. Feelings lead to rationalizations. Academic thought is rationalization. Ergo academic thought is ALWAYS downstream of of feelings. Feelings trump facts always. That's why you can punch holes in someone's arguments (their rationalizations) and they still will not change their mind. Because the rationalization is downstream of their internal sub-conscious feelings.
If academia did not exist, these parents and kids would still feel the same it just wouldn't be described in academic language. Academia is not as important as it thinks it is. So don't buy into it's own rhetoric.
This, too, is just false, though. White guilt, according to Wikipedia, "is a belief that white people bear a responsibility for the harm which has resulted from historical or current racist treatment of people belonging to other ethnic groups, as for example in the context of the Atlantic slave trade, European colonialism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples." This is a different concept from white privilege, which is the notion that modern society (due in large part to the legacy of overt racism) provides privileges to white people that are denied to people of other races, especially black people, in subtle, often unnoticed ways. It's a fancy academic term that builds on already existing feelings like "white guilt," but it's clearly something new that academia developed.
From what I can tell, you appear to have a near dogmatic belief in this. As long as you believe that arguments can't change someone's mind, I don't see why you would want to argue anything ever, such as in this comment thread. I think real-world evidence clearly shows that people tend to manipulate their logic and perception in order to flatter their feelings, and that whatever logic and perception they come up with also cycles back to affect their feelings. That is, even if feelings trump facts always, in the most literal sense of the word, it doesn't change the fact that beliefs about facts change feelings, and academia is and has affected people's beliefs about the facts. Especially for people who were already predisposed, via their feelings, to trust certain facts.
"Feel the same" is sufficiently vague an idea that either this statement is meaningless or wrong. Without the development of concepts like "white privilege," many modern Blue Tribe people would still feel "white guilt" or believe that white people ought to feel "white guilt." They would not feel that each and every interaction between any white person and any black person in any context is tinged with injustice due to the subtle, imperceptible patterns and biases that we practice due to growing up in a "white supremacist" society that causes us to inevitably treat black people worse than white people which thus justifies explicit, overt treatment of black people better than white people. Some might, but there's no reason to believe that everyone would just spontaneously develop these ideas on their own based on their pre-existing feelings, not without some high status institution like academia telling them that there's something Correct about these developments of ideas that build on their pre-existing feelings (in this case white guilt).
Because we don't argue to change minds or win here we argue to understand. It's right there at the top of the page.
"Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds." "In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here."
And I would say that the realization is probably my fundamental takeaway from being part of the political culture war for near decades. Much of what is believed about how people operate and how politics and the culture war operate is untrue. The influence of academia and the media is vastly over-stated and the influence of the society and family is vastly under-stated. That people rationalize almost all their beliefs based upon their pre-existing feelings and that this leads to the fact that people very rarely can be argued out of or into a belief set. That our societies are much more bottom up than top down, and that people complaining about politicians, academia and the like are mistaken, because as long as we are as we are, we will get the academia and politicians we deserve. Trying to get better politicians or better academics is a fools errand, because what you really need is better people in general. That much of our academics (social sciences at least) is generated from the spontaneous transmission of belief sets at the bottom up level that then gets rationalized through academic thought.
So again yes I would suggest that those ideas would in fact have spread absent academia, because race particularly is a fundamental issue within America. The tension between slavery and America's founding mythos inevitably led to the Civil War, the abolishment of slavery, white guilt, which leads to white privilege which leads to affirmative action and so on and so forth. None of that needs academia in anyway. Jefferson was able to predict it was going to be America's albatross. The idea that previous oppression leads to guilt, leads to the simple concept that interactions today can be influenced by history does not need academia. I do indeed submit that even without academia, very little would have changed as to wokism and the like.
People look at the history of slavery in the US, look at their founding mythos, look at the Civil War, look at Jim Crow and segregation and feel bad and sad that their nation, the shining city on the hill did such things. So guilt. Guilt creates an impulse to make things right, to do better, so that you can feel better. You can't undo the past so you must impact the present. So that means black people now must get something. If you're cynical that clashes with peoples own selfishness, so instead of giving up large amounts of status and money they think about it every time they interact with a black person and so on and so forth and it makes you feel more guilty. You notice that your retail workers are almost exclusively black. That your neighbors are almost exclusively white. You notice. You absolutely do not need a high status institution for this. It's noticed because it is true. Previous actions have in fact shaped the present. It doesn't require high brow thinking to realise.
Now to be sure this isn't everyone in America clearly. But it is a throughline through Blue Tribe thought, academia or no. You're correct that not everyone would develop this spontaneously. They wouldn't need to, because their neighbor would, or their parents. Social mores were transmitted and taught and punished well before we had academia. There is no reason to think it is necessary at all.
I don't think I am going to change many people's minds, if any at all. But I enjoy the back and forth and sometimes I do learn new things from new people. If people think I am wrong that is more than ok.
Absent academia those ideas look more like the Black Panthers and Nation of Islam, and less like Robin Diangelo and other NYT bestsellers.
To borrow from an esteemed set of cultural artifacts, the psychic energy would be the same 35 foot 600 pound twinkie, but wouldn't select the same form of the destroyer.
It takes a certain kind of mind that didn't exist before to think maybe people shouldn't be policed or punished based on race.
Letting people die for "health equity" is so high brow it's left the head entirely.
Not at all. If you have a certain amount of resources you have to decide who is going to get them and who is going to get them first. That kind of thinking is centuries old (if not older!) The presentation might be new but it's exactly the same sort of decision you have to make when deciding to build a hospital in London or Bradford. Do you put it in a poor area or a rich one?
Choosing it to place it where health outcomes are worst is taking into account health equity. Again the term may be new but the reality that you have to allocate scarce resources and who should get them is old. Probably as old as deciding if you should give food to the old toothless elder who may die any day or to the hunters in your tribe.
I don't expect us to come to agree on much of anything but I always appreciate your input.
This particular example enrages me because it was much more direct than what I think you're suggesting- it was about withholding vaccines from older, high-risk populations and distributing them to young, low-risk populations by virtue of race. I think the people that suggested this should've been first in line to Seven Pounds for health equity, if they believed it so strongly.
So maybe because I've worked in public health this is not particularly bothersome. We already trade off deaths vs other values. Increased speed limits leads to economic gain but more deaths. Another hospital in an urban area will save more lives than funding one in a rural area. Deaths simply are a trade off at a population level. People here argued we should have allowed more Covid deaths in older populations in order to preserve the economy and rights of free movement et al.
Having said that, from the point of view of vaccines, they have two purposes, protect the individual who takes the vaccine and try to achieve herd immunity (or at least reduced spread). Black communities were among those worst at taking up the vaccine (for a few reasons). With increased obesity and other health conditions, even low risk black age groups are at higher risk than similar white (or asian) age groups.
"In people 65 years and older, Blacks are nearly 5 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than Whites. This increased risk of COVID-19 mortality in Blacks is even worse in younger populations—up to a 10-times greater risk in adults 35 to 64 years old. In fact, younger Blacks are dying from COVID-19 at a rate greater than older Whites. For example, Blacks 55 to 64 years old are dying from COVID-19 at rate two-times greater than Whites a decade older."
So their community is less likely to have protective levels of vaccination, more likely to get sicker than an equivalent white person and more likely to die. They're also disproportionately more likely to work in a customer service or retail role and therefore get exposed. Are you sure that it would be the wrong decision to push more vaccines that way, even if all we were looking at was deaths prevented?
If ethnicity impacts outcomes then logically it should be at least a factor when looking at policy. How much of a factor depends on what you're trying to achieve.
I considered it for a time, but was put off by many prevailing attitudes. I regret that now; I should've went into the field to try and counterweight the worst of those attitudes. I didn't and don't have the thirst for attention to do so, though.
This would be one of those times where how you discuss a problem is incredibly relevant even if the downstream effects are approximately the same, and I should've quoted the offensiveness instead of leaving it (for once!) unquoted.
So I would like to say you have convinced me there is a way that the different prioritization is actually defensible. I can see why one might, especially early on, distribute vaccines in a racially biased manner. As is so often the case, the pseudonymous rando is a much better advocate for a given cause than the credentialed experts cited in the Paper of Record.
Unfortunately, that is not the way the credentialed experts in the Paper of Record described it and so, I present the source of my everlasting hatred for them:
What a putrid soul it must take to think and speak that way.
Their goal is, as they stated themselves, not to save lives. It is to "reduce health equities." In the way of that equity cartoon, you can hand the short man a ladder or machete the tall man at the knees. Their choice is to machete the tall man at the knees, and for that they should be condemned. They are the primary reason I have an immediate and vehement distrust of anyone using the phrase "health equity."
I see no viable defense and, frankly, have no interest in a defense of such people, any more than I would have interest in a defense of King Leopold's actions in the Congo. For better and worse, people rarely receive the fate they deserve.
For what it's worth, the article taken as a whole is interesting, and the author was clearly deliberate in positioning the back and forth of good argumentation versus abject horrors.
So obviously you feel strongly about it and I don't want to rile you up. But I don't see too much objectionable here. Levelling the playing field is about taking into account the differences here. He even says it, the white populations are healthier so they live longer, so if you just take into account age, you will miss out on morbidity increasing factors which in the United States are drawn heavily along racial lines because your underclass is heavily skewed black. Likewise with teachers, middle class white people with degrees are likely to suffer from fewer health issues than non-middle class, non white, non degree holders. All of this appears to be factual information.
I think that equity phrase/cartoon is hijacking your perception a little here. The equity cartoon isn't a one to one description of how equity would work in the real world when carried out by real people, nor do people always mean the same thing when they say equity. The actual positions they were advocating are nowhere similar to taking a machete to a tall person. They are actually advocating for something closer to the original equality cartoon, with vaccines instead of boxes. The tall people are still going to be tall. The healthier groups are still going to be healthier, they would have to be making the healthier group intrinsically less healthy in the name of equity for the machete to apply. Like putting immuno-suppressants in the water, so that the death rates were equalized with the worse off populations or something by making them worse (a al Harrison Bergeron).
Rather than giving something to the worse off populations to reduce their death rates to similar to the taller population. That's the definition of the ladder analogy really. They advocate to make the short person taller (healthier) rather than make the tall person shorter (unhealthier). The latter would be equity as described by the (I agree) objectionable cartoon. If they were recommending making white people more vulnerable to the disease, so that they died in rough equity with black people, I completely agree that would be very objectionable! That would be taking a machete to the legs of the tall. But that's not the recommendation they are making. The vaccine is the boxes or ladders. If you didn't give them to anybody, the tall person would still be tall and the short person would still be short.
Which isn't to say they don't have objectionable views in general, or that they are definitely correct. I'd want to take a much deeper dive into specific proposals and trade offs, and confirm numbers and the like, but I don't think they show much sign of being outright evil monsters. At worst they believe the boxes version of equity, while you believe the machete version of equity.
Note: The Equality vs Equity cartoon a woke person is likely to point to doesn't involve any machetes at all. It just shows shifting one box from the tall man (equality) to the short man (equity) so the short man has two and the tall man has zero. But I've gone with the (more critical of equity) version you describe to keep the analogy rolling along.
https://pressbooks.openedmb.ca/app/uploads/sites/52/2023/01/image1.jpeg
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But the term isn't just about "allocating scarce resources and who should get them", it's "allocating them in such a way, that you are predictably causing more deaths than an alternative, traditional allocation".
Again this is NOT new. In Public Health policy we already take into account things other than just number of lives saved. If we didn't then you would just abandon huge rural areas because the investment there simply gets a worse return on lives saved than adding another hospital in a dense city where the ED is packed every day.
We ALREADY choose to cause more deaths in certain places for certain reasons. We trade off speed limits on safety vs efficiency and on and on. That doesn't mean any particular reason is a good one of course, it has to be examined in light of what you are trying to accomplish, but choosing to predictably cause more deaths is a valid trade-off. If you think poor or rural people should get healthcare resources that could save more urban people that is a valid option. If you think the economic benefits of faster commutes is worth 10 deaths a year, that's also a valid option. At the population level deaths are a trade off for other things.
In fact many people argued here that we should have allowed more deaths from Covid in order to not tank the economy as much and disrupt schooling and the like. It's already established that deaths are tradeable for other values. We're just quibbling over which ones and why. So the fact it predictably causes more deaths is not in and of itself a useful critique. Whose deaths? Why? You have to look at the object level not the meta level.
You don't think we invest in urban hospitals until the point where diminishing returns make it so that it saves more lives to open a hospital in a more rural area, rather than another one in a city?
No. Not at all. The formula used by the NHS explicitly has a rural weighting so as to offset the population densities. Not entirely of course but somewhat. You can argue that's because politically telling rural voters "Hey you're too expensive to treat, so just fend for yourselves" is a bit of a non starter, but the effect is the same.
In the US about 35% of hospitals are in rural areas but about 83% of people live in cities. Just to be clear rural healthcare is still often poor because the US is really, really big. But it is still getting more than simple population would suggest. Which is probably correct, you want your farmers et al to have access to healthcare even if there aren't very many of them. They are pretty important, whereas a Starbucks worker or what have you is likely not adding quite as much value at a societal level (sorry baristas).
But that is kind of the point, at high levels you do have to take into account other factors than just the number of lives you can save/treat. You have to consider economic factors, political factors and plenty of others. If 1000 bucks would save 3 baristas or 1 farmer. Well it might be you should save the farmer. If 1000 bucks saves Elon Musk or a farmer, well you should probably save Elon Musk.
In fact I might argue the US still needs to skew it's healthcare even more rurally than currently. I'd probably want to do a lot of research to confirm that but it's certainly possible.
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Understanding something that you didn't understand before means changing one's mind, though...
The rest of your comment is mostly just a just-so fictional narrative in hindsight you made up that appears to me as a rationalization for your committed belief. It's trivially easy to come up with any number of counterfactuals about how Blue Tribe's attitudes towards race would've developed with equal plausibility (and more generally, about how anything would've happened, with equal plausibility as what actually did happen), because of the nature of counterfactuals. E.g. one could respond to white guilt by just rejecting it as a concept and prioritizing individuality. Much of the Blue Tribe was on board with that in the 90s, of treating individuals as individuals who aren't tarnished with the guilt of their ancestors or people who happened to share their skin color in the case of recent immigrants. That this narrative being crushed in the Blue Tribe was destined is not proven or even supported by the fact that you can put together a narrative explaining the chain of logic.
In reality, what we do see is pretty well evidenced chain of causality of these ideas built and developed by academia spreading to society at large, often word-for-word, done with overt intent. Maybe the people intentionally doing this are mistaken. Almost certainly, they're mistaken about some of the impact they believe they have on society at large, like everyone. But to claim that they're completely mistaken and that they have zero influence in pulling Blue Tribe towards those ideas that were developed and crystalized in academia (largely based on feelings already within that Tribe), well, your arguments for such a claim seem mostly like motivated reasoning.
How so? I am in Academia. My motivated reasoning would be to make us more important not less no? I could very well be wrong to be clear! But it's a worldview I have put together over many years of trying to influence people, and to me it fits the observed evidence of my own eyes better than any other.
No. Or rather, maybe. There are a myriad of reasons why someone would want to over- or under-estimate the influence and importance of organizations to which they belong. Generally, the former helps oneself feel more important and powerful, while the latter helps oneself feel more unfettered and free from responsibility. But it depends greatly on the specifics.
I don't know you personally, and even if I did, I doubt I would know you well enough to figure out whatever motivations you have behind understating the impact academia has had on Blue Tribe culture. Based on your surprise at the idea that your position could motivate you towards understating the impact, I'd groundlessly speculate that some of it is motivated by your belief that your position should motivate you the other way and trying to correct for it. I'm guilty of this more often than I'd like - and almost definitely more often than I perceive - in that I'm very aware that my upbringing makes me inevitably biased in favor of Blue Tribe/progressive/leftist ideas, and as such, I apply greater scrutiny to such ideas than ones from competing groups.
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