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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34500 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I've frequently heard that a big problem, and part of why so many young black kids look up to rappers and athletes as role models, is that there just aren't many good role models for them to look up to. And that was a point I'd previously conceded. But when you think about it, that doesn't actually make sense. It's true that black people should have more equitable representation in positions of power, but there are some that exist in positions of power and they don't seem to be regarded as role models within the black community - at least not to the extent that the issue actually seems to be a lack of black role models to choose from. Like there should be more black CEOs and scientists, but there are enough out there to serve as role models, but they simply don't seem to be regarded in that way. There has obviously been a black president and there are many black members of congress. It's not like there is such a paucity of them that the only possible person a young black kid could look up to is someone like Future. It's true that only 6% of CEOs in the US are black, but I'd bet good money that the average black person can't name a single one (and for the record neither can I), and the same is true for the six black CEOs that head fortune 500 companies. If there is such a demand for positive black role models, why are none of those six executives widely regarded as such?

I guess my question is to those who say that the only role models available to young black kids are entertainers, what do you mean? Why do the above examples not suffice to the point that there are just no role models for young black kids to look up to?

A role model is someone you feel like you can emulate and increase your chances of success. When a kid imagines a successful lawyer, doctor, whatever, do they imagine someone that is similar enough to themselves that they could even try to emulate that person? Do they have the thought, "If that person can do it, then why can't I"? In this scenario representative share is important. Seeing a lot of people like you doing something makes it feel a lot more possible than seeing a few people do it. Also, since visibility is so important, having to look up that person is much less useful. Having to look up your role model means you already had the thought that you wanted to be someone like that, when the issue is that kids are not having that thought in the first place.

In this scenario representative share is important. Seeing a lot of people like you doing something makes it feel a lot more possible than seeing a few people do it.

There's two ways of interpreting "representative share."

One is as a proportion of the role the model inhabits. I.e. what percentage of CEOs are Asian American? What percentage of doctors were Asian American at the time the answer to that question went from "approx 0%" to "basically all"?

A second is proportion of people that the modeler observes. I.e. what percentage of Asian Americans that a young Asian American sees are doctors, CEOs/business executives/etc? I think you are alluding to the latter. By definition this will be biased towards highly visible roles such as rapper or sports player.

The natural solution then is to reduce the number of black people in highly visible professions. We could ban rap music and penalize sports teams where whites/Asians are underrepresented. Then black kids will have fewer rappers/basketball players to look up to and might turn to people they know in real life with more achievable professions.

I would say that it is related to the proportion of role models that are observed, but not the way you're suggesting. If there are zero prominent black doctors, lawyers etc, then I wouldn't expect fewer rappers to help encourage black kids to become doctors or lawyers. Likewise I don't think more black rappers and basketball players will make people forget there was a black president.

If there are zero prominent black doctors, lawyers etc,

From what I can tell there are maybe 3 prominent doctors of any race: Fauci, Phil and Oz. In 2019 there were only 2.

Even if you include TV doctors played by actors in the list of "prominent", you get this:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ac/GreysAnatomysSeason1Cast.jpg https://imgs.search.brave.com/hysRef-QN6BMM2eTEp8a6s-UR42RuFNs4yhGsO9lyXU/rs:fit:1200:798:1/g:ce/aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cu/dHZpbnNpZGVyLmNv/bS93cC1jb250ZW50/L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAy/MS8wNC9lci1zZWFz/b24tNC1jYXN0LTE0/MjB4Nzk4LmpwZw https://imgs.search.brave.com/OLW5OIoYr8AmyV94xcc_5PDdTCn7cVPUTJCgLP31ZpQ/rs:fit:1200:1080:1/g:ce/aHR0cDovL3R2c2Vy/aWVzZmluYWxlLmNv/bS93cC1jb250ZW50/L3VwbG9hZHMvMjAx/Ni8wMy9zY3J1YnMu/anBn

Plenty of black people, but quite oddly not a single Desi. That's pretty different from literally every hospital I've ever been to in the US.

Yet in spite of about 0% of prominent doctors being Desi, and Desis being about 1.3% of America, they still make up 30% of doctors.

I've frequently heard that a big problem, and part of why so many young black kids look up to rappers and athletes as role models, is that there just aren't many good role models for them to look up to. And that was a point I'd previously conceded. But when you think about it, that doesn't actually make sense.

There's also another theory that's imo more parsimonious: young, poor black kids (of which there are disproportionately many) look up to rappers and ball players because those are the paths to wealth that they think they aren't barred from - especially as they get older and older and haven't done the basic groundwork to conceivably become successful in other ways (e.g. being Ben Carson)

And they're not wrong, an 85 IQ black kid does in fact have a much better chance of becoming an NBA player than a successful mathematician. Of course this will still be the case no matter how many mathematicians you put in front of him for him to look up to.

1: I am extremely skeptical of the "role model" thing as relating to celebrities or strangers. Actual role models are people in other people's lives, and no amount of group X in job Y is going to increase that.

2: The problem is that what really does affect the life choices of underclass kids of all races is their role models in the neighborhood, school, and social circle. Who is cool, who gets dates, who is feared, who is funny etc.

For the overwhelming majority of underclass kids, they aren't one black lead actor away from a successful career in law. Their realistic options are welfare poverty, crime, or low-paid, low-status work permanently. Is it such a shock that for many, welfare and crime seem like lesser evils? It's more of a shock to me that so few take that path. The majority still take the low-paid low-status work, in most places.

If you want to create role models for poor kids with low prospects, you need jobs that bring either reasonably good wages or social status, that can be done by people in the bottom quarter of IQ, self control and time horizon distributions. And you need social change among the underclass community to value that sort of effort, rather than viewing it as an attack on their culture and dignity. White people can really only influence one of these things in the black underclass.

Or, you know, solid father figures. Even if he's a janitor making minimum wage, a man who comes back to the home with his kids every day, teaches them, and shares meaningful experiences with them will be a powerful positive influence on their lives, particularly if they're boys.

This applies regardless of race or class.

Absolutely, the father is the ultimate role model. I think any serious discussion of the solutions to generational poverty has to start with reforming the family court system, and how we reward certain familial arrangements more than others, sometimes to the detriment of all involved. Ultimately though, this is the province of the community itself, whatever the group. Trailer parks aren't known for familial stability either, or military bases.

That does appear to be the strongest argument I’ve seen on this thread. That what really matters is local role models. But the corollary from there is that this is not an issue that is specific to the black community, but rather to those who didn’t grow up in wealthy families/communities.

However, the only thing that argument doesn’t address is that it’s black entertainers who fill that role for these kids, which are obviously not people they know from their communities. Which would suggest that they aren’t just selecting from local role models.

I think to some extent it’s simply that entertainers represent an avenue towards quick money. And athletics and rap are to some extent fundamentally of the black culture (rap in particular), so they receive a degree of elevation in the black community that enhances the degree of appeal.

There's plenty of local role models in working class white communities. I suspect that lower-middle class blacks have them available as well, and I suspect white trailer parks don't have positive role models available either.

So I've lived in a variety of cities around the US and it strikes me that for all the stereotypes of "Racist Rednecks" my experience of the south has been that racial tensions are in fact much less pronounced than they are in say Massachusetts or California. Sure you might hear the N-word more in the south but it also feels far more "integrated". IE you go into a bar, a church, or a doctor's office in a city like Atlanta or Gulfport you'll find a fairly representative sample of whites and blacks amongst both the patrons and staff. Sure the ultra-wealthy "Old Money" types might all be white landowners who's families have been there since the 1800s but in terms of people John Q Public is going to be interacting with on a regular basis no-one is going to raise an eyebrow at a black doctor or white homeless guy.

Meanwhile a cities like LA or Boston where the only black people one is likely to meet are either criminals or working menial/low-status jobs is also where the worst stereotypes seem to be the most pronounced, and are the places that inevitably get trotted out by race-essentialists as examples of why integration can't work.

A thought that occurs to me is that segregation might have ironically helped on this front by both inoculating everyone against progressive nonsense like "safe spaces". "Safe? This space is not safe this space is a gym". and by ensuring that these cities had an existing tradition of black-owned businesses and kids having those sorts of local role-models that @JTarrou describes.

Edit: Paragraphs reordered

I've noted before the perverse character of segregation, that the same system that so badly disenfranchised black americans also kept their "role model" types in the community.

After official segregation ended, unofficial segregation was left, and the people who escaped it were mostly the middle- and upper-class blacks. While some discrimination lingered to this day, it wasn't enough to stop the talented and motivated members of the black community from moving up in the world. For very understandable reasons, these upwardly mobile, assimilationist black people moved out of the poorer neighborhoods. This lead to an "evaporative cooling" of areas, especially in the north where large numbers of blacks had migrated for factory work. It left them stranded in very white states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, etc.) with all the black doctors and lawyers moved out to the suburbs. Combined with the collapse of the manufacturing sector, the jobs that had provided the structure for their community went back down south. This leaves islands of heavily black towns in burnt-out industrial areas in the midwest with high crime, high poverty, low educational attainment and a host of metastasized underclass problems.

I do agree that the south seems to have better race relations than the north, and it's probably to do with this more stark difference, plus a lack of historical structure to race relations.

I totally think Black scientists and CEOs are great role models for Black kids from the same social class.

Thasunda Brown Duckett went to an unremarkable high school, to an unremarkable university, got an MBA from a better university, but still not one of the top ones and still became a CEO of a Fortune 500 company. She's a great role model for a middle-class Black student who can't get into an Ivy or another prestigious uni.

But she's a terrible role model for a working-class Black student that goes to a ghetto high school. A ghetto-to-NBA or a ghetto-to-Grammy success story is much more plausible than a ghetto-to-C-level one. What is missing is a ghetto-to-suburbs success story for those who can't play sports or perform. A small-scale story of how Shawna or Trayvon worked hard, went to community collegee, got a salaried job, found a stable partner, worked even harder, got enough raises that allowed them to get a mortgage for a house of their own, and now they have two kids that go to a nice school and might even think of Ms. Duckett as their role model.

When everyone in the Black community will be able to point at someone they know who took this path to get away from the MLK Drive, then it will work as a decentralized role model.

So are you saying it’s more that they don’t know people in their personal lives and community’s to look up to as role models? I can see the merit in that, but at the same time by virtue of the fact that rappers and athletes are often who fill that gap it doesn’t seem like the issue is a lack of local role models, as most black people don’t know, or even know anyone who knows, Lebron or Future.

Not exactly. A celebrity is a celebrity, they have global appeal. A single rapper can grow up in South Side and be a role model for Black people countrywide. A man from South Side who moved to a middle-class neighborhood in Chicago is not a celebrity, someone from East St Louis won't be moved by a story of his life.

To rephrase my idea, two things are mandatory:

  • relatable origins

  • total change in the quality of life

So, if some community organizer starts turning lives around in one specific location and, say, 250 Black families end up with $200000 of assets each, then it will be comparable to a single Black man becoming a celebrity worth $50 million. Actually, it'll probably be even better than one Black family becoming middle-class in 250 different towns.

So would a CEO/politician/scientist etc. that grew up in similar circumstances not fit that criteria?

I think it also gets back to the issue of this not being specific to the black community, but rather any community that is either middle class and below or lower middle class and below, in which case, while this is going to be a more common phenomenon in the black community owing to their lower share of wealth, it is being unnecessarily racialized.

My primary view of these issues is that they are not necessarily grounded in race and are, therefore, not mostly the result of systemic prejudice, but rather they are largely a function of growing up in a poor socioeconomic environment. And because black people disproportionately grow up in poor socioeconomic communities, there is a tendency to attribute race as the cause, as opposed to race existing adjacent to the cause.

It's a lack of role models acceptable to the cultural gatekeepers. Successful black men rarely vote Republican but are often more religious and conservative than activists on the left are comfortable with.

The blue haired teachers seen on Tik Tok would have a meltdown if one of their black students said Clarence Thomas was their hero. Better to push athletes on them.

This is also probably true, but I think we should also take care to note that successful black men who are not republican are often not choirboys either- that is to say, a hypothetical world where teachers are all mainstream republicans would also find fault with them. The black community seems to generally have a much higher amount of acceptance of successful men cheating on(or otherwise mistreating) their wives, taking little interest in their children, using drugs, etc.

(Copying and pasting the first part from another comment because I have the same question)

So are you saying it’s more that they don’t know people in their personal lives and community’s to look up to as role models? I can see the merit in that, but at the same time by virtue of the fact that rappers and athletes are often who fill that gap it doesn’t seem like the issue is a lack of local role models, as most black people don’t know, or even know anyone who knows, Lebron or Future.

I’m also wondering what you would say the analog for these role models is in white communities.

I would also counter that local role models that represent more accessible forms of success are more confined to upper middle class and above families. And while most people in that strata are white, most white people are not in that strata. So it would appear that most white people probably suffer from the same lack of accessible and realistic role models.

And I will be the first one to concede that that is a little-discussed privilege enjoyed by the upper middle class +, as I grew up lower middle class (and white) and am currently entering that upper strata. But relative to my peers who grew up in that strata I’ve really had to do a lot of guess work and just make professional decisions based on lessons learned from failure, as I didn’t really know anyone I could look to for advice or as a model to emulate. For instance, I didn’t know what an investment banker was until my mid 20s.

I. I think there's a germ of a correct idea here: black men choose strategies that work, in part because they see them working. Becoming a high-status gangsta character in entertainment is possible, makes use of natural talents, and will be genuinely respected; becoming a physicist or a senator is both harder work, and not really high-status. The former issue may be remedied with China-style social engineering – antisocial hip hop artists publicly humiliated, emasculated, reduced to second-class citizens like some underclass rabble, sexy rebellious «trugs» becoming dirty «ruffians» in the Victorian sense. Alas, something tells me this route will not be taken.

II. But also: the whole role model theory is just more positive psychology claptrap, hopefully soon to go into the same trash bin as power posing, Pygmalion effect and so on. It's both a liberal fiction and another conservative-friendly epicycle to support the race-blind (yet helpless to save the speaker from racism accusations) idea that it's all in the culture.

It's actually turning the situation on its head. The story goes kinda like this: people of group X somehow or another happen to get overrepresented in the notable/elite group A, therefore X-people in general learn that this is an avenue of success for them, start doing A-coded things, succeed, so the overrepresentation is maintained. Now we convince Y-people that they, too, have champions among A, so they choose that path and hopefully X and Y are eventually equalized (per capita) in A positions.

This is painfully silly if you think about it for a bit. The logic of a high school girl «choosing» a political platform because she's seen Hillary in a pantsuit (or, well, a sociologist picking a thesis about racial role models; I guess the similarity here is not a coincidence). In practice the reason the ranks of As are stuffed by Xers is not any role model effect at all. It may be, indeed, a certain systemic advantage (not all progressive beliefs are absurd on their face). But more fundamentally the advantage may be just that Xers inherently have a high Aness score, so the right tail of general Aness distribution is X-heavy. We know how tail effects work in a great number of cases; it's a very parsimonious and powerful scheme whose premises – polycausality of trait values, central limit theorem and normality – are basically unavoidable for human traits that matter.

Naturally, role model theory proponents tend to assume that tail effects are something furry-related; or if they're savvy, they figure it's alt-right pseudoscience like phrenology. The very idea that groups may differ on «Aness quotient» is alien to them; indeed the idea that people have predispositions and aren't blank slates, or that different skills and occupations are not nominatively distinct but demanding different capabilities which can be ranked quantitatively – all that's pretty archaic, cringe and boring to them.

Come on. It's a just-so story. Imagine a white boy saying the opposite: «if there are no precedents, I could still be the first! This idea will be my edge!» Or a scrawny Asian kid: «I will prove that we can do it no worse than Gaijins!» (a popular and, far as I can tell, organic trope in sports mangas; the Japanese are easily inspired by hulking American athletes in sports where East Asians are poorly represented and cannot seriously compete). It's perfectly conceivable that the paucity of known «relatable» figures from your demographic will be an invigorating stimulus, rather than discouragement. Naturally we could speculate about median reactions; but only outliers make it to the role model level anyway.

III. The more sinister aspect is that (I suspect) this theory is peddled by simulacra producers who sell people role models under the guise of entertainment. One could say they're in the racial Dasein engineering business, or hope their business to actually be that; they are crafting narratives about ways demographic identities can relate to the world. These are the folks who dutifully inserted cringey black nerds in glasses into my 90s television – characters who neither made sense on their own nor appealed to anyone, white or black. They were trying to summon those nerds into reality. They are also behind the denied (even here) but incredibly obvious overrepresentation of interracial couples in fiction (see @Lewyn here and what he replies to).

IV. And a more charitable, but also more hopeless, aspect of this I can think of is that the role model theory is true – but exactly for performers of roles, for people whose career is near-entirely about being famous, or at least looked at and admired. @Heebiejeebies tells us of «a little black girl who wants to be a pop singer». Many such cases. Does it matter if she imitates Katy Perry or Beyonce? Either way she will make the same choice of life goals and values, it'll only affect her path within the chosen socioeconomic niche. Trying to add Marie Curie or, uh, Marie Maynard Daly (thanks Google, my go-to source for black intellectuals) into that list is very disingenuous. A woman going the Marie Curie route will not become famous-like-Marie-Curie, not even close; it's a thankless job for conscientious introverts, the only hope here is exactly to be made into another role model, on account of your demographic's rarity in the occupation and the fact that influential people buy the role model theory. It's something of a reputational Ponzi scheme. And it has dual added harms of deceiving people with public performer personalities into joining the field, which they will a) turn into more of their attention-seeking circus, and b) discredit their rare brethren who are in fact outliers and care for the job as such.

The hopeless part is that many of those high-status prosocial occupations that progressives are trying to fabricate and «amplify» diverse role models for are dominated by white men precisely because they are not about public performing. These people go there to realize a dream, to gain power, to give back to the community. They have well-formed ideals, authentic inner desires or capabilities in search of an application – which is a… more than adequate replacement for «relatable role models». Even though there are plenty, it's not they who invite more of the same, it's the nature of the field, and the nature of those who feel affinity for it.

antisocial hip hop artists publicly humiliated, emasculated,

Reminds of the conspiracy theory that succesful Black male entertainers are forced to take portray women, in order to humilitate them. A notable of this hypothesis is Chappele.

The millionaire/billionaire biz celebrity phenomenon - Elon musk, Mark Cuban etc. - has meant that a lot of the reason for the praise these days for rappers and to some degree athletes is because they are thought of as savvy businessmen. "He's ballin, he got business smarts" is it greater part of discourse around adoration and adulation for celebrities than it used to be, in black fandom, as it were.

More and more, artists need to have side hustles and sponsorships and other things going on (just like the typical American, shunted into "being their own boss" by driving for Uber on the side) because high-profile, steady gigs are fleeting and scattershot compared to ages back.

It is weird because I don’t think most white kids want to grow up to be say Leon Black or even Elon Musk. Most want to be an athlete or actress or musician…

But their other role models are their parents. So to the extent a role model matters (which I find dubious) that could explain the difference.

But looking at twin studies shows that it doesn't really seem to impact outcomes.

Perhaps people dream more of becoming a lawyer or whatever if their parent is a lawyer but that doesn't make them more capable of achieving that. In fact, one could even argue that this is a net negative because a dream is sold that is very unlikely to be realised, leading to disappointment and self hate.

Hence my paragraph though due to the fact mating isn’t random kids of successful parents are more likely to be successful.

But their other role models are their parents. So to the extent a role model matters (which I find dubious) that could explain the difference.

Yes, this probably makes a huge difference, even with extended family and social networks. I have great uncles who were globetrotting humanities scholars, and despite being rather distantly related, I always got the impression that kind of thing might be possible, in a way I didn't for things like CEO or politician.

It's believable that someone growing up in a black neighborhood might know someone by proxy who made it big in entertainment, but not anyone who's doing well in the corporate world.

The role model view of the world just seems inherently flawed to me. Most kids idolize famous people, be they actors or athletes or musicians. Most of those kids grow up to be accountants anyways.

Also, there is probably a CEO that lots of black kids know because of his TV celebrity: Daymond John

How many White and Asian teens consider CEOs and scientists to be role models?

Those teens think Elon Musk is awesome. Few teenagers in the '80s thought of Lee Iaocca as some kind of badass.

Of course not, the badass businessman was "Neutron Jack" Welch.

What if you question the premise that your role model has to be of the same culture let alone race? Like yeah if you want to satisfy the lowest common denominator then you might as well add on more conditionals to it, but at one point you might reach the conclusion that these people aren't actually forward-thinking enough in a way for them to even seek out a role model. And to me, the same race is well past that point.

The pernicious premise to this premise is that black people can't ever be at fault for anything, if The World isn't ordered such that they should flourish, there is something wrong with the structure.

It's a dead-ended model of reality because it presupposes that black people can't ever fail due to their own shortcomings.

It doesn't matter if you think it should or shouldn't exist, all that matters is this tendency does exist.

This reminds me that there is a "just kidding, but not really" meme of modern young men idolizing Marcus Aurelius, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, etc. People from hundreds or thousands of years ago who lived in different cultures, spoke different languages, and had unimaginably different lived experiences can be admirable in their ways. No common skin color is required.

Julius Caesar idolized Alexander and had a midlife crisis about not conquering the world by 30, according to legend.

Role models are typically relatable, the incentive is that if "I behave like this person, I can achieve what this person achieves."

If you're coming from a place of perceived poverty and repression, no amount of "acting white" will grant you the benefits these white CEOs received by virtue of not being dark-skinned.

Put another way, if I'm a little black girl who wants to be a pop singer, should I model my behavior on Katy Perry or Beyonce?

Probably Katy Perry because that would be novel.

Role models are typically relatable, the incentive is that if "I behave like this person, I can achieve what this person achieves."

Really? Iron Man is relatable? Captain America? Hercules? Naruto (who is totally a role model, at least when it comes to running form)? I could tell a just-so story that Role Models are deliberately supposed to be hyper-exaggerated, unrealistic caricatures; that they're purposely-outsize exemplars just to drum the applicable idea/trope into impressionable but unsophisticated minds.

Naruto is my role model for generating swirling blue orbs in my palms.

Most of those characters are relatable - it's part of what makes their stories so successful.

You might not be a billionaire playboy, but you know what it feels like to want to atone for a past mistake.

No one will make you a juiced super soldier, but who doesn't sympathize with feeling the call to act after your country is attacked.

So they're both, actually - partially relatable, but partially deliberately alien. Maybe call it "accessible escapism."

I would tell the girl to get really good at singing and leave the rest to god. And to develop an attraction for fat hairy men whose surnames rhyme with 'ein or iceberg.

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not.

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