This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
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. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
As someone who remembers the ad - you can certainly argue that it's not literally "racist" to state facts and show a picture of the criminal. But I think you'd have to be very naive, or disingenuous, to claim that they did not carefully select that particular crime and that particular criminal for its obvious valences, or that no one involved in the campaign gave any thought to what was being signaled.
Was it powerful? Was it effective? Was there a legitimate argument being made about soft-on-crime policies? Sure. But let's be real here, you can argue that the racial messaging was on point, but you can't argue that it wasn't intentional.
Is that crime somehow out of the ordinary? If we assume that black and white people in MA were about as likely as their counterparts elsewhere in the U.S. to be criminals, I don't think the Bush team would have had to try very hard to select a murder with a black perpetrator in 1988.
Famously, between 1980 and 2008 52.5% of all murder offenders nation-wide were black. Thus, if the Bush team wanted to spotlight an American murder and picked one at random, the perpetrator would be black slightly more than half the time. As MA was only 5% black (pdf warning) compared to the national population's 12% (pdf warning), that would make appx. 22% of all MA murderers black unless either my math is wrong or there was some factor which made the population of MA murderers not representative of national trends.
Thus, Bush would have had to work harder than flipping a coin to find a MA murderer who was black, but 1-in-4.5 is still not particularly bad odds.
More options
Context Copy link
One of the youtube commenters claims "There has been a serious rewrite of history. This ad was only run in New Hampshire, on cable, a couple of times. Yet it is shown in history classes as "the infamous Willie Horton ad. The real Willie Horton ad, which was also denounced as racist, did not show a picture of Horton or mention his race." Do you remember if that's true or not?
Obviously the makers of the ad weren't "not seeing color". But racial messaging could mean "be racist! hate black people" ... or racial messaging could be "there's a crime problem, perpetrators are disproportionately black, a desire to be anti-racist is preventing the left from solving the crime problem, and it won't stop us".
I won't swear to it (memories of things you might or might not have seen on TV 35 years ago being what they are), but I think I recall actually seeing this ad (and I did not live anywhere near New Hampshire).
I would be very curious to know which "history classes" show that ad.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I think there's two different questions getting blurred, here. I'm very skeptical that Lee Atwater, of all people, overlooked the racial implications. But I'm also very skeptical that Lee Atwater, of all people, would have overlooked a case where an opponent's tremendously controversial policy decisions (Dukakis had pocket veto'd a bill specifically meant to stop furloughs like the one Horton received!) had lead to a murderer going on a raping and stabbing vacation from jail, had it turned out that the murderer and rapist looked like Charlie Manson instead. I'm not even sure Atwater would have refused to include a picture.
And it's not like there was some wide universe where the Bush campaign carefully selected the worst one. Horton wasn't the only LWOP murderer to get furloughs, but there had been a total of 11 first-degree murderers to escape during a furlough as of 1988. While Horton wasn't the only noteworthy escapee, I can't find anything from the others talking about shoot-outs with police, nevermind the rape and stabbing.
More options
Context Copy link
This is like the reverse Chinese robber fallacy. People often care about heinous crimes. Black people are more likely to commit heinous crimes in the US and when it comes to rape are very much more likely to rape victims outside of their race (even after accounting for population sizes).
Picking someone that looks like Horton was very likely to happen if it was random. Suggesting therefore that there was something racist or intentional about selecting Horton confuses something that has racial valiance with racism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link