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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm still on Kendi's How to be an Antiracist (updated edition). Kendi takes definitions very seriously, and it seems like everything he believes stems from a rigorous application of definitions which he considers clear and accurate.
Paper I'm reading: Stulík's A Typology of Good and Evil: An Analysis of the Work Education of a Christian Prince by Erasmus of Rotterdam.
In Kendi's world, an antiracist is one who starts with the assumption that no race is inferior, concludes that racial inequities are not caused by culture or innate capacity, and commits to fighting racist policy.
Most interesting so far are his thoughts on culture. I don't know how accurate his numbers are, but at one point he posits a cycle where 1. a seemingly race-neutral policy (the war on drugs) is enacted, 2. the policy is used in a racist manner (he says that it was unevenly enforced on blacks despite whites having similar issues), 3. successful members of the minority group accept the criticism (ie. middle class blacks take to lambasting their own kind for being drug dealers and addicts).
Successful members of minority groups are also important to a recent article on the recent Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action, co-written by Kendi. They argue that wealthier Asian Americans have unfair advantages (such as paying for test prep) which aren't available to poorer Asian Americans, who will be the losers of race-neutral policies.
On one hand, I'm pleasantly surprised by an attempt at clarity and consistency, and am much impressed with his mindset, which may bear studying for methods of resistance against power.
On the other, one gets the impression that people would not appreciate being conscripted into a program which mandates fighting against one's own, as much as they try to make it seem like it is the Court which is pitting the successful against the less successful.
Still I must admit that my skepticism could be driven by a certain tolerance for (or at least understanding of) seeking unfair advantages for the benefit of family, and a belief that some individuals are exceptional, and might have their ambitions suppressed by Kendi's preferred policies. I very much doubt that Kendi believes in people who have exceptions.
The biggest problem that I see so far is that, even if we accept his assumptions, he still has to provide a mechanism of this adjustment to racial equity which does not itself invoke the traditional demons of racism. Are we to accept proliferating hatred as a 'temporary' cost towards a promised racial justice through positive discrimination?
Perhaps he has answers which I have not reached yet. Either way, this was worth the time.
This position, and all of Kendi's arguments really, hinges on the assumption that racial inequities can under no circumstances be caused by cultural or biological differences. He argues that because drug policies were unevenly enforced that they must be racist, because if you assume there can be no difference in rates of drug abuse or crime between any two populations then the only thing that could lead to uneven enforcement is racism, but if that assumption doesn't hold the whole edifice falls apart. The reason that Kendi and his supporters hold so much sway over contemporary political discourse in America is because almost no one is willing to challenge this assumption in public, and if you don't then you have no choice but to tacitly accept the framing they have presented, and you can only argue at the margins for how to best implement antiracist policies.
The context, per Kendi:
For the first two claims he cites Vice, The war on drugs remains as racist as ever, statistics show, and the report Racial/Ethnic Differences in Substance Use (2015-2019). I'm entirely unfamiliar with the data, so I can't comment on its accuracy.
The Vice article links to another article, whuch says:
The 1980 article is behind a paywall, but is from 1980. Ten bucks says it includes kids who occasionally sold pot at parties. The 1989 article is not a survey of youth in Boston, but rather of inner city youth in Boston. ("The survey covers youths in three highpoverty areas of Boston's central city: Roxbury (a primarily black area), South Boston (an almost exclusively white area), and South Dorchester (a racially mixed area)"). The last link doesn't work, but again I would bet it includes a lot of casual pot sales.
Nevertheless, it does not take a very high level of bias at each level of the criminal justice process to yield large disparities in outcomes. If 80 pct of black drug possessors are arrested versus 70 of whites, and similar pcts apply to the decision to charge, the chance of conviction, and the decision to incarcerate, then 41 pct of black drug users will be incarcerated but only 24 pct of white drug dealers will be.
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