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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30593 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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The Obama Factor

Ran across this lengthy piece in Tablet this week. I have a lot of thoughts about it, but the main one is that it is the first piece I've encountered that feels sufficiently removed from the Obama years to count as sufficiently distant to be a really good historical retrospective. Of course, that's not all it is! But it consists substantially of a conversation between two men who have impeccable liberal bona fides. David Garrow is a biographer of some repute, and his wide-ranging commentary here is priceless.

For my part, back in the day, I was bullish on Obama during the Democratic primaries, in part due to a rumor that he intended to tap Lawrence Lessig to do some intellectual property reform. Beneath the soaring oratory and the socialist populism, Obama seemed to me to get technology in a way that I thought it might be good for America's economic future. When he did things like appoint RIAA lawyers to top positions a lot of the old nerd guard felt betrayed, but looking back I think most were also profoundly incurious about that betrayal. Maybe because we're all just accustomed to politicians failing to live up to their promises? Only, I don't know that Obama made any clear promises along these lines, it was more that he spoke in promising ways, if that makes sense. It was a failure, not of promises, but of promise. Obama's failure to appoint the right tech people didn't make a lot of sense to me then, but modeling him as doing things he imagines winners do, rather than modeling him as someone with real ideological commitments, gets me there.

Likewise, the economic plight of black Americans actually worsened under Obama (e.g.), but I don't recall much discussion then about how Obama is not Black, i.e. is not a descendant of American slavery and did not even especially grow up with descendants of American slavery. This piece touches on that a fair bit.

There is also some fascinating stuff here re: MLK, and Clarence Thomas. It opens with a great exploration of Obama's fabulism, and touches on his dalliances with Marxism. It makes explicit the connection between Obama's courting of Iran, and his turning a blind eye to Syria. There are digs on Bibi and Putin, there's a brief discussion of Hitler. It all hangs together as a talk about the relationship between individual personalities and the sweep of political history.

I'd include some choice quotes but I don't want to focus the conversation any more than I already have. Every single word of this piece is worth reading, on my view, and I'd love to hear what others take from it.

Very good article, recommended by anyone from Bari Weiss to dead bird Nazis.

The "gotcha" thing most people take from it is are Obama's fantasies of having sex with men, or in the case of conspirologists, that Obama is the real "big man" from Hunter's mails and the real grey eminence in charge of the White House.

More important, in my wiew, is Obama's cosmopolitan background, the fact he could reinvent himself as "black American" even when he has nothing in common with them.

The contrast to Barack could not be greater. He doesn’t know the daddy. He sort of knows the mother. He’s living with these elderly white people, and he’s being shuttled between Indonesia and Honolulu. And both in high school and at Oxy, and those three years in New York, his friendship network is all these guys like Chandoo Hasan, who are fellow international stateless children.

...

Birtherism was a classic Trump move because it found a really quick way to encapsulate a feeling that people had, even if the facts weren’t true. The literal accusation—”Oh, he was born in Kenya, and his birth certificate is a fake”—was false, and it made Obama really mad. The word they kept using was racist. But I was like, “Did anyone ever suggest that Jesse Jackson or Lebron James was born anywhere besides the United States?” It was not about racism, I think—at least not primarily. It was about foreignness, un-American-ness. I think that what Obama feared was that showing the birth certificate would make his Hawaiian-Kenyan-Indonesian outsiderness even more plain.

The one time I met him, we talked about rap music at a fundraiser. The thing I was struck by, having spent a bunch of time in Bali, was the way he stood and the way he held his head while he listened. I recognized Indonesia in the tilt of the head and the stillness of his body. It was very familiar. Americans don’t have that kind of pose, or poise.

In Anatoly Karlin's speak, we have here typical example of "elite human capital", who can fly like bids everywhere, who are at home anywhere and nowhere.

These people are indeed the winners, the world belongs to them. For all eternity, as Karlin believed when he left Russian cause and crossed to their side, or for shorter time? Time will tell.

Likewise, the economic plight of black Americans actually worsened under Obama (e.g.), but I don't recall much discussion then about how Obama is not Black, i.e. is not a descendant of American slavery and did not even especially grow up with descendants of American slavery. This piece touches on that a fair bit.

given that real and nominal wages rose, blacks , alone with everyone else, saw gains.

the economic plight of black Americans actually worsened under Obama

That does not seem to be the case. The Census Bureau reports that real median household income for black Americans rose between 2008-2016. And, the poverty rate dropped. And the unemployment rate for blacks was 12.7% in Jan of 2009 and 7.5% in Jan of 2017.

So unemployment dropped from the heights of the Great Recession to a still rather high figure. Great job, Obama.

By that logic, Biden and Trump are two of the greatest Presidents in U.S. history because unemployment has never been so low.

Blaming Presidents for unemployment is like blaming them for the weather.

I'm not blaming anyone, merely noting that it's not actually impressive. It's actually ridiculous to give Obama any credit here.

I think if you consult the linked source, you will find that a 7.5% unemployment rate for African Americans is in fact quite low in historical terms. The data starts in 1972, and from then until Jan of 2017 the African American unemployment rate had almost never been below 7.5%, and then only very briefly.

More importantly, the issue is not whether Obama is a good guy, or did a "good job." It is whether OP's specific empirical claim is correct, and it does not seem to be.

Also beware of household stats. Let’s say kid is living with mom. Both work and make 25k each. Let’s say kid gets a raise to 40k enabling him to move out of mom’s (which he wants to do).

Now the median household income goes from 50k to 32.5k but everyone is better off.

Real individual income for African Americans also increased from 2008-2016

Likewise, the economic plight of black Americans actually worsened under Obama

I don't think this actually means much. To a first approximation, no one knows how to improve the economic plight of black Americans, particularly if that situation has to be improved relative to other races.

To a first approximation, no one knows how to improve the economic plight of black Americans, particularly if that situation has to be improved relative to other races.

I agree with you here, but most would not. Part of the reason it's so important to get a black guy in office is because They Know how to help where a white guy wouldn't.

I don’t think this is true. As in, I can’t recall anyone arguing that Obama “Knew” something Bush or McCain or Romney didn’t. Or even that the white guys don’t “know” what to do.

Far more common to assert that everyone “knows” what to do, but chooses not to do it. Sometimes because of a competing class interest. Sometimes due to personal preference. Perhaps even thanks to the opposition of an implacable deep state. All of these are more common than the argument that an African-American president “knows” the secret, but won’t share it.

They Know how to help where a white guy wouldn't.

I don’t think this is true...

Isn't the who point of diversity is to get representation into places of power? That a cis white man could never understand the type of adversity ...

This point has been hammered home for over a decade, you don't think that was part of it?

Depends on who you ask.

Modern DEI is usually justified by claiming a competitive advantage. From McKinsey,

Diversity—through the lenses of race, ethnicity, ability, gender, sexual orientation, neurodiversity, and beyond—can help to strengthen organizations, as studies have shown time and again...Companies that are diverse, equitable, and inclusive are better able to respond to challenges, win top talent, and meet the needs of different customer bases.

Nothing about adversity there--this is a consulting company, not a charity. They aren't claiming to uplift the poor and huddled masses. Nor are they openly attacking the majority as incapable. Instead, DEI is presented as an unalloyed good which hedges against various failure modes, like stagnation, or getting canceled. Er,

...struggling to attract talent or losing customers and government support.

Is this a carefully marketed approach? Of course. That's their job description.

Is it also the motte to a racial-justice bailey? Are McKinsey execs using it as cover to achieve racial justice? I don't think the incentives line up. They're more interested in branding as a diverse/inclusive/responsible corporation. That makes representation an advertisement rather than an instrument.

I think that's the dominant mode for DEI advocates. The representation isn't supposed to solve inequity, it's supposed to say "Look how cool and diverse we are! No one can say we're racist! It will totally pay for itself, and also, you can get in on this brand when you hire us!"

We had a very good discussion on this piece in the Culture War Thread last week, here.

I think the most interesting assertion is that Obama has stayed in DC and is secretly the power behind Biden, holds meetings with all his juniors, is implied to decide policy. I'm pretty doubtful here. I don't think Obama is ideologically motivated enough to shape ongoing policy, the argument actually seems to counteract both Garrow's and Samuels' other claims.

I'm pretty doubtful here. I don't think Obama is ideologically motivated enough to shape ongoing policy

The article has an answer: it started as a response to Trump and continues cause Obama wants to push his non-achievements like rapprochement with Iran.

It doesn't seem contradictory but it's yet another thing that is blamed on his narcissism.

Rapprochement with Iran would likely have proceeded much better if the administration that followed Obama hadn't been led by Iran hawks.

I doubt it would matter. Obama attempted to push through an extremely unpopular agreement with Iran by pure executive fiat with no buy-in from anyone else, even significant parts of his own state department, and was thus doomed to fail. Chalking this up as some sort of "accomplishment," or "victory" at all is silly.

Trump came along, saw yet another winning card on the floor in the form of yet another very unpopular Obama policy, and made it part of his campaign. The same is true for the TPP agreement, the Paris Accords, and others.

After a string of terrible foreign policy failures in his Iraq Policy, his Syria policy, his Libya policy, and his Arab spring interventions, the Obama admin was trying to get a "win." The results? Another disaster. And to top it off, the cost of this empty "win" which had no chance of succeeding was the Obama admin signed off on and participated in Saudi Arabia invading Yemen leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths which continues to this day. The agreement itself looked more like a money laundering scheme and payoff to Euros to legally trade with Iran. Rapprochement had little chance of working at all and the attempt was done through secrecy and scheme with the result looking like a scam.

The good news is the Obama foreign policy B-team who gave the world these achievements is currently in charge of foreign policy in the Biden Admin and already racking up some gems.

I'm echoing their framing.

He did five years ago. Now the question becomes, why are they still fixated on Iran after the Iran deal failed, its premises are exploded? And who are “they,” exactly?

Well, for Barack, everything has to be a success. Everything has to be a victory. I mean, I’m not a health policy expert by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve always thought that the whole Obamacare thing was, in large part, a fraud. It’s a great achievement for the health insurance industry.

Not just the passive voice about how the premises "exploded" (somehow) but that this is just a pattern with him and policy "frauds" (which is honestly worse than "non-achievement").

It also would have proceeded better had Obama not tried to approach foreign policy without the buy-in of the opposition party in general.

Later-term Obama basically ran foreign policy conflating executive fiat with presenting a fait accompli. This was done on the assumption that there wouldn't be an opposition party succession, let alone willing to pay the political costs of not going along with it, which was hubris.

Given that Obama took office at a time when Americans had turned against the idea that the Iraq War had been the right thing to do, I think he could maybe be forgiven if he thought that the opposition party would back him in de-escalating American hawkishness in the Middle East.

However, he may have underestimated the deep hatred of Iran that still seems to be widespread in US political circles. Even Trump, who openly criticized the decision to invade Iraq, seems to hate Iran.

That is partly because Iran consistently goes out of its ways to not only be bad by generally neutral standards, but especially the standards the Obama administration claimed to care about.

Rapproachment with Iran wasn't something that could be neatly simplified as 'de-escalating American hawkishness in the Middle East.' It involved things as over-the-top as flying literal planeloads of cash to a known state-sponsor of terrorism, who was involved in killing American soldiers in Iraq and made no promises to stop, for a deal even its adherents claimed would only result in Iran reaching breakout capability, i.e. what it would reach without it. You don't need to be 'hawkish' to think that that's not a particularly good play, and that was even as Iran was one of the most extreme global examples of the institutionalized homophobia (as in, literal stoning the gays) and gender discrimination. Not only was the later a flaw on the human rights front, Iran's sins were the sort of accusations that the Obama administration and the progressive-millenials were using as political cudgels in the domestic culture war at the same time.

Obama seeking rapproachment with Iran by fiat and trying to avoid Congressional scrutiny didn't come across as 'at last, reason will give peace a chance!'- it came across as a really short-sighted stupid bit of political hypocrisy, for which the primary beneficiary on the American side was Obama himself in terms of international laurels for giving the Europeans endorsement to trade with someone who at the time was helping blow up American soldiers and was in no way required to stop doing so.

It involved things as over-the-top as flying literal planeloads of cash to a known state-sponsor of terrorism, who was involved in killing American soldiers in Iraq and made no promises to stop

I mean, take out the very subjective word "terrorism" and this is the same thing that the US is currently doing in Ukraine. It's not like the Iranians were blowing up Americans who were peacefully sitting on bases in the US. For true rapprochement to happen, generally both sides have to make compromises, not just one.

As for breakout capacity, I don't see why the US should try to stop Iran from building a nuke to begin with. Why should I care if they have a nuke?

Also, being belligerent towards Iran is pretty unlikely to get them to treat homosexuals better. Soft power could potentially do it. A full-on invasion could also do it, but that was not an option in 2008 and even if it was, it would have killed probably hundreds of thousands of people, so the tradeoff is questionable.

I mean, take out the very subjective word "terrorism"

If you disagree that Iran supports groups that are broadly and internationally recognized as terrorist groups, feel free to disagree with the object level claim, but you haven't actually said you disagree.

and this is the same thing that the US is currently doing in Ukraine.

And if a Russian politician tried to make a series of major concessions to the US without the US reciprocating with major policy changes, and without convincing their political base of the appropriateness or necessity or usefulness of doing so for even marginal effects, their efforts would probably not last very long.

If you want to make a deal with an adversary, you need to sell it to your political base. The saying 'only Nixon could go to China' reflects the belief that only Nixon had the political capital and credibility to sell a deal as a valid thing, as opposed to being seen as a sell out. Without the popular legitimacy that requires buy-in, the deal itself means nothing. This is why weak leaders can rarely make enduring changes, as the changes they can implement through their formal power rarely outlive their terms in office. By contrast, strong leaders can make changes to public perception that even their political opponents accept the reframings on some level.

It's not like the Iranians were blowing up Americans who were peacefully sitting on bases in the US.

Why would a reasonable American political establishment or voting base would only care about Americans blown up in the US?

Your claimed confusion why Americans would dislike the Iranians. Part of this is because, regardless of whether people supported the Iraq War or not, only a relative minority are indifferent about the Americans who were there being blown up, or indifferent about who helped blow them up. The US government- even the Democratic parts of it- has long memories of people they have spent in some cases literal decades in conflict with. It only required a short-term memory- contemporary even- to find personal and living grievances with Iran.

For true rapprochement to happen, generally both sides have to make compromises, not just one.

That was one of the arguments against the deal, yes- a lack of equivalent Iranian policy compromise.

The functional compromise the Iranians were agreeing to in the final versions of the deal were... breakout capability, for a limited period of time, without the sort of verification systems that would prevent the Iranians to cheating and completing it unnoticed if they wanted to. This is the same capability the iranians have without a deal.

Ultimately Obama wasn't actually interested in true rapproachment, and didn't even try to sell the deal as such.

As for breakout capacity, I don't see why the US should try to stop Iran from building a nuke to begin with. Why should I care if they have a nuke?

Why should anyone care about the nuclear proliferation opinions of someone who doesn't value nuclear non-proliferation?

The answer is of course your opinion doesn't matter- the question was about why people didn't care for Obama's plan.

Whether you agree or not, most politically-engaged people are not, in fact, indifferent to nuclear proliferation. They tend to be opposed to it in fact. The deal did not stop nuclear proliferation. As a consequence, the deal's maintenance could not be credibly be argued to be needed to prevent nuclear proliferation, because by the design the deal wouldn't do that because it lacked verification and enforcement mechanisms at Iranian insistence.

Also, being belligerent towards Iran is pretty unlikely to get them to treat homosexuals better. Soft power could potentially do it. A full-on invasion could also do it, but that was not an option in 2008 and even if it was, it would have killed probably hundreds of thousands of people, so the tradeoff is questionable.

You seem to have missed the message to the domestic audience. The point isn't that the Obama administration had any hope of making the Iranians change policy (nuclear or gay). The point is that the Obama administration was willing to make major policy compromises to a major abuser, while using far lesser alleged character condmenation to justify not making domestic political compromises.

For his own base, who broadly considered the line of attack valid on a domestic front, it served as an easily co-optable tool against the Iran deal, which they would have a hard line refuting. For the opposition he used the attack against, the contradiction spoke of hypocrisy and insincerity, which undermined any political argument that the opposition should try to maintain a deal whose maintenance could be used to validate a line of political attack against them.

Why should I care if they have a nuke?

Because they can use it.

More comments

I sort of feel this is overly complicated. There are two power in the ME the Saudis and the Iranians. Pick one. The other will hate you. Those two will compete. Any Iranian homophobia you can probably sling on Saudis. For a long time Saudi oil was more important which they had more of so we were friends with them.

Iran would say all sort of nice things about us if we quit supporting the Saudis and let Iran run Iraq etc and being the ME hegemon.

I don’t know if there’s a way where America could ever be best buds with both. Maybe we could be neutral with both.

I understand why Samuels wants to see the Iran Deal as this major obsession of Obama's, because Samuels is a committed Zionist who hates the JCPOA because he thinks it's bad for Israel and, as part of that, that any rapprochement with Iran without regime change is absolutely wrong.

But in real life I'm not sure Obama is that committed to the deal. Even if it had held, it wouldn't be cited as the main thing of import that happened during his presidency (which will be 'economic recovery from 2008' or 'Obamacare'). If it gets restored under Biden it still won't be a great legacy and is unlikely to lead to a full or even partial normalization of relations (something that hasn't even happened yet with Cuba despite them being much less hostile to the US than Iran, having restored diplomatic relations and so on).

The Iran Deal was, separately from the geopolitics, also a pretty major effort by the executive branch to bypass any limits on its spending or treaty powers, as well as to hide from outside scrutiny period. It's not like they just sent John Kerry to futz around and a deal just spilled out.

I'm doubtful Obama would have put it as a top-five and maybe not even as a top-ten in terms of things he'd highlight from his presidency (Ben Rhodes, on the other hand...), but in terms of something that took a ton of political capital and seemed to get outsized focus for what it could have returned even had Iran actually intended to hold to it, I think Samuel's summary is pretty reasonable.

We had a very good discussion on this piece in the Culture War Thread last week, here.

Thanks--I'm sorry I missed that!

I had missed it too but read your link above. Thanks for posting it.

That thing is long.

  1. On black Americans your piece seems to be entirely tied to housing losses in 2008. The only solution there would have been some sort of debt jubilee like student debt proposals but orders of magnitudes bigger. Would be interesting to see other areas could have done better but the specific example seems unpractical.

  2. I’m pro-Iran. Probably somewhat because a close friend is second generation Iranian. Honestly seems like a high hbd country and logical local hegemon and internal not as religious. Makes sense to be our ally.

  3. Seems like a meme is developing that Obama isn’t black. And perhaps from the left and right. Joe Biden also isn’t Catholic. And both seem to have a lot of truth.

  4. Supreme Court is smarter today. It does seem like right-coded judges come off more intellectual. It’s probably a bit of iron sharpens iron. Federalist are outcast at their Universities which means their entire career they have had to make better arguments. While left coded can just pick the right cite and then everyone praises you.

  5. A bit between Obama still being secretly in power but also some things about him being lazy. Somewhat alluded to because he’s mostly stayed in DC. Stuff about him being behind Trump Resistance and and now running portions of the Biden White House. I haven’t seen anything on this in the media.

  6. He cites 2014 as the year when BLM came out and race relations went bad. Under Obama not Trump. I think this came from having a sort of black POTUS came a belief that legacy differences would just disappear. Sort of breaking the noble lie or what was described as the Reagan deal on race.

  7. One thing I identify with Obama is not being from somewhere and being part of the credentialed elite. Who ran away from where I came. Everyone who was anything left my hometown. Though I likely do have some deeper roots than Obama. There is something here about “Why does modern art/film etc suck”. My guess is it’s written by people who are from nowhere. Versus it references JFK who had deep ties. Stories are just better when they are about people with a connection to a place, time, and people. And Obama is sort of that stand-in character as POTUS like a Hollywood movie picking the right diversity for their cast but deep down their people without backgrounds or roots.

Seems like a meme is developing that Obama isn’t black. And perhaps from the left and right.

As far as I know, Obama had essentially no exposure to black culture until he voluntary chose to immerse himself in it. The only difference between him and Rachel Dolezal would seem to be his genetic makeup.

I know that "Democrats are the real racists" tropes are considered tired, but I do think that the left believes in genetic determinism more than the right does.

You may choose your gender, but you racial identity must match your DNA or you are cancelled.

The one interesting thing I see here is most of the big black politicians were not slave descendants or in American culture. Whichever way you want to go with that (American black culture bad or some structural racism) would make some sense. Kamala also wasn’t American black but Jamacain/Indian. I believe her dad said they were significantly slave owning descendants in Jamaica (or could be called rape baby), but regardless her dad cites Scotts-Irish background. GOP actually seems to have more influential slave descendent representation (Clarence Thomas/Tim Scott). Take that as you will but perhaps buying into GOP culture war has positive influence.

Well of course buying into GOP culture war has positive influences for ADOS- even if black culture were no worse than average, ‘you need to fix your culture by focusing more on schooling and family values’ results in more focus on schooling and family values for people who buy into it. These are highly correlated with good things.

Well of course buying into GOP culture war has positive influences for ADOS- even if black culture were no worse than average, ‘you need to fix your culture by focusing more on schooling and family values’ results in more focus on schooling and family values for people who buy into it. These are highly correlated with good things.

This would probably be true pre-2016, but right now "you need to focus more on schooling" is pretty deeply left-coded. Although there are right-wing memes telling young men to work hard and learn a trade, the dominant right-wing meme is "lift weights and learn to shoot" - which would not be an improvement to ADOS culture. The very online right is claiming Kayne West as one of their own for God's sake.

Coleman Hughes makes this point about West Indian immigrants in the 60s and 70s, who presumably laboured under the same racism as their slave-descendant counterparts, but had vastly different social and economic outcomes.

https://quillette.com/2018/05/14/the-racism-treadmill/

I think that the CRT zeitgeist is evolving in response to this, focusing more on "anti-black racism".

For reference, West Indian blacks include people like Marcus Garvey, Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, Harry Belafonte, and Sidney Poitier.

Oh, thanks for clarifying, I didn't realize Hughes was talking about West Indian blacks, I was thinking more like Bangladeshis.

Exactly what I thought when I first read the article, yeah.

Yeah, its similar to Harvard's affirmative action. They need black people so they juice the numbers with people that have little connection to African-American culture.

Actual lived experience as an African American matters very little. Having the right DNA and visual appearance is what is important to the left, at least according to revealed preference.

They need black people so they juice the numbers with people that have little connection to African-American culture

they pretty much select the "blacks" from the elite of the US or foreign countries who may have immigrated here and grew up in white neighborhoods and whose behavior codes as white

I basically never ran into American "blacks" (i.e., from Black American culture) in the student body despite administration regularly touting those stats

I always thought it was funny when a professor would get some 2nd gen immigrant from Somalia's deposed vicious ruling elite to be called on to talk about her "black" experience growing up in a exclusive New England boarding school. The funniest bit is as time went on she figured the part the school (and others) wanted her play and she played it, even though it was mostly fake.

If their experience was similar, it really makes me understand why someone like Clarence Thomas could have such a strong animus towards YLS.

That’s the issue though. American schools shouldn’t be worse than Nigeria or Jamaica etc. We spend a ton of money on them.

It isn't the schools - in the first world the problem is always the students. There is one very obvious explanation for why non-ADOS blacks do better in America, which is that they (or their parents) were pre-selected as desirable immigrants. But this doesn't seem like the whole story - Caribbean blacks in the UK seem better off than ADOS blacks in the US despite their ancestors moving here to take on low-skill jobs at a time when migration within the British Empire was unrestricted.

There are two obvious HBD just-so stories:

  1. Slave ships reached the Caribbean first, so the American cotton planters got the crappy slaves the Caribbean sugar planters didn't want.
  2. The process of maintaining a self-sustaining slave population in America between the ban on the slave trade in 1808 and emancipation in 1865 was highly dysgenic because masters preferred dumber slaves who were easier to control.

There is also the obvious cultural theory.

Or that voluntary migration is in itself a filter.

This isn’t hbd but I think there’s a cultural angle in the sense that African American culture doesn’t push education or high achievement. They’re not really a work culture in the same way that other cultures are. When the culture around you favors gangsters honor culture, sports, and music over reading, math and working, it’s not going to go well for you unless you specifically reject that culture.

This isn’t hbd but I think there’s a cultural angle in the sense that African American culture doesn’t push education or high achievement.

Shamus Khan's Privilege touches on differences even in an affluent high school school that lets in minorities and poorer people to get its diversity bona fides.

The issue in that school is not so much that black students that get there aren't studious (they have to be, to be selected at all). It's that, in his view, they always stand outside the system in a way because race stops them from seeing it as legitimate in the way that white people or even some other minorities (people like Vivek who are more unabashed about believing in the American Dream than a lot of progressive well-off white people - look at his tense debate with Don Lemon and the interview on the Breakfast Club for when these mindsets collide).

The system recognizes this and it hurts them.

As stories like George’s piled up, I began to see the difference with Carla as a racial one. Carla questions the general legitimacy of a St. Paul’s education. St. Paul’s is a bullshit system you need to learn, not a legitimate understanding of how the world works. Or put less harshly, it’s one among many legitimate ways of understanding things. What’s “bullshit” about St. Paul’s is not that the school’s vision is invalid but that implicit to this vision is the belief that its particular way of understanding the world is the way. This is what frustrates Carla: that her way is not recognized.

Though Carla is recognized as an excellent student and is quite popular at the school, this approach to the school does make life difficult for her. Faculty feel something different in her work. They often told me they wished she were “warmer”; both her work and her personality were often “cold.” She did good work, but it was “formal” and “distant.” And students similarly told me that they felt a kind of “distance” from her. One of Carla’s closest friends confided in me: “Sometimes I feel like we’re just going through the motions here . . . I don’t know, with her it’s sometimes different. Like we’re not really connecting, almost like we are, but I remember it like something I saw in a movie, not us. Like it happened to someone else. Like our connection is someone else’s, or something I saw. Not all the time. But it’s weird. I don’t get that from everyone. Or really anyone else.”

Rather than learning to truly embody the school in a way that is natural, Carla learns, in her translation, to “act it.” Her refusal to think of St. Paul’s as the natural order and instead as one potential order among many results in a distance from the school and others within it. We might think of this distance in negative ways, or as a kind of oppositional consciousness, where Carla claims her “previously subordinate identity as a positive identification.”5

Of course, you could argue that this is just a just-so story from Khan to deal with both him and black people noticing the things HBD predicts they'll notice but they can't otherwise explain:

Carla was one of the few students who talked to me about all the students who could be at St. Paul’s—who perhaps deserved to be—but were not. While the school and its students talk relentlessly of hard work, merit, and excellence, almost no one talked about what this emphasis meant for those who weren’t at the school. In other words, if St. Paul’s was a meritocratic place—if you got there because of your hard work and your own personal excellence—then why was the school made up of mostly very wealthy students? Why were there comparatively few black or Latino students? Why did blacks and Latinos not do as well as the white and Asian students? Why, though girls consistently did better than the boys, was the student body still half boys and half girls? Why did students tend to come from cities or areas just outside of cities? Why were they mostly from the East Coast? Why were many students the children of parents who went to boarding school, particularly St. Paul’s? Most of these questions are rather easy to answer. In fact, the answers seem so obvious that we tend to dismiss questions like these. But if we really believe that the school is a place for those who are excellent, who work hard, and who deserve their place—and that nothing else should limit who applies, or gets in, or goes to the school—then these questions become very hard. Carla asked these questions. And her answer was that these privileged groups had a way of “knowing” the world that was their own. Not hers. As it turns out, her answer is quite a good one.

Honestly, it may be due a re-read to see if he really makes his case, it's a short book.

Pre-selected filter doesn’t make sense to me. We have 50 million here with a significant portion being partial white. And all of them have educational opportunities. Even the worse Baltimore school I would think has more opportune than a non-elite school in Jamaica or Nigeria I would think. Maybe that’s wrong. So even though on net there are way more in Africa I have my doubts that many have the schools necessary to climb out. Maybe I’m wrong there but I don’t think we are filtering out a billion people for their best versus 50 million here.

Plus Hannania has shown stats that children of African immigrants with degrees still do poorly on IQ test.

Or the best just don’t want to be politicians and end up in a comfy seat at GS making a million a year with DEI job security.

Something is going on and I don’t have a theory I trust for that.

They're not worse than Nigeria. They're worse than the elite of Nigeria.

In a lot of these places people don't go to public school because "public" is for people with no choice. Private schools on the other hand don't have to try to educate everyone.

One of my classmates went to Yale. She was very smart and studious but I have to wonder what would have happened had she been stuck in some stereotypically hellish inner city school with the worst performing students.

But, honestly, a lot of it is just pre-school social family resources. People from her class come in with an expectation of studiousness (which parents reinforce with private tutoring and other means). Hard to hold it against American schools that in a universal system many people...don't.

(That said, it is insane to me that teachers have to expect violence. You'd think that would be a bare minimum thing).

Nigeria only has a population 4.3X our black community. Maybe throw in the Caribbean and some other countries and you get to 10x. That just doesn’t seem big enough to filter at the rate we are seeing especially when a large pop of that population probably doesn’t have parental wealth to even enter the filter (for schooling/travel expenses).

That just doesn’t seem big enough to filter at the rate we are seeing

It isn't?

I'm honestly asking here: there's very few Ivy League spots. Even if every person in Harvard's 2026 class counted as "black" it hardly seems a huge rate.

Especially if Murray in Facing Reality is right: Harvard can skim off the top of the most academically inclined blacks. Everyone else then does their best with what they have. Even if that means "talented locals" rather than "peak of Nigerian elite".

More comments

Money is not freely convertible into the things that make schools conducive to learning, nor is there one set of things that works for educating all types of people. Some people will learn if you just let them loose in a room full of books and things to tinker with. Others need to be proverbially chained to the desk and smacked with rulers, Prussian/Irish Nun style.

Obama's failure to appoint the right tech people didn't make a lot of sense to me then, but modeling him as doing things he imagines winners do, rather than modeling him as someone with real ideological commitments, gets me there.

Yeah, that explains his current behavior. Racking up the money and starting your own (uninspired) multimedia brand seem like other things people should just naturally do to leverage their win now (see also the Sussexes).

It also explains why some of that stuff feels so uninspired. The Obamas could have set up a media organization that was absolutely politically worthless but still did things like say...tell stories of some random working class person in Iowa or a particularly effective community organizer in Chicago. Instead, looking at Michelle's podcast's guest list, it's basically the same people you'd expect them to talk to

Because they're winners so they should hang with the other winners.

It opens with a great exploration of Obama's fabulism, and touches on his dalliances with Marxism. It makes explicit the connection between Obama's courting of Iran, and his turning a blind eye to Syria. There are digs on Bibi and Putin, there's a brief discussion of Hitler.

The article is all character analysis, but it kind of loses me when it frames so much of his geopolitics as due to him being a product or "revenge" of the periphery of the empire (even if framing Obama more generally as a cosmopolitan that isn't from anywhere resonates).

It blames his Iran and Cuba policy specifically on this but could it also be that...his side of the political aisle has always had people more ambivalent on Cuba especially?

Criticism of the US' Iran policy is nothing new. It is not even just concentrated on the Left; realists like Walt and such have been complaining about it for years (on the grounds that it failed and the main beneficiary was Israel)

Speaking of Israel:

Again, if you look at this as the revenge of the periphery of empire, these are the key symbolic issues of the periphery. Cuba, Iran. With a subtext of the Iran issue, of course, being diminishing and marginalizing Israel, because the Jews are so fucking annoying. ...

But historically speaking, Jews are not, or were not, a particularly American obsession, except among some morons and leather fetishists on the right. But they are a major obsession on the periphery of the American empire, where envy and fear of the mythic role that Jews supposedly play in Washington, because of Israel, are defining emotions, regardless of the facts.

How does this theory explain the drama inside the Women's March between the black and Jewish leaders. What about the general issue of antisemitism with prominent black performers going from Kanye and Nick Cannon today to Ice Cube in the past? What about the long links between black activists and entertainers and a clear antisemite like Farrakhan?

What about the very antisemitic story the article adduces to show Obama to be a bloodless and self-serving politician? Cokely - the black man spreading blood libel - was not a "nowhere" like Obama. Moreover, if we're going to frame Obama as a self-serving actor in refusing to denounce him, whose support was he afraid to lose? Is Chicago politics dominated by half-Kenyans?

To say nothing of the general left-wing criticism of Israel...Younger, more diverse party. Maybe the party grandees just can't keep it in check anymore? This seems to be true of a few things (do we blame the GOP's anti-trade turn on Drumpf's foreignness?)

It seems incredibly self-serving to otherize Obama first and then blame his entire (anti-Israel, at least how they see it) foreign policy agenda on his non-ADOS otherness and this sort of general seething the periphery has about some of these things . Conveniently ignores the fault lines within the US and basically blames it all on foreign troublemakers. "Real Americans wouldn't do this, it's just the rootless cosmopolitans who hate Jews that would..."

It’s also a repressive theocracy that has consistently spread chaos and violence beyond its own borders. Yet the entire point of the Iran deal is that it’s a mechanism to allow us to bring this foreign and repugnant thing into the American global security system, to join ourselves to it. Why?

The US hasn't integrated foreign and repugnant things before? Like ,for example, an absolutist monarchy and gender apartheid regime? I wonder what the difference is between that country and Iran...

It seems to me they have absolute contempt for the Iran deal which is fine, but there doesn't seem to be even an attempt to describe why anyone like Obama might do it besides his general delusions of grandeur and desire for a legacy and basically mixed loyalties (ironic, when complaining about antisemitism).

Only, I don't know that Obama made any clear promises along these lines, it was more that he spoke in promising ways, if that makes sense.

I suppose, because I'm older, I wasn't swept away by the whole idea of First Black President (no thrills up the leg for me!). It was certainly an historic achievement but setting that aside, I saw Obama as a typical politician (okay, maybe not so typical because he went into it late and had his law career in academia beforehand). Same way I felt about Trump later: neither of them would be the Greatest Thing Ever as their partisans wished, nor the Worst Thing Ever as their enemies prognosticated.

I thought Obama was ambitous for political success and had carefully crafted an image to appeal to the white liberals in the Democratic Party. The entire "hope and change" thing was masterfully done, because it was a mirror: you looked into it and saw what you wanted/hoped for/dreamed for looking back out at you, while someone standing beside you did the same and saw something completely different, but also appealing to them.

You wanted the End of Racism? LGBT rights? General niceness for nice people? It was all there if you wanted to see it, and the oratory and rhetoric promised much without promising anything directly.

Remember, the oceans were going to stop rising and the planet start healing. And if you believed that as anything other than soaring rhetoric to make everybody feel good - well, you got the guy and the reality and his phone and pen.

I don't think he was intentionally deceptive, he's just a politican and this is the kind of stuff you churn out to get the punters to vote for you. Nobody believes it and you don't expect anybody to believe it. I think he may believe in his own legend a little, but if you're not in part a narcissist, then why are you going into politics? 😀

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