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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   30437 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.

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.

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.

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