Victimization Whack-a-Mole

(We are offline due to a much-needed research period at the moment, so we've decided to re-publish some earlier pieces you might have missed the first time.)

Catch me if you can

[Re-post, original post here.]

In the 1982 comedy 'Tootsie,' actor Michael Dorsey (Dustin Hoffman) is desperate for work.  A casting director tells him what's wrong:

Dustin Hoffman as Tootsie (video at link)

The reading was fine. You're the wrong height.
   I can be taller.
No. We're looking for somebody shorter.
   Look, I don't have to be this tall. See, I'm wearing lifts. I can be shorter.

I know, but we're looking for somebody different.

   I can be different.
We're looking for somebody else.


Some people, in a word, cannot be satisfied. Trying to please them is like playing whack-a-mole: their unhappiness has no remedy. You're sure you've nipped it in the bud, but no, it pops up again, and then over there, and over there... is there any way to nab it once and for all?

In our blank-slatist world, where all groups are presumed equal, puzzling 'performance gaps' leave some feeling outraged. Rather than shake their fist at Mother Nature (the real source of disparities), they continue to demand action that they are sure will Close the Gap.  When it doesn't, the target changes. Then changes again, and again...  This endless merry-go-round of finger-pointing is a clue that what they seek cannot be found. Has all logic gone down the mole hole?  Pick up your mallet and follow us...

Progressives: the New Race Realists

I will save you from your people

One hundred years ago, progressives referred to people of color as 'backward races,' 'degenerate and unprogressive,' 'non-adults.' Today's leftists, of course, believe no such thing. They think all humans are equal, as they tell us at every available opportunity.

Don't they?

Careful: TWCS is noticing a sea change.

The rhetoric and the actions emanating from the left as of late show that they have perhaps taken a U-turn—a salutary one.  People of Color, they are now saying, in fact have little agency, are near-prisoners of their instincts, and thus can't be held to the same standards as other ethnies.

 Take up the Leftist's burden

In other words, today's progressives have become de facto race realists.

On what do we base such a claim?

Meritocracy and Its Discontents

Jewish pogrom in Prague, 1744 

We've considered the dangers inherent in a multi-ethnic society.  One of them is a policy that deserves special attention, because it (1) is getting ever more popular, (2) can lead to disastrous outcomes, and (3) has actual merit from a race-realist perspective.  That policy is affirmative action.

We've looked before at its history.  Though unpopular amongst conservatives, there are two plausible arguments that could be made in its favor:

I. Natives should restrict foreign immigrant groups' ability to dominate certain institutions.

II. It is a social good to 'insert' members of lower-perfoming groups into roles where they can feel productive.


Our first argument is one for which there is much evidence, both for and against.

When the Melting Pot Reaches a Boil

'The Face of Tomorrow'

As we have seen, some are hoping fervently for a 'post-racial' West in which we all blend to a mocha color and harmony comes at last.  In such a world, so it's thought, we'll see no more prejudice, exclusion, oppression, micro-aggressions, or 'other-ing.'  There isn't a social problem, it appears, that cannot be righted by us all becoming beige.

But where is the evidence that tossing diverse ethnies in a pot leads to a happy racial purée?  To those who insist it is coming, we at Those Who Can See offer three counter-hypotheses:

(1)  No multi-ethnic society will blend smoothly down to one race.

(2)  Multi-ethnic societies will always breed inequality, and the more disparate the groups, the more inequality there will be.

(3)  The resentments that spring from this can only weaken, not strengthen, society.


For these reasons, we propose that the ideal society is not ethnically diverse, but ethnically homogenous.

*     *     *

The prophets of a Beige Future are everywhere.  Being colored is trendy; being white is bland:

'Ours! ... It was our people!  ... Everywhere you saw nothing but this superb brown color that only the loveliest human beings have... [...]  Personally, I don't want to be Western. I don't want to be a white Catholic; I'd rather be a black atheist.'

--French Socialist MP (and white Catholic) Jean-Luc Melenchon, describing a political rally full of immigrants

'Look at all the beautiful colours the women here are wearing. Within ten years this is what it is going to look like all over Europe. Back home it’s so bleak and dreary, the colours are devoid of life. ...' 

--Swedish Finance Minister Anders Borg, appreciating the aesthetics of Lagos, Nigeria

We see echoes of the 'exoticism' of 18th and 19th century colonialism, where displaying a Chinese painted screen or an Ashanti mask in your drawing room was a sign of status. Today, appropriating not the possessions but the very identity of these 'exotics' has become à la mode.

La Japonaise (Monet's wife in Japanese costume), 1876

But let us not be fooled:  The light-skinned elite may preach 'marrying out' to the masses, but they avoid it scrupulously among themselves.  At the same time, it is rare that high-status men of color have children as dark as or darker than themselves.

 Black legends and their wives: Music greats Herbie Hancock and James Brown, sports icons Michael Jordan and Pele, acting legends Sidney Poitier and James Earl Jones (Courtesy of A Field Negro)

Which leads us to the two great color systems the colonial world has known:  The one-drop rule and the pigmentocracy. Is there evidence that either one can lead to post-racial paradise?
 

Sweet Little Lies

'Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into a fact.'

--Honore de Balzac  
(Image source) 

Two hundred thirty years ago, Thomas Jefferson opined:  

I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

Today, Euro America (like Euro South Africa) has pushed aside such ideas.  We are sure that God the Universe has created us all equal, as we go out of our way to tell each other at every opportunity.

But do we believe it?  Talk is cheap. When a man's actions don't back up his words, we call him mistaken--or a hypocrite.

'Black and White are equal in every important way,' proclaim a great number of Euro-Americans today. We here at Those Who Can See are not so sure that they really believe it.  We argue, on the contrary, that progressive white Americans are in the habit of treating Afros as if they were slightly mentally retarded.  And that Blacks themselves often seem to agree. 


What is our evidence?

Hunting the Yeti: Institutional Racism in the 21st Century

Image source

Omar Thornton, the beer-filching delivery man who, upon hearing he was to be fired for his thieving ways, unloaded a Ruger SR9 into ten of his co-workers then himself, has a posthumous website (h/t Crimes of the Times).  Created by his mother. Why?

It's hard to swing a cat these days without hitting someone decrying Institutional Racism.  It has become the catch-all excuse for Afro under-performance in relation to other ethnic groups...

Top Chicago Cop Links U.S. Gun Laws to Institutional Racism

Failing the Test of Fairness: Institutional Racism and the SAT

DC Million Hoodies March Denounces Institutional Racism

...And so forth.

Like the elusive Yeti, it has to be out there--we've heard stories, terrifying stories, of it ambling hither and yon leaving carnage in its path. Its footprints are visible everywhere. And yet...when pressed, no one seems able to cough up hard proof of its existence. 

Just as great footprints in the snow are no proof of the Yeti, the fact that Blacks do not score as highly as Whites on firefighter exams is no proof of Institutional Racism.  But the charge is a serious one. It deserves a serious response. Our question is not, however, 'did institutional racism exist in decades past?'--it unquestionably did--but rather, 'does it exist today?'  We at Those Who Can See have taken our snowshoes and our rucksack and gone in search of this beast:  Down what trail lies the evidence that Institutional Racism continues to harm Afro-Americans in 2012?

Who's Afraid of Affirmative Action?

 Image source

Meritocracy is rare indeed, however far back in history we may look.  Member-of-my-family-ocracy, on the other hand, can be found almost everywhere.  Political dynasties are as old as time.  Ancien régime France let state posts be passed down from father to son, like a house.  In clannish Arab lands today, one's spot in college, the army, or the civil service is largely determined by the power of one's relatives.  David Pryce-Jones on Arab society:

To take the everyday matter of wanting to obtain a job, a young man approaches the head of his family or clan, his patron.  The head of the family is under obligation to do his very best to make sure that his kinsman is given what he asks for.  The honor of the whole family is at stake. [...]  In the event  of the job going to someone else, the patron becomes the object of shame, and his standing is under threat [...] Whether or not the young man deserved the job is no kind of consideration.  Civic spirit, the good of the community, or mere consideration of who could best perform the job in hand has no part in these proceedings.

Where meritocracy is allowed, the results can be impressive.  The Ottomans' Janissary corps is one example. The ancient Chinese civil service exam system is another.  In the modern West, outbred and commonweal-oriented as we are, nepotism rubs us the wrong way.  Shouldn't the best man get the job?

Enter racial quotas.

We may understand why they came to be, and loudly proclaim their time has gone. But the affirmative action coin has two sides.  What happens when a foreign group arrives among us and out-performs us?  Are we in our rights to establish quotas to keep them from forming an alien elite?  Indians in Uganda, Chinese in Malaysia, Ashkenazi Jews in the U.S., Europeans in South Africa--all have been excluded via quotas by a native population ill at ease with their success.  Is this fair?  When are quotas justified?

Disparate Impact III

[Disparate Impact Part II can be found here.]
[Disparate Impact Part I can be found here.]



      Boxing has kindly shown us why weight classes are a Good Thing:

Featherweight / Lightweight / Middleweight / Heavyweight. =  Everyone gets to play.

All thrown in the ring together. =  Only one gets to play. 

      (And we already know who that is.) 

Low / Average / Bright / Very bright.  =  Everyone gets a job (or into college).
All thrown in the ring together.  =  Only one gets a job (or into college).

     Do we already know who that is?

In our parallel-universe Akron, Ohio, apparently, it's Asian-Americans.

But what about back here in the real universe?

Disparate Impact II

[Disparate Impact Part I can be found here.]

You're employed.

As an accountant at Winter Shoe Company in Akron, Ohio, and have been for a long time.  As long as you've been there, only People Like You—European-descended folks, that is—have worked there.

Happily.

One day, for reasons unknowable, a wave of Chinese-Americans starts to flood into lovely Akron. Descendants of the railroad builders, let's say.  California exiles, driven off by sky-high taxes.  They've come to Akron, and they want to work at Winter Shoe Company too.   

Guess what?