Diversity and the North, Yesterday and Today

 Luncheonette in Lancaster, Ohio, 1938

Paul Kersey at SBPDL has been informing us better than anyone about the housing merry-go-round on which Afros and Euros have been riding for forty years.

Humans have a way of sniffing out their own interests, platitudes be damned. If you want to know what a man believes, don't watch his lips; watch his feet.  The young urban White may boast of his 'edgy' neighborhood (enduring daily street crime makes him more authentic), but come baby-making time, he finds his way to paler pastures with startling speed. The only 'diversity' which interests him past this point is of the Chinese, Indian, or talented-tenth Mulatto variety.

Given that this gentleman cheers the loudest about the joys of racial mixing, and weeps the most bitterly before maps like these,

Image source

...whence this paradox?  While his mouth is singing 'Fair Housing Act' hosannas, his feet are doing the 'Restrictive Covenant' two-step.

We know why: Afros bring down property values. And for good reason. From a Euro perspective, they don't make good neighbors.  Their children tend to commit more crime, as do their adults, they make transport unpleasant, degrade swimming pools, chase out merchants, shut down nightclubs, disrupt cinemas, mistreat animals, volunteer less, litter more, weaken schools, cripple school boards, waste police resources, and generally make life less pleasant for their white neighbors than it was before their arrival.

Since the Brits' ill-fated decision to import Africans to this land, the 98% of Euro-Americans who haven't own slaves have been forced to live with its consequences.  Broadly speaking, three approaches have been tried: (1) segregation de jure (the old South), (2) segregation de facto (the old North), and (3) attrition (today). 

We are all familiar with the South's de jure approach, their state lawmakers seeing to it that schools, housing, transport, and public accomodations existed in 'white' and 'colored' versions.  This apartheid system and its architects have been throughly villainized in all modern textbooks.

We may be less familiar with the old North.  Those of us born there have been told all our lives how warmly we opened our arms to these suffering Afros, saving them from the noose or at least the colored water fountain. 

Or did we.

Portland, OR, 1943

Checking our Ashkenazi Privilege

Image source

We recently explored the Blank-slatist's charge that U.S. minorities are currently under-achieving due to 'white privilege.'  What we found was that America's Asian minority is not only immune to this woe, but that they out-perform Euro-Americans on a number of measures. As we said then,

How to explain this paradox?  Are Asians creeping in at night and siphoning off the privilege from Whites' privilege-tanks?  Are they endowed with a force-field that resists the Euros' privilege-rays, ricocheting them back in a blinding flash that then cripples white performance relative to their own?

As it turns out, Asians are not the only group strangely inoculated against this danger.

One of the most persecuted, oppressed, and vilified groups in human history has settled in significant numbers in the U.S. and, despite years of mistreatment, has managed to resist the damaging effects of WASPs' privilege rays: Ashkenazi Jews.

How do we know?



1) Wealth

Forty-six percent (55% of Reform Jews) report family incomes of over $100,000 compared to 19% of all Americans, with the next highest group being Hindus at 43%.

Data source

Overcoming our Asian Privilege

 

"We swim in a sea of whiteness, it's the norm," Ellen O'Neill, one of the campaign  organizers, said. 
"If we're white we don't have to think about it, we don't see it. 

So the first step is getting white people to see it."

Headlines you may have seen recently:

• 'Duluth's "unfair" campaign tackles white privilege'  

• 'No Longer Colorblind:  Portland teachers must rank themselves by their self-assessed "White Privilege" score'

• 'What James Holmes and the Colorado Movie Massacre Tell Us About White (Male) Privilege'

Let us step into another mental world: that of the Blank-slatist.

In his universe,  all human beings are interchangeable, their differences only skin-deep.  If the U.S. population is 64% white, 16% Hispanic, 13% black, and 5% Asian, these same break-downs must apply in every area of human endeavor: Standardized testing, educational accomplishment, politics, the arts, the sciences, the military, criminal justice, sports, etc.  Anywhere a group is under-represented (or in the case of prison, over-represented), this reflects an attack on them by...

...well, by whom?

'Institutional racism,' some have said, and have spilled much ink over it since the late 1960s (h/t Audacious Epigone) :

But as we have seen, in a country where de facto quotas routinely push out qualified Euros in favor of less qualified Afros and Hispanics in both the public and private sectors, this argument has become a tough sell.

So the Blank-slatist has settled on a new culprit: 'white privilege.'

'What is it?,' we ask him.

     'It is systematic, institutional exclusion of non-Whites,' he says.

'But we have looked at the facts and figures, and found the opposite is true--today institutional racism favors Blacks and Hispanics,' we reply.

     'We swim in a sea of whiteness.  White is the "default setting." Minority groups suffer simply from being the minority.'

'But Whites are the minority in many places--Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Houston; even entire states like California or New Mexico, or countries like South Africa--and yet still show superior life outcomes to Blacks and Hispanics.'

     'None of that matters. The very fact of being white gives them an unfair advantage. Check your privilege.'


Taking him at his word, that this nebulous White Privilege beams out its rays twenty-four hours a day and forces Afros, Hispanics, and Asians to under-perform their Euro subjugators, let's fire up our privilege radar and see if his argument holds up.