White Liberals Present Themselves as Less Competent in Interactions with African-Americans

[Loren Pechtel]

How are you supposed to "help poverty" if you are ignorant of very important facts about the lives of the poor such as how their perceived race has affected them? How are you "Respecting an individual" if you are erasing or trying to erase a large part of their lived experience? My life is impossible to understand without understanding the things people assume about me because of my skin color. It is not the only thing that is important, but it a thing that is and has often been important. How can you claim to understand and care about me without it?

You help poverty by providing help, not by affixing blame. The people need money and an understanding of the proper use of money. Without the latter the former does little good.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

You can address poverty by providing economic opportunity and aid based on income level.

This is, in fact, what all forms of social welfare in the US are currently based on.

Correct, but not what affirmative action is based on.

 

[ruby sparks]

No offense, but you should leave the snark to Tom Sawyer. You're not very good at this.

No offence taken. It's not really my fault if my sophisticated western European snark sometimes goes above the heads of many of those (excluding yourself, obviously) living in the former colonies.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Is the study perfect? No, but it's limitations are far less damning than those that prevent any valid interpretation of the "Emily-Lakisha" studies. The biggest limitation with this study is that the companies were listed in the College Placement publication, which may not be representative of all types of companies. Although over a thousand companies were listed there in 1980 with many employing 10,000 to 20,000 people. The resumes were for more skilled positions typically filled by college grads, but were also entry-level in these jobs.

And note that they were hiring college grads and back before affirmative action was pervasive enough to affect degrees. Thus this eliminates the Lakisha problem. Blacks with degrees fare better than whites with degrees and apparently that bias existed even that far back.

The problem is not as many blacks get degrees. The fix isn't to hand them unjustified degrees (which would make employers question all degrees held by blacks), but to address the reasons they don't go.

Some efforts along these lines have shown promise (attempting to address roadblocks) but the main problem is cultural.

Regardless, the study shows that even 40 years ago, racism in entry-level hiring was not so pervasive that it was reflected by these types of firms that employ a sizable % of the workforce. In fact, the data strongly suggest that many firms even 40 years ago felt enough social/political/legal pressure to avoid the appearance of racial discrimination that they engaged in race-based discrimination against white applicants when the opportunity to hire qualified minorities arose.

That still allows for plenty of room for anti-minority racism in both promotion and advancement and in hiring for positions that do not typically entail college degrees. But the studies in the previously cited meta-analysis are not valid evidence of it.

While it allows room for discrimination it strongly suggests that when you have a truly equal playing field you don't find the discrimination. The vast majority of the "research" that shows "discrimination" is seriously flawed, taking disparate results as proof in the face of obvious other factors. (For example, more blacks have criminal records and those with criminal records rarely get good jobs no matter what race the are. Or take that bit about blacks getting inferior treatment in the ER--yes, it's true--but its a matter of the ER, not their race. Inner city ERs don't provide as good care as suburban ERs and more blacks go to the inner city ERs.)

- - - Updated - - -

When talking to clients, I always try to simplify things, though not to the point of idiocy. What is the point is getting all fancy with the terminology other than to brag how brilliant one is?

The more interesting point, lost in all the idiocy from JP and LP, is the little tidbit about how conservatives try to act smarter around minorities. That is, IMO, and even more racist tell as they try to make themselves look better.

I've intentionally done the same thing to people (like a certain college professor of mine who tried to use vocabulary to intimidate his students), but only as a reaction to their attempts to do it to me or others.

Talk about twisting!

The issue is lowering one's speaking level, not raising it.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What I find amusing (and disturbing) about all this is that its the liberals are the ones that have ranted on for many years about the evils of racial profiling and stereotyping, and yet they are the ones stereotyping and profiling black people as less competent, while the conservatives are treating them much more as equals. More evidence that I think I'm living in the Bizarro world.

I don't interpret the results that way at all.

Just to be clear, JP and LP are advocating for the situation on the left.

http://i2.wp.com/interactioninstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/IISC_EqualityEquity.png

The problem here is that in this case there is an obvious need difference.

What we are objecting to is giving the black guy zero boxes (because on average blacks are taller), the white guy one and the Asian guy two (because on average Asians are shorter.) (Yeah, the height differences are far too small to be represented by a whole box.) Don't use proxies in figuring need!

And don't rig things at all when giving to one harms another. In your picture the tall guy doesn't suffer from not having a box.

 

[ronburgundy]

So now not dumbing yourself down is a sort of racism. Talk about the "soft" bigotry of low expectations.

Not discriminating by race is the new racism. Up is down. Left is right. War is peace. It really is quite orwellian, isn't it?

For the record, nothing in the OP studies imply that anyone was "dumbing themselves down", nor is there any evidence that anyone was trying to appear "less competent", despite the baseless pseudo-science conclusions being drawn by the study authors.
People were given a limited set of adjectives to choose from to put in a letter to someone. The so-called "less competent" words were simply the more common wildly understood words that most people would naturally use. The "more competent" words were those that conveyed similar meaning but were needlessly more esoteric and less commonly used, like saying "euphoric" rather than "happy", which one would use when one is more concerned with showing off and establishing social status than with making sure the listener understands what you are saying. In fact, Euphoric and melancholy are likely to be overly dramatic and extreme in their implied emotions in most situations where "happy" and "sad" are more generally applicable. Thus, use of the "competent" words implies someone trying to hard.

Also, liberals and conservatives did not actually use different words from each other when speaking to the supposed "black" person. They differed only in how they spoke to the "white" person.

I put the races in quotes b/c the studies also have nothing to do with race, despite pseudoscience claims by the authors. Subjects were never given any info about the person's race. They were given the persons name, which is not only indicative of education and could imply you are writing to a non-native English speaker, but it is not a reliable predictor of race (While almost no whites are named "Lakisha", almost no blacks are either (less than 1%), more black people are likely named Emily than Lakisha).

So, if the extremely weak and unreliable results have any meaning, they merely suggest the following:
When they are speaking to a person whose obscure name based in a foreign language suggest a potential language barrier, liberals and conservative choose the same words as each other. But when they are speaking to a more typical member of one's English speaking culture, liberals have a very slightly greater tendency than conservatives to choose a less common word, either because of some desire to appear clever or because fewer conservatives know what those words even mean, so they don't use them regardless of the audience.

 

[ruby sparks]

A proxy is a thing used to represent or model a different thing whic is itself "hidden". A stereotypical example is the use of race as a proxy to wealth or education. Wealth and education both correlate with race, so people often on both sides will often use race rather than the actual level of education or wealth when targeting social programs. This is problematic for a number of reasons. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm the one who started the language he is using, at least here on these forums.

he has some valid points in here that we should be sanitizing our laws of concepts such as race and gender or any age or any other thing that measures someone's "identity", and coming at the issue from the other direction: only those categories explicitly named in law should be applicable in public commerce, or elements directly material to the position at hand (i.e., whether the person robbed the store, sex offender status, etc). To that end, it wouldn't be difficult to pass a law that prohibits (suitably large) employers from having direct access to name, address, gender, or age of applicants, with this information proxied by randomized "standard" names, to prevent bias. Essentially, our laws are gravitating in a direction of "special/explicit" management rather than general principle.
As I keep stating, the largest element of this is generated by the GOP and conservatives clamoring to seek an "other" that they can induce paranoia over, and then the left, while well meaning, seeks to help the "other" without regards to the principle of neutrality; you can't effectively fight an anti-gay movement without being "pro gay" and without doing it at the expense of attention to everyone else who is marginalized and NOT gay. In fact, the whole concept of gay persons came about as an attempt to other, and wouldn't exist in modern discussions if not for the othering. In an attempt to counter the othering, we validated it.

Thanks.

Without setting aside your personal views and experiences and those of Jolly and being aware that unlike both of you I speak as a white person, I would like to offer some counterthoughts to what you say there. In regard to my own personal experiences I have no particular axe to grind in this dispute and in fact another of my limitations is that I am viewing it from afar. We have our own version of a pronounced divide here in Northern Ireland, but it is a different one (religio-cultural rather than racial). That said, geographical distance may allow me at least a little bit more neutrality in some ways.

In a nutshell, and as I have implied before, I am yet to be convinced that what I will call 'non-colour blind' approaches are doing most of the damage in the USA in terms of holding back progress towards racial equality. I accept that there are drawbacks with them and that doing something about race on a race basis is imperfect, but I feel I am being asked to accept that by and large well-meaning attempts (acknowledging that they may be flawed as regards things like unintentional bias and gaming the system) are doing more harm than (a) the actual majority racism and (b) the insidious attacks on progressive, liberal efforts by powerful, conservative rightists, in other words that the former is actually doing more harm than (a) and (b) added together.

I would also throw in that in some ways it seems to me that one of the big problems with coming out and using the word race when trying to do something about racism is not the use of the word itself, but the adverse reactions (some would say backlash) to it, which at least according to the studies I cited, is apparently strongly correlated, in the USA, to having racist or anti-progressive tendencies, which if true raises the possibility that by going colour-blind, you may in practice be facilitating their non-benign aspirations.

Finally, another thing I am not yet convinced about is that colour-blind policies are in overall terms necessarily better. They have their drawbacks too. It is not hard to find numerous articles against colour-blindness. This, for example:

Color-Blindness Is Counterproductive
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/color-blindness-is-counterproductive/405037/

 

[Loren Pechtel]

So now not dumbing yourself down is a sort of racism. Talk about the "soft" bigotry of low expectations.

Not discriminating by race is the new racism. Up is down. Left is right. War is peace. It really is quite orwellian, isn't it?

For the record, nothing in the OP studies imply that anyone was "dumbing themselves down", nor is there any evidence that anyone was trying to appear "less competent", despite the baseless pseudo-science conclusions being drawn by the study authors.
People were given a limited set of adjectives to choose from to put in a letter to someone. The so-called "less competent" words were simply the more common wildly understood words that most people would naturally use. The "more competent" words were those that conveyed similar meaning but were needlessly more esoteric and less commonly used, like saying "euphoric" rather than "happy", which one would use when one is more concerned with showing off and establishing social status than with making sure the listener understands what you are saying. In fact, Euphoric and melancholy are likely to be overly dramatic and extreme in their implied emotions in most situations where "happy" and "sad" are more generally applicable. Thus, use of the "competent" words implies someone trying to hard.

So what? The reality was liberals changed the words, conservatives did not. It doesn't matter why people picked one word over another, it does matter that they made different picks depending on the race of the person they were talking to. We have a decision in which race is clearly a factor and no other reasonable explanation for it--thus a strong suspicion of racism.

 

[Rhea]

Not under the normal understanding of racism.
No, it is about your imputation of liberal belief which is based on the implicit assumption that a dialect used by a minority indicates inferiority.

Did you not notice the article? The liberals lower their speech level, the conservatives don't.

The article did not say that. You said that. The data don’t support you.
The article said liberals got friendlier, they traded assertive words for cooperative ones.

 

[Rhea]

"Connecting" = speaking at their level = dumbing down.

No, the article does not say that. It does not say the words are dumber. It says they are friendlier and more cooperative.

 

[laughing dog]

Not under the normal understanding of racism.
No, it is about your imputation of liberal belief which is based on the implicit assumption that a dialect used by a minority indicates inferiority.

Did you not notice the article? The liberals lower their speech level, the conservatives don't.

The article did not say that. You said that. The data don’t support you.
The article said liberals got friendlier, they traded assertive words for cooperative ones.

Hey, in the new era, facts don't matter - truthiness trumps truth. The misinterpreted results fit these people's distorted view of the world, and that is all that matters.

 

[Jarhyn]

The article did not say that. You said that. The data don’t support you.
The article said liberals got friendlier, they traded assertive words for cooperative ones.

Hey, in the new era, facts don't matter - truthiness trumps truth. The misinterpreted results fit these people's distorted view of the world, and that is all that matters.

In other words, conservatives were always on the attack, no matter who they talked to, and liberals attempted empathy and cooperative modes instead, particularly when faced with people they percieved as having been systematically denied that compassion.

 

[ruby sparks]

Racism agsinst black people, brown people, yellow people, and yes, even white people exists. Some face it more than others. This is not news. But these studies don't show naked or commonplace anything. They show name bias in the participants in regard to resumes.



You may not like Loren. I don't always agree with Loren. But he isn't an idiot. You should apologize.

and as for you, you obviously never checked to see what was in them before opining about their supposed shortcomings. What makes you think there was insufficient individual information in them? There wasn't, by the way.

You're right. I didn't check anything. I took whoever posted it's word that the study was done and found what they said it did. And resumes are resumes. No resume can have sufficient information in it on which you should hire people.

In any case 'actually meeting the individual' would have ruined the point of the experiment

Exactly. Getting to know them would ruin it even further. Because then they would be looked at as the individuals that they are and the racism would be drastically reduced (in most people).

In short, only a fool or a racist denier would question the conclusions from those sorts of studies, not least because unlike the OP ones they have been repeated over and over dozens of times with similarly significant results, statistically-speaking.

Nobody is questionint the data or findings. Loren and another person upthread theorized why they happen. Their explanations are incomplete but are not entirely wrong.

I am insisting that race and racism are actual, real, everyday and commonplace issues, that's all. Your severe (if somewhat inconsistent) aversion to identity politics seems to have led you as far as doubting that.

Racial identity politics usually IS racism. People presuming I will vote a particular way, have particular issues and values, or have particular connections to particular people because of how I look, is racist.

Oh I do doubt you sometimes, and then sometimes I don't, and then you do stuff like admit that hearing that Dr Who was going to be a woman worried you as regards the role (wtf)

It didn't worry me. It made me a bit suspicious, based on other media that have done so to virtue signal and cash in. I was wrong to be. I admitted a failing in myself. Some would call that noble. You'd rather use it as a weapon against me. I predicted that would happen.

or when you say there's a case for Orwell being more right about the left than about Donald Trump

Did you read the article? There is such a case. Both Trump and the iilliberalism growing on the left display Orwellian thought.

I think sometimes you believe the tail is wagging the dog.

There is no dog. There is only a penguin.

It's very late here. Rather than respond to each of those, I will say that I at least partly accept them all. How's that for a liberal fudge?

Overall, it's true that I don't know where you're coming from, what your real motivations are. That said, mine are arguably equally open to scrutiny and question, as are those of anyone here (my rather cynical view is that we humans tend to be largely ruled by perceived self-interest and emotional investment rather than objective impartiality).

That said, I believe I judge you on what you write, by which I mean the overall content and common themes. You have in the past said that you post on 'neglected' issues which while not necessarily major by comparison, are nonetheless important to highlight because they are often overlooked or under-expresssed (or sometimes threatened with censorship) and I can get my head around that. And then there are times when I get the impression that you are actually 'neglecting' that at least part of the reason some of these issues are comparatively less often aired is precisely because they are less major by comparison. Hence my comment about tails wagging dogs.

You are right. I should not be using your honest acceptance of your minor failings (and we all have failings, and fwiw I have some major ones though I'm not telling you what they are, lol) as a weapon against you. But at least I know you're not so fragile about it that you would ask me to desist. Ditto if you use my similarly 'noble' acknowledgement of my white privileges against me in turn. At least we are both free speech warriors, eh?

And of course I am a known snark.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

The article did not say that. You said that. The data don’t support you.
The article said liberals got friendlier, they traded assertive words for cooperative ones.

Hey, in the new era, facts don't matter - truthiness trumps truth. The misinterpreted results fit these people's distorted view of the world, and that is all that matters.

In other words, conservatives were always on the attack, no matter who they talked to, and liberals attempted empathy and cooperative modes instead, particularly when faced with people they percieved as having been systematically denied that compassion.

Attack is not differentiating between people based on color, and compassion is talking down to people based on color. The former is racist, the latter isn't.

 

[dismal]

"Connecting" = speaking at their level = dumbing down.

No, the article does not say that. It does not say the words are dumber. It says they are friendlier and more cooperative.

It says they downgrade themselves. They portray themselves as worse than they would to a white person. In one of the experiments they literally asked people to rate themselves for their partner and found (white liberal) people rated themselves lower when they believed their partner was Black. The partner wasn’t even there.

 

[Jarhyn]

In other words, conservatives were always on the attack, no matter who they talked to, and liberals attempted empathy and cooperative modes instead, particularly when faced with people they percieved as having been systematically denied that compassion.

Attack is not differentiating between people based on color, and compassion is talking down to people based on color. The former is racist, the latter isn't.

No. Attack is what you are doing right now. It's not 'racist' to attack people, it's just shitty. And it's shitty in particular to attack people who have been particularly attacked in policy and education and opportunities for categories perpetuated in law, originated in law, for the purpose of setting them apart and keeping them out of power , badly educated, and poor.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Conservatives: Look everyone, libruhls are elitists!!11!
Liberals: Uhoh, we'd better start talking empathetically to groups instead of being intellectually detached. Let's do that.
Conservatives: Look everyone, libruhls are talk empathetically to everyone now, even black people. Now they're elitists and racists!!111!

 

[ronburgundy]

And note that they were hiring college grads and back before affirmative action was pervasive enough to affect degrees. Thus this eliminates the Lakisha problem. Blacks with degrees fare better than whites with degrees and apparently that bias existed even that far back.

The problem is not as many blacks get degrees. The fix isn't to hand them unjustified degrees (which would make employers question all degrees held by blacks), but to address the reasons they don't go.

Some efforts along these lines have shown promise (attempting to address roadblocks) but the main problem is cultural.

IF by "cultural" you mean poverty, then yes. Poverty accounts for more variance in who goes to college than any other factor and most of the racial gap in college attendance.
Look at the graph below with compares college enrollment rates for kids graduating from public non-charter schools, depending upon the high or low income of the neighborhood which is highly related to school quality, and other variables including race and urban vs. suburban vs. rural.

Income of the neighborhood trumps (pun intended) the other factors. Kids from poorer areas are much likely likely to enroll for both races and all type of regions, and if your in a poor area, then race and region type don't matter much at all. Among higher income schools there is more differences between races but they are smaller than for low-high income, and even those "race" differences" are likely mostly person income of the student rather than neighborhood income that impacts overall school quality. "Higher income schools" just mean less than 50% of students qualify for free lunch, which still means that a large % of students still would, especially in "High Minority". If the income of the individual students were factored in, there would be little difference left between blacks and whites for any other aspect of "culture" to account for. And what there would be left would itself be mostly cultural byproducts of historical poverty and lack of opportunity caused by centuries of slavery and racism.

While it allows room for discrimination it strongly suggests that when you have a truly equal playing field you don't find the discrimination.

No, it only suggests that when companies are hiring college educated applicants who have a tangible demonstrated work ethic and minimal qualifications in the form of a degree, then racist assumptions about applicants have less room to play a role. And even then, the observed results may only apply to large companies that likely have very low % of black employees and fear they might garner an investigation by the EEOC. There is not a rational basis to generalize that discrimination does not occur outside these situations, and it is prior acts of discrimination that create the highly unequal playing field that then impact decisions that favor whites though not directly due to their race.

The vast majority of the "research" that shows "discrimination" is seriously flawed, taking disparate results as proof in the face of obvious other factors.

The flaws of the research is largely due to inherent practical obstacles to conducting a true controlled experiment that allows clear causal inferences while also being realistic enough to have implications for actual hiring situations. It is clear instance where absence where absence of direct evidence is not in any way evidence of absence. There is evidence beyond reasonable doubt that a large % of US whites hold racist views against blacks. There is also plenty of evidence that such worldview beliefs impact many aspects of behavior. Thus, it would be just short of an inexplicable miracle if many whites did not discriminate against blacks in many situations. The general information we know combine to make this conclusion a near logical certainty. Those who demanding direct experimental evidence of it before accepting this conclusion is just intellectual dishonesty fueled by racism itself.

At the same time, similar forms of evidence make it a near logical certainty that enough people have the means and motive to discriminate against whites in the form of "affirmative action" type goals that this is certainly happening too. The only reasonable debate is about the relative frequency of each of these types of race-based discrimination.

(For example, more blacks have criminal records and those with criminal records rarely get good jobs no matter what race the are. Or take that bit about blacks getting inferior treatment in the ER--yes, it's true--but its a matter of the ER, not their race. Inner city ERs don't provide as good care as suburban ERs and more blacks go to the inner city ERs.)

Yeah, but those factors are themselves partly a product of racial discrimination and most certainly a partial byproduct of historical discrimination. I realize that these indirect downstream impacts of prior discrimination require a different type of response and are just inherently problematic to remedy at all, because it is not possible to know exactly where the discrimination occurred and which portion of the outcome is tied to past discrimination effects. For example, some blacks are criminals for the same reasons some whites are criminals, but the greater criminality of blacks is largely if not entirely a product of accumulated discrimination, whether it was the criminal being directly mistreated at some point in their own life or going all the way back to the Jim Crow laws and slavery that created cultural forces that fuel poverty, helplessness, and distrust for the "law". We can and must acknowledge this reality while still holding criminals themselves at being immediately responsible for their actions.

 

[ruby sparks]

Great post.

I would like to just pick up on one relatively small thing we might or might not disagree on.

At the same time, similar forms of evidence make it a near logical certainty that enough people have the means and motive to discriminate against whites in the form of "affirmative action" type goals that this is certainly happening too. The only reasonable debate is about the relative frequency of each of these types of race-based discrimination.

I would say that the debate is not just about the relative frequency. I don't think we can reasonably talk about all types of discrimination in the same terms in principle. And then there are outcomes. Even if the frequency was similar, the scale of the outcomes, benign and/or adverse, might differ (and it wouldn't just be a matter of counting numbers of people directly affected one way or the other).

I am temporarily setting aside differences in intent, although I do think it likely that this is not totally irrelevant.

I think by 'cultural', Loren tends to mean 'whatever you do, don't mention the R word'.

Because the main problem, as he sees it (I think) is cultural disinclination on the part of blacks to better themselves. See for comparison: asians.

Not that there isn't at least some truth in that of course. Imo, there is. But it's quite complex in overall terms.

Lately, I've been coming to the conclusion that if America wants to actually get anywhere with its race problems, it maybe should just drop the 'R' word (as it does for social welfare). I say that partly on pragmatic grounds, because the 'R' word is such a strong adverse trigger for so many, perhaps especially for those who could be doing the most.

If that was done, the question after that would become 'how many Americans are actually up for enacting social measures even on socioeconomic grounds'?

Or would we find that the 'R' issue was just a (Word of the Week alert) proxy for being 'non-progressive no matter what'?

Some say almost everything in America comes down to money in the end. I'm sure that's probably an overstatement, and also that it's true of most modern societies.

Sorry, my thoughts are wandering around a bit.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Conservatives: Look everyone, libruhls are elitists!!11!
Liberals: Uhoh, we'd better start talking empathetically to groups instead of being intellectually detached. Let's do that.
Conservatives: Look everyone, libruhls are talk empathetically to everyone now, even black people. Now they're elitists and racists!!111!

Can I put that post in my garden to scare away the crows?