Wednesday, May 04, 2016

Failures of white liberalism


For the record, I am white and liberal.

John J. Dilulio Jr., having served as an adviser to George W. Bush, is probably not a liberal, but he has had an influence on them by his popularization of the term "superpredator". He was famous for stirring up the panic that this new breed of youth was remorseless, and a blood bath would wash over the land. 


This did not turn out to be true, in a similar manner to how fears about crack babies were overblown, and how youth weren't really playing "the knock-out game", and how not only was "wilding" questionable in terms of how it was understood, but that the Central Park Five were not the rapists.

To be fair, we are learning new things about psychology and the brain all the time, so it may have seemed like a reasonable conclusion for Dilulio, except for how many people heard "superpredator" and "gang members" and pictured "Black".

Now, as an adviser to LBJ, Pat Moynihan probably was liberal. His report The Negro Family: The Case For National Action was sympathetic to African Americans and saw many factors in the legacy of slavery and of continued discrimination that led to the poverty and problems. Unfortunately, it still pathologized Black people.

The Moynihan Report came from 1965, but over twenty years later when I was a high school student it was still influencing how people thought and how teachers taught. They didn't refer to the report, but looking back I can see that's where it came from.

This is a gross simplification, but where we were at was that Black people had problems. If you were conservative you blamed them, and if you were liberal you blamed society for what it had done to them, but you were still thinking of them as separate and as a mass. Viewing them as victims may have made liberals more sympathetic, but it didn't mean you wouldn't get nervous when you saw dark skin approaching.

When you start viewing some of this, guilt is a natural reaction, but it may not be that useful. The structure that is in place does a good job of separating races, and whom you get to know, and whom you see, and this is perpetuated by entertainment and publishing and how news is reported, all of which is disgusting.

I suppose this is why I have focused my reading more on learning about what different people were doing at different times. There is oppression, but there is resistance too.

And they are not a monolith. Some Black people may be very passive, and some are criminals, though if you look at some of the factors there are problems, but mainly they are individuals. We don't look at aggressive panhandlers and think that all white teens are that way. We don't look at a rise in the rate of unwed white mothers and blame slavery. (Actually, we slut shame instead.)

What I am clumsily saying is that sympathetic objectification is not strongly superior to hostile objectification.

It's unfortunate with the social sciences that they seem to have a harder time responding to progress. Often in physics or biology it can be pretty easy to test, see the error, and keep looking until a new hypothesis works out. It doesn't mean that new one won't be replaced later, but people see change all the time and accept it.

But here, very nice, well-meaning, people who are trying to be progressive get stuck because someone said something that sounded reasonable once, but was also wrong. To actually make progress we are going to have to move beyond that.

I try to be educated about that, but it still wasn't until about a year ago that I start realizing how many involved Black fathers I knew.


(And the world just lost one of the really good ones last week. We'll miss you Uncle Carl.)

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