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I’ve also read that it was the byproduct of post war migration of whites who wanted access to the city but were afraid of the concentration of black people who resided in the city interior.

(Stamped from the Beginning by Ibrim X Kendi)

You should really read a little more history. There's a long, long tradition of "patently obvious" "science" that just happens to justify the continued dominance of whatever group is top at the moment. As I mentioned elsewhere, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent examination of the racial aspect of that.

I agree plenty of history happened in between, but your notion that they're unrelated is absurd. Nobody today learned English from Alexander Hamilton, but nonetheless we not only understand the Federalist Papers just fine, we live by many of the ideas he expressed. Culture is handed down.

If you'd like to better understand that, I'd suggest you read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", who gives an intellectual history of America's racist ideas. I also think you're mistaken to lay the current troubles at the feet of formal segregation policies, which were only active in one part on the US. Maybe go read "Sundown Towns", which shows that all across America we had towns with de-facto segregation without formal policies. And it takes only a glance at modern maps showing race to see we haven't solved the problem.

Often, yes. Because the statistics themselves can be distorted. For example, consider any of the openly racist police forces in the Jim Crow south. Any naive system based on their data would mirror the racism of their practices.

And that's ignoring more complicated feedback loops. Since colonial times, American whites have often used their dominance to keep black people impoverished. [1] Poverty and crime are correlated. Wealth is correlated with getting away with crime. So if a system looks at crime statistics without considering at the history, it would be easy to perpetuate the ugly parts of that history.

[1] See Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" for the colonial-era laws and practices, and Loewen's "Sundown Towns" for the Nadir up through suburbanization.

Ibram X Kendi has an excellent book, "Stamped from the Beginning" that does a great job of explaining how SAT and ACT tests were really only ever meaningful as a barrier to class mobility for blacks in the United states. in the 21st century it does the same thing. By keeping test prep out of public school and forcing takers to invest up to a thousand dollars on a classroom instruction for the test (which often promises an increase up to 200 points) it remains a disadvantage to latinx and black minorities who are generally poorer.

'Test prep' is also less about what you learn, and more about the finesse or 'form' required to take the test. Much the same as a power lifter lifts greater weight due to ther superior form, those whove attended test prep complete the SAT and ACT with a higher score because of superior test taking 'form.'

And that's no accident. I'm currently reading Kendi's excellent "Stamped from the Beginning". He goes into a fair bit of detail how early in the US's history poor whites allied with poor blacks in pursuit of better economic equality. The white elites quickly recognized this as a problem and worked to turn poor white people against the black population. We're still paying the price today.

If you have feelings in response to my views, that's fine. Good, even. But I think it's hilarious that out of one side of your mouth you argue for respecting individuals and their views while at the same time trying to shut me up about my views because of your white fragility.

I don't think anybody's consciousness is "determined" by anything. But there are strong correlations. The language people speak, their religion, their customs, and many of their views are usually taken from the people around them growing up. That's the whole point of culture, after all: inter-generational transmission of non-genetic adaptation.

Some of that cultural heritages is good, some bad. All of it should be consciously examined. But conscious thought is small and slow compared to our vast cultural inheritance, so it's inevitable that many of people's beliefs and behaviors will be unexamined. More so if they are "frankly embarrassed" by anybody doing that examination in their presence.

I am not only a well-off white male. But I'm definitely those things, and they have had an influence. That's especially true in a society where well-off white men drew strong legal and cultural divisions between well-off white men and everybody else. Your unwillingness to examine whiteness is part of that culture.

So if you are seriously concerned about crimes against humanity (hint: you probably aren't) you should really take some time to look at the cultural and ideological factors behind America's wide array of those. A good place to start: Who were the perpetrators of those crimes? If you can sit with that question for as long as 30 seconds, you might be ready to read Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" or Loewen's "Sundown Towns".

I think that's reasonable. I strongly recommend Kendi's booked "Stamped from the Beginning", which is basically a history of racist ideas. One of the things that's really striking about it is the extent to which the ideas commonly in circulation are ones useful to the powerful.

One clear example from the book is the various theories of natural inferiority. During long periods when white slavery of Africans was common, Europeans claimed that Africans were naturally inferior because of the much hotter climate. But earlier, Greeks thought that northern peoples like the Slavs (from whom we get the term "slave") were inferior because they were from a cold climate.

The US had a lot of that going on, with different ideas about religion, culture, biology, and society shifting to be what was convenient for the rich. Given how much US wealth came from chattel slavery and after that labor exploitation, it's not a stretch to suspect that police, whose basic job is using violence to enforce the status quo, would have a lot of ideas and habits that match.

It's a great point. And the reason we have a lot of pro-slavery art is that the anti-slavery art was destroyed, or never allowed to be created in the first place. I've recently been reading The Fiery Trial, a biography of Lincoln's ideas, and mobs would happily assault and sometimes kill white abolitionists just for speaking about the notion. And Kendi's Stamped From The Beginning makes clear how eager the greater portion of American whites were to keep black people from having opinions at all.

Art has pretty much always been subjected to a pretty ruthless collaborative editing process. In San Francisco's alleys, art is continually being put up and painted over. The good pieces last longer than the random squiggles, but very few reach the level where somebody like Precita Eyes [1] will preserve it past its natural lifespan. For something to survive across generations, it has to fit the standards of multiple generations, and that's how it always has been.

Predictably, Bari Weiss isn't upset about that ongoing loss of San Francisco art. Gosh golly, why is losing this specific set of unexceptional murals important to her?

[1] http://www.precitaeyes.org/

That has everything to do with politics.

Go take a look at the various declarations of secession when the slaveholding US states tried to quit and form the Confederacy. A number of them explicitly mention that a system of racial slavery is fine because black people were naturally inferior, which is how in the 1850s one would have said "biological differences". That was very obviously politics.

Further, there's an enormous history of explaining why people on the short end of a power differential truly deserve it because of their inferiority. You could look at all the talk around the time a century ago when men were deciding whether women should be allowed to vote. Women's "biological differences" were a huge reason they supposedly couldn't handle political power.

For those interested in the history, Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning" is an excellent history of how ideas about "biological differences" have, since the ancient Greeks at least, been used politically. The particular "biological differences" change, of course. E.g., the Slavs, from whom we get the word slave, were considered naturally inferior by the Greeks because they came from a colder place. When enslaving Africans became an industry for people from the north, suddenly the problem was Africa's hotter climate. The "science" keeps changing, but what doesn't is the result: "inferior" people deserve less social or economic power.

Ibram X Kendi speaks about this in his book "Stamped from The Beginning." The concept is called upward-suasion, and was designed 200 years ago to dispel common myths and stereotypes about blacks at the time. Essentially if you're twice as nice, then white people will accept you as an equal.

Of course, it didnt work. Regardless of how nice and polite W.E.B. Du Bois was, the state department still revoked his passport for his uncomfortable habit of reporting systemic racism in America to European and British intellectuals.

Dont feel like you owe people anything. Be yourself. Speaking as a card-carrying white male who works as an engine mechanic, the thing that makes an industry suck (or anything for that matter) is racists. Rebuilding the drivetrain on a box truck is hard work, but its doubly unpleasant having to listen to some old grease-monkey lecture you on what they think about "the negro."

The maps at the exhibit referenced[1] were fascinating.

I know people often criticize topics that surface anything remotely concerning race, as there is a “race to the bottom”, but I often find that I learn a lot just by the fact-checking that it spawns.

To that end, one reference that I didn’t know coming in is “Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660”, for the degree to which Trans Atlantic slave trade re-shaped Central African society. Secondly, a book I read a year or so ago Ibrahim Kendi’s “Stamped From The Beginning” which discusses how exponential profits reaped by the trans-Atlantic and inter-America slave trade — unprecedented in the human practice of enslavement — spawned racist hierarchies that persist now.

[1] https://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/maps

> It seems to me that calling it "racial injustice" rather than "injustice" is not adding anything useful.

Yes, it seems that way to a lot of white people, especially ones who haven't studied the topic. But there are deep historical roots here, and white bias is a major cause of the problem. Continuing to erase that means the problems will continue to remain unsolved.

If you'd like to learn more, I'd suggest Kendi's How to be an Anti-Racist. For the historical roots, Kendi's history of racist ideas, Stamped from the Beginning is fascinating, too. To understand the white pattern of reaction and erasure here, DiAngelo's, White Fragility is a good resource (as is her 2011 paper by the same name).

If you think you can solve these problems via focus on just a generic injustice, feel free to take a swing at it. But I don't think white armchair critique of anti-racist activists is helpful. And I haven't for some years: https://www.facebook.com/williamp/posts/10105565800812373

Hey rayiner, love your contributions to HN. I think you're missing a big piece here that I have very recently started to see myself. I would be delighted to share with you.

Are you aware of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi's book "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America"? I am just about done reading it. Before I may have side-eyed "criminal-justice racism" "health-care racism", etc. After, it is clear as day how racism in America should be a first-order question when examining any social issue/problem.

I really hope you check out the book!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25898216-stamped-from-th...

As for "health-care racism" I even caught that in the news recently.
"Racial bias in a medical algorithm favors white patients over sicker black patients"

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/10/24/racial-bias...

I used to think the same way. But now that I see how pervasive a force racism has been in America's history, I have a different view. Now I think it's worth asking both questions: Is racism really at play? And given America's lasting, endemic racism, is there reason to think something makes it absent in a given case?

A couple of the books that turned me around here: Kendi's "Stamped from the Beginning", a history of racist ideas. And Loewen's "Sundown Towns", a look at the wave of ethnic cleansing during the Nadir that happened across America. I had known about the Tulsa Massacre, but what I didn't know was how common smaller-scale events were for decades.