The Limited Racial Imagination of the American Right
An African American man lynched from a tree, 1925 (wikimedia)
The Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro opines that Sonia Sotomayor’s selection “represents the very worst of racial politics” as “she is not a leading light of the judiciary and would not have been considered had she not been a Hispanic woman.”
I think this is a revealing moment. Sotomayor has the normal qualifications for a Supreme Court justice—she shares the president’s political views, she lacks a record of inflammatory legal writing that would prevent confirmation, the has experience as an appellate judge, she went to fancy schools. Insofar as her background was a consideration in selecting her, which it undoubtedly was, this is also totally normal. Presidents have always sought various kinds of regional, religious, and ethnic balance in the courts. Much was made out of Samuel Alito’s Italian American ancestry, and obviously Thurgood Marshall was initially put on the court in part to make a symbolic statement about civil rights and Clarence Thomas was appointed to replace him in part out of a desire to fill Marshall’s old seat with an African-American. There was a tradition of a “Jewish seat” at various times, etc.
But even more revealing is that even if Sotomayor’s selection were somehow out of the ordinary, the idea that picking one appellate judge rather than another for a promotion could possibly be the very worst of racial politics is ludicrous. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved the systematic disenfranchisement of millions of people, their subjection to pervasive social and economic discrimination, and the maintenance of the apartheid system via the threat and reality of state-sponsored terrorist violence. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved persistent filibustering to prevent the federal government from doing anything to curb widespread lynching. At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved a violent rebellion that sought to dismantle the country in the name of chattel slavery and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
But despite that long history, broad swathes of the American right remain persistently and willfully blind to the problem of discrimination against non-whites. Their view is, essentially, that racism emerged as a problem sometime in the year 1967 and that the problem consists of white people being unduly burdened by efforts to remediate something or other.
87 Responses to “The Limited Racial Imagination of the American Right”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 11th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved a violent rebellion that sought to dismantle the country in the name of chattel slavery and led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.
Well, yes. Also the slavery itself.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
Please use a different picture. The photo of this lynched man has nothing to do with your post and serves no purpose other than to desensitize people to these terrible crimes.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
No. That is a picture of historical fact, and in this context, it’s appropriate. I would have used a pic of a lynching from the fifties or sixties, but this is real enough.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
“There was a tradition of a “Jewish seat” at various times, etc.”
What’s disturbing is the more recent trend that only Catholics can be appointed to the Supreme Court. Wasn’t there something in the Constitution about having no religious tests for federal offices? We seem to have given up on that one.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
CParis, do you really not see the connection between Shapiro’s insensitive claim and the stark reality of that picture? It’s clear that it’s the Shapiros of the world that have already been “desensitized”; pictures such as this one are necessary to overcome that.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
“The photo of this lynched man has nothing to do with your post…”
Um, what? Seems to tie in pretty clearly with:
“At its very worst, racial politics in the United States involved persistent filibustering to prevent the federal government from doing anything to curb widespread lynching.”
August 11th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
Well, you’re wrong. The photo is directly responsive to the claim that appointing a hispanic supreme court justice is “the very worst of racial politics”. Plainly, the picture shows, there are racial politics which are worse.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
“Very worst of racial politics” is certainly a poorly-considered phrase.
But in general, I never feel this point is quite as insightful as some of MY’s other points. It’s true that there’s something asymmetric about the history of racism in the US; it has come down much harder on black people than on anyone else.
But MY seems to think that this fact serves as an all-purpose invalidation of conservative concerns about reverse discrimination. And I really don’t get it. He’s right that conservatives are consistently more concerned with one side of the equation than the other. But the same thing could be said about liberals. And though the history of racism is deeply asymmetric, the question of how asymmetric things are at the moment is precisely the question under dispute. It’s a question that isn’t illuminated much by saying “Your side never pays due respect to our concerns.”
August 11th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
I don’t see why an untalented white male living on wingnut welfare isn’t the perfect person to comment on why those blacks, Hispanics, Asians, etc. are given everything.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:20 pm
CParis gets the gold medal in Concern Trolling.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
And though the history of racism is deeply asymmetric, the question of how asymmetric things are at the moment is precisely the question under dispute.
… and at this very moment, a white man really needs to pick nits to find he’s been getting the shaft because he’s white. Meanwhile, whenever a white person gets into a jam and needs to divert attention, it seems many police departments still fall for “the black guy did it”.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
How to write a libertarian commentary on race*
1. Point out an issue, shed crocodile tears about how terrible it is
2. Point out an individual in the government who claims to care about said issue, declare that said individual’s very existence to be evidence that the government is powerless to make anything better.
3. Regardless of the argument you made in 2, perform a complete about face and declare said individual’s plan to improve the issue in 1 is evidence of government perniciousness and would in fact be much, much worse than said issue itself
4. Sit back and relax, comfortable in the fact that you’ll never be held accountable for any real-life policy outcomes that you advocate for, because there aren’t any
*anything
August 11th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
Thank you, Matt.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
The essence of “progressivism” on race is to remain blindly focused on the past and never think about the present or, God forbid, the future.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
As always in these matters, Matt, well said and well written.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
Today, absent the threat of legal repercussions, millions of Americans would gather around lynching trees, mugging for the cameras and pointing to the dangling black corpse swaying from a bough. Don’t you believe for one moment wide swaths of our society aren’t possessed of vile, eliminationist tendencies. Many of the shouters and screamers in and outside of recent health care town hall meetings would bring the rope to Obama’s hanging.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
“The essence of “progressivism” on race is to remain blindly focused on the past and never think about the present or, God forbid, the future.”
Oh no, there’s plenty of racism in the present, and it will surely continue into the future. Your very existence is evidence that racism is alive and well.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
@11: you could be right, cmholm. I’m not actually claiming that there is, even now, a moral equivalence between white grievances and black grievances.
I’m just saying that that *is* what people disagree about. MY constantly seems to miss the point, inasmuch as he’s surprised that conservatives don’t pay due respect to the grievances of minorities. Well, they don’t do that because they believe there is now something like equivalence between discrimination and reverse discrimination. That statement could be wrong or right, but my point is just that Matt’s aspersions on conservative *motives* never actually do much to illuminate it.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:36 pm
@Ted: “And though the history of racism is deeply asymmetric, the question of how asymmetric things are at the moment is precisely the question under dispute”.
There is certainly some truth in the fact that the asymmetry has lessened. Historically there have been 109 white males on the SCOTUS versus 3 women – it sounds awful. Currently there are 7 white males versus 2 women – not so bad really.
There is a good debate to be had about the changing asymmetry, but it is not yet a debate about which direction that asymmetry runs. The implied “reverse racism” argument is that whites are getting the WORST of it, which is a fairly outlandish view.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
MY:
Why are you shocked? You did read that Shapiro’s article was printed in the Moonie Times, right? What else would get printed in that birdcage liner?
August 11th, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Fostert’s comment is at the same time complete nonsense and kind of interesting. It is clearly not the case that any of the recent Supreme Court justices was appointed because they are Catholic. Sotomayor was picked in part because she is hispanic, and most hispanics are Catholic, but neither of those things challenges the religious clause in the constitution. Thomas was picked because he is black, and his in the minority among blacks in being Catholic. (And given the percentage in the population the Jewish representation is equally high).
But the reason for this imbalance seems to be the lack of serious conservative Protestant legal theorists. Remember Bush wanted to appoint Harriet Meiers who is Protestant but was clearly woefully unprepared for the job. This was in part to appease his conservative Protestant base. It was odd that when that flamed out he didn’t have a more serious Protestant jurist he could turn to.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:41 pm
Conservapedia article on racism: 266 words
Conservapedia article on “race baiting”: 906 words
Obviously Cato isn’t Conservapedia. But they seem to agree on this one: False accusations of racism are simply a much greater problem than racism itself.
(Wikipedia is 10,516 words and 178 words, respectively.)
August 11th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Sailer is right. Anyone who looks at the present would have to see how downtrodden the poor white man is these days. Why progressives refuse to focus on the world around them is just a mystery. Today minorities have the advantages of more available housing, more free time during the day, more free meals and beds provided to them for the state for extended periods of time. And the poor white man gets nothing. Very sad.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:45 pm
Cato-style libertarians really do embarrass themselves when they talk about race.
And do fuck off, Sailer. The future doesn’t belong to you.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:46 pm
I think I agree that that’s an outlandish view. Which is why I would summarize (reasonable) conservative concerns as questions about how asymmetric things really are at the moment. But I have to admit that a) a lot of them are a lot loonier than that and b) they do have a habit of ignoring/minimizing history, which is a terrible place to start when you’re thinking about race in the U.S.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
the question of how asymmetric things are at the moment is precisely the question under dispute.
Seriously? I think many of the varieties of structural racism that persist in this country are actually pretty conclusively documented. We could haggle at the margins, maybe, quibble about what’s “really” going on in a particular instance (e.g. Gates/Crowley), but there’s really no room for reasonable people to disagree about whether or not we have a massive frelling problem in general.
And I’m not sure the asses Matt’s complaining about really even bother to try. They just say “Don’t look at that, look over here! A hispanic women nominated to the supreme court! Racism!”
August 11th, 2009 at 4:57 pm
Wow: another shitbag at Cato! Who could’ve guessed?
August 11th, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Steve Sailer – The essence of “progressivism” on race is to remain blindly focused on the past and never think about the present or, God forbid, the future.
The present is the Illinois AG suing a major bank (Wells Fargo) for forcing minorities into high-cost subprime loans when whites with similar incomes got offered more favorable terms. Wells Fargo is also being sued by the City of Baltimore for using similar racial distinctions while making foreclosures.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:06 pm
“Fostert’s comment is at the same time complete nonsense and kind of interesting.”
I wasn’t actually being entirely serious about the Catholics. But the trend is very strange. And I do agree that there does seem to be a shortage of qualified Protestants. But I actually do think there is a little more to it. It is basically that Catholics are more likely to be moderate, while Protestants tend towards the extremes in both directions. The Catholic Church has a broad range of followers, but that range doesn’t include the beliefs of Unitarians and Pentecostals. So when a Republican is looking for a conservative protestant, a lot of the choices will be John Hagee types. When a Democrat wants a liberal protestant, many of the choices will be new age hipsters or black power fanatics. In both cases, the politically expedient move is to pick a Catholic instead. That’s not to say that moderate Protestants don’t exist, they surely do. It’s just that the Catholics are more concentrated in the center.
But what’s interesting is that we don’t even talk about the possibility that someone who is neither Christian nor Jewish would have a chance. How about a Buddhist, or (gasp!) a Muslim?
August 11th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Pseudonymous in NC,
You could really just shorten it to:
Cato-style libertarians really do embarrass themselves when they talk.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
joejoejoe:
You really don’t want to bring up the mortgage meltdown that kicked off the recession.
Both parties spent 40 years pushing for more mortgage lending to minorities, both by prodding lenders and by restraining regulators, all in the name of lessening the racial gaps in homeownership.
The result was that in California, the center of the mortgage meltdown, a sizable majority of all defaulted dollars are on loans to minorities.
That’s the recent history, but it just makes you scared and angry to think about it, so you’ll just get mad at the messenger.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
they do have a habit of ignoring/minimizing history, which is a terrible place to start when you’re thinking about race in the U.S.
I’d actually say that the problem sort of comes from paying too much attention to history. The mass-market claim of the “reverse racism” crowd is basically that since we don’t actually lynch people (much) anymore, racism must not exist either.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:26 pm
No Ted, that statement can only be wrong. How many white people get mistakenly shot by the police. You don’t get pulled over for driving while white. You don’t decide against buying a mercedes because the police will think you stole it if you’re white. For twenty percent of advertised job openings black applicants are rejected out of hand. The accusations of reverse discrimination, even if true, concern a vanishingly small percentage of the population.
It is not a matter of debate. Discrimination is still a monumentally larger problem than reverse discrimination. Conservatives don’t see it as a problem because most of them really don’t like non-whites.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
You see, Ted, another problem the conservative argument has is the very large number of conservatives who claim that discrimination is warranted.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Shapiro doesn’t really offer any counter-suggestions as to who Obama should have nominated (maybe Ted Olsen?), so we don’t have a clear idea of what he considers to be a “leading light” of the judiciary. Incredibly, Shapiro goes on to bewail the Senate’s failure to confirm Miguel Estrada, which would seem to vitiate whatever point he had both about racial politics and Sotomayor’s supposed mediocrity (Estrada may have been brilliant for all I know, but there was no record of it as his experience was negligible).
Never mind his obtuseness regarding this country’s racial history; Ilya Shapiro is simply too stupid to be allowed to interrupt a discussion among adults.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
That’s the recent history, but it just makes you scared and angry to think about it, so you’ll just get mad at the messenger.
No, Steve the message is bullshit and you’ve been told why a billion times.
I actually play a parlor game when I remember that you exist and I pick whatever ill of the world is presenting itself and try to work it backwards so it’s some minorities fault. Sometimes I come up with something less stupid than you do.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
And nothing that has been said about Sotomayor even vaguely compares to the calumnies that were (and continue to be) heaped on Clarence Thomas. Having the “wrong” opinions as a minority member makes the left go absolutely bats.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Christ, Ted, your argument is equivalent to saying both sides of evolution/creationism should be taught and respected in biology classes because there are people who think both are science. One side is clearly wrong and lying through its teeth, and we don’t need to continue rehashing it every time it comes up.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Steve Sailer – I really do take issue with your BS talking points about what kicked off the recession. It had almost nothing to do with sub-prime loans and everything to do with banks trying to get a piece of the real estate bubble through relaxed lending standards across the board (these italics mean to white people and other skintones, rich and poor alike!) as well as through the sale of collateralized debt obligations to people who couldn’t begin to understand what was within them like say the State of Florida. And I’m sure all the problems we’re seeing in the commercial real estate market are due to problems pushed by progressives to help minorities. Ri-iight.
I’m talking about race and you bring up the politics of debt. Fine. The politics of civil rights in this country was bipartisan through the 60s with many Republicans for affirmative action and many Democrats opposed. Several elections later, all the seats once occupied by Republicans have turned blue and all the Democrats who opposed civil rights are now either held by Republicans or ‘Blue Dogs’ who oppose spending on social programs. You really don’t want to go into why that is, do you?
August 11th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
njorl asserts:
“The accusations of reverse discrimination, even if true, concern a vanishingly small percentage of the population.”
You only think that way because the media keep you ignorant of the massiveness of de jure and de facto racial/ethnic preferences after 40 years, much of it driven by the legal theory of “disparate impact.”
Yet, preferences for African Americans and Native Americans are more or less affordable, since those population groups aren’t growing rapidly.
What’s not affordable in the long run are preferences for immigrant groups. The Census Bureau estimates that the number of Hispanics will increase 97 million from 2000 to 2050, while the number of whites who have to bear the cost of preferences for Hispanics will be approximately flat.
That’s a huge problem, exactly analogous to the much discussed problems besetting Social Security and Medicaid of an increasing ratio of beneficiaries to benefactors. Yet, you never hear about it in the press, because the press lies about how big preferences are right now.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:45 pm
Steve Sailer: Living proof that there’s no such thing as racism or racists anymore.
Oh. Wait.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:46 pm
I actually play a parlor game when I remember that you exist and I pick whatever ill of the world is presenting itself and try to work it backwards so it’s some minorities fault. Sometimes I come up with something less stupid than you do.
Classic. Brilliant.
August 11th, 2009 at 5:56 pm
…Clarence Thomas. Having
the “wrong” opinions as a minority membercrazy, wrong-headed opinions and a history of sexually harassing colleagues makes the leftgo absolutely batspoint out that you’re a conservative jerk who shouldn’t be a Supreme Court justice.Fixed that for you.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
joejoejoe:
Of course the root of the economic crisis is in “relaxed lending standards.”
Typically, recessions cause a rise in the foreclosure rate. This is the first time in generations when a rise in the foreclosure rate set off a recession.
But, what you haven’t been told much is how those relaxed lending standards were publicly rationalized over and over by politicians, regulators, and lenders on the grounds of fighting racist redlining and eliminating the racial gaps in homeownership rates.
For the history of the Clinton Administration’s role in causing the mortgage meltdown by promoting minority borrowing, read the first chapter of the new book “Our Lot” by Alyssa Katz of Mother Jones.
The even larger role of the Bush Administration in debauching credit standards in the name of Bush’s goal of adding 5.5 million minority homeowners by 2010, which he announced at his October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Minority Home Ownership, has been reported mostly by me.
As part of this plan, George W. Bush made several speeches rallying enthusiasm for his October 15, 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. For instance, there was his classic Bushian effort on June 18, 2002:
“The goal is, everybody who wants to own a home has got a shot at doing so. The problem is we have what we call a homeownership gap in America. Three-quarters of Anglos own their homes, and yet less than 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanics own homes. … So I’ve set this goal for the country. We want 5.5 million more homeowners by 2010—million more minority homeowners by 2010. (Applause.) … ”
Bush repeatedly denounced downpayment requirements and paperwork requirements as barriers to minority homeownership. This sent a clear message to federal regulators that The Boss was cool with zero down mortgages (which exploded in California from 7% of first time homebuyers under Clinton to 41% in 2006) and with liar loans. And it sent a clear message to lenders, such as Angelo Mozillo of Countrywide, that the feds wouldn’t get in the way of boiler room operations aimed at lending to dubious credit risks.
Republicans have shoved Bush’s Increasing Minority Homeownership initiative down the memory hole for obvious reasons. Libertarians won’t mention it because it shows the problems of less regulation. Democrats won’t mention it because they would rather tar Republicans as racist.
But, it happened.
http://www.vdare.com/Sailer/080928_rove.htm
August 11th, 2009 at 6:01 pm
Ahh yes, the left. Where dissent from the wrong opinions makes you insane. One wonders how long it will be before the left starts recommending isolation in mental wards for people who have the wrong ideas.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:09 pm
eric k: well, they can get away with their bullshit on certain abstract topics, but they’re about as comfortable talking about race at Cato as they are about tampons.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Ah yes, James “Fuck you, I got mine” Robertson. A natural member of the Cato constituency.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Ahh yes, the left. Where dissent from the wrong opinions makes you insane. One wonders how long it will be before the left starts recommending isolation in mental wards for people who have the wrong ideas.
Dude. I give you Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, among many others.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
And if we’re not allowed to call people crazy and wrong when we think they’re crazy and wrong, what are we supposed to call them?
I guess it doesn’t matter, because whatever criticism we level would make us racists…
August 11th, 2009 at 6:18 pm
For data from a Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco study on what proportion minorities account for foreclosures in California, the heart of the mortgage meltdown, see:
“We also find that race has an independent effect on foreclosure even after controlling for borrower income and credit score. In particular, African American borrowers were 3.3 times as likely as white borrowers to be in foreclosure, whereas Latino and Asian borrowers were 2.5 and 1.6 times respectively more likely to be in foreclosure as white borrowers.”
It would appear that minorities accounted for a very sizable majority of all foreclosures in California in the time period setting of the Great Recession.
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2009/08/foreclosure-rates-in-california-by.html
In other words, large scale replacement of the population of California did not make the new Californians as creditworthy as the old Californians had been. But that’s the kind of statement that makes people yell and scream at you (e.g., see above) and gets you sued if you are a lender.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
But, who cares about what happened in 2004-2007 or what will happen in the future? Progressives like Matt only care about what happened several generations ago. That’s what makes them progressive!
August 11th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
No. My argument is equivalent to saying that refutations of creationism should focus on its advocates’ claims — and the fact that they provide weak or no evidence for them — rather than focusing on the fact that “creationists never seem to care about the evolutionist point of view.”
To boil it down to its essence: I’m saying that on race (but not on most other topics) MY has a bad habit of focusing on assertions about motives, when we should stay focused on the actual content of the disagreement.
I also have to say that most of the commenters on this thread seem to be using this argument:
A) There is still more racism than reverse discrimination.
B) Therefore concerns about reverse discrimination are without merit and deserve to be dismissed.
I agree about A, but it’s really not clear to me that A implies B.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:25 pm
Matt (like so many of his readers) constantly uses ad hominem arguments on race because he hasn’t figured out any non-ad hominem arguments.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
No, we don’t need to focus on the content of the disagreement because one side is garbage and is lying. Since their argument is driven by their motives, and not by facts, it is their motives that must be examined.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:31 pm
To add to my above post, treating these kind of arguments (or creationism, to use my earlier example) as honest arguments rather than looking at what their motives are gives them legitimacy and standing that they do not deserve. These are not people arguing from an honest position, and as such do not deserve to be taken at face value.
August 11th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
The analogy starts to break down, because politics isn’t science, and you can’t demand the same sort of evidentiary basis before “admitting” someone to the argument.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
that’s the kind of statement that makes people yell and scream at you (e.g., see above) and gets you sued* if you are a lender
* – by the State of Illinois and the City of Baltimore, not the denizens of blog comments
August 11th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
The analogy starts to break down, because politics isn’t science, and you can’t demand the same sort of evidentiary basis before “admitting” someone to the argument.
But you can make inferences about their honesty. When these people discuss something like Ricci, it’s always all about the white guy. There’s no principled discussion of the tradeoffs and difficulties involved in crafting policies to address structural racism. To them, there is no such thing – or if there is, it is dwarfed by the problem of “reverse discrimination” against white guys. These are objectively false beliefs. (Where they are even beliefs at all, and not just cheap political stunts.)
And you can’t have an honest argument with someone who refuses to acknowledge the objective context of the debate.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
The point we should be making, Matthew, is that if you looked at their resumes with the ethnic or gender-identifying information removed, Sotmayor is every bit Alito’s equal in academic and judicial achievement. It’s the rightwingers and the racists (like Ilya Shapiro) who are hung up on her race.
Make them support Alito. He was a reliable rightwing hack his entire career who never demonstrated any of the transcendent legal thinking racists like Shapiro suddenly find lacking in Sotomayor. Why weren’t they upset at his selection?
August 11th, 2009 at 7:26 pm
# Ted Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
The analogy starts to break down, because politics isn’t science, and you can’t demand the same sort of evidentiary basis before “admitting” someone to the argument.
I realize it’s not a perfect analogy. However, there are objective facts and statistical evidence. All of which is completely ignored or minimized in favor of extremely questionable anecdotes and fallacious arguments. Just because something isn’t science doesn’t mean there aren’t objective truths that must be observed and considered in order to formulate a reasonable argument and have an honest discussion. When a whole group ignores these, it is silly to engage the “content” of their “argument” rather than the motive. The current health care reform “debate” is very similar, in that one side is engaging in outright lies and distortion. No amount of debate, correction of facts, or refutation will stop them.
August 11th, 2009 at 7:39 pm
@60: Well, I do agree with you about health care. The whole “death panel” thing is just a lie. It can be shown to be false, and when I watched the nightly news this evening, all the anchors were (more or less) saying so.
I just don’t think the debate about reverse discrimination is that cut and dried. The weight of evidence and argument may in fact be on one side — there may be a right answer. But I don’t think the answer is immediately self-evident to any well-informed person of good faith.
But on that, I’m happy to agree to disagree.
August 11th, 2009 at 8:09 pm
Steve sailer misrepresenting the san Fran fed to feed his prejudices. Hoocoodanode?
August 11th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Whoever is writing under the name Steve Sailer doesn’t seem to understand the concept of an ad hominem attack. Yglesias’ post above is entirely focused on the content of the remark by Shapiro. Shapiro claims that Sotomayor wouldn’t have been considered if not for the fact that she is Hispanic. Yglesias notes that her qualification are actually normal for supreme court justices. If a white male conservative with Sotomayor’s experience had been nominated by Bush, his qualification would not have been an issue.
He then notes that Shapiro’s comment goes beyond being wrong to the level of farce by claiming that this is the worst of racial politics, how ignorant of American history does one have to be to make such a claim while not wearing a clown nose.
Of course this is insulting to Shapiro, but it is insulting based on the content of what he said. That is not at all what an ad hominem argument is.
Getting called on the idiotic things one says does not count as ad hominem.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:30 pm
So let me get this straight:
followed by
equals “It’s the fault of minorities.” Damn them, for getting ripped off by white-owned banks at a higher rate!
August 11th, 2009 at 9:33 pm
Yeah, it’s all a big conspiracy to keep whitey down. All those rich non-white people who own media companies are really putting the screws to us.
This statement of yours can be used to impugn anything you say in the future. Any reasonable person should always assume you are lying. To call you a liar is no longer an ad hminem attack. It is the equivalent of pointing out that a plumber who gives medical advice is likely to be wrong because he is not qualified to do so. In that vane, Steve Sailer, as a liar, is not qualified to state anything.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
You know what else the San Francisco office of the Fed has to say about the question?
You see that last one? Fair-housing laws that extended credit to historically-redlined areas made the financial system SAFER. That’s why the geniuses at the CATO Institute wrote a report a few years ago calling for the repeal of the CRA, because the mortgage lenders who were completely unaffected by that law were flooding into the neighborhoods with “innovative” mortgage products. Which brings us full circle.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:37 pm
Link to the San Francisco Fed’s report on the CRA.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
On the long run, the fancy school thing will be the biggest problem with political positions. Discrimination against woman and ethnic groups is clearly in decline. Its changeing incredible slow, but almost always in the right direction. Some outstanding talents with the “wrong” (= not rich enough, parents not well enough connected) background get acess to the Ivy league schools, get asimilated to the upper class and are now supposed to care a lot about poor opressed minorities? Not so, the at least 7 years at those Universities will do the psychological job (on average we like people more we have a lot to do with – and those have for years most to do with rich people) , soften them down decide much more in favour of the upper class than they should be. But thats not the only problem with the dominance of maybe 5 Universities that to make things worse copy each other. Everybody learns the same perspective. When this perspective happens to be wrong, welcome a nice crisis like this one.
August 11th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
Most of this Fed report consists of a defense of the Community Reinvestment Act by showing lower foreclosure rates for banks (e.g., Washington Mutual) than for independent mortgage companies (e.g., Countrywide). Of course, that’s not a very informative comparison since the Clinton Administration warned Countrywide-like firms that they would have the CRA extended to cover them legislatively unless they behaved like they already were under the CRA. Thus, Angelo Mozilo signed a deal with HUD secretary Henry Cisneros to lend more to minorities and lower income borrowers, and then put Cisneros on Countrywide’s board, and even named Cisneros consultant to Mozilo’s CRA-like trillion dollar pledge of January 2005.
What’s really interesting is the actual data hinted at in the Fed report that shows much higher default rates in California for minorities, even after adjusting for differences in income and FICO scores. Since we know from the federal Home Mortgage Disclosure Act database that minorities got 56% of all home purchase mortgage dollars and 77% of all subprime dollars in California in 2006, the worst vintage for mortgages, then we can be sure that minorities account for a sizable majority of all defaulted dollars in California.
I’ve filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Reserve Board to get access to the unadjusted raw data for California. I’ll let you know what the numbers are when they are released.
Does this mean the mortgage meltdown was the “fault” of minorities? Nah. The people most at fault were the politicians, like George W. Bush and Henry Cisneros, who should have been regulating the boiler room operators like Angelo Mozilo. Instead, they were egging them on.
Here’s the New York Times article on Cisneros, “Building Flawed American Dreams,” which will give you a small taste of what actually happened:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/19/business/19cisneros.html?pagewanted=all
August 11th, 2009 at 10:30 pm
But they weren’t “behaving more like the CRA,” and Mozilo’s lending practices were in no way “CRA-like.” They were behaving in a manner completely different from banks covered by the CRA. They were handing out irresponsible, unaffordable loans, which the CRA forbids. They were selling their mortgages to be be turned into MBSs, which the CRA forbids. We can see just how unlike the CRA-covered banks their behavior was in the default rates, and in the analyses of who provided the unaffordable loans.
Once again, Steve blames minorities for being ripped off by white-owned companies, and blames the irresponsible lending practices of those companies on the government coddling minorities. Disgusting.
It’s certainly true that the government, mainly for the purpose of using the housing market to keep the overall economy growing strongly, encouraged irresponsible lending – to middle-class and above suburbanites, who were, as the report I linked to from the unimpeachable, Steve Sailer-endorsed San Francisco Fed demonstrates, the primary recipients of irresponsible, unaffordable mortgages. – 60 percent of higher-priced loans went to middle- or higher-income borrowers or neighborhoods not covered by the CRA, and only six percent of all higher-priced loans were extended by CRA-covered lenders to lower-income borrowers or neighborhoods in their CRA assessment areas.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
A reasonable person would read this:
The present is the Illinois AG suing a major bank (Wells Fargo) for forcing minorities into high-cost subprime loans when whites with similar incomes got offered more favorable terms. Wells Fargo is also being sued by the City of Baltimore for using similar racial distinctions while making foreclosures.
And realize that it is the reason for this:
Steve Sailer Says:
August 11th, 2009 at 9:56 pm
What’s really interesting is the actual data hinted at in the Fed report that shows much higher default rates in California for minorities, even after adjusting for differences in income and FICO scores.
But, as discussed above, some people are so dishonest it is only worthwhile to examine their motives rather than their arguments.
August 11th, 2009 at 10:31 pm
#49 – I invite you to listen to the skeptoid podcast. You’ll find out why calling your opponents crazy is not the best idea in the world.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:04 pm
One wonders how long it will be before the left starts recommending isolation in mental wards for people who have the wrong ideas.
It’s in Paragraph 403(b) of the health care bill, after the Obama Death Panels mandate.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
James, anyone who thinks that we have been at war with the people of Iraq for the past 17 years – is fucking insane. That such a person would ignore the disaster created by his support for mass murder and focus only on the intangible benefits of “removing Saddam” shows that he is stupid as well.
See, stupid and crazy is pretty much the default position for “conservatives.”
Thomas, as his support for Bush’s genocidal policies and his support for infinite detention without just cause is you in a black robe and a job he should never have been given.
August 11th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
#74 – I guess you don’t actually read what I write. What I’ve said is that once we decided to go to war in 1991, and then leave the Hussein regime in power, a future war was pretty much inevitable – especially since we maintained a low level war with Iraq in the years after that (you can go look up the various air raids we conducted during that time, as well as the enforcement of the no fly zones).
We maintained a state of near war right up to the point where we went back to war; that’s why I said that after the way we left things in 1991, a future war was a near certainty.
You can dislike that all you want, but that’s the policy we maintained, from Bush I through Clinton.
And before you toss around genocide theories, you might look at the death toll for French civilians in WWII before, during, and after D-Day – I think you’ll find that they were much, much larger than anything we did in Iraq. Not a huge surprise, since it was a bigger war – but if the toll in Iraq was genocide, what was that?
August 11th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Joe from Lowell says:
“But they weren’t “behaving more like the CRA,” and Mozilo’s lending practices were in no way “CRA-like.” They were behaving in a manner completely different from banks covered by the CRA.”
Sure, like Kerry Killinger of Washington Mutual, who passed 29 Community Reinvestment Act reviews as he built WaMu into the sixth biggest bank in the country. In fact, he got into a CRA pledge bidding war in order to get into the Southern California market. Killinger ultimately made a $375 billion CRA pledge.
http://vdare.com/Sailer/090201_meltdown.htm
Or how about Citi, which made a $1.5 trillion CRA pledge?
How’d those pledges work out?
Look, the point of the diversity push was to change the culture of lenders, from being penny-pinching Mr. Potters into open-hearted and open-handed George Baileys. If you wanted to get big in the mortgage game, you had to play along with the politicians, who wanted more lending for “underserved” Americans. (And you could just bundle up these dubious mortgages and sell them to Fannie Mae or a bunch of foreigners who have no clue what California’s exurbs are like these days: predatory securitizing.)
Well, the “underserved” Americans got it, good and hard.
August 12th, 2009 at 12:01 am
Ah, Steve Sailer: just as finance went from buying and selling to options trades based upon mezzanine tranches of mortgage-backed securities, plain ol’ racism morphed into collateralized bigotry obligations.
August 12th, 2009 at 12:04 am
I’m fascinated by where racism and the right is right now. Everyone knows racism is wrong. In theory. Certainly no one will admit to being racist. If accused, they always back way. Sometimes with legitimate excuses, yet sometimes not – their original conduct was clearly racist yet they still deny it.
This is very weird. I suppose many of them harbor these thoughts in private and just don’t want to deal with the political/social/etc. fallout if they took public ownership. But then, many I suspect don’t actually believe they are racist (they somehow know racism = bad) and thus genuinely back-peddle and make excuses for their behavior.
I imagine most modern racists fall into the latter category.
Even the white liberal friends of mine, who as liberals are more likely to have done the more complex listening & self-reflecting that begins the process of disentangling cultural prejudices and subconscious bias, still can’t escape falling into crude stereotypes or the “other” mentality. I admit to a fair amount of it myself. In that sense we are all modern racists.
Although I think what is key is the continued acknowledgment of the problem – of how deeply embedded it is in our cultural frameworks. Fundamentally it is an admission that we are not perfect, that we are products of our environment, our natures. And our goal is to strive beyond.
Yet the anti-race racist, by reflexively denying his own human frailty (sin, as I think it has been correctly identified as by mythological narrative) denies not only his own role, but fails to see it in others. This is a self-perpetuating cycle, as acknowledged evidence of racism in others implies it is still alive as a phenomenon, and thus possibly alive in oneself. Thus denying it in others helps to deny it in one’s self.
Politically the right has all the reason in the world to downplay racism as a phenomenon. Every instance of it not only allows the possibility of their own racism, and their own frailty, but also discredits the purity of the American project, both evidenced in “direct” and “legacy” racism. Direct racism actively damages individual freedoms, while legacy racism builds disadvantage into entire communities through community dysfunction or inadequate resources.
As both are social vehicles for inequity, they present a niggling problem for the fundamental meritocratic assumptions of conservatism. Sure, minorities had a reason to be poor when discrimination was law. But now that it isn’t, we can wash our hands of the whole problem and expect every man’s success or failure to be his own. The existence of racism doesn’t allow us to do this, as it is a social injustice that requires intervention. And how to better to do this than government decree.
Except you can’t simply will racism out of existence. It requires social transformation, which takes time and effort – and most forcefully, government action. And until it is eradicated, you can’t hold each man accountable for his lot in life. Those niggling demographic statistics on race and poverty, education, criminality, etc. are evidence of this.
This is the stuff of white privilege. And to a free market philosophy built on the assumption of every one starting with “their own bootstraps”, privilege is really annoying! It throws the whole concept off. Free markets will always have winners and losers, which is a bitter pill to begin with. But it gets that much more bitter when most winners just happen to come from very different backgrounds than do the losers.
I’m still waiting for a conservative explanation for demographic success disparities. Appeals to free will would seem to predict relative random distribution of results year over year, yet there are an enormous number of very solid socioeconomic predictors.
Were I to be a conservative, I would be very concerned with making the playing field level so that my free market could run relatively equitably. How you do this without government intervention is beyond me. Their main line of argumentation right now seems to be that it has actually BEEN government intervention that has perpetuated inequity, via welfare, housing, education, etc. Which seems pretty ridiculous. Sure, these programs have their faults, but one wonders how the the alternative, a.k.a. doing nothing, amounts to anything more than wishful thinking.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Nice dodge, Sailer. I point out the (completely unchallenged, I’ll note) FACT that CRA-covered banks were lending much more responsibly than non-CRA-covered lenders, and you attempt to refute this by pointing out that large banks are covered by the CRA? No shit, Sherlock.
Of course, as we all know, both Citi and WaMu’s troubles were the consequence of over-leveraging mortgage-backed securities, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the performance of the loans they made in CRA-covered neighborhoods. But, then, the problem of MBSs is one created almost entirely by rich white people, so you’re certainly not going to blame them.
You are, quite simply, completely wrong. Lending under the CRA was SAFER than the lending performed by non-CRA-covered institutions. This has been proven over and over again. This is probably because the CRA has strict affordability and background-checking standards, while the unregulated lending market does not.
The CRA and other fair-housing programs squeezed some portion of the irresponsible lending market out of the system, and replaced go-go loans of the “innovative” lending companies with boring, old bank loans subject to strict standards. The CRA made the lending market, and the overall financial market, less risky. It’s just a shame that the same standards that govern CRA loans weren’t applied to the rest of the market.
August 12th, 2009 at 9:22 am
The appalling ignorance of these right-wingers who make assertions about fair-lending laws is breathtaking.
Anybody who has ever had any contact with affordable housing programs knows that the agencies crawl up your ass with a microscope, and have to submit suitcases full of documentation proving that the recipient can afford the loan.
But they’re right-wingers, so they just make up their own facts.
August 12th, 2009 at 10:28 am
#49 – I invite you to listen to the skeptoid podcast. You’ll find out why calling your opponents crazy is not the best idea in the world.
The stupid really burns… Look, “hack” would probably have been a better word than crazy. So sue me.
Your focus on this trivial little choice of vocabulary seems to me mainly an effort to distract everyone from your awesomely bad logic @37. Namely:
1. Sotomayor has been criticized by the Right [...almost entirely in race baiting terms.]
2. Clarence Thomas has been criticized by the Left. [...full stop.]
3. Ergo, the Left = racists too!
…
Oh, wait! I see the light! We can substitute almost any right wing figure in step two, even a white guy!
I mean, George W. Bush got a lot of flak from the left. So do a lot of of other white politicians. And, since criticism = racism: Reverse racism! Reverse discrimination!
August 12th, 2009 at 11:12 am
How the Cato Institute can simultaneously employ this ignorant nutbag & Radley Balko (whose main focus is such disproportionately minority affecting things as the War on Drugs & police misconduct) puzzles me.
August 12th, 2009 at 11:23 am
I’m shocked that Matt doesn’t have anything to say about the claim that “she . . . would not have been considered had she not been a Hispanic woman.” How does Shapiro know this, other than the racist assumption that people of color are always unqualified?
His only argument is that she’s not a “leading light of the judiciary,” but that makes no sense. If anything, being a leading light of the judiciary is a disqualification. You don’t get to be a leading light without saying far too many controversial things to make it through the modern confirmation process. It also usually takes a lot of seniority to be recognized as a leading light. That conflicts with the fact that Presidents now want to pick Justices as young as possible so they can stay on the court as long as possible. I think the fact that such concerns have come to dominate the confirmation process is sad, but that’s how it works.
And, fwiw, Alito wasn’t a leading light of the judiciary either. But given what conservative politics are like, he probably never would have been picked if he weren’t white.
August 12th, 2009 at 11:31 am
joejoejoe:
You really don’t want to bring up the mortgage meltdown that kicked off the recession.
Sailer continues to ignore the CDSes and other exotic derivatives and the insanely excessive margins that rich white over-educated investors had and the orders of magnitude larger dollar amounts involved.
August 12th, 2009 at 11:49 am
But what’s interesting is that we don’t even talk about the possibility that someone who is neither Christian nor Jewish would have a chance. How about a Buddhist, or (gasp!) a Muslim? – fostert
To expand on your comments, another thing about Protestantism is that it just doesn’t have the legalistic tradition that Judaism and even Catholicism has. In fact, outside of the Dominionist movement (and maybe the Anglicans), Protestantism has a long history of being anti-legalistic.
When Protestants had a lock on power in this country, of course, SCOTUS too remained Protestant. But now that we are doing a better job of living up to the Constitutional ideal of “no religious tests” in practice (*), we get to see more Catholics (and Jews) on SCOTUS and fewer Protestants.
I would hypothesize that once we as a society get to the point where we are comfortable having a Muslim on SCOTUS, Muslims will also, actually, end up being over-represented, because Islam also has a strong, legal tradition. I imagine the SCOTUS of the future will have something like 2 Muslims, 2 Jews, 4 Catholics (or other Orthodox Christians) and perhaps a Protestant or a member of a non-Abrahamic faith.
(*at least as far as not excluding Catholics and Jews from certain offices … in some ways we’re going backwards — in the past we frequently had Deistic Presidents — could you imagine a President getting elected today who wasn’t a confessed Trinitarian Christian?)
August 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
MY has a bad habit of focusing on assertions about motives, when we should stay focused on the actual content of the disagreement.
The “actual content of the disagreement” is the “motives.” Matt had already explained why the “actual content” of Shapiro’s complaint made no damn sense, essentially that everything you could say about Sotomayor — other than that she’s a damn Puerto Rican — was equally true about Alito. The only reasonable explanation for such nonsense just is Shapiro’s “motives.”
August 12th, 2009 at 6:54 pm
Re: could you imagine a President getting elected today who wasn’t a confessed Trinitarian Christian?)
Yes, I think we could elect a Mormon* or a Jewish president. And I don’t think Trinitarianism is a test: lots and lots of people, including many Evangelicals, don’t even know what the word means. And in fact some Penatcostal groups are explicitly not Trinitarian.
* I don’t want to argue theology here. If someone tells me that the LDS does subscribe to the Trinity I’ll accept it.