Ocasio-Cortez, a poor [wo]man’s Bernie

[creekster]

If there are less self-identified racists but their activities have increased and public profiles risen, has racism really decreased?

Also white separatism or white nationalism is code for racist. Hell, some of them even talk about identifying that way to soften their image.

Fewer. Not less, fewer. Sorry, pet peeve of mine.

And, yes, racism has decreased. It is foolish to claim otherwise. The only way to claim this is not true is by expanding the notion of racism to areas of thought instead of limiting it to areas of acts. Remember, we are talking about a hispanic woman who was elected despite the fact that she appears to be an economic moron and we aren't discussing (nor is the media, much) the muslim minority woman who was also elected to congress (perhaps because the latter does NOT appear to be an economic moron). And all of this takes place in the shadow of a just completed two term run of a black president who was almost universally lauded by the nation. And the fact is that AOC has said some incredibly stupid, as in monumentally and ridiculously moronic, economic things and has refused to back down from them. It's really a compliment to her perseverance and cleverness that she managed to get so far in life while being so dumb in some key and relevant areas.

[swampfrog]

They think their culture is threatened by the presence of those who don't look like them.

I don't think I have anything more to add to this topic. Everyone should believe their culture may be threatened by outsiders, because it is. History is replete with examples of this. I do appreciate the discussion. Thank you.

[creekster]

She's a bomb-thrower for sure but outside of her district, what militant leftist angst is there?

I am not sure how one operates as a militant but angsty leftist. Militant angst seems almost oxymoronic. Omaha says it is a leftist wave of millennial angst. You added militancy. And, yes, California is replete with leftist angst.

[frank ryan]

I don't think I have anything more to add to this topic. Everyone should believe their culture may be threatened by outsiders, because it is. History is replete with examples of this. I do appreciate the discussion. Thank you.

Oh dear.

[Uncle Ted]

If there are less self-identified racists but their activities have increased and public profiles risen, has racism really decreased?

Also white separatism or white nationalism is code for racist. Hell, some of them even talk about identifying that way to soften their image.

Actually, it is white liberals that are more likely to be patronizing and demeaning toward minorities:

Study: White Liberals Rely On Old Stereotypes When Interacting With Black People

A new study from Yale University concludes that white liberals actually make themselves appear less competent when interacting with African Americans.

In the first part of Self-Presentations in Interracial Settings: The Competence Downshift by White Liberals, researchers analyzed 25 years of speeches delivered by white presidential candidates to predominantly black audiences and predominantly white audiences. The study found that liberal candidates tended to use words that downplayed their language competence.
[...]

http://www.wnpr.org/post/study-white...g-black-people

Of course, this study was done at a university full of rich, white crackers so what the hell do they know.

[falafel]

Oh dear.

swampfrog is probably the only poster here who adds to these discussions with real evidence instead of just arguing from the seats of our pants. I wouldn't think you'd want to drive him away.

[swampfrog]

I don't think American society is necessarily more racist. I do think many of those who have those beliefs have suddenly felt vindicated and more comfortable expressing them outwardly, sometimes through hate crimes, than before Trump was elected.

I think we agree here, though measuring this would be extremely difficult. When a number like the percentage of people that approve of interracial marriage goes from 4% in 1958 to 87% in 2013, how else can that be accounted for? That's not some small change, it's a complete reversal from one extreme to the other.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/163697/...ks-whites.aspx

The major shift in attitudes about such unions, however, is a telling indicator of the general shift in views of racial matters on many fronts in the U.S. over the last five decades.

[frank ryan]

swampfrog is probably the only poster here who adds to these discussions with real evidence instead of just arguing from the seats of our pants. I wouldn't think you'd want to drive him away.

Spare me the indignation. No one wants him to leave. I don’t think “white culture” is under threat.

[falafel]

Spare me the indignation. No one wants him to leave. I don’t think “white culture” is under threat.

There's no indignation, frank.

[swampfrog]

swampfrog is probably the only poster here who adds to these discussions with real evidence instead of just arguing from the seats of our pants. I wouldn't think you'd want to drive him away.

Not going anywhere. My participation has always minimal. I had recently been delving into the issue of racism in the U.S. for my own personal understanding. Perception and reality are often not consistent. The discussion was mostly free from snark, it just wasn't going anywhere. I learned what I intended from the back and forth.

[frank ryan]

Not going anywhere. My participation has always minimal. I had recently been delving into the issue of racism in the U.S. for my own personal understanding. Perception and reality are often not consistent. The discussion was mostly free from snark, it just wasn't going anywhere. I learned what I intended from the back and forth.

I enjoy your presence on the board even if I argued with you.

[Uncle Ted]

"We need to invent technology that's never even been invented yet."

https://www.wnyc.org/story/alexandri...limate-change/

I guess socialists are just use to taking stuff that isn't theirs?

[swampfrog]

I wasn’t going to comment further, but sometimes a piece of a puzzle falls into place and I write to help clarify my own mind. I was at a standstill with the apparent contradictory paradox of an increase of white power presence and violence with statistical polling data showing reduction in common racist beliefs and attitudes in the general population.

Last night I was watching a documentary style report on Frontline that Frank sent me. An interview contained in the presentation helped cement some ideas. This will probably ramble a bit (ok a lot), I don’t have time to return to the many podcasts and articles that I have listened to or read to extract proper citations.

One of the problems with gathering data about controversial and/or political topics is the framing of questions can elicit responses that are dependent on the framing. In the podcast from this past summer, Sam Harris interviews Coleman Hughes who makes the following point. If whites and blacks are asked if they support Affirmative Action, the majority say yes (this is true for both blacks and whites). However, if asked about specific implementations (like should universities discriminate enrollment based on race), the result is reversed. How questions are framed matters, which makes it difficult to extricate valid statistical data. The YouTube version of the podcast can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqtZTMQiupg

Considering political commentators or ideologs, almost to a fault they will frame questions in such a manner that the response is nearly guaranteed to match a political agenda. Hate crime statistics have the same and other similar problems. Definitions of “hate crime” vary wildly and come under political pressure to show increase/decreases dependent on the agenda of those currently in power. It’s a difficult measure to pin down over time because of the multiple variables not being held constant.

I’m willing to grant that there is an increase in “hate crime” in the U.S., at least for sake of argument. (There is FBI data showing a sharp decrease from 1994 to 2015, see the first citation below this paragraph,) The question is then what does that represent? What can be extrapolated from that increase? If you take an iceberg frame of reference, in that what little is exposed as violence must be representative of deeper roots among the general population (the tip is just the visible manifestation of a large society level problem), the natural conclusion is increased violence equals increased racism.

Is this frame correct? The Gallup polls that show attitudes towards interracial marriage, comfort living next to different races, and other similar questions have shown a steady reversal of racist attitudes since 1958. However, if you ask the question, “do you think race relations are improving?” the trend is the opposite in the last decade. This presents a data dichotomy which requires explanation. Tension is ratcheting up while actual attitudes towards historically racists viewpoints has completely reversed.

https://qz.com/983016/the-data-are-i...an-old-people/

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1687/race-relations.aspx

If discriminatory attitudes and practices are in decline, yet tension is increasing, that’s a significant dilemma. Where is the tension coming from? It is manifesting itself in violence on both extreme ends. It looks to be a power game. The more important question might be, who gains the most by maintaining or increasing the tension between races? Political polarization may be the actual culprit and race relations is just another weapon with which the political war is being fought.

Which brings this meandering stream to the piece I discovered last night. What societal factors historically have resulted in a rise of white power racist violence? During the Frontline piece, the reporter goes to interview Kathleen Belew (https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/kathleen-belew). She makes a statement that caused me to go back and transcribe it because it connected to some previous insights that I had heard from Jonathan Haidt.

“One thing to understand is that throughout American history there is always a correlation between the aftermath of warfare and this kind of vigilante and revolutionary white power violence. If you look for instance at surges in Ku Klux Klan membership they align more consistently with the return of veterans from combat and the aftermath of war than they do with anti-immigration, populism, economic hardship, or any of the other factors that historians have typically used to explain them. Nationalist fervor, populist movements, those are all worse predictors than the aftermath of war.”

If this is true, then the iceberg metaphor is invalid. The rise of white power violence is not built on the foundation of underlying populist racism but is an unintended consequence of the U.S. putting boots on the ground in foreign countries. This reminded me of a statement by Haidt that when motivations of suicide bombers were analyzed, the same conclusion is reached, not bombs, not drones, not economic sanctions—boots on the ground motivate young people to sacrifice their lives to destroy the enemy.

The “boots on the ground” framework is significant because it represents an invasion of the unknown—it invites humans (and other animals) to invoke internal self-actualizing reflexive subroutines for persecution of the “Them”. The subroutines are intertwined with the same routines that invoke disgust that prevent humans from consuming spoiled food.

Jonathan Haidt and Jordan Peterson discuss the disgust mechanisms in relation to Hitler here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jIixHZVs4w (fantastic 6-minute video excerpted from a longer discussion)

It’s easy to take the results of white power violence and scream “racist” as the single causal factor, but the reality of what creates the necessary environment in which these types of acts emerge is way more complicated and complex. But they are easy weapons to be deployed in the landscape of the continued U.S. culture wars.

If instead of viewing white power violence as the tip of an iceberg, maybe it can be seen as a long balloon filled with “racist” water. The water starts in a state of equilibrium, evenly distributed throughout the population. Then, over time, society changes and begins to eschew racist philosophies and attitudes. Social policies are implemented which condemn and control it. The total amount of racism is reduced, water is released from the balloon.

All of it cannot be removed, there are biologically determined amounts of Us versus Them which can be reduced but not fully eradicated (which can also be cultivated again). The end of the balloon is tied at that point. The population represented by the middle of the balloon increases the tolerance and inclusivity pressure even further such that the remaining racist elements are pushed to the extreme ends.

The clear majority of the population has reduced racist tendencies and attitudes, and as a result, the remaining has been forced to the fringes. They go underground, secluded, and operate in secret. Occasionally, frustrated by the pressure from being subjugated (from their perspective) to the tyranny of the mindless brainwashed majority, they perpetrate acts of violence. From this perspective, the violence can be viewed as the result of successful policies that has reduced racial beliefs throughout the majority of the population. If boots end up on the ground, and uptick of activity is expected.

On the left side of the balloon, racism itself become the target of the same disgust mechanisms that motivate the white supremacists. Racists are disgusting. All racist tendencies must fully be exterminated, any views, thoughts, words, ideas, history, etc. which remotely resemble racist attitudes must be destroyed. So great is the danger of racism that everyone must obediently submit to reeducation systems designed to reprogram human consciousness. Racism is everywhere and will not be tolerated. We should all know where that ends.

https://www.dailywire.com/news/39089...wrong-andy-ngo

[Walter Sobchak]

This newly elected group gives me some hope.

https://theintercept.com/2018/12/03/...congress-trip/

RASHIDA TLAIB, A Democratic representative-elect from Michigan, belongs to a cohort of incoming members of Congress who’ve vowed to upend the status quo — even on third-rail issues in Washington like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To that end, Tlaib is planning to lead a congressional delegation to the Israeli-occupied West Bank, she told The Intercept. Her planned trip is a swift rebuke of a decades-old tradition for newly elected members: a junket to Israel sponsored by the education arm of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, known as AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby group.

We need more elected representatives like these in this new batch of progressives IMHO. God bless 'em. Drain the swamp!

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[wapiti]

We need more elected representatives like these in this new batch of progressives IMHO. God bless 'em. Drain the swamp!

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