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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3262 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 9, 2023

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Most interesting so far are his thoughts on culture. I don't know how accurate his numbers are, but at one point he posits a cycle where 1. a seemingly race-neutral policy (the war on drugs) is enacted, 2. the policy is used in a racist manner (he says that it was unevenly enforced on blacks despite whites having similar issues), 3. successful members of the minority group accept the criticism (ie. middle class blacks take to lambasting their own kind for being drug dealers and addicts).

This position, and all of Kendi's arguments really, hinges on the assumption that racial inequities can under no circumstances be caused by cultural or biological differences. He argues that because drug policies were unevenly enforced that they must be racist, because if you assume there can be no difference in rates of drug abuse or crime between any two populations then the only thing that could lead to uneven enforcement is racism, but if that assumption doesn't hold the whole edifice falls apart. The reason that Kendi and his supporters hold so much sway over contemporary political discourse in America is because almost no one is willing to challenge this assumption in public, and if you don't then you have no choice but to tacitly accept the framing they have presented, and you can only argue at the margins for how to best implement antiracist policies.

The context, per Kendi:

White Americans are more likely than Black and Latinx Americans to sell drugs, and these groups consume drugs at similar rates. Yet Black Americans are far more likely than White Americans to be jailed for drug offenses. Black Americans convicted of nonviolent drug-related activities remain in prisons for about the same length of time (58.7 months) as White Americans convicted of violence (61.7 months).

For the first two claims he cites Vice, The war on drugs remains as racist as ever, statistics show, and the report Racial/Ethnic Differences in Substance Use (2015-2019). I'm entirely unfamiliar with the data, so I can't comment on its accuracy.

The Vice article links to another article, whuch says:

Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).

The 1980 article is behind a paywall, but is from 1980. Ten bucks says it includes kids who occasionally sold pot at parties. The 1989 article is not a survey of youth in Boston, but rather of inner city youth in Boston. ("The survey covers youths in three highpoverty areas of Boston's central city: Roxbury (a primarily black area), South Boston (an almost exclusively white area), and South Dorchester (a racially mixed area)"). The last link doesn't work, but again I would bet it includes a lot of casual pot sales.

Nevertheless, it does not take a very high level of bias at each level of the criminal justice process to yield large disparities in outcomes. If 80 pct of black drug possessors are arrested versus 70 of whites, and similar pcts apply to the decision to charge, the chance of conviction, and the decision to incarcerate, then 41 pct of black drug users will be incarcerated but only 24 pct of white drug dealers will be.

Not taking a particular stance, but there's no inherent contradiction in simultaneously believing the ideas that 1) there are cultural/biological differences between races and 2) the government unevenly enforces punishment on one race, out of proportion to a just enforcement distribution.

I'm pretty sure Kendi would (stridently) reject 1), but even if it's true, it doesn't make 2) false. It just makes attribution much more difficult.

I don't think your point applies to the debate set up in the parent comments. If 1 is true, whether or not 2 is, then equity is not appropriate. Proving 1 to be true is sufficient to reject equity. 2 is still taken to be true under a colorblind ethos, which basically maps to <yes 1 culture> <no 1 biology>, and which Kendi is against.

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