Exactly. DEI as it's been practiced begins with grains of truth that they exaggerate into lies. We need to reject the latter without denying the former.
Useful article but straining things a LOT to suggest innate in-group bias is a particularly strong or easy pathway to racism: "The correct thing to say is that, although we are not hardwired to be racist, humans are by nature groupish and exophobic, dispositions that can easily lead to racism."
In-group bias can occur along entirely arbitrary lines and has formed naturally among kids wearing red versus blue t-shirts, or being allocated into groups by adults based on their alleged fondness for one painter over another. Should we say that being groupish can easily lead to T-shirtism?
It's also not clear that in-group bias makes us innately exophobic. In fact, studies suggest people are mostly neutral / indifferent to "innocent" strangers. Exophobia kicks in when our ingroup feels in some way threatened - the defense mechanism is innate but needs to be triggered by a real or perceived threat, whether e.g. from predators or a rival human group.
While race itself may no longer be the barrier to success that it once was, as evidenced by the academic achievements of African immigrants in the UK and US, the insidious impact of sustained intergenerational poverty and underachievement has created a different form of social capital.
Institutional racism WAS a social construct in US history. It's a little-known fact that in the early days of the Virginia colony Black people were free to own property, serve in the defense of the colony and take cases to court - including, in the case of "Anthony Johnson. Negro" to secure the return of his slave. When the colony of Georgia (which included much of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi) was founded it had an absolute ban on slavery which lasted for decades, until soaring demand for cotton made planters "Stark mad after Negroes" in the 1750s.
The US wasn't directly responsible for most of the souls brought over from Africa on the Middle Passage, but the country did create an ideology around the righteousness of racial slavery in the US (unlike, bizarrely, the international Slave Trade). US breeding programs were framed as a moral good grounded in spurious claims of racial superiority, or more euphemistically, racial difference. JC Calhoun favorably compared the care of elderly retired slaves to the Dickensian conditions of the urban poor in slums - like these are my only options?
Attitudes to slavery and race tracked very closely to the mix of crops grown in each region. Sugar in Louisiana, "Carolina Gold" rice and cotton in Georgia all profited from the domestic breeding of slaves sold down-river from the Upper South. None of these regions even had a high rate of manumission before the Civil War, unlike Virginia, Maryland or Delaware, where wheat replaced tobacco as the main crop. All had Slave Codes that prevented free Black people from living there, and sumptuary laws that prevented Black people from dressing like white people.
That heritage of slavery and racism persisted through the twentieth century in Jim Crow laws. Black and white people were not allowed to marry in Virginia until 1967. DEI programs may have made inaccurate or controversial claims, but the legacy of racial prejudice and discrimination remains.
Eamonn - when you ask rhetorically, "Should we say that being groupish can easily lead to T-shirtism?" I wasn't sure what point you were making. T-shirtism is a silly word, but it seems as good as word as any to allude to the phenomenon observed in the social experiments you're referring to. So my answer to that questions would be...Yes? Why not? So I don't see how this disproves the idea that similar groupish tendencies can easily lead to racism. Can you expand a bit on that?
Apologies for the somewhat flippant tone. I was suggesting that the flimsiest pretext, such as t-shirt color, can easily lead to inter-group rivalry. That alone doesn't disprove the contention that groupish tendencies can easily lead to racism, but the evidence I've seen suggests that codifying discrimination based on race is not easy. It requires much more than innate groupishness to emerge as a social construct.
As I think was mentioned in the article, in-group bias evolved between people who closely physically resembled one another, long before large-scale contact between different racial groups. Groups can form around entirely arbitrary distinctions, and at least in the earliest stages of formation, membership of the in-group can be quite fluid.
That was certainly the case in early American colonial history, where the existence of slavery in Virginia did not prevent free Black people from taking an active role as citizens of the colony. Anthony Johnson is a case in point. An immigrant from Angola, when he successfully sued for the return of his slave, the court commended him for his service in defending the colony from attacks by Native Americans, yet a few decades later his grandchildren would flee the state as race-based Slave Codes led to the expulsion of free Black citizens.
The immediate catalyst for this change in seventeenth century Virginia was the rebellion of poorer white and Black citizens led by Nathaniel Bacon, who wanted the governor to drive Native Americans out of the area so they could settle the land. More generally, the codification of racism in Slave Codes was fueled by the enormous profits to be made in producing Plantation commodities. Wherever these commodities could be grown, whether it was Barbados, Louisiana or Carolina, racial Slave Codes followed. Native Americans who had been captured and enslaved after conflicts were re-classified as Black in plantation records.
These Slave Codes could emerge even in areas where there was a long-established and absolute ban on slavery. When Georgia was founded as the southern-most British colony, it was envisaged that a network of small homesteaders, each farming 50 acres, would deter Spanish adventurers from heading north. There was an absolute ban on slavery that lasted for 20 years, but less than 25 years before the Declaration of Independence announced that all men were created equal, that ban was lifted to facilitate industrial-scale production of cotton.
A nation founded on the basis of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness found it difficult to square the moral circle. The Founding Fathers hoped slavery would wither away without fresh imports. America joined with the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron to end the slave trade in the 19th century. This inadvertently led to a booming domestic breeding program and a thriving inter-state slave trade. It wasn't long before this population boom prompted southern politicians like JC Calhoun to reframe US slavery as a "moral good."
"US slavery good, international slave trade bad" was a morally stressful position to maintain. There is evidence (e.g. Paul Bloom's studies tracking the eye movements of babies watching puppet shows) that a rudimentary moral sense is innate. We don't like to be the bad guys. We have always distanced ourselves from our wrongdoing by othering. In the case of slavery, that has meant creating distinctions e.g. between victor and vanquished. In ancient Sumerian, the word for slave is a synonym for a person from the mountains.
The enormous profits from slave labor were not sufficient to justify the actions of US Planters, scions of the Enlightenment, to themselves. They had to make any reminders of common humanity, such as dressing in the same way, illegal through sumptuary laws. They had to argue that slavery was a benign force elevating their racial inferiors. Religious denominations tore themselves apart over whether slavery was merely an evil, or a moral evil, in the decades before the US Civil War.
In-group bias can of course occur on racial lines, but that in itself has not been sufficient for racism to flourish. It required enormous economic incentives to see prohibitions on slavery overturned, and an ideological scaffolding that justified racially based slavery as a form of paternalism, indoctrinating generations of white southerners in their racial superiority, with a horror at miscegenation that had to be learned at their parent's knee. Racism survived the Civil War and reemerged in the Jim Crow laws of Reconstruction, but codifying and maintaining it was far from easy. It relied more on our ability to salve our conscience with good strong lies than our innate groupishness.
Eamonn, how about the argument that, yes, out-group membership can arise based on strange features like origin in near-by mountains, but such arbitrary distinctions tend to become salient only when there isn’t a more obvious phenotypic basis?
Back when people in a local area only saw others who looked just like themselves, the innate tendency to create in groups and out groups had little to latch on to. But when the world gets smaller, racism is the easiest way for the innate tendency to go.
I am thrilled to see the strength and breadth of the Left’s rejection of the Far Left. Pieces like this one genuinely excite me. I’m a moderate former Republican, and this is political thought I can really get behind, core values that a solid majority of Americans should be able to support, even if there are a lot of other things they disagree about.
The time and effort put into DEI programs could have been put into improving our primary and secondary education systems starting with the recognition that on the average or for the most part the optimal learning environments (A) for boys v. girls and (B) advantaged v. disadvantaged students are different. A "one size fits all" education system leaves a lot of children behind.
Regarding your first section about race, I take your point regarding the idea that there is some biological reality correlating with "race." But I think you're slightly straw-manning the critique by failing to address the socially constructed elements of race. The obvious example is the concept of Blackness in European colonial states, which is constructed around phenotype and has nothing to do with ancestry. You could send the saliva of four different "Black" individuals to 23andme and get results showing Nigerian ancestry, Pygmy ancestry, Papuan ancestry, and maybe someone who's 75% European but has a visibly "Black" phenotype in certain respects such that under the one drop rule, they're Black for Jim Crow purposes. Obviously, the historical shift of Whiteness surrounding Jews and Italians presents similar issues. So when you say, "In every canonical use of the term, race is determined by ancestry, and ancestry is a straightforward biological concept." I respectfully disagree.
In DEI, the idea that race is a social construct strangely coexists with its reification. If American society is irredeemably racist, and as per Kendi, every social problem derives from “structural racism”, how can you simultaneously say that race does not really exist? On what basis is the “construction” done? It is a circular and logically inconsistent argument, which simply shows that we are dealing with a secular religion rather than a consistent philosophical system.
Personally I think it's not only normal but actually beneficial for the natives of any country to remain 'Supreme' in their own homeland. This is considered obvious in the entire world except the white West, where we've come to feel that it is our moral duty to work for our own replacement.
I appreciate the effort the author put into assembling this list and I certainly agree with his premise that DEI programming gets many things substantively wrong. But the whole first half of the essay seems directionally backwards to me.
Maybe DEI training is different in Canada? Because items 1 - 3 are unrecognizable in the context of the US debate around this.
They paint a picture in which DEI training is, essentially, too idealistic. It would be nice, you see, if we lived in the DEI world where race was just a social construct, stereotypes were false and racism was learned, not innate. Alas, we do not live in such a world, so DEI advocates need to "get real" and accept some unpleasant truths.
What !?
In fact, the most divisive aspects of DEI in the US are because it preaches the polar opposite of each of these. It tells us racial categories are profoundly important to everyone's identity; stereotypes are generally *true* (hence "Whiteness" etc.), and racism is innate, pervasive, "structural" - not something you can stop just by, you know, not being racist. This is pessimism, not idealism.
Look at the Supreme Court decision that ended affirmative action at US colleges. The majority blasted the use of an "Asian" racial category by these colleges, pointing out at length how absurd and arbitrary it is - lumping Koreans and Japanese and Indians together for equal (mis-)treatment. In essence, the conversative Supreme Court majority made something like a "race is a social construct" argument. But they used to *skewer* DEI, not to defend it! That all makes sense to me; the author's upside down version of the landscape does not.
The essay is on stronger ground for points 4 and 5, which come closer to acknowledging the inherent negativity of the DEI philosophy. But then it's the author's turn to fall for some undue idealism. He thinks he can get proponents to swap out structural and statistical diagnoses of the problem for something more like "instances of actual racism." While that would be welcome, I'm sure he knows that limiting the scope of DEI down to - well, what anyone can intuitively understand from their elementary-school morality, without the help of highly-paid consultants - was never going to draw quite as much... talent or attention.
This is among the best things I’ve read about DEI. He avoids one crucial question though: what is race? And its corellary: what useful criteria can one use to classify human beings by race? I think the answer to the latter is — there are none. When you think of how fluidly and arbitrarily “white” or “black” are applied, you’ll see what I mean. Try figuring that out in Brazil, for instance, where inter-group miscegenation has long been common. And there’s that most meaningless term, constructed for political purposes “person of color”. Americans tend to think the categories on our census form are universal realities. But our understood categories, based on true white supremacist theory is the infamous “one drop” rule. And what is a silly classification like “Asian” supposed to mean? Koreans, Indians, Iranians, Israelis, and Kazakhs are all one race? What sets them apart from Norwegians, Italians, Nigerians, or Canadians?
Much as I admire this piece, the author has skipped over this essential question.
I. Different societies "culturally construct" race differently: for example Brazil in contrast to the US. In Panama race is entirely a social, or if you like, cultural construct. If a Panamanian appears as Black, but is culturally hispanic and fluent in Spanish they are not considered to be Black. If a Panamanian is Afro-Caribbean with a different culture and speaking a dialect of English they are considered to be Black.
3 Humans have a tendency to identify the "other" as not belonging to the in group. But the acceptance of the "other" as part of the in group has broadened dramatically over human history. In the United States, the Irish immigrants were the "other" and now they are part of the mainstream.
4. It is important to understand class privilege. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this as "cultural capital". It enables middle class people to be more successful at school and at work because they know the ropes. This would be "minority privilege".
5. Some racial disparities are unjust. Not only are Black people more than twice as likely to be poor in comparison to white people, Black people are much more likely to be in what is called "deep poverty." There is historical evidence from the New Deal until today that the degree of poverty tolerated in the US (as compared to Europe) is the result of racism i.e. our weak social safety net. Sally Bould. Professor of Sociology, Emerita. University of Delaware.
Several people have made this familiar point about Brazilians using a different classification system from Americans when talking about race, so I thought I might address it. What this example actually shows is that race is not a "natural kind" (which is why different cultures slice things up differently) It does not show that it is socially constructed. For example, many cultures do not categorize medical conditions, such as "sepsis," in the same way that we do, but instead use a set of non-overlapping classifications of the various symptoms. But that does not mean sepsis is a social construct -- it is a physiological condition. The claim that it is a social construct is a much stronger claim, which is not necessary in order to make the point that is usually being made.
Thank you for critiquing and refining much of the sloppy thinking behind DEI. However, your analysis of Dogma 1 unfortunately propagates one of its errors, albeit a very common one: the confusion of Race with Ethnicity. Ethnicity is based upon objective verifiable characteristics such as ancestry, language, or other discrete cultural markers. Ethnic boundaries may be disputed, but they are based upon biology, anthropology, and/or linguistics. Race is an arbitrary meta-grouping of Ethnicities, socially defined, with group boundaries that have changed over time in response to social and political events. We can objectively determine (or debate) if someone is Greek or Italian, but whether Greeks and Italians are White depends upon what year it is.
Exactly. DEI as it's been practiced begins with grains of truth that they exaggerate into lies. We need to reject the latter without denying the former.
Yes indeed, *beautifully* snarky!!
Useful article but straining things a LOT to suggest innate in-group bias is a particularly strong or easy pathway to racism: "The correct thing to say is that, although we are not hardwired to be racist, humans are by nature groupish and exophobic, dispositions that can easily lead to racism."
In-group bias can occur along entirely arbitrary lines and has formed naturally among kids wearing red versus blue t-shirts, or being allocated into groups by adults based on their alleged fondness for one painter over another. Should we say that being groupish can easily lead to T-shirtism?
It's also not clear that in-group bias makes us innately exophobic. In fact, studies suggest people are mostly neutral / indifferent to "innocent" strangers. Exophobia kicks in when our ingroup feels in some way threatened - the defense mechanism is innate but needs to be triggered by a real or perceived threat, whether e.g. from predators or a rival human group.
While race itself may no longer be the barrier to success that it once was, as evidenced by the academic achievements of African immigrants in the UK and US, the insidious impact of sustained intergenerational poverty and underachievement has created a different form of social capital.
Institutional racism WAS a social construct in US history. It's a little-known fact that in the early days of the Virginia colony Black people were free to own property, serve in the defense of the colony and take cases to court - including, in the case of "Anthony Johnson. Negro" to secure the return of his slave. When the colony of Georgia (which included much of modern-day Alabama and Mississippi) was founded it had an absolute ban on slavery which lasted for decades, until soaring demand for cotton made planters "Stark mad after Negroes" in the 1750s.
The US wasn't directly responsible for most of the souls brought over from Africa on the Middle Passage, but the country did create an ideology around the righteousness of racial slavery in the US (unlike, bizarrely, the international Slave Trade). US breeding programs were framed as a moral good grounded in spurious claims of racial superiority, or more euphemistically, racial difference. JC Calhoun favorably compared the care of elderly retired slaves to the Dickensian conditions of the urban poor in slums - like these are my only options?
Attitudes to slavery and race tracked very closely to the mix of crops grown in each region. Sugar in Louisiana, "Carolina Gold" rice and cotton in Georgia all profited from the domestic breeding of slaves sold down-river from the Upper South. None of these regions even had a high rate of manumission before the Civil War, unlike Virginia, Maryland or Delaware, where wheat replaced tobacco as the main crop. All had Slave Codes that prevented free Black people from living there, and sumptuary laws that prevented Black people from dressing like white people.
That heritage of slavery and racism persisted through the twentieth century in Jim Crow laws. Black and white people were not allowed to marry in Virginia until 1967. DEI programs may have made inaccurate or controversial claims, but the legacy of racial prejudice and discrimination remains.
Eamonn - when you ask rhetorically, "Should we say that being groupish can easily lead to T-shirtism?" I wasn't sure what point you were making. T-shirtism is a silly word, but it seems as good as word as any to allude to the phenomenon observed in the social experiments you're referring to. So my answer to that questions would be...Yes? Why not? So I don't see how this disproves the idea that similar groupish tendencies can easily lead to racism. Can you expand a bit on that?
Apologies for the somewhat flippant tone. I was suggesting that the flimsiest pretext, such as t-shirt color, can easily lead to inter-group rivalry. That alone doesn't disprove the contention that groupish tendencies can easily lead to racism, but the evidence I've seen suggests that codifying discrimination based on race is not easy. It requires much more than innate groupishness to emerge as a social construct.
As I think was mentioned in the article, in-group bias evolved between people who closely physically resembled one another, long before large-scale contact between different racial groups. Groups can form around entirely arbitrary distinctions, and at least in the earliest stages of formation, membership of the in-group can be quite fluid.
That was certainly the case in early American colonial history, where the existence of slavery in Virginia did not prevent free Black people from taking an active role as citizens of the colony. Anthony Johnson is a case in point. An immigrant from Angola, when he successfully sued for the return of his slave, the court commended him for his service in defending the colony from attacks by Native Americans, yet a few decades later his grandchildren would flee the state as race-based Slave Codes led to the expulsion of free Black citizens.
The immediate catalyst for this change in seventeenth century Virginia was the rebellion of poorer white and Black citizens led by Nathaniel Bacon, who wanted the governor to drive Native Americans out of the area so they could settle the land. More generally, the codification of racism in Slave Codes was fueled by the enormous profits to be made in producing Plantation commodities. Wherever these commodities could be grown, whether it was Barbados, Louisiana or Carolina, racial Slave Codes followed. Native Americans who had been captured and enslaved after conflicts were re-classified as Black in plantation records.
These Slave Codes could emerge even in areas where there was a long-established and absolute ban on slavery. When Georgia was founded as the southern-most British colony, it was envisaged that a network of small homesteaders, each farming 50 acres, would deter Spanish adventurers from heading north. There was an absolute ban on slavery that lasted for 20 years, but less than 25 years before the Declaration of Independence announced that all men were created equal, that ban was lifted to facilitate industrial-scale production of cotton.
A nation founded on the basis of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness found it difficult to square the moral circle. The Founding Fathers hoped slavery would wither away without fresh imports. America joined with the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron to end the slave trade in the 19th century. This inadvertently led to a booming domestic breeding program and a thriving inter-state slave trade. It wasn't long before this population boom prompted southern politicians like JC Calhoun to reframe US slavery as a "moral good."
"US slavery good, international slave trade bad" was a morally stressful position to maintain. There is evidence (e.g. Paul Bloom's studies tracking the eye movements of babies watching puppet shows) that a rudimentary moral sense is innate. We don't like to be the bad guys. We have always distanced ourselves from our wrongdoing by othering. In the case of slavery, that has meant creating distinctions e.g. between victor and vanquished. In ancient Sumerian, the word for slave is a synonym for a person from the mountains.
The enormous profits from slave labor were not sufficient to justify the actions of US Planters, scions of the Enlightenment, to themselves. They had to make any reminders of common humanity, such as dressing in the same way, illegal through sumptuary laws. They had to argue that slavery was a benign force elevating their racial inferiors. Religious denominations tore themselves apart over whether slavery was merely an evil, or a moral evil, in the decades before the US Civil War.
In-group bias can of course occur on racial lines, but that in itself has not been sufficient for racism to flourish. It required enormous economic incentives to see prohibitions on slavery overturned, and an ideological scaffolding that justified racially based slavery as a form of paternalism, indoctrinating generations of white southerners in their racial superiority, with a horror at miscegenation that had to be learned at their parent's knee. Racism survived the Civil War and reemerged in the Jim Crow laws of Reconstruction, but codifying and maintaining it was far from easy. It relied more on our ability to salve our conscience with good strong lies than our innate groupishness.
Eamonn, how about the argument that, yes, out-group membership can arise based on strange features like origin in near-by mountains, but such arbitrary distinctions tend to become salient only when there isn’t a more obvious phenotypic basis?
Back when people in a local area only saw others who looked just like themselves, the innate tendency to create in groups and out groups had little to latch on to. But when the world gets smaller, racism is the easiest way for the innate tendency to go.
I am thrilled to see the strength and breadth of the Left’s rejection of the Far Left. Pieces like this one genuinely excite me. I’m a moderate former Republican, and this is political thought I can really get behind, core values that a solid majority of Americans should be able to support, even if there are a lot of other things they disagree about.
I found this an interesting, fair-minded post on a subject I don't/didn't know much about.
So, thanks.
The time and effort put into DEI programs could have been put into improving our primary and secondary education systems starting with the recognition that on the average or for the most part the optimal learning environments (A) for boys v. girls and (B) advantaged v. disadvantaged students are different. A "one size fits all" education system leaves a lot of children behind.
"We are ... all innocent until corrupted by society."
- The fundamental fallacy supporting all the vast corpus of Leftist ideology. Thanks a bunch, Rousseau. By the way, how are your kids?
Regarding your first section about race, I take your point regarding the idea that there is some biological reality correlating with "race." But I think you're slightly straw-manning the critique by failing to address the socially constructed elements of race. The obvious example is the concept of Blackness in European colonial states, which is constructed around phenotype and has nothing to do with ancestry. You could send the saliva of four different "Black" individuals to 23andme and get results showing Nigerian ancestry, Pygmy ancestry, Papuan ancestry, and maybe someone who's 75% European but has a visibly "Black" phenotype in certain respects such that under the one drop rule, they're Black for Jim Crow purposes. Obviously, the historical shift of Whiteness surrounding Jews and Italians presents similar issues. So when you say, "In every canonical use of the term, race is determined by ancestry, and ancestry is a straightforward biological concept." I respectfully disagree.
Prof Heath, you give DEI too much credit. It is/was a fraud. Let's move on and do something useful toward creating equality of opportunity.
Rawls' Justice as Fairness makes sense; Catholic Social teaching of Preferential Option for the poor makes sense. DEI? No sense at all!
In DEI, the idea that race is a social construct strangely coexists with its reification. If American society is irredeemably racist, and as per Kendi, every social problem derives from “structural racism”, how can you simultaneously say that race does not really exist? On what basis is the “construction” done? It is a circular and logically inconsistent argument, which simply shows that we are dealing with a secular religion rather than a consistent philosophical system.
Personally I think it's not only normal but actually beneficial for the natives of any country to remain 'Supreme' in their own homeland. This is considered obvious in the entire world except the white West, where we've come to feel that it is our moral duty to work for our own replacement.
I appreciate the effort the author put into assembling this list and I certainly agree with his premise that DEI programming gets many things substantively wrong. But the whole first half of the essay seems directionally backwards to me.
Maybe DEI training is different in Canada? Because items 1 - 3 are unrecognizable in the context of the US debate around this.
They paint a picture in which DEI training is, essentially, too idealistic. It would be nice, you see, if we lived in the DEI world where race was just a social construct, stereotypes were false and racism was learned, not innate. Alas, we do not live in such a world, so DEI advocates need to "get real" and accept some unpleasant truths.
What !?
In fact, the most divisive aspects of DEI in the US are because it preaches the polar opposite of each of these. It tells us racial categories are profoundly important to everyone's identity; stereotypes are generally *true* (hence "Whiteness" etc.), and racism is innate, pervasive, "structural" - not something you can stop just by, you know, not being racist. This is pessimism, not idealism.
Look at the Supreme Court decision that ended affirmative action at US colleges. The majority blasted the use of an "Asian" racial category by these colleges, pointing out at length how absurd and arbitrary it is - lumping Koreans and Japanese and Indians together for equal (mis-)treatment. In essence, the conversative Supreme Court majority made something like a "race is a social construct" argument. But they used to *skewer* DEI, not to defend it! That all makes sense to me; the author's upside down version of the landscape does not.
The essay is on stronger ground for points 4 and 5, which come closer to acknowledging the inherent negativity of the DEI philosophy. But then it's the author's turn to fall for some undue idealism. He thinks he can get proponents to swap out structural and statistical diagnoses of the problem for something more like "instances of actual racism." While that would be welcome, I'm sure he knows that limiting the scope of DEI down to - well, what anyone can intuitively understand from their elementary-school morality, without the help of highly-paid consultants - was never going to draw quite as much... talent or attention.
This is among the best things I’ve read about DEI. He avoids one crucial question though: what is race? And its corellary: what useful criteria can one use to classify human beings by race? I think the answer to the latter is — there are none. When you think of how fluidly and arbitrarily “white” or “black” are applied, you’ll see what I mean. Try figuring that out in Brazil, for instance, where inter-group miscegenation has long been common. And there’s that most meaningless term, constructed for political purposes “person of color”. Americans tend to think the categories on our census form are universal realities. But our understood categories, based on true white supremacist theory is the infamous “one drop” rule. And what is a silly classification like “Asian” supposed to mean? Koreans, Indians, Iranians, Israelis, and Kazakhs are all one race? What sets them apart from Norwegians, Italians, Nigerians, or Canadians?
Much as I admire this piece, the author has skipped over this essential question.
I. Different societies "culturally construct" race differently: for example Brazil in contrast to the US. In Panama race is entirely a social, or if you like, cultural construct. If a Panamanian appears as Black, but is culturally hispanic and fluent in Spanish they are not considered to be Black. If a Panamanian is Afro-Caribbean with a different culture and speaking a dialect of English they are considered to be Black.
3 Humans have a tendency to identify the "other" as not belonging to the in group. But the acceptance of the "other" as part of the in group has broadened dramatically over human history. In the United States, the Irish immigrants were the "other" and now they are part of the mainstream.
4. It is important to understand class privilege. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu identified this as "cultural capital". It enables middle class people to be more successful at school and at work because they know the ropes. This would be "minority privilege".
5. Some racial disparities are unjust. Not only are Black people more than twice as likely to be poor in comparison to white people, Black people are much more likely to be in what is called "deep poverty." There is historical evidence from the New Deal until today that the degree of poverty tolerated in the US (as compared to Europe) is the result of racism i.e. our weak social safety net. Sally Bould. Professor of Sociology, Emerita. University of Delaware.
Several people have made this familiar point about Brazilians using a different classification system from Americans when talking about race, so I thought I might address it. What this example actually shows is that race is not a "natural kind" (which is why different cultures slice things up differently) It does not show that it is socially constructed. For example, many cultures do not categorize medical conditions, such as "sepsis," in the same way that we do, but instead use a set of non-overlapping classifications of the various symptoms. But that does not mean sepsis is a social construct -- it is a physiological condition. The claim that it is a social construct is a much stronger claim, which is not necessary in order to make the point that is usually being made.
Thank you for critiquing and refining much of the sloppy thinking behind DEI. However, your analysis of Dogma 1 unfortunately propagates one of its errors, albeit a very common one: the confusion of Race with Ethnicity. Ethnicity is based upon objective verifiable characteristics such as ancestry, language, or other discrete cultural markers. Ethnic boundaries may be disputed, but they are based upon biology, anthropology, and/or linguistics. Race is an arbitrary meta-grouping of Ethnicities, socially defined, with group boundaries that have changed over time in response to social and political events. We can objectively determine (or debate) if someone is Greek or Italian, but whether Greeks and Italians are White depends upon what year it is.