Juice's Lecture Notes wrote:
I'm reading through it as I reply to you, and I'm seeing a lot of uninspired retorts to Shapiro's points. Feel free to substantiate your original claim with your own input, but here's a sampling:
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First, Asian Americans are wealthier than white people, which would be impossible if racism determined economic outcomes. (Shapiro doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Asian American adults are immigrants, and they are disproportionately from the wealthier and more highly-educated segments of their own countries.)
Here's the first obfuscation: Is this discussion about how racism impacts earning power or is it not? Because if racism was a determining factor in earning power, the education level and family wealth of Asian Americans would be irrelevant to their earning power in the racist economy favoring whites in America. Now all of a sudden earning potential incorporates education and family structure? Ok....
No, it's a basic point about selection bias. The average Asian immigrant isn't as poor as the average African American in the first place, so pointing to their wealth doesn't result in an apples-to-apples comparison.
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Second, he says, people of any race who work full time, are married, and have high school diplomas tend not to be poor, meaning that poverty is a function of one’s choice not to do these things. (In fact, this theory, widely cited by conservatives, turns out to be vacuous: of course people who have full-time jobs usually aren’t in poverty, the problem is that black people disproportionately can’t get jobs.)
Now earning potential is back to being determined by racism, instead of education, but the writer literally just got done telling us Shapiro is wrong for pointing out that the alleged racism of American culture doesn't seem to impact Asian Americans and their earning power, because those Asian Americans tend to be more highly educated. Which. Is. It?
Why does it have to be one or the other? Are you seriously suggesting racism can only affect one of the two variables here?
Also, if Asian-Americans start with on greater wealth in the first place (not
just greater education, as Robinson noted but you've now omitted), then pointing to their higher earning power doesn't do a thing to suggest racism is non-existent.
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Next, Shapiro says that because black married couples have a lower poverty rate than white single mothers, “life decisions” are what creates poverty. (Actually, even when two black people pool their wealth in a marriage, “the median white single parent has 2.2 times more wealth than the median black two-parent household.”)
This is, quite simply, a rather poor strawman. Shapiro specifically said, and the writer specifically quoted, "white single mothers", but the "debunking" of Shapiro's point is done with "white single parent" figures, not incorporating education level (which the author still hasn't decided matters or not).
Why is Robinson's quoted statistic any less valid as a response to the "life decisions" argument than Shapiro's is in support of it? Why is the onus on Robinson to put controls on the data but not Shapiro?
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Until you prove otherwise, Big Stroker, it just looks like you don't want to engage with Shapiro because you disagree with him, not because of anything specifically that makes him unworthy of serious consideration.
Your rather weak efforts to respond the article haven't done a thing to convince me that Shapiro is some kind of serious intellectual. What are these Very Important Insights that he's making about the world? What is the philosophically rigorous way of arguing that he has that you evidently believe Robinson lacks?
If it really hurts your guys' feelings so much that I compared him to Milo, then I'll say instead he's comparable to your average Fox News asshole troll like Carlson or Coulter. Still not someone who I'd describe as a particularly good faith actor.
Especially since his defenders want norms extended to him that he himself doesn't want to extend to his own opposition.
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