OMG, I would never do that!

Yeah, it happens.

You two are a couple of puds.

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We all have private ails. The troublemakers are they who need public cures for their private ails.- Eric Hoffer

jbi11s and Nas? I actually agree.

Agreed.

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Agree as well.

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Missed this the first time. Classic.

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Coates uses anecdotes to make emotional arguments. I have attacked his ideas and scholarship. Saying right wing talking points is not a argument.
In the course of this argument you have not be able to clearly define:

1. What exactly structural racism is or how to solve for it? (Obstacles that we can never define is the best you seem to be able to do with this.)

2. Dismissed Obama as not really black or concerned with black problems.

3. Failed to say what the factual errors with the Hughes piece.

4. Failed to say what "historians" have backed up the scholarship of Coates.

5. Doubled-down on name calling and accusations of racism.

The last point is really all your side has, and it's a losing hand.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

It was not an argument. It was a question about the central thesis in Coates writings, which is that this society is doomed to be racist forever.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

Sort of like 'two pees in a pud'.

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Power is always in the hands of the masses of men. What oppresses the masses is their own ignorance, their own short-sighted selfishness.
- Henry George

Are they?

What do you base that on?

(and maybe they are for the most part, it just always raises an eyebrow for me when someone makes such an all encompassing statement)


I mean, if were just using economy and numbers, you can say the same thing about the Obama years when comparing 2008 and 2012 or 12-16

He bases it on the fact that he doesn't give a shit about anything other than his own newfound opinions. Just let him be.

No, there's a lot of validity in what he says. A lot of groups are doing better, just maybe not "every single one" as he stated.

A rising tide raises all boats...

...except, it doesn't.

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But giving rich people and coroporations was supposed to get more money to me. Trump said so.

Has it not done so?

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My paycheck is great again.

So you agree you were, in fact, full of shit with your attempted GOTCHA by bringing up that out of context 9/11 nonsense? Good.

Just saying Coates uses anecdotes and is "emotional" are definitely not arguments either. Hughes has used plenty of anecdotes alongside his cherrypicked statistics in his writing, so I fail to see why you're so angry at Coates but not him (well I do actually). Likewise I can find plenty of numbers in "The Case for Reparations" alongside the stories he weaves together.
Forgive me if I don't want to play the "educate me with a definition" game with someone who was insisting with hellfire and brimstone that it didn't exist and was all a liberal boogeyman just a few pages ago. You're more than capable of finding scholarly definitions of the term with the help of Google if you actually give a crap about learning what it was. And I posted multiple policies 2 replies ago that went similarly ignored.

I am more comfortable with my framing of Obama as a neoliberal than your take, which amounted to "Da blacks got Obama so things must really be equal here!"
I've listed out charges multiple times, but will elaborate just for you sweetheart. For some reason, I highly doubt you're capable of constructing a list of similar complaints against Coates.

His view on the Civil War is complete garbage. "But slavery is hardly the root cause of America’s prosperity. If it were, then we would expect American states that practiced slavery to be richer than those that did not." This view is complete ahistorical rubbish to anyone the least bit familiar with Civil War economics, or even the concept of the Civil War in general. Most accounts on pre-Civil War economics emphasize the extent to which Southern states hyper-focused on the creation of raw materials with slave labor, at the expense of any kind of diversified economy, and then would have to buy products made with those raw materials back from the North. Additionally, it's almost like there was some mysterious event between the pre-Civil War and post-Civil War eras that may have done something to upset the capital and wealth in the former slave states. I can't quite put my finger on what such an event may be though. The point of course is just saying "The North is doing better than the South economically!" is an utter non-sequitur, and to use it to downplay the effects of slavery is garbage.

Hughes creates strawmen versions of Coates, Baradaran, and Rothstein. I don't believe a single one of them said anything resembling the idea that the racial gap is entirely caused by slavery and New Deal policies. I have a hunch that Hughes did not even read much of the source material, as Baradaran herself anticipates and responds to some of the very cultural arguments Hughes is making. And on the specific spending point, the vast majority of empirical analyses on conspicuous consumption suggest that it's more a product of living in poverty than a cause of it. Of course, said literature is scarcely examined by Hughes in his rush to blame culture.

Hughes cherrypicks data. The biggest example of this of course is his citation of this is the Brandeis study, where he cherrypicks numbers to lowball the effects of institutional and systemic forces by simply focusing on 2 of the variables and instead concludes that 68% must be from some other explanation, including culture. In contrast to that, here are the authors of that very same paper he was citing arriving at a nearly opposite proportion than Hughes did:


Hughes does not understand the concept of survivorship bias and as a result makes sloppy, unfounded comparisons between immigrant groups and black Americans. My absolute favorite example of this is when he starts going on about the success of the Japanese, when anyone with even a cursory knowledge of history would realize that group actually received reparations for their treatment in World War II.

Finally, Hughes' arguments are not novel. Perhaps the most annoying part of this episode has been the extent to which IDW members have been tripping all of themselves to prop up this regurgitation of typical conservative race politics. One of those hacks even compared him to James effin' Baldwin.
I don't know of any credible historian who's disputed the actual facts of his larger essays to the extent people have with Hughes. People of course disagree with the conclusions and prescription he draws from his history, but I don't believe the facts on the ground have been misrepresented here. And as I noted previously, Coates' longer form works engage more with multiple historians and social scientists in a way that Hughes simply does not.

I'm pretty sure I never called you a racist in the course of this discussion, though I understand you'd really like me to in order to continue to play the victim.

1. This simply is not a good faith argument. You can't provide an example or definition of institutional racism other than saying minorities face "obstacles." When challenged on this you get angry and say things like hellfire and brimstone, and then Google it. This means that you are deflecting because you don't have a clear definition. You just "know" it exists.

2. Calling Obama a neo-liberal is just a dismissive way end the conversation. Then you tried to make it about childish personal insults. If society is built to hold down minorities how was a black man allowed to hold the highest office in the country-twice? That's a fair question. If this society is irrevocably racist then what society do you recommend we emulate? And what specific policies should we enact to arrive upon this ideal state?

3. This is simply a terrible analysis of what he said. Do you disagree that slavery is hardly the root cause of American prosperity? It seems like that should be obvious to anyone. This does not downplay the effects of slavery. It's meant to say that American wealth is not because of slave labor. This seems like something that everyone can agree upon. The Civil War disrupted the Southern economy, but it was already an unsophisticated economy that had limited industry and railroads. This is clearly to show that majority of American wealth was not built on the broken black bodies of slavery that Coates loves to bring up. This does not mean that slavery was not terrible or did not have long term effects. That's not the argument though.

You disagree with the notion that the long term effects of slavery and the lack of participation in New Deal progress are what Coates and other say are the reasons for the wealth gap? I agree that those are major factors, but hardly the only. It might be a slight oversimplification, but it sums up their positions nicely.

I enjoy that you say Hughes cherry-picks data. You think Coates doesn't?

Toni Morrison started with the James Baldwin by calling Coates the modern version. I am guessing they are responding to that.

4. There are many historians and academics who do not agree with Coates:

https://nypost.com/2016/08/22/making-fr ... a-mistake/



-This sums up my biggest complaint about Coates.

Full context here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/ar ... es/399641/

5. Your entire response is littered with condensation, name-calling and allusions to racism. I agree that long-term poverty is major problem. I disagree that we live in a nation presently constructed to hold blacks down in the year 2018, and I know that projecting a hopeless situation is not helpful in the least.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

No structural or institutional racism?

Then what do you call this?

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/departme ... s-claiming

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No, I'm simply reacting to your own bad faith line of questioning. Structural racism is discussed at length enough by social scientists that there's a wealth of reading material available via simple search. If you had started the conversation genuinely looking for answers, I'd be inclined to play ball. However, given your obstinate refusal to recognize even the potential of it existing, I have no interest in wasting even more words on a brick wall.
As I said multiple replies ago and you chose to ignore, the success of individual black people does not preclude the existence of institutional racism. Nor does one have to believe the entirety of society is organized to holding minorities down to still realize those barriers exist. Once again, this is just the "I have a black friend" defense against individual racism applied society-wide. And as I also have repeated several times (but you ignored), there's a wealth of policy options including more robust welfare protections, job programs, and harsher anti-discrimination laws (including those where discriminatory outcome outweighs intent).
The industries that thrived in the North were in part created by the raw materials extracted by slave labor. Merely looking at the South's long-term economic mismanagement to conclude that slave labor had little to do with the wealth of the country is an absolute joke.

Please point me to a passage where you think that sums up their positions nicely. An actual quote, thank you.
Shouldn't be so hard to find a good example of that then. And I would say I was being too nice when I suggested Hughes merely cherrypicked data regarding the Brandeis study. He utterly misrepresented the actual conclusions of the authors in service of his own half-baked thesis.

Sorry but this is bollocks. Nothing about Coates at all warrants pumping up Hughes' regurgitation of conservative talking points as some kind of significant and world changing essay on the level of Baldwin.
But of course, I have explicitly acknowledged multiple times now that one can object to the prescriptions and conclusions Coates draws. Cherry is largely objecting to those and the framing Coates takes, but I see little in the way of having gotten the facts he himself draws on wrong. Now if you want to say he focuses on the wrong facts, go for it, but realize you've just invited in all the bashing of Hughes for his own out of context facts as well, in addition to those he just gets wrong altogether.
Congrats, this "biggest complaint" about Coates has been utterly absent from your previous biggest complaints about Coates throughout this exchange, including the time you suggested he was happy about white people dying during 9/11.

And as someone who's actually met Rodgers and is sympathetic to this critique of Coates, let me assure you that that particular complaint (similar to the one offered by R.L Stephens, among other critics from the left) does not exactly lend support to the bootstraps/culture/respectability dreck of Hughes, Harris, and the IDW. Their problem is the paralysis that Coates' perspective inspires for actual political action and solidarity, but that by no means entails everything is just hunky dory in the present or that we instead should just blame culture for the wealth gap. This is something I myself noted in my own previous criticism of Coates as well to JORR multiple pages ago, while of course rejecting the idea that his pessimism means he's Louis Farrakhan in terms of his hatred of white people.


Your responses have been filled with an equal amount of condescension and name calling and far less substantiation for your critique of Coates and your defense of Hughes.

During the time of slavery some blacks owned slaves. Does that mean that there wasn't institutional racism because a few blacks owned slaves? During Jim Crow some blacks were millionaires or in fact "well off". Does that mean that structural and institutional racism were non existent simply because a few blacks prospered?

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That is a settlement of a long-standing lawsuit announced by a black head of state and the black leader of the Department of Justice. You think that's a good example of showing that racism is structural, and there is no way to fix it?

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

It's pretty unproductive to get into long, drawn out political arguments on here. Especially with someone saying something as ridiculous as structural/institutional racism is made up.

Zeph handled it pretty well anyway.

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Fare you well, fare you well
I love you more than words can tell
Listen to the river sing sweet songs
To rock my soul

Actually I do think it is a good example that is why I used it.

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The success of individuals does not mean the system isn't cast against them. This is the opposite of the black friend argument you like to make. Well all of these people are the exceptions. Sure. It means that there is no threshold that you can create to declare structural racism to be over. It's endless.

My discussions about Coates are not limited to this thread. Do a search as you like to say. As I have said previously Coates amount to nihilism when you drill down to it.

And to say the industries that thrived were in due part to raw materials... come on. Northern industry and farming destroyed the Old South. Chattel slave labor was not an efficient system, and it's legacy plays a trivial amount into the long term wealth of the United States. The United States did not really become a global power until after the Civil War. If he said wage slavery then that's a different story. That continues to this day.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

It appears to be remedied.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

I am sure that you can provide a concrete example of this still being the case since it's so prevalent.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?

I did some digging because I was curious to what extent slavery made the U.S. what it was economically. Apparently the 1870's and 1880's were the highest decades in terms of GDP growth in our history. And it also seems that the U.S. really became a global powerhouse in the wake of WWI.

But I fully admit I have not studied the subject as I prefer modern finance over the historical variety. I actually enjoyed some of the back and forth between WFR and Zeph in this thread.....and I have very little basis to argue the points one way or the other.

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Hawaii (fuck) You

Just coming here to ask this very thing. I often hear that slavery made the US wealthy and that it drove the early industrial economy. I know nothing about it, but I had a TA in college who nearly got fired for saying that slavery wasn't beneficial to the regional and national economies. If the question itself sounds insensitive, I definitely don't mean it to be. I was just wondering what the experts (in a variety of fields) say about this.

The TA was right. Slavery was an inefficient system and a third world system. They kept people in chains to sell raw materials. Does that sound like an efficient economy? The United States was a second rate power during this time period. Massive industrialization made the country a power after the Civil War. The United State became a world class power after the First World War when it was the bankroll and supplier of the allies. It became the greatest power in the history of the world after the Second. Slavery was a part of the early years of the nation, when it was a divided agrarian state.

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Why are only 14 percent of black CPS 11th-graders proficient in English?