Lived experience is the bread and butter of writers everywhere. It is deeply personal and when conveyed effectively is capable of swaying hearts and minds, inviting the type of agapē which transcends the everyday. It is also a highly effective tool for framing political poetic truths, in order to win people over to your side, because it uses the highly emotive to sway and persuade, rather than rational argument, and we know from a plethora of sources that this type of emotional argument works better than data or the unvarnished facts.
Unfortunately, in the modern era the universalism which once asked people to imagine themselves in another persons shoes is under threat, because postmodernism would have us believe it id impossible for us to truly empathise with the lived experience of another person. Worse still, if you happen to be from outside a particular arbitrary group (for example, from a different ethnicity), it is futile to try- because however unwittingly you are the servant of your own oppressor group interest. Established and successful writers are being told to “stay in their lane”, because postmodernism believes that attempting to write characters from outside your own personal lived experiences is the height of audacity and presumption, akin to a from of cultural appropriation which burglarises other people’s lives. Its an empty philosophy which is needlessly divisive in that it runs counter to our painfully slow erosion of the importance that race brings to bear in impacting an individual’s life.
One of the problems which postmodernism fails to confront when looking at race is that the overwhelming majority of systemic or structural racism requires no human agency at all- even in terms of implicit bias. Indeed, if the activists has bothered to read their Stokely Carmichael who, in defining institutional racism, laid the foundation for the concepts of systemic and structural racism, then they would know that one does not need racists or even implicit bias to have racism. In his thesis, he used the NYPD as an example, and believed that even if one completely replaced the entire organisation with upstanding Black choristers, then the NYPD would still be institutionally racist because the circumstances in which African Americans in New York lived at the time, would have made them far more likely to come into contact with the police in a negative manner.
The problem is this doesn't gel with the activists 'epistemological framework'- the ideology of all the critical theories require oppressor and oppressed groups in order to generate its call to dismantle the Enlightenment culture of liberal democracies. This doesn't mean that structural of systemic racism never has implicit or unconscious bias at its root- affinity or ingroup bias in hiring has proven to be quite discriminatory in practice, even if some critics of the studies of this phenomenon have asserted that class may play a far greater role in this problem than race. But overall, any empirical analysis of the evidence would have to lay 80% to 90% of the disparity between group at the feet of other more nebulous factors, instead of racism or implicit bias.
In his landmark study of social mobility, Dr Raj Chetty looked at the life progress of every child in America over a given period. The single greatest factor in upward social mobility from the bottom 20% of the socio-economic spectrum was found to be the proportion of fathers in the community in which a child grows, far more determinative than even quality of education.
What makes matters worse, is that we know that stable family formation is also vital for the creation of family wealth. Simply put two income households are far more likely to give their kids a better start in life, from an economic standpoint, so any group which has a low rate of family formation is likely to experience a form of intergenerational reset, pushing the group back down the socio-economic spectrum. In this light, the following graph is highly informative:
I've already covered the subject of systemic hegemony in another substack thread, it shows how AI is spotlighting the biases which in financial, insurance and actuarial systems reifies race, even when such considerations are deliberately removed through statutory mandate. This should concern all of us- because living in cultures which have the sovereignty of the individual as a core value, such collectivist systems built into the framework of our society as systemic disadvantages strikes at the very heart of classical liberalism. We may not care that an actor faces higher premiums to insure his car, but we should care more that a Black marine might face a higher chance of rejection when trying to take out a loan to start his own restaurant, simply because of the life factors he was faced with, growing up Black.
We also need to consider the historic harms done to African Americans in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era. High density urban public housing became absolutely catastrophic in its ability to amplify social ills, as soon as well-meaning liberals insisted that public housing become less discriminatory. All the behavioural evidence shows that when one groups the antisocial with the prosocial, especially in teenage peer groups, the prosocial become more antisocial, with no positive influence on the antisocial, whatsoever.
Similarly, sending out agents in every American city to recruit African American single mothers onto welfare was also absolutely disastrous, given that the primary proviso of the welfare checks was not having a significant male father figure in the home. Overall, if we look at the history of African American economic progress in America, then it is clear that the African American community made far greater strides towards economic parity with whites during the Jim Crow era- when overt racism was as endemic as it was brutal- than they have done since the institution of the War on Poverty.
Here in the UK, the evidence of the calamitous effects of Liberal Consensus policies framed around well-meaning government intervention is even more damning. Bangladeshi British and Afro Caribbean British ethnicities both fare poorly today because of the historical legacy of such government policies, compared to groups of comparable race, but differing ethnicity. But they are not alone- the white working class, more aptly described as an underclass in modern terms, were also beneficiaries of these good intentions gone horribly wrong. Today a white working class boy in Britain only has a 9% chance of going to university in a broader population where 50% attend university. For white working class girls, the figure is only slightly better, at 14%.
Finally, we need to consider the elephant in the room- perhaps the most thorny and controversial issue in American politics and culture- that of race and American policing. To be sure, the current perception of police brutality is based if not wholly then substantially on the failure of American journalism to report exactly similar police shootings of unarmed white men at a national level, with the deliberate intention of misleading the American public into believing a narrative of overwhelming racism in policing. This is not to say that racism does not exist in the American Criminal Justice, but it exists for entirely different reasons than the media would have you believe.
It was the bad legislative policies of both the Reagan and Clinton eras, and their impact on whole slew of issues from legal and court related issues to a failure to provide treatment as an alternative to prison which are the main factors in mass incarceration, not policing. The police are merely the janitors for social ills in our societies- they are not the politicians who pass the laws, or the politically ambitious prosecutors who applied those laws with draconian discretion.
And at the moment, the criminal justice pendulum has swung violently the other way, with the leniency of public prosecutors and the complete withdrawal of proactive policing methods (through the not unjustified concerns of police officers that they will be hung out to dry if anything goes wrong), leading to soaring homicide rates in poor high crime African American and Latino communities. One has to wonder whether as soon as one focuses upon race as an issue for public policy reform, one isn't entirely doomed to fail catastrophically.
Whether one believes in the mounting and conclusive evidence that proactive policing is vital to maintain positive social conditions for the disadvantaged, it is clear the police do. For them, it's a matter of competing virtues, even though many will not have read Aristotle on ethics. Their sense of justice, magnanimity, patience and friendliness might make them want to desire to be kinder to wayward youth, but in high crime communities the cynical voice of wisdom teaches that they need their moral courage to enforce the law far more. Even before the current violent crime surge, homicide was the leading cause of death for African American men under the age of 45, and the absence of anti-gang focused proactive policing is causing this very American problem to get worse.
There are two insurmountable problems which police instructors face when training new recruits. First, no matter how realistic they make their life and death training simulations, there is no way of knowing how a particular individual will react to the high stress environment of potential immediate death. This can lead to circumstances where the layperson misjudges fatally poor judgement under the influence of an extreme adrenalin reaction as racism. Second, there is no way of knowing how a particular person will react to power- often the nicest and most affable people become tyrannical bullies when exposed to a little power. So often what might look like racism at face value, might be caused by entirely different factors when one probes below the surface.
This is the real problem with lived experience, because if relied upon without the generosity of spirit required to give people the benefit of the doubt when ascribing motives, it has the potential to backfire spectacularly. And one has to wonder whether the activists and academics aren't making exactly the mistake that some police officers have historically made.
Because just as working as a police officer in a poor high crime community might invite a level of cynicism which causes an officer to make snap judgements about a member of the public on the basis of previous interactions and experience- leading to a form of experience acquired racial bias- to what extent are those inclined to make snap judgements about the motives of American policing using similarly flawed availability heuristics? In the final analysis, lived experience is just a collection of anecdotes by another name, and the plural of anecdote is not evidence.
I've noted that lived experience rarely seems to include: 1) police brutality (it's typically redirected as systemic racism) and harassment; 2) mass incarceration; 3) being bombed and helicopter gunned and drone missiled by foreign occupying armies; 4) enjoying recreational drugs; 5) enjoying gambling; 6) founding and operating a business; 7) learning important things (rather than just acquiring a credential); 8) being pushed by a black person onto train tracks because you are Asian; 9) having your business burned down or homeless people blocking your door....
It would be beneficial if living experience turned into learned experience, if 'all' lived experience could be looked at and not just small moments in time. Lived experience now seems to be regarded as just random happenings that are not taken in context of the wide broader lived experience. It is an emotional experience that can never learn because the next time it happens they experience the same emotion, without thoughtful learning of the first.
“One of the problems which postmodernism fails to confront when looking at race is that the overwhelming majority of systemic or structural racism requires no human agency at all . . .” Spot on. Levi-Strauss said famously: “Myth thinks itself in the actions of mankind, even when they don’t know it . . .” Substitute “racism” for “myth” and, voila, KenDiAngelo in a nutshell. (Let me add for the record I don’t think CRT is Levi-Strauss’ fault.) But if one thinks of Structure in a death-of-the-author manner, human agency does rather disappear. Essential, Structural identity precedes existence.
Have you a reference for the Stokely Carmichael bit? In any case it does seem to underscore how CRT is rooted, not in 2014 so much as in 1966. In a talk entitled “What is Racism?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r29uPHicew) John McWhorter makes the same point about public education: CRT folx assert that disparities in educational outcome are caused exclusively by systemic racism; and yet increasingly, Black people staff the public schools. (Analogy to Carmichael’s point about staffing the NYPD. I take it McWhorter’s point is that this just shows what a red herring racial makeup is, compared to institutional structure; in his view the problem seems to be more the rot which infects schools of education.)
“The police are merely the janitors for social ills . . .” Easier to blame the janitors (or, the public employee unions) than the bosses. (What IS the matter with Kansas?) “Defund the janitors?” Not so much of a ring to it, though . . .
I've noted that lived experience rarely seems to include: 1) police brutality (it's typically redirected as systemic racism) and harassment; 2) mass incarceration; 3) being bombed and helicopter gunned and drone missiled by foreign occupying armies; 4) enjoying recreational drugs; 5) enjoying gambling; 6) founding and operating a business; 7) learning important things (rather than just acquiring a credential); 8) being pushed by a black person onto train tracks because you are Asian; 9) having your business burned down or homeless people blocking your door....
It would be beneficial if living experience turned into learned experience, if 'all' lived experience could be looked at and not just small moments in time. Lived experience now seems to be regarded as just random happenings that are not taken in context of the wide broader lived experience. It is an emotional experience that can never learn because the next time it happens they experience the same emotion, without thoughtful learning of the first.
A stimulating commentary. Some thoughts on it?
“One of the problems which postmodernism fails to confront when looking at race is that the overwhelming majority of systemic or structural racism requires no human agency at all . . .” Spot on. Levi-Strauss said famously: “Myth thinks itself in the actions of mankind, even when they don’t know it . . .” Substitute “racism” for “myth” and, voila, KenDiAngelo in a nutshell. (Let me add for the record I don’t think CRT is Levi-Strauss’ fault.) But if one thinks of Structure in a death-of-the-author manner, human agency does rather disappear. Essential, Structural identity precedes existence.
Have you a reference for the Stokely Carmichael bit? In any case it does seem to underscore how CRT is rooted, not in 2014 so much as in 1966. In a talk entitled “What is Racism?” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1r29uPHicew) John McWhorter makes the same point about public education: CRT folx assert that disparities in educational outcome are caused exclusively by systemic racism; and yet increasingly, Black people staff the public schools. (Analogy to Carmichael’s point about staffing the NYPD. I take it McWhorter’s point is that this just shows what a red herring racial makeup is, compared to institutional structure; in his view the problem seems to be more the rot which infects schools of education.)
“The police are merely the janitors for social ills . . .” Easier to blame the janitors (or, the public employee unions) than the bosses. (What IS the matter with Kansas?) “Defund the janitors?” Not so much of a ring to it, though . . .
Police must be retiring in droves.