A crucial understanding of feedback racism is acknowledging that it is often policies designed to help which aggravate existing systemic racism. It’s the ‘soft bigotry of low expectations’ 2.0. This essay was written as a response to an article in Quillette entitled “Silicon Valley’s ‘Mission Protocol’ Revolution Is Beginning to Attain Critical Mass”.
Systemic racism exists as does racial disparity, but by classifying all racial disparity as rooted in systemic racism, the Left robs society of the ability to tackle the real root causes of disparity. There are plenty of ways this operates. A prime example is through AI- with financial and insurance systems. The standard belief is that programmers encode their own biases into new software, which is no doubt true to a small degree, but the lion’s share of the disparity which embeds itself into new systems is introduced by what one might call collectivism by numbers.
What do I mean by this? Well, if you are an actor then you will face higher premiums to insure your car. This isn’t because the insurance industry is prejudiced against actors, but because on average actors are terrible drivers (especially when they are hands-free with their agents). Here’s the thing- if you remove the fact that an individual is an actor from the data used to determine an insurance quote, then the data will still arrive at a much higher than average insurance premium, because of all the associated data and life choices which go with being an actor.
And, if anything, as data collection and modelling becomes more sophisticated, the bias against actors will become more pronounced, not less so. If we apply this understanding to historical practices such as Redlining, we can see how even though the practice has long since been banned, it still persists in terms of effect because even if the race of an applicant for a loan, insurance or a mortgage is specifically excluded from their data, then then Redlining will still persist in terms of effect, through the fact that their race is embedded in their data.
Residence, financial history, crime rates, educational backgrounds and the lifestyle habits of kids born into poorer circumstances, can all act as a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, which only becomes more pronounced when data systems weight the scales by providing predictions and risk assessments.
I’m now willing to go a little bit further with my hypothesis and state that the statistical hegemony which pervades financial and insurance systems is a symptom of a far broader ranging problem which I’m going to call feedback racism. Simply put, it’s the idea that your arbitrary group identities can negatively effect your development to the extent that your life outcomes are impaired. Although feedback racism can be the product of unfair stereotypes or the discrimination of statistical slants, it can also be product of the deliberate and intentional desire to remove racial disparity using blunt tools- sometimes the help hurts.
From the article: “Put another way, the administration was demanding racial parity in school discipline, regardless of who was being disruptive, which is as silly as demanding racial parity in police arrests, regardless of who’s committing crimes.”
“The bigger problem with these antisuspension crusades is that they ultimately harm the groups they are supposed to help. After New York City made it more difficult to remove troublemakers from the classroom, schools with the highest percentages of minority students were more likely to experience an increase in fighting, gang activity and drug use. A federal report on school crime and safety released last year by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 25% of black students nationwide reported being bullied, the highest proportion of any racial or ethnic group.”
But bullying is only the tip of the iceberg. Even moderately disrupted classrooms losing ten minutes per hour to unruly students, will result in two years lost education by the end of K-12. Schools are supposed to be the great levellers of our Western societies. When we look at the disparities in parental nurture driven by socio-economics and family formation, and acknowledge that a child has only three knowledge sources- their parents, their peer group and their school, then it’s vital we see that anything which impairs the ability of the school to impart a knowledge-rich curriculum is devastating to the attempt to narrow racial disparities.
The single biggest factor in racial disparity is differential rates of fathers by community. Dr Raj Chetty’s research on social mobility looked at every child in America’s economic progress over a given period and found that the single biggest factor in upward social mobility, even more important than quality of education, was the rate of fathers in the community in which a child grows up. If we also understand that a two income household is the only way to reliably build intergenerational family wealth, or even tread water in many cases, then we begin to see that African Americans are suffering from a form of intergenerational wealth reset, which exposes them systemically to the lower end of socio-economic spectrum, and all its baleful effects.
But other than this major disadvantage, the majority of the remaining problems confronting African Americans are caused by feedback racism. In many ways the Police Officer who has been charged with enforcing anti-gang activities in a neighbourhood which is predominantly Black, is only the final stage of an awful process which has been running since childhood, disadvantaging the young man he might encounter at every turn. And trying to remove the societal triage the police officer represents leads to a backlash from the community itself, and its removal creating worse outcomes, not better ones.
The problem with trying to dismantle the systemic racism caused by feedback racism is that the blunt tools used are only treating the symptoms of the problem, not the root cause, and this often cause more harm than good. In any group which is not perennially high performing, we will always see 50% or more of kids who do not do well at school. The reason why some communities are better able to mitigate this problem is because having a higher proportion of their population in blue collar occupations means they have a community-based safety net which will catch these kids when they fall.
It doesn’t matter that much if you don’t do well at school if you possess a ‘friends and family’ network which can get you a job as a roofer, a window cleaner, an electrician or plumber. And it works out well for the smart kids, as well, because any back-of-the-envelope calculation which looks at where all the better jobs and careers come from would have to conclude that at least half of all jobs in the top 20% of socio-economic spectrum are dependent on having a healthy and gainfully employed blue collar class. Corporate hierarchies, media, government, tech and engineering might account for some better paying jobs, but family doctors, accountants, lawyers and SME entrepreneurs are all dependent upon a thriving blue collar class to pay their bills.
So how do we remedy racial disparities and heal America in the process? First, institute a vocational focus for kids who don’t do well at school at 14. Vocational training is what the Germans do, and its the main reason why they largely have a functional orderly society with less glaring inequalities, low crime and where ordinary working people can live a basic comfortable life without having the worry about falling off a cliff, financially speaking. Crucially vocational training can act as a mentoring program for boys who don’t have high quality male role models, because often boys self-select towards training which has predominantly male instructors.
Second, institute a set of major reforms which increase the production of new single family homes. America needs to ensure that it has a steady stream of cheaply available land with authorisation permits which are low cost, in regulatory terms. This in turn will create far greater opportunity for SME building firms to enter the market and increase competition.
There was already an excess of demand for blue collar labour before the pandemic. In 2019, 7 million blue collar jobs were left unfilled, many of which were paying $60K a year. By stimulating the supply side of home building, America will be fulfilling an incredible demand for affordable new housing amongst millennials- remedying one of the two major reasons why they are turning their backs on capitalism.
But most of all, by providing the next generation of kids from poor white, Latino and African American communities with the skills that they need to thrive in a booming blue collar economy, America will be healing many of the underlying issues which create racial disparities. Key to this is providing the right ingredients to aid stable family formation.
A young woman will sleep with a man, in many instances even have his kid, if he is reasonable attractive and possesses relatively high status within his peer group, but stable family formation will only occur if he has a reliable job and is a contributor to the household. With many African American communities possessing labour participation rates which point to historical real unemployment rates of around 80% to 90%, it was little wonder that social scientists witnessed the Black family disintegrating before their eyes.
In time, changing socio-economics and rising community fatherhood rates will heal many of the issues which have been previously labelled as systemically racist. In many ways, it’s Jude The Obscure 2.0- with true progress only really achievable over more than one generation. The literature from cognitive science proves that both socio-economics and higher paternal nurturing lead to boosted cognitive development, and this will equalise many of the disparities we see in educational outcomes. Some more progressive scientists, activists and economists have taken to calling this phenomenon “Missing or Lost Einstein’s”- the developmental deficit caused by growing up in less than ideal, or adverse, circumstances.
By myopically focusing on opportunities at the top, whilst ignoring a desperate desire amongst the working poor to find opportunities which can help them reach the middle, the activists and anti-racists have been putting the cart before the horse. Strength and wealth are built from the base, and through the virtuous cycle of a thriving and successful blue collar class. Where millennials have gone wrong is in failing to realise that by finding solutions to the housing problems which beset them personally, they might also empower the very groups they seek to help.
Brother, I really enjoy your writing, but you've got to do something about your substack page. Without serifs the font is somewhat difficult to read at this size - you'd do better bumping it up a point or two, or simply changing to a serif font. There are odd empty spots and weird, pointless gifs in different places that make the reader wonder whether the essay is finished, only to find that it continues on, further down. There are weird links to other essays stuck in the middle (NY Mayor Race, eg) that make it look as if what follows beneath the titles are new essays... It's kind of a mess. I've admired your comments on Quillette for quite a while, and wish you had a bigger audience. Fix your substack page so that readers who stumble across it won't quickly stumble away out of confusion. As I've always told my students, a writer gets exactly one awkward sentence before the reader starts to drift away and lose focus, and on the second awkward sentence the reader is gone. Your page is a graphic representation of the same difficulty. So... you know... please do something about it.
New to this show, thanks to Geary’s link at Quillette. Subscribed and looking forward to the offerings and discussion.
I am a bit puzzled by the apparent conflation of bias and data, however. If real data (I understand the corruptability of data) indicates an 80% default rate in a certain zip code would I be biased or informed if I chose not to loan money in that environ?
Interesting takes as usual. A big issue is that the future seems to require less labor, as progress is all about reducing labor, in effort, injury, time and expense. How many people by labor-increasing tools and services? Yes, exercise equipment is one of the clear outliars among those who don't labor for a living!
Brother, I really enjoy your writing, but you've got to do something about your substack page. Without serifs the font is somewhat difficult to read at this size - you'd do better bumping it up a point or two, or simply changing to a serif font. There are odd empty spots and weird, pointless gifs in different places that make the reader wonder whether the essay is finished, only to find that it continues on, further down. There are weird links to other essays stuck in the middle (NY Mayor Race, eg) that make it look as if what follows beneath the titles are new essays... It's kind of a mess. I've admired your comments on Quillette for quite a while, and wish you had a bigger audience. Fix your substack page so that readers who stumble across it won't quickly stumble away out of confusion. As I've always told my students, a writer gets exactly one awkward sentence before the reader starts to drift away and lose focus, and on the second awkward sentence the reader is gone. Your page is a graphic representation of the same difficulty. So... you know... please do something about it.
New to this show, thanks to Geary’s link at Quillette. Subscribed and looking forward to the offerings and discussion.
I am a bit puzzled by the apparent conflation of bias and data, however. If real data (I understand the corruptability of data) indicates an 80% default rate in a certain zip code would I be biased or informed if I chose not to loan money in that environ?
Interesting takes as usual. A big issue is that the future seems to require less labor, as progress is all about reducing labor, in effort, injury, time and expense. How many people by labor-increasing tools and services? Yes, exercise equipment is one of the clear outliars among those who don't labor for a living!