Yvain wrote a very interesting blog post about structural power and social power and y’all should go read it, and I feel very sorry for yanking three paragraphs out of context in the middle to argue with.
Just to use race as an example, fifty years ago, there were explicit laws keeping black people down, and scientific racists in universities were blithely speculating on the cranial capacity of “Negroids” without a second thought. Today, an impressive amount of the Western world’s academic output by weight is now devoted to yelling about how much we hate racism and homophobia. We have successfully reached the point where a single ambiguously racist comment can bring down pretty much any politician in the country, and where people who use the word “fuck” like it’s going out of style are terrified even to quote, let alone use, ethnic slurs. In terms of progress in deploying social power against racism, we have come pretty darned far.
Yet the black/white income gap, which is probably the best objective measure we have of structural/unconscious power, worse today than forty years ago when good records first started being kept. Fifty years of feminists telling people to rape less has resulted in a trend line for rape that looks exactly like that for every other violent crime. The biggest success of the anti-inequality movement, higher incomes for women, seems to be an economic transition that had only a little to do with any kind of a social justice movement (citation admittedly needed, but that’d be a whole post in itself).
So what if social/conscious power just isn’t that good a lever? We know that in at least in a business environment, promoting diversity has zero positive impact and in fact may just make people more racist. If this is true on a social level, it would fit nicely with the stagnant/disimproving structural/unconscious power situation despite the vastly improved social/conscious power situation.
First, I have to point out that his source for the rape thing is the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, which are notoriously shit about rape. During most of the period when that data was being collected, the UCR defined rape as “the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will“, which excluded male rape survivors, female perpetrators, non-forcible rape, anal and oral rape, and rape with body parts other than a penis. (Also, marital rape was not illegal in most states during a substantial amount of the time period in question.) Furthermore, half of rapes are not reported to police, which makes it somewhat hard to include them in the UCR statistics.
All of that about the UCR is actually fairly irrelevant, because RAINN, which uses the actually pretty decent* National Crime Victimization Survey data, suggests that there’s been a 60% decrease in rape since 1993, which is actually basically in line with the chart in question. And the data is so muddy about the prevalence of rape anytime before about 1980 that it’s terribly hard to come up with a trend line. But I really hate seeing people citing the damn UCR data and it’s my blog so I’m allowed to rant.
I think the fundamental problem with Yvain’s conclusion that social/conscious power doesn’t work that well is that it makes the unwarranted assumption that social justice advocates have any idea what they’re doing.
Social/conscious power works really well for some kinds of marginalization. Historically, social justice movements have been amazingly effective at getting rid of structural** marginalization, perhaps because social power is really really good at convincing people to give you what you want so that you go away and stop being annoying. “Christ, fine, we’ll stop gender-segregating want ads and start drawing up a sexual harassment policy, just stop walking around outside waving signs and yelling.”
But direct use of social power falls down when it comes to the other kinds of marginalization.
It perhaps works best with conscious interpersonal marginalization. If people have factually mistaken ideas or ideas that hurt people, social power enables you to explain that those ideas are false or hurtful, and then at least some people will stop believing them. (I may be overestimating people.)
Furthermore, using social power against sexism makes being sexist unpleasant– “wow, every time I say something sexist I get in an argument with an offended feminist.” Of course, it also gives feminists a reputation as humorless man-haters, makes the sexists convinced that they are Nobly Saying The Truths The PC Police Don’t Want You To Hear, and leaves people afraid of asking me honest questions in case they accidentally say something sexist and I yell at them.*** So it’s not a perfect strategy.
And with internal marginalization and subconscious interpersonal marginalization? Shit.
There are some tactics– the consciousness-raising group and its descendant the feminist blog– to help people unlearn internal marginalization. But if that worked perfectly I wouldn’t be having conversations on Twitter about how we know the idea of What A Genderqueer Should Look Like is stupid and yet we hate ourselves for not living up to it. (I imagine that you could steal some concepts from cognitive behavioral therapy to use to work on internal marginalization. Has someone done that? Report to me in comments.)
And for subconscious stuff… shit, I have no idea what the optimal strategy is. There used to be huge hiring bias against women; now the bias is only marginal (although obviously still very real). The hiring bias against people of color, however, is still huge. Why did the hiring bias against women decrease and people of color stay mostly stagnant? Some studies suggest that people who are more aware of cultural racial stereotypes are more likely to see an unarmed black man as armed. If that generalizes to all kinds of subconscious interpersonal marginalization, then use of social power in social justice movements isn’t just useless, it’s actively harmful. (Everyone! There’s no racism in America! We live in a colorblind society!)
I think the “privilege” concept is part of the problem here, because it creates the unstated assumption that all social justice problems are, on a fundamental level, the same problem. Which is stupid. Racism is probably the result of our brains’ natural tendency to see people who don’t look like us as The Other; classism is probably a side effect of a capitalist economy; homophobia is basically a vast cultural squick with a religious patina. (Yes, these are vastly oversimplified.) Why would you assume that you can use the same tactics to get rid of things with different causes?
So basically I think that we need to put a lot more study into figuring out how to get rid of internal marginalization and subconscious interpersonal marginalization and not just assume that the answers are, respectively, “we won’t have that come the Revolution!” and “we will yell at you until you stop being racist! Be aware of your racism, horrible racist person!” Also we should stop assuming that, as a movement, social justice advocates have any idea what we’re doing.
*except for its classification of most rape of men by women as “forcible penetration” which incidentally is the worst thing
**Shit, I just realized that having both “structural marginalization” and “structural power” as completely unrelated concepts is going to make this blog post hella confusing. They’re completely unrelated concepts. Sorry about that.
***For the record, I am not going to take offense at honest questions. Ever. I promise.
Thing of Things 
“First, I have to point out that his source for the rape thing is the FBI Uniform Crime Reports, which are notoriously shit about rape. …”
In that paragraph, were you implying that the type of rape the FBI watches went down but other types of rape didn’t (and thus FBI-defined-rape went down as a % of total rapes) and “Yvain”‘s point doesn’t hold, or did you just want to remind everyone that the FBI has a narrow definition of rape?
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“All of that about the UCR is actually fairly irrelevant, because RAINN, which uses the actually pretty decent* National Crime Victimization Survey data, suggests that there’s been a 60% decrease in rape since 1993, which is actually basically in line with the chart in question.” Implies that the latter is the case.
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I think it’s pretty tough to credibly argue that things are worse for black people today than in 1975. If your metric suggests that this is the case, you should probably consider it falsified.
That being said, my cursory internet research suggests that the percentile per capita gap using 2012 dollars used to be 46%, but is now 36%. These numbers can be crunched a lot of ways, so there’s probably some wiggle room about the exact details. But this seems broadly accurate, and broadly compatible with a racial reconciliation that was primarily aimed at permitting white people to save face.
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“I think it’s pretty tough to credibly argue that things are worse for black people today than in 1975. If your metric suggests that this is the case, you should probably consider it falsified.”
indeed.
I think the problem is an artifact of a system of sloppy categories, in this case the category being “white” . “White” does describe a category but that category has a very short list of criteria. it does not constitute a demographic entity of any real substance. So if you are comparing white/black income gap, you are going to be including the 1% as white, when those people bear no real relationship or similarity to the rest of that category. The same goes for incarceration rates and so on.
This in turn is an artifact of our national denialism over class and our Melting Pot myth, so that everyone who fits the ever broader, ever less useful criteria for “white” is lumped into one, undifferentiated mass – white sharecroppers and their descendants, Yankees, confederates, protestants, Catholics – groups that were in fact blood enemies and not only had conflicting interest but ongoing and bloody conflicts. For instance the Prot/Cath divide is still alive enough in the US that the labor union movement stopped right at the interethnic boundary along the Ohio River. So while the category does apply in some cases, it is in no way analogous to “black.” It’s probably closer to “Latino” or “Asian”, both amorphous designations that often have no real acceptance by members of those groups, at least in terms of any sense of solidarity as defined by those designations.
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> So basically I think that we need to put a lot more study into figuring out how to get rid of internal marginalization and subconscious interpersonal marginalization…
Is there any reliable way to tell whether any given person possesses these subconscious traits ? If not, then you’re looking at lots of potentially wasted effort, because you’re going to spend a bunch of time and money on re-educating people, and you won’t even know whether you’ve got the right people, or whether your mental conditioning programme is even having any effect.
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This reminds me strong of the theory that a lot of feminist agitating against sexism in men is harmful because genuinely sexist men will ignore it, while scrupulous men who heed it don’t really need it, and will probably torture themselves for sexist thoughts they don’t really have.
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Implicit association tests?
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This is just speculation on my part (as a cis het white guy, so take this with a grain of salt), but I wonder if part of fighting unconscious biases and marginalization is assimilation.* Human beings are tribalistic; we like people who are culturally like us. Unfortunately, traits like race/gender/sexual orientation have been strongly associated with specific outside-the-mainstream subcultures, often due to past oppression, but still lingering as explicit oppression has subsided.
Women seem to have been willing to adopt more male-coded behaviors, at least in the work place. The children of Asian immigrants seem to assimilate into white culture very quickly. Gay culture has moved in the direction of the mainstream. These three groups have seen massive improvement compared to other marginalized groups. All three still have many important issues that I don’t want to minimize, but they’ve been relatively successful. Meanwhile, blacks and certain hispanic groups seem to cling to their outsider culture and refuse to even partially assimilate any more than is necessary. I know losing a part of one’s culture sucks, but I think there’s a vicious cycle where groups cling to their extremely outsider culture to cope with marginalization, their extreme oustider culture reinforces sub conscious biases, so they continue to be oppressed, etc.
*Note: I don’t think everybody has to start acting exactly like white men, people can keep distinct cultures, just to a (sometimes much) lesser degree than currently.
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I think a big issue here is that cultures have both terminal and instrumental values. There are certain instrumental values that are helpful in pretty much any situation in life (being on time and keeping appointments is a good example). The problem a lot of outsider cultures have is that when they resist assimilation they end up rejecting a lot of genuinely good instrumental values.
There needs to be some way for people to say “I’m adopting this value from your culture, but only because it’s a really good instrumental value, not because your culture is better overall.”
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If culture A has better instrumental values than culture B on issue X, then culture A is better than culture B on issue X. If this is true on sufficiently many-and-important issues, relative to the many-and-important issues for which the reverse is true, then culture A is better overall.
And even if it is not, then culture B-with-A’s-values-substituted-on-issue-X is clearly better than culture B.
Resisting this is irrational.
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@osberend
When I say that having good instrumental values doesn’t make a culture “better” I didn’t mean “better” as in “better at achieving one’s goals.” I meant better as in “people from that culture deserve higher social status than people from other ones.”
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Osbernd, (this probably sounds highly cynical but has no hidden meaning) I can’t help help but think ‘Resistance is futile: you will be assimalated.’
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I think that people who currently manifest (whether as a result of their original socialization or as a result a assimilation) a superior culture should have higher social status than those who currently manifest an inferior culture. Virtue should be socially rewarded, and vice socially punished.
@Lambert: I am all for adding (the worthwhile aspects of) others’ biological and technological distinctiveness to our own.
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I think this is substantially correct. One confound in the black vs. white resume studies is that the “black” names are not just black, they’re defiantly black. Employers may be thinking that someone named LaToursha is unlikely to share the cultural values needed for their workplace, but be perfectly fine with hiring an Alvin or Jerome, of whatever skin color. In fact, it might even flip the preference the other way! The authors of the NBER paper specifically mentioned this — they deliberately went against statistical name frequency, to heighten the contrast.
Remember that Derbyshire column that got him fired? Yeah, he deserved it, but he also seemed pretty honest about his own thinking, and he advocated actively seeking out well-integrated blacks and befriending them. Even someone whom most of us would judge quite racist is more attuned to cultural difference than to skin pigmentation.
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It doesn’t have to be one-way, though, and shouldn’t be. I am 110% assimilationist, because I grew up in the ultimate melting pot (and, consequently, home of the greatest food in the world), New Orleans. If the dominant culture stops being so closed-off and cultural exchange goes both ways, look what happens: Mardi Gras, beniets, jazz, gumbo, and spices that cause 3rd degree chemical burns. Sure, it’s not all perfect, but where is? Lasiez bon temps rouler!
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I am loudly in favor of a self-aware and sensible melting pot:
1. On matters of moral (or of sufficient practical) significance, everyone should adopt whatever cultural traits are best, regardless of what culture they originate from.
2. On matters indifferent, but where unity is sufficiently useful or necessary, everyone should adopt the traits of the dominant culture.
3. On matters indifferent for which unity is not especially useful or necessary, everyone should do just as they please, again, regardless of whether what they please to do was first done by their ancestors, by someone else’s ancestors, or by them personally.
And yeah, good gumbo is amazing.
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Curious as to what kind of matters you consider unity to be necessary for.
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Fluency in [language] is a big one. Not in the sense that people knowing additional languages is bad, but in the sense that a society should have a single dominant language, and everyone should have an adequate level of proficiency in it for both daily interaction and understanding important news and opinion.
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One thing that complicates this conversation is the degree to which “cultural appropriation” is ill-defined.
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What I hear from the other side is that even very assimilated blacks find that they aren’t fully welcomed.
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Well it would have to be a collective assimilation, like a large majority assimilating. Unfortunately there’s a collective action problem, and it may not happen very quickly at all if it even happens.
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“The children of Asian immigrants seem to assimilate into white culture very quickly.”
Some do and some don’t, but it usually comes down to class backgrounds. Sino-Viet kids do great, but they have an entrepreneurial class culture. Hmong kids do much less well. in fact if they had been settled in Appalachia, they might have assimilated there quite well.
Also, don’t make the mistake of equating “white” and “mainstream”. They are not identical and it only reinforces white privilege to equate them.
“Gay culture has moved in the direction of the mainstream. ”
It’s not that simple. Gay culture has adopted elements of straight culture without giving up elements of gay culture, so what you see is a synthesis. So where long-term relationships were rare in the 70s (I do not include lesbians in “gay”.) and are much more common now, especially they can get legal recognition, you don’t see any of the sexual policing that is such a feature of straight marriages (“My husband looks at porn, the beast! He thinks I’m fat, the beast!) This may be a regionalism, but sexually open and emotionally closed relationships are not that unusual here. (Seattle)
That can’t really be called movement in the direction of straight culture.
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But isn’t sex positivity a movement of straights in their direction?
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Sex positivity in straights is not something they get from gay people. Straight people are sex negative or positive depending on their own culture’s attitudes.
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About the black/white income gap: one possible factor is that inequality in general has increased, which might show up as a higher black/white pay gap even if the gap actually attributable to racial difference decreases. In other words, it could be some type of Simpson’s paradox.
Example: suppose that a population consists of 72% working class whites, 18% working class blacks, 9.9% upper class whites, and 0.1% upper class blacks.
Suppose that in 1973 whites as a rule made 20% more than their black counterparts, and upper class people as a rule made three times as much as their working class counterparts. So for every $10 a working class black makes, a working class white makes $12, an upper class black makes $30, and an upper class white makes $36. If you combine black and white incomes and disregard class, you find that blacks make 66.9% of what whites make.
In 2013, whites as a rule made no more than their black counterparts, but upper class people as a rule made ten times as much as their working class counterparts. Now blacks only make 50.3% of what whites makes as a whole, even though the relationship between race and class has been constant, and the race-only income gap has disappeared entirely.
My numbers are made up, and I don’t really think purely racial inequality has disappeared, but anyway, increasing overall income inequality would show up in gross racial disparity measurements too.
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I don’t think you can treat race and class as separable.
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They’re correlated, but if you use the right statistical tests, you can tease apart the effects of each alone as well as any more complex interaction terms.
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I certainly simplified things a lot to get it to a blog-comment level of simplicity and mathematical tractability (e.g., two highly defined classes rather than a continuous distribution of income), but in general, if you have a higher fraction of blacks in lower class positions and a higher fraction of whites in upper class positions, simply stretching out the distribution of income would lead to a higher black/white income gap, even if the relative status of black people were constant or even improving somewhat.
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“They’re correlated, but if you use the right statistical tests, ”
Good statistical methods cannot overcome the effects of faulty data. data based on poorly defined or inaccurate categorization is faulty.
So for instance, since class is generally defined in the US solely by income rather than occupational field, you get all kinds of weird distortions. An e-7 in the Army (senior sergeant) making roughly $45K is not really living in the same world as a sales rep making that much (is that even close; I have n idea.) – not financially, not culturally, not with respect to career mobility.
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@Ginko – well, yes, garbage in garbage out. My answer was predicated on the ability to get good data in the first place.
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MCA, my point is that the structure of the inquiry, in this case the categories, can itself damage the data.
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It’s a pretty cool coincidence that my RSS had two new posts – this one and this, which describes how this approach worked well with gay people.
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I’m really interested in knowing how the massive cultural shift on homosexuality happened so quickly. When I was a kid in the late 70s/early 80s, “gay” was an epithet, “queer” meant someone was getting punched in the face, and the topic was completely off limits in polite conversation — almost, if not quite, on par with bestiality or necrophilia.
Thirty-odd years later, we are on track to having legal gay marriage in every U.S. state. Something really, really unusual happened! I can’t think of a remotely comparable shift in attitudes on any other topic, except maybe sushi. (Gross yuppie food, to the 80s mind. Seriously, there were stand-up routines about it.)
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” I can’t think of a remotely comparable shift in attitudes on any other topic, except maybe sushi.”
Religion. It used to be a third rail socially. There were very strong strictures in polite society about discussing any aspect of another person’s, or your own, religiosity or religious affiliation. families could be split irreparably if someone married out.
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I don’t think classism can be described as a side-effect of capitalism, because it pre-dates it. Before there was capital as such, there was feudalism and monarchy, and those were pretty fucking classist.
I guess it’s more of an ape-status thing. Since I didn’t come here just to nitpick, I’ll suggest that the best corrective for inaccurate or unjust beliefs (including allocation of ape-status) is probably freedom of speech laws protecting satire and parody.
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My instinct is to suggest that class (and so classism) in a capitalist society is pretty closely tied to one’s role within capitalism, while other societies tend to have something fairly analogous but which differs relevantly based on those societies’ forms of political and economic power.
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Wait, how does satire and parody create a just allocation of status? Even monarchs used to have court jesters.
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It doesn’t, but it’s one of many mechanisms that can put some limits on some forms of injustice in status allocation.
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How is it that we know that talking about cognitive biases is an effective way to deal with our (mostly subconscious) cognitive biases? Answer: we don’t, or at least I don’t. I’ve never seen a study about it. However, I’m just going to go by the naive assumption that talking about problems is in general effective, and I’ll acknowledge the possibility that some specific techniques may be proven ineffective in the future.
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Something that’s been coming up often in my studies lately is the question, “What type of control is this process under?” There are usually two possible answers: kinetic control and mass transfer control.
Both have the same basic result: that mineral will be dissolved, that limestone will be calcined, that metal will be deposited, that ligand will be replaced, etc. Someone sitting outside the process doesn’t really need to know, because it doesn’t make a difference. The end result is the end result, and the type of control doesn’t usually matter.
Someone sitting inside the process, trying to change it? To make it more efficient? To finds ways to cut costs without cutting production? To manipulate the system to the optimal state? They need to know.
It makes sense to lump all types of privilege into a loose bundle. They basically operate in similar ways. It is a bit too easy to jump from there to the conclusion that the solutions will all work in similar ways.
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Rather: It makes sense to lump them only so long as you don’t care about altering it.
The whole notion of “privilege” seems more a rhetorical device than actual realistic model most of the time. To repeat the obvious: A lot of what it is commonly described as “privilege” is the benefit of being unmarked, what society considers “the default”. So it’s hard to notice this as a benefit because you’re not used to thinking of it as a condition to be thought about in the first part. The language of “privilege” is a useful rhetorical device because it turns that on its head, says, hey, imagine now that your unmarkedness is in fact marked, imagine what this would look like if we thought of these as positive advantages rather than just lack of disadvantages.
Which is all good so far as it goes. “Some people are advantaged” and “Some people are disadvantaged” are essentially equivalent if you only care about describing the effects, and if describing it in the former way sometimes helps people notice the problem, well, great.
But if you actually want to alter things, you need a description that is correct at the level of mechanism, not just at the level of effect. And I’d be pretty surprised if the “privilege” description was better at that level rather than the naive “disadvantage” description. (For many things, anyway. There are some exceptions.)
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I make a distinction between advantage (how far ahead you start) and privilege (literally “private law” – thanks to Terry Pratchett for teaching me that) which is how the rules of the game are rigged in your favour.
The distinction is blurred because sometimes the rules are things like “rich people get treated with respect” so inherited wealth (an advantage) becomes privilege to that extent and in that context.
So I can have white male privilege although I came from working class parents who were the first generation in their families to go to uni, and I never had much money growing up. That I was bright enough to go to uni myself, and now earn a decent salary is advantage. If I leverage that advantage to be a dick to people and get away with it because I seem like a respectable and articulate member of society, that’s privilege again.
I don’t expect anyone else to adopt the same semantic distinction, but I can always rewrite “check your privilege” into “check your assumptions” when people say it to me: that way it’s good rationality advice anyway.
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“I make a distinction between advantage (how far ahead you start) and privilege (literally “private law” – thanks to Terry Pratchett for teaching me that) which is how the rules of the game are rigged in your favour.”
Your last sentence is where it gets touchy. “…are rigged…” is syntactically ambiguous, and on a very important point. That point is whether that privilege is the result of favoritism or is a naturally arising effect. This difference determines how unfair the situation is, and also what an effectual remedy would be.
The syntactic ambiguity turns on how English and other SAE languages form their passive construction, on a “past” participle. Participles are adjectival, and adjectives are a subset of transitive verbs semantically. This is where the ambiguity comes from as to the degree of agency involved in the situation. Compare:
“I am tired.”
“I’m hit!”
The first one is purely adjectival; no one made you tired (maybe that did happen, but that isn’t coded in that construction.) The second one reflects the agency of a now deleted or hidden agent, the enemy with the gun or whatever.
So if you enjoy some advantage because you gamed the system, or built a system that advantaged you – well, the workman is worthy of his wage – but if you want to even things out, you look at reforming the system so that it delivers more even results. On the other hand if that advantage is the result of favoritism, the solution is simply to stop the favoritism. This really matters if you are interested in changing the situation as opposed to scoring righteousness points.
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In terms of tools, have you looked at the psych literature on Direct and Extended Contact? There’s a fair amount of research that suggests the (perhaps a little obvious) conclusion that having friends from an out-group, or knowing people who have friends in an out-group, are both pretty powerful ways of improving your opinions of that out-group. Since some of these studies use [experimental techniques to quickly generate friendship](http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-11/08/how-to-find-love-in-45-mins), I’d imagine that interventions based on those sorts of tools would be effective.
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