Monday, June 14, 2021

The First Of All Shall Be Last And Servant Of All

Am I supposed to be upset by this? Concerned about it? Because what I see is rectification more than racism.

As long as we categorize people by “race,” we are going to have this problem.  But we can’t erase “race” as a category just by saying so.  I don’t need Critical Race Theory to tell me that we accepted race too early in American culture (back to Columbus, strictly speaking, though racial categories came into it a bit later than that) and for too long to simply erase it now.  History isn’t a blackboard, our culture is not written in chalk.  But having adopted race as a way to keep us (whites, I mean) in privileged positions, we can’t discard it now because we deem racism icky, or think it can’t be used to right the wrongs we have institutionalized.

So is it bad that Asians have a low chance of getting in to Harvard, but blacks get in almost easily?  Sorry, I don’t see it.  Were the ancestors of those Asian applicants likely the slaves who built Harvard, or supplied the wealth for their endowment through their labor?  I know that seems far removed and buried in the past, but the only people trying to bury that in the past are us white folks, who are burying our guilt as much as anything else.  I agree that rectifying racism by using race to do seems, at best, like creating a new problem.  But we don’t correct the old problem by pretending we are leveling the playing field by not banning blacks form making an application.

No, it isn't.  It took us 400 years to create this problem. It may take nearly 400 more to undo it. Just because we’re ashamed of the concept of race that we made so important to our culture, doesn’t mean we can escape our responsibility for it easily.  We certainly can't escape it by saying "We don't DO racism any more!"
And I'd have to look at the stats a bit, but this argument, on its face, strikes me as supremely silly, akin to arguing the "solved" racism in America because elected Obama. Harvard is a very good school to go to if you want to create a "legacy" that includes putting you a few rungs up the socioeconomic ladder, but it doesn't follow that every Harvard graduate is automatically placed much higher up that ladder than anyone else.  If nothing else, consider how a mere four decades of a handful of students (Harvard does not equal the population of the United States) weighs against the inequties faced by blacks in this country in the last four decades.  Have conditions for blacks substantially improved because a few more students graduated from Harvard every year?  How many of those students have been wealth enough to create "legacies" for their children, because as I understand it, that "legacy" has a lot more to do with social and economic position, than with mere ancestry.  I'd have to see the numbers on that claim before I'd even begin to give this argument any credibility.

You see what we've done to ourselves with 400 years of racism?  Do you think we can untangle that simply by saying "racism is now bad and we won't allow it anymore!"?  The argument here still seems to revolve around one issue:  we can't inconvenience the "wrong" people.
Yeah, pretty much.
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